Shubnum Khan's Blog, page 11

So she's sitting at the sea

So she's sitting at the sea.

So she's sitting at the sea and she's thinking. She's thinking she has folded over at the edges and she has become a tiny little box. She would like to disappear, she thinks (already she had started to, fighting at first against it, but now she's giving in). The sounds are too loud. Her edges are transparent. Yes, yes, fight to live and everything but perhaps it's easier to give in. Sometimes coming up for air is worse than drowning, you know? And nothing really matters of course. But oh, the sound is too loud - the sound of people living their lives.

So she's sitting on the sand and thinking that maybe she should disappear. Be like the water, you know. The world is too loud. Too outraged. Too self righteous. Too pious. She wants to go where it's quiet. But she knows nothing matters in the end. Not the past, not the future. People will still go on living their lives thinking they are the most important part.

So she's wondering if she can disappear forever. Take everything and go. Fall off the face of the earth. She's seen the other side. It lonely there for sure. But there's no noise. Already she's half off. Knowing nothing and no one anymore. The world is so quiet now. Too loud to go back. She's standing at the edge.

Too long at the edge changes the bones of a person.

She's got her hands on her ears now. It's too much noise. The sea is coming up like a tongue to taunt her.

Her edges are almost out now. Sometimes she whispers. But who remembers that anyway?

A Moment (on the platform in Shanghai)

I am in the elevator.

The foyer is empty. It is 5: 45am. I am wheeling my suitcase.
The street has never been this quiet. The sun is just touching the buildings. Just hovering over their edges. But I am not thinking of this. I am not thinking of anything except the subway I have to reach the subway in time. My hands are shaking. No one is awake. The entire world is sleeping. Everyone, including the cleaner  sweeping the sidewalk. The city is huge. It engulfs me. But I am not thinking that. I am thinking I must reach the subway.

 I stand at the platform. I wait. I think I am praying. Adjust my bag.

I am wearing my hiking boots - everything will be okay.

A Moment on the platform in Shanghai

I am in the elevator. The foyer is empty. It is 5: 45am. I am wheeling my suitcase. Now I am on the street and it is the quietest I have ever seen it. The sun is still a thought in the sky. The buildings are long, their shadows still short. I am not thinking of this. I am not thinking of anything except the subway I have to reach. My hands are shaking. No one is awake. The entire world is sleeping. Everyone, including the cleaner ahead of me, sweeping the sidewalk. The city is huge. It engulfs me. I stand at the platform. I wait. I think I am praying.

I am wearing my hiking boots - everything will be okay.

So she's on a road.

So she's on a road.

She's been driving. She's been driving a long time.

She pulls up on the side of the road one day. It is hot. The sun is burning down. She can't see anyone around for miles. There's a feeling in her elbows she's trying to shake off. She sits on the side of the road against the car. Kicks the dust. The road turns up ahead and meanders through a hill. A bird calls out. She begins to hum a tune and pretty soon she's singing a song and then she's shouting out the lyrics. The bird flies away. She's got her head in her hands.
Truck go past, shaking the earth so that she can feel it in her ears
She calls out. Calls out to the emptiness of everything.
She screams then. Screams until she is hoarse.
Later, she dusts off the gravel from her jeans. Gets back in the car. Drives away.

So she's standing on a roof

So she's standing on a roof.

The sun is not yet in the sky, it's lighting up from below, pulling out the blue so that everything turns to ice, even in summer. There are cars on the road, probably taxis, their headlights still lit, carrying people coming home from parties, their heads against shoulders and window panes, their eyes half closed.

And so she is standing on the roof and the world is coming alive.

The river is moving like a silent sleeping monster, and the city lights are going off one by one and there is a slight wind in the air.

Her eyes are closed. Her feet are bare and beneath it all, beneath the veneers and the pretense are her fears and now she grasps them in her hand, pulls them out from inside her chest and no, she does not throw them from the building, she holds on to it - the shaking shivering fear, the hot fevers in her hand, the trembling and the dull ache, she looks down on it and wonders how it ever came to be there, this serpent in her bones, this trembling hot furnace, so limp and dead in her hands now, she holds it close to her, brings her arms to her face, caresses this pain, this once burning pain and then yes, she lets it go, it simply slips from her hand and disappears and she looks out to the river and she opens her eyes and she takes in the city, already lit up with light, the road more busy and she is brave, she is more brave than she has ever thought herself to be.

She turns around, leaves the city standing in the sky, takes a deep breath and steps down.

A History of Moments

I fall asleep
I wake up

turn my head to the window
listen to the birds

The sky is blue
more blue than that day at the beach
when I wore yellow
smiling in pictures like I was the sun

I am 6, sitting on the carpet
I am praying to God,
asking him to help me

I fall asleep
I wake up

I am sitting in the car my head against the window
the green landscape turning brown
I have my earphones in,
my father is singing, the road is winding
I put my head on my sister's lap as we take the turn

I fall asleep
I wake up

I am in the garden
I am always in the garden
I am collecting snails in a glass jar,
making mud cakes on red slabs of tiles
with pink bougainvillea on top,

my hands are dirty

my mother is is at the kitchen window and she is calling me

I fall asleep
I wake up

I am ten, I am walking back home wearing a scratchy green jersey
there's a dog on the road and I'm afraid it will give chase
I break out into a sweat

the sun is in my eyes

I fall asleep
I wake up

Turn my head to the window

I am 15 at a new high school
I wear white pants, get picked on
we stand for hours in the assembly because we don't know how to behave
we sit on the tarmac,
I draw cartoons

I fall asleep
I wake up

I am standing at my mother's bed and she is having an asthma attack
and I don't know what to do

I fall asleep
I wake up

I look to the window

I am 21 and I am walking up the university stairs and I am going to teach my first tut class.

I fall asleep
I wake up

I am on a train to Mumbai, sleeping on the top bunk
the cold air from the vent is hitting me

I fall asleep
I wake up

I am on a plane to New York
and there's the Atlantic ocean before me
but I am afraid to be free, and my hands are shaking
I know it will be all okay, but I don't really know,
not right then

and then it starts to snow on the street and then I know it will

I fall asleep
I wake up

I am sitting in a studio in China, writing below a sea of roses

I fall asleep I wake up

I am 5, walking down the rickety stairs of our new house and I am calling out for my mother, until I see a candle in the distance and I make my way toward her.

The Wave

I was sitting in the room in the tower.

I was cutting green peppers in the kitchen when I checked my phone.

I was sitting in a road side dhaba in Jaipur eating mushroom soup.

I was sitting in the back of a restaurant waiting for our lunch.

I was sitting at my computer waiting for a reply and I got an email.

I was sitting in the car on the way back home from the drive to the south coast.

And again, and again, and again.

Each time I heard it, I shook and shrivelled. Turned smaller. Fought the wave.

I know it has been my overwhelming optimism that has helped me carry such a weight.

Excerpt (Nadine Gordimer)

Nadine Gordimer writes in Telling Times: Writing and Living:

"What is a writer’s freedom?To me it is his* right to maintain and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation in which he finds his society. If he is to work as well as he can, he must take, and be granted, freedom from the public conformity of political interpretation, morals and tastes.[…]All that the writer can do, as a writer, is to go on writing the truth as he sees it."

Things I miss about home

1. Blue skies and fresh air

2. Good food

3. Being able to communicate with anyone properly (English is not a first language even for most of the non Chinese people I meet).

4. The beach

5. Family, the kids especially

6. Cheap prices of anything (in Shanghai everything is expensive)

7. The movies

8. The birds

9. Good fish

10. Green

Shanghai Public Reading 2 (Paper Flowers)