Word Count: 3885 | Reading Time: 13 min
Last Thursday I collected food items in my basket and handed out exact change to the woman at the counter. We don’t even try to say anything or ask each other how we’re doing anymore, the woman and I. But we smile at each other. Sometimes she touches my wrist slightly to indicate that she is sad. I glance at the photo she has in the corner behind her, under the windowsill by the counter, the light outside is turning dark blue, we are entering the blue hour again. That soft inexplicable hour and a half between day and night. The photo is of her mother sitting in a chemo chair from the year before the word rations started. She is sitting next to the older woman in the photo, holding hands, through catheters between fingers. I smile back slightly to reassure her. I don’t think that it actually reassures her. But I never know what to say. And then we part. The next customer moves into my spot, and the woman turns away.
The other day I showed her the flowers I had bought for myself when I passed the counter. She smiled a bit longer than usual, I think she approved. I think this is her way of showing she is listening. I can never quite do the same, I try to imitate her sometimes, but I always fall short I think. Words, even before they were restricted, were hard to access for me. And other strangers who I would talk to after a while walked away, in a way to indicate that we had nothing more to exchange.
As I was putting away my wallet, two ticket stubs to the History of Sound Museum fell out from the side pocket of my bag, the only museum at the edge of the city, where there are booths with hologram human figures reciting everything in repetition, from ghazals to ayats, for heartaches and even anger, from letters being read aloud to just a hologram human figure talking to you with a script designed by an AI, if you’re lonely. The only place in this city where words are not contained, or perhaps in their way of repetition, the containment is different from ours. I had thought about taking us there for your birthday in winter, but winter is still far away.
After the grocery market, I walked to the street vendors to bargain for vegetables. The price of poultry is now fixed throughout the city after the demonstrations last year when you were visiting the city in the north, and so I bargain only for vegetables in smaller markets now, where vendors change their prices, where I can hope to find vegetables enough for a clear soup or a stir-fry on months when a thin slab of butter is available. I looked at the price of a vegetable the vendor has written near its basket and I pointed out tomato after tomato, inspecting each carefully as the hawker made me a small bag. After weighing it against a scale, I asked for the final price. Peas, potatoes, carrots and spring onions, I repeated the same gestures for these vegetables and purchase them. Perhaps I always come across as too eager, and not too pushy. They point at the price, lower it a bit if I end up buying at least two bags. We settled and I moved on.
It has been three hundred and thirty-seven days now since your father’s silence after Gustakh’s death. And seven hundred and ninety-two days since the wrist counters were put in. I have learned to manage my rations allotted to me quite reasonably now. I learned how to add meaning in my silences and pauses around you, I learned to pace them sparingly throughout the time we were together.
And in the time we were together I had sometimes felt that you and I, we deliberately looked for obscure, almost hidden corners around the city to hide in, to sit by each other surrounded by our shared pauses and silences. Mutual shared silence is quite like a conversation. Stolen gazes are conversations. These are enough to carry on days when words are scarce. A gentle flick of the hand to brush a strand of hair behind my ear, our fingers touching slightly as we passed cigarettes back and forth, the gentle nod whenever the newspaper was passed across the table. An intimacy in a shared silence. That is how I remember we would talk. You read a stanza to yourself, marking it with a lead pencil, and handing it to me to read. Then I would slowly read word after word, stopping a few times. Your smile whenever there was a word I couldn’t translate entirely, or immediately — I placed my finger under the words, and looked at you. I remember how you read the phrase with your eyes, and look for it in the dictionary beside us, pointing at the meaning, and sometimes, you would write the meaning with the pencil, using your ration to read it aloud, accompanied by that smile in your eyes, and with a few phrases of a poem we would have talked as much as our rations would have allowed at that point in the month.
It used to be quite difficult in the beginning. I would sometimes bite the skin around my nails when I had too much to say, and not enough words left to use. I used to open cans of carbonated drinks, one after another, with fingertips which had skin peeled near the nail, just to keep my hands busy. I would be impatient, restlessly stubbing out half smoked cigarettes into ashtrays. In these moments, I sometimes used to look towards you. Your face, it used to have a soft and a gentle smile, your eyes used to have kindness. But soon after the wrist counters, your words and your smile, they disappeared. After Gustakh, you did not smile at all.
Even before the rations were allotted, you used your words carefully, they were measured and precise. Remember how you walked around restlessly that January evening, when you and your father had an argument? This was just after the rations had been introduced. You kicked the wall in the alley where we stood, and took a deep breath, and then you did it again repeatedly, eleven times. And all the while you were sobbing. Twelve times.
With the microchip counters inserted near the radial artery, how does one explain to the State that a thousand spoken words in a month are never enough for people like you and me, or like your older brother? I think even the silent ones, like your father who stopped talking after Gustakh’s death, couldn’t hold the grief that his heart held, his tongue could not utter it, so he repeatedly prayed loudly for his heart to stop beating for months, till he fell silent.
