Shubnum Khan's Blog, page 7

Of 2016

In 2016I lived in Shanghai
I bought a stove and carried it on the subwayGorikhala passed away,I wasn’t there,The last thing she told me, was to take biscuitsI learnt that mourning alone is not mourningI travelled alone and told no oneI learned a hysterical kind of solitudeAbajaan died
I wasn't there
I tried to be there
I was there
I learnt that mourning together is mourning
I learnt the heart of a tree is a heart because of age
I learn to listen to myself
I learnt how to look after myself
I unlearnt an old song
I still woke up with the same tape but different music
Abba cried
My friends bought me cake
I forgave myself
My car got stuck
We went on holiday
I taught creative writing
I took part in a writing festival
Abajaan fell,
I picked him up,
I almost couldn't
I went on holiday with friends
I wrote about my sand collection
Laure made me laugh
I took a train with JC
I ate duck
I met a stranger
I sang a new song

A Moment (From Adolescence)

When I was 11, I cried a whole lot. I don't know why. Hormones. The idea of death. The idea of life. The idea of losing the ones I loved. I would sob and sob. The inner turmoil a landscape in which I buried myself. 

Rooms of Water (Ajar Press, Summer 2016)

Rooms of Water

In a tub, one evening, she steps out and quickly wraps a towel around herself and he asks her, why? Why has she stepped out so fast, so determinedly; why is she behaving like this? And she turns her head, her body still facing away from him,             ‘You wont remember any of this.’             And she turns away from him and steps into the cold bedroom, the air conditioner a hum in the room. She sits on the floor next to the bed with the towel wrapped around her tightly, trying not to think, trying to get on with the next step: drying her shoulders, then her calves, wiping the drops off her face, slipping on her clothes, stepping out of the hotel, taking a taxi home, falling asleep and forgetting him entirely.             But she can’t get up, she can’t take the next step, not while knowing she has him there.             She feels caught; caught between walls in a space she only too easily remembers and she curls herself tightly and waits to move or waits for him, waits for something.             Her lungs feel squashed inside her chest and she feels like she is sipping small breaths of air. She reminds herself to breathe. She closes her eyes.             She is water. She is water. She is water.             And then she hears him move in the tub and the sound of water runs through the pipes as he lets the bathwater out. She wants to apologise, wake up and go to him, slip her arms around his wet shoulders and lay her face on his bare back as he stands still, perhaps angry with her, gone into one of his silent rages.            She closes her eyes.             She is water. She is water. She is water.            Eventually he steps out of the bathroom, shuts the door behind him, a towel slung across his hips. He sees the top of her head, walks toward her and sits at the edge of the bed and sighs. Water drips onto the carpet. They say nothing. Then eventually with her chin drawn against her knees, she starts, ‘You will forget. You will forget all of this. You wont remember.’             As if the moment contained no importance, no weight, as if she could not lose herself to this because the memory of it would be too vague for him and too distinct for her. The importance of this moment, its reality, depended on the importance of its memory later.             She refuses to let this stain her.  She gathers her face, catches the edges before they fall.            He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand this anguish of hers. He doesn’t understand that she knows even as the moment is happening, even despite all his good intentions, the moment is being lost. She knows this. It’s all a waste. What is the point of playing roles and investing this much if nothing will come out of it? These things, these hotel rooms, these moments are supposed to be steps to something significant but he refuses to follow the steps, only retrace them. He doesn’t understand this. All he knows is that he wants to be here right now, that he wants to hold her in his arms. That is all he knows and he wonders if he will ever understand and she wonders if she can ever explain.            They circle, hover like vultures, unsure of whether to pick at bones or continue south.            She sits, cold now, shivering. Wondering what she is doing here. She wishes, more than anything for the strength to stand up, for the strength to get up and just leave. Not to upset him or prove anything to herself.            Just to do it because it is Right.             He leans forward and puts a hand on her shoulder and that is all it takes; she feels weak, wants to swipe his hand away and hold him close at the same time and the confusion makes her feel sick. She stays still. Keeps her eyes closed. Dreams of water. He climbs down next to her on the floor; takes her face in his. And presses his forehead to hers. It feels like such a natural action but she fights against feeling anything, even though she knows she will return to it again and again later. She leans in, give in, as she always does, this giving space, this bendable creature, who will always make space in herself for him. She softens, rests her head against his, lets his hands fall around her and they sit like that for a moment and she tries not to think this moment is sacred because he will forget, and she will remember and nothing is sacred if it can be forgotten.            (She is right. He will not remember. It takes him only a month to forget. One day in the future he remembers a shadow of it. It is a feeling that he cannot place; a shape with a dull outline that he grapples to fill in; a drawing of plans to a house he cannot recall even though he senses its importance.)             But as she had predicted, she remembers. The drops on her shoulder. The forehead against hers. The hum of the air conditioner. The sound of water in the pipes. She is still sitting in the room, knees drawn to her chest.            She closes her eyes.             She is water. She is water. She is water.

