Making the turn

Ali and I: An inseparable duo

My father would always be busy, Busy traveling the world while I would be stuck in my hometown, the only place I had ever known.

He wasn’t always this way, at least not according to the memories I had of him till I was half a decade old. I remember asking my grandmother once “why does baba stay away from me? Does he loathe me?” to which my grandmother replied unconsciously, “he doesn’t hate you, he just can’t handle the stinging pain he feels every time he sees  you, jami” I was only 7 years old, too young to fathom the dark truth, that I brought nothing but pain to my father but the words remained in my head, till I understood.   

Every time I paid a call to my relatives, They would remind me how much I resembled my dear mother. I had inherited virtually all of my mother’s features, from her coffee coloured hair to her straight edge shaped nose, I even got her narrow hooded hazel eyes. In fact even strangers who knew my mother, within an instant would know I was her son, in my father’s case that hardly ever happened. I would look in the mirror and see a part of her in my reflection which would bring me a great deal of pain because the mirror would also reflect the despondency I felt.

Maybe, the sight of me carried my father back to the short lived time he spent with my mother. what baffled me was, why was I the victim of my father’s aloofness for something I could not control? Which made me skeptical about my father’s love for my mother for if he really loved her, wouldn’t he have wanted to take care of their last mark of true love, himself? Why would he run away from a part of her? Did he detest my mother so much that he could not bare to glance at me? The provoking thoughts made me sure of one thing, if my love were to ever depart this world for the next with me left to mourn, I’d take care of whatever she left, till my very last breath.

The only thing my father and I had in common was the missing of a feminine presence in our lives,(For even my grandmothers had passed away soon after my mother’s passing) and our need to either ignore or finish it. I didn’t know what my father chose to do but I chose the latter because there needed to be a balance, without which I could never attain peace.

Now that I think of it, even the missing of that feminine presence is not what we have ever had in common. My father could always find his wife in me but I could not in a million years find her in him, I couldn’t even find his own self. What we had in common was the same shot at attaining peace, All we had to do was try. In my case, I had to express what I felt for Salma.

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Jamil shams Hasan or in short Jamil S Hasan, was the name I was granted by my late mother, whom I only got to spend 5 years of my life with. The years I relished life the most, perhaps the reason being my short lived completeness. After which, my maternal and paternal grandparents took turns to raise me. I was an only child, which meant, I had no one who was familiar with the pain I felt while going through that horrendous time, not even someone to divert the thoughts that declined my mental strength constantly.   

 Getting older, I felt immense desperation to fill the gap that my parents had left. With my mother up in the heavens and my father of whom I got a glimpse of if I were very lucky, I knew I could never count on them to fill the void. So I sought God’s help because in times of total isolation, I found Him, giving me more love than any parent ever could. It was by His grace that I found the world of fiction and literature, which became my safe haven, my home. This world might not have filled the void perpetually but it did divert my attention from the world I lived in whenever I needed to, which I found enough as it did allay the angst I felt in my sordid world.

So I read, From Lousia May Alcott to Jane austen, Dan Brown to William Shakespeare, John green to Veronica Roth, Mark Twain to Charles Dickens, J.K Rowling to Oscar Wilde, J.R.R Tolken to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bapsi Sidwa to Mohammad Hanif, Rumi to Iqbal. The list perpetuated, every day for I gained speed quickly. It didn’t matter if the book was more female oriented or was a mushy fabricated love story because it had always been my belief that the beauty of literature was and is, it not being restricted to a special audience but being open to everyone.