I read the other day that in the first year, thirty seven men and women were arrested and disappeared for protesting. They were asking the State to raise the ration quota of written words from two hundred to a thousand. My neighbor Mina said that they were all poets, like her. She also told me there were also rumors, which said that people were driven mad because of the constant ticking if they ran out of words in their counters and they walked around wanting to hurt themselves. Or they disappeared.
I have been writing this note for months now, mostly on the last five nights before the monthly resets. Before the counters I used to feel so much that it would spill over into uncounted words, now as I accumulate them one upon the other, I rethink about the same thought for days, and sometimes in that process the questions and answers become one or the other, interchangeably. Or the feeling dissolves. The rations have given me time to pause, if nothing else. And time, like its promise, changed other things in return.
Even now when I think about Gustakh, he loved words, their sound on his tongue, their place in his jokes, the way they followed one after the other in a ghazal, and then ending, like ghazals do — contained within two lines, an entire galaxy, an entire town. You never told me when they started calling him Gustakh, but it was a name amongst other poets like him. But I can’t be certain how the name took over his real name. And how it was also the last word uttered to him. His name repeated as he was kicked and beaten. And like most words and names which cannot be contained or explained, can sometimes cause discomfort to others. And so we must explain, right? Or else we might die. But when I asked you about this a couple of times, you kept quiet, you had heard rumors and whispers before it had happened, and maybe that was your burden and so eventually you decided to save your words, and you looked away. I had asked too much of you.
No one had time to wonder why the government had put in the counters – everyone was counting their own words rather than using them for complaints or political protests. There were vegetables and flowers to be bought with those words. Freedom of speech were three very wasteful words. I remember the first week after the rations were imposed, and the counters were put in. The nights were long. The days were longer. And we weighed the sound of every word we knew, holding it in our mouth to wonder if it deserved to be said aloud.
There was a man who had written a short poem years before the rations. And his poem, since it couldn’t be read out repeatedly for fear of wasting words, or more importantly for displeasing the State, the words were posted on a photograph and were passed around from one WhatsApp group to another. It was a strange little poem, and people called the poet a prophet – the poem showed a world like ours, with word rations and two lovers who went about their days.
But in that poem, there was nothing about a poet-brother who was killed before he could explain. The poem did not say how frustrating it was when you wanted to explain a misunderstood statement, or you wanted to argue about a cruel remark made here or there, left sparingly in the middle of pauses. Nor can we mutter uselessly to ourselves as well, it wastes away words. We can’t sound out the names of our lovers and mothers, fathers and best friends, our dead brothers, our dogs — but most importantly we can’t sound out our own names. We can’t waste words to say our names to ourselves. I sometimes miss saying the two syllables of my own name, next to the two syllables in yours.
Taking the metro train requires alertness. Since the rationing, the announcements of the incoming and delayed trains were displayed on a small board in the corner. And so one has to be prepared to notice the changes. There is a deep hum inside the trains and at the platforms. Nobody speaks and everyone is looking at their phones or their feet or around other passengers. The dense hum follows you till you come out on the main road. And even then, like a shadow it follows you back home sometimes. The streets have other sounds, but never without the hum. It follows me, it follows you, it follows us. It follows, like a reptile, sneaking quietly, crawling, into the shadows, but is always lurking. Just like that man who had stood next to me at the metro station nearest the stadium the other day. As the announcement was made, the doors of the train pushed open, he rushed up against me, pushing me into me, against me, as we tried to enter the carriage of the train. There were others around me, but he stood close to me, as his hands wandered to parts of my body, feeling them, and I felt the words in my throat clog up, and when I stared back at him, he just smiled, an ugly smile, his smile approved of what his hands had done to my body intentionally. I looked down at my wrist counter, I had seven words left. We entered the train and I went to the other end of the carriage, the women’s side, he followed and stood nearby. I sat down next to the woman in the corner. As he reached us, he noticed the woman. He looked at his counter, then looked at the woman. I was watching this now, his gaze only focused on the woman next to me. The train started moving, we were moving back and forth, everyone in a single rhythm, as the carriage moved. He kept staring at the woman and scratching his chin, his thighs. She looked up at him and turned her gaze away again. He kept staring from his corner across from us. Just as the train pulled over at the station near the flyover and next to the bus station, he walked up to our corner and pulled at her dupatta from her neck and laughed. Then he turned to the old man standing near the door and pointed at her and said ‘yeh aadmi hai’. The woman looked down at her hands, avoiding the man’s comment. He laughed and looked at me, smiled and said ‘tum toh aurat he ho mujhey pata lag gaya hai’. His gaze and his hands, more than his words, decided how both of us would be treated. There was an announcement of a raid at the platform of the station, and he walked off. My unspoken eight words tasted like vomit in my throat.
