Grief Is Power- Essays

THE LANGUAGE OF HOPE

Silence is the language of hope. And it begins with betrayal.

Simply put, I often wonder how a word that consists of lesser alphabets than the fingers on my one hand can represent something larger than life itself. Have I found an answer? Obviously not. There is no framework, no basis for such an emotion.

That is actually a lie. It does have a basis. But what makes it weaker, and more vulnerable to betrayal is that it is based on another human emotion. Expectation— is an intricately crafted word. However, the term could split itself (not literally) in two and belong to either side of despair or profound, positive happenings.

So, could we call hope an ideal state of mind? Ideal may sound like a robust and wrong word. But the aspect of it, the elements of that word, the emotion, the thought, is far too universal. Stand up, look around yourself. Find me a single space where this absurd optimistic mist doesn't lurk around one? It takes more than being just human to expect something in favor of oneself.

Who says the sunflower doesn't hope that the bee will kiss its heart today?

Who says that the butterfly stuck in the city, near a building, knowing death awaits it within hours, doesn't hope to find nectar on a flat-petalled flower to fly while it breathes?

And how do you know that when you're about to die, you don't hope to see just a little longer?

You may not know that it lives like a creature climbing the walls of your house, knocking on your windows at night, sleeping through the worst of moments that surround your life. The sound of it is futile, rough and echoey, not transparent, not bright. It is the shy bird that does not want to sing in front of you. So it hides behind those bushes you look at but do not admire.

Yet, it is not a "thing." There is no physical hope. Of course, we create signs of it, embody it with feathers, in other people, in our technology, in faith, in religion, in relationships. Hope, though varied in its intentions, in its nature, is the religion of the universe. We deny it, yet we have it. We indulge in it. And most of us look away from it, disappointed in an empty vessel that begins and ends only in mind.

So what is hope?— the genesis and the termination of imagination.

Like every religion, it has its own language. Hope is the most overused, common human language.

But then, where does this language lay? Where does it eat, breathe, sleep? Hope simply lies in empty spaces, the gap that unifies the happening, the happened, and everything that will eventually occur. It lives between words in a dictionary, in literature, in what we speak, the sounds we make, and our gestures. The four-letter word, somehow closer to the four-legged animal that loves its parent, follows every angle of life: the monumental or the indivisible.

Hope is a language with several dialects.

When I read The Great Gatsby by F Scott. Fitzgerald, I remember feeling passionately empty for Gatsby. I couldn't at first fathom the blind, ruthless and vacant hope that never went dormant in this larger-than-life human being. Obsessive, it was, yes, but also, to a certain level, delusional. But on the other hand, perhaps, without a doubt, the most pitiful character, caught up in the craziness of it all, was the delicate, numb socialite, Daisy Buchanan. Her hope comes in the form of love, in all its innocent glory. She hopes her daughter will grow up to "be a fool." But when she sees Gatsby after her marriage, for the first time, she too, like him, hopes to fix a specific portion of time, to put together a gone, crumpled past.

Bakha, a young Dalit man from Mulk Raj Anand's masterpiece, The Untouchable, goes through a rollercoaster of a day in strange hopes that he will be able to eradicate himself from his destiny of being a latrine cleaner. His adventures throughout, regardless of their results, are littered with hope for freedom.

Hope is a shapeless entity, full of faith, possibilities, of expressions. Hope is the one thing that combines all things human and subdues every other feeling that floods the heart, soul, and mind.

When a community fights for peace, a country fights for freedom, and the animals fight for food, it is when the language of hope bends and recreates the reimagination of what or how things are supposed to be. A farmer's wish for the sky to pour is as good as a parched throat's wishes for water. And a Gardner remains an incurable futurist.

But before it lets us bare it in our arms, in our chests, or on our necks like a tumor, it warns us about the repercussions. That things change. That nothing remains forever, and time is the only reality. That the building standing will one day fall, that the sun will go, and that life will reset. Hope is a dangerous, devilish thing. It beckons us like a dog for treats. Whether we get it or not, it remains a hopeful tragedy.

So if all that we speak is in the same language, of different dialects, in different tones, in various punctuations and pronunciations, how are we left so disconnected?

Hope is the language of the gone— the ones who hoped are the ones who spoke it. Hope tells stories. We sleep on its pillow of comfort. It could be obsession, love, freedom, imagination, fantasy, or anything that forms the foundations of a reimagination. It is the only thing that remains— to reimagine the world.

That the next destruction could birth the hope for yet another world. A new language.