(Originally published in Ajar Press, Summer 2016 issue.)

A Moment (from a rooftop)

Once I was standing on a roof waiting. And it seemed like I had always been waiting and waiting and the waiting would never end, and that nothing would arrive and that I would always have this expectant feeling in my heart full of waiting and wanting and never having or being fulfilled and that that was the way my life was meant to be. So I stood in the sun looking down at the street, waiting and waiting with my full heart and then I looked up to talk to the landlady, and she asked me where I was from and how I was doing and then she went away and then when I looked down, I saw what I wanted to see and it seemed to me unreal, so unbelievably unreal as if it were a dream. And I raised my hand to my head to shield my eyes and I looked down and I smiled.

A Moment (from one of my best moments)

Once when I was walking down the street and the cold was so bad that it was shaking my fingers and my bones and we were trying to make our way to the subway station and the cold was getting worse and worse and then there were flurry things blurring my vision; almost dust and then I realised it was snow and I couldn't believe it and no one expected snow in March but I knew, I knew it could happen because extraordinary things followed my wake and I was looking up at the grey sky and the snow was falling and I was thinking, I am so lucky, I am so lucky, I am so lucky.

Later on the train everything turned to white and I kept leaning over my neighbour to look out the glass, to make sure the world out there was real.

Dreams in my bottles (Sunday Times)

Dreams in my bottlesShubnum Khan
In Dido’s 2009 hit song, Sand in my shoes, she sings, Two weeks away feels likes the whole world should have changed/ But I’m home now/ And things still look the same/I think I’ll leave ‘till tomorrow to unpack/Try to forget for one night that I’m back in my flat, and in a few words she captures the surreal feeling of returning home from some foreign place where immersed in new sights and sounds we finally felt alive. To remind us how brave we were, we collect fridge magnets, take photographs and post #tbt during our lunch hour.
But some of us do other things.
As a teenager sitting at my local library in Durban I was inspired by novels that exposed me to foreign places like the American Midwest, London’s East End, snowy Russia and the rocky Himalayas and I became determined to possess this seemingly wide and wonderful world in my own way. On local family holidays I collected bags of sands from beaches in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Natal’s South Coast. In 2001 I asked my sister to bring me back a piece of Mauritius from her holiday and thus my sand-collecting journey went international. Soon after I brought back my own sand from a trip across India with my family. As I got older my hobby became more than just owning a piece of the world, it became an anchor to not only capture my own travel memories but also the history of the land itself.
However unless you’re on a beach holiday sand-collecting is no easy feat; the process usually involves scraping gravel, surreptitiously clawing parks and poking fingers into gardens whilst avoiding eye contact with passers by. The contents of these exertions are then deposited into hotel shampoo bottles, airsickness bags and even Purity bottles.
In fact in expensive cities where land value is high it’s almost downright impossible. When my sister visited Japan I begged her to bring some sand and all she managed to find were a few stones, (most likely from someone’s zen garden). In Singapore I struggled so much that I finally relented and dug up soil from the hotel foyer’s pot plant while the concierge was busy. And if I thought expensive cities were tough, conflict zones where the very land is being contested is even more difficult. Regretting not having brought back sand from Palestine when I visited in 1993 I tried to coax a friend going there to bring some back for me. Surprisingly, Israeli security takes their land grabbing very seriously and they confiscated it from his bag. In Lahore at the tense Wagha border between India and Pakistan I managed to dig up a handful of sand and take it across into India and for a while in my pocket, the two lands were finally united.
Kashmir, the contested Himalayan region was another story. I worked up the courage (and my father’s permission) to teach at a school in the mountains of Jammu and Kashmir some 7000 feet above sea level in a small village that could only be reached by horse. For four months with a group of volunteers I taught the loveliest kids so hungry for knowledge that some of them walked for kilometres uphill every morning just to learn. On rainy days the mountain turned into a muddy clay that the villagers used to bake into bricks and it was this mud that lined the path that passed through fields filled with corn and apples to the school. This was the earth I chose to bring back from Kashmir; the clay from the path to the school in the mountains and not the earth stained with blood from the valley just below.
In the U.S.A I arrived during the end of a particularly cold winter and like the weather outside I was undergoing my own inner change as I recovered from heartache. I lived with a group of writers in rural upstate New York in a Colonial Dutch house overlooking the Catskills. The place radiated old American charm with sprawling hills, red tractors, gable-end homes and neighbours that waved. A five-kilometre walk dubbed The Loop became my daily habit in reflection and as the season changed so too did the landscape; icy ponds melted, magnolias bloomed and sparrows began to sing. As Spring arrived I too felt myself emerge from the cold and at the end of my last walk I dug up the earth from that path that kept me going that winter’s end.
In China I lived for 6 months in a majestic hotel from 1906 lining Shanghai’s Bund as part of a residency with Swatch Watch. My studio overlooked Nanjing East, the main shopping street in China and one of the busiest in the world. From the ceiling I hung dried roses and my writing desk was filled with plants and flowers. I hardly ventured out because of the crowds and when I did try to collect sand from outside I suspected its integrity had been compromised with dirt and pollution from the bustling city. Exasperated, in my last week I finally emptied a pot plant on my desk and while it may have been mostly potting soil, in retrospect I can’t imagine any place better than from my studio’s writing desk.
Bali, Maldives, Phuket and Penang, all beach towns were no problem. And in Morocco I managed a handful of dust from the outskirts of the Volubilis Ruins. In Saudi Arabia, having heard stories of sands that wept for their return to the holy lands I ensured mine was only from the coastal city of Jeddah. The rest in my collection from Switzerland, South Korea, United Arab Emirates and Turkey were a mix of gifts and moments I can’t recall anymore.
There were places I actually forgot; in Canada and England utterly depressed over some private matter I forgot to collect any sand at all. In Spain I was too taken by the unexpected delight of finding myself in the middle of Cordoba’s Patios Festival (where the entire city celebrates Spring by inviting visitors to admire their blossoming patios) to remember anything else.

These bottles of sand serve as a reminder to keep dreaming. As a teenager in the library even imagining that I might go out into the world this way seemed impossible; I was (and still am) a girl from a small and often conservative community in Durban. The experience has been both rewarding and frustrating. My bottled sand reminds me that dreams can become a reality and that big things can happen to small people. When Dido was singing about sand in her shoes, I think what she was really talking about was dreams in bottles and how we should never stop pursuing them.
(Originally published in the Sunday Times, Lifestyle magazine, 13 November 2016)

A Moment (from the mall)

I was sitting on a bench in a mall when I glanced at my phone and saw a message and then my mother was phoning me and I knew before I even heard it and I didn't know what to say except that I was coming as soon as I could and when I put the phone down I looked at my hands and I kept sitting and the mall was well lit and there was light and children screaming and people living and I didn't know what to do. And then A came and she made a joke and I looked up at her and I was laughing except that I was crying and her face changed and she came to me and she put an arm on my shoulder. And it was okay, I kept saying it was okay, that it was bound to happen but still, even when it happened it felt wrong. It felt like I had betrayed him. Like I had given him up. Like I had let go first.

You know.

A Moment (from the car in the driveway)

I was sitting in the car when I heard what I already knew. I had just parked in the driveway and I looked at my phone and K was next to me and I looked at my screen and I saw what I already knew but still, something happened when I saw it, and I don't remember what happened next except that it felt like the pin holding me together had fallen out and I collapsed against the steering wheel and all pretence was gone and I was sobbing and K, she tried to put her arm around me and she said it would be okay and she patted my back. And there was nothing left to think and nothing left to say.

K says she will never forget that moment; how the world seemed to disappear from beneath me.

Shall I tell you...

Shall I tell you about grief?
I shall not.
For there are no words for roads that were never taken and trips that were never planned and hands that were never held and parts that were never pieced and seeds that were never planted and lies that were never truthed and stories that were never told and words that were never spoken and mistakes that were never fixed and hopes that were never dashed and pieces that were never wholed and fingers that were never fitted and gifts that were never given and chances that were never taken and damns that were never given and answers that were never questioned and questions that were never answered because, how, how could words ever express any of these things? There are no words for these things. No words to lock them in.
If only words were doors that opened outward and not inward, taking us outside into the light instead of locking us in.

A Moment (on a train in China)

One night on a train to Xi'an I wake up and the world is passing me by. The dark night is rushing outside the glass and I blink, bleary eyed my head half lifted. The compartment is filled with the sound of people sleeping or the sound of people pretending to sleep, soft snores, the crease of rough pants on sheets. For a moment through a slice of curtain where the light hit my closed eyes seconds before I see another world, passing lights in deep darkness, the sound of the tracks and the flush of the toilet next door and I can see worlds, entire worlds rushing pass my window in the darkness, bright burning lights, entire cities lit up and still the rattle of the train. I close my eyes, lower my head, hold the moment, the flashing light a shudder in my dreams.