When the train reached my station, I walked down the escalators quickly, holding my throat. On such days, it is not till I am inside my room, my gate locked, do I take off my shawl and then I use the last words of the day to sing while I smoke in my bathroom. It had been humid and my hair was stuck to my face, my neck, but here in these shadows, when I am unwatched, I am alone. I saved my words for this moment, to sing a song about my heavy heart in eight words. I sat down in the store room next to the terrace. Inside the storeroom, in my parent’s old wooden trunk are my old notebooks and journals, and here while slowly flipping through them I hummed an Iqbal Bano song. I remember the tune briefly, hummed by my grandparents, years before the rations, years before they burned music cassettes in piled heaps because the reigning General saw a dream about an unknown song that would cause a revolution which might disrupt his government, years before his government was removed by another General and a song was played at the former Dictator’s arrest, years before the rations and counters. And even now, when no music remains, a few words uttered with measure, the soft voice of Iqbal Bano recorded over the static of an old bootlegged cassette, a cassette long destroyed now, I remember her as she sang Muddat hui hai yaar ko mehmaan kiyey hue, in a moment while I sat alone, an urge arose in some part of my heart, I had to listen to it again, I would go to the museum with you and listen to the song. I wanted to listen to that tune and remember my grandmother’s laughter. When I repeated the verse out aloud, I ran out of words midway through the humming of the song.
I remember a tall young neighbor I had once, who couldn’t explain how much sadness he carried around with him, they say he eventually disappeared himself. The man who sold tobacco and water near the corner of our street said he saw the man being taken away for being too sad. I remember you saying it wasn’t because of the sadness, it was also just because of repeatedly running out of his words and then out of frustration trying to take out his wrist counter. The other day, the old man Rizwan, who sold flowers at the old cemetery near my house was taken away for calling out his wife’s name repeatedly at her grave. After his words ran out, he kept making a loud croaking sound, his throat dried, no one could understand the words, but it still sounded like the name of his wife, his nephew held onto him from the back, crying with him. I watched them, my throat felt dry, and even after drinking warm water, my throat has been feeling scratched all day today. When Mina dropped by later, she said her throat also felt dry since she had heard the man yesterday.
Isn’t it rather strange that they decided to place the counter chip so close to our radial artery— an artery which leads back to the heart; an artery which if we cut open to remove the chip will leave us drained of blood. And dead. For days on end now, I have been carrying a heaviness in my heart, but I am afraid to cry. What if the sadness carried on through the artery to other parts of me? What should I do then to make that sadness stop? What if it goes around in my blood, making pit stops at different organs. Leaving its traces of sadness in every corner of my body. My sobs might rob me of words. I can’t cry, it will leave me wordless. The counter does that sometimes. It can’t differentiate between audible and mumbled words really. I can’t have that. I just can’t. What if I have to tell you to stay, to hold my hand — what will I do? What if you disappear, and I have to call you, how will I call you on the phone then, with no words with me? What if they take you away, and I can’t shout to save you? What will I do then? I can’t be selfish because of my sadness.
But you did call me selfish. You said I couldn’t understand how you could love anything anymore. And how angry you were. And how when you kept shouting and your words ran out while they were beating Gustakh, and suddenly you had no words left. You wanted to give your words to him, just so he could tell them what he had meant. He was a poet. Poets should have words. But they said he was disrespecting their religion. And he had to die. So they started beating him. And you kept trying to come in between, trying to give your words to him. But he still died.
These last few months, we have gone around the city’s corners, to hide away and sit together without saying much, shoulder to shoulder sometimes. We don’t need to say much when we sit like this. These corners hold us. These corners which we’ve been stumbling across, a morning one week, an evening another. Sometimes the same table by the window for days, other times a rooftop while it rains nearby. I sometimes lean in to drink my chai, while you flip through a book, fingers brushing against the paper slowly. We sit around each other with comfortable long pauses — to breathe in the morning air, then to take a drag of the first cigarette, to sniff the steam above a cup, a moment here and a moment there. Like rituals, like a prayer, fingers playing with paper and pen, tobacco and flower petals, you glance slightly at me and we continue to sit together in absolute silence. I sometimes try not to think about your moments of impatience, that brief nod, that moment where you would bite your lip to stop yourself from saying something cruel. And how you would sometimes look at me, and your otherwise almost kind eyes would look through mine, without a blink.
Yesterday evening when we walked around the park, everything was lit in soft pale peach light. There was a delicate October breeze in the spaces between you and me, while we sat quietly near the fountains. You had told me that it was difficult for you to love anyone like you once did. How your heart held so many sorrows that it was impossible to love anyone. When you protested near the Supreme court, asking for a trial for your brother, I went with him to the district courts week after week. But trials waste words, and no one wanted to waste these for a man who was a poet, whose grave was desecrated every night, till it was left without a stone or any markings of a name. Nameless.
Last week at the park, you told me that my love was not enough for you. You looked away after this. Your eyes held that look again, that stare where you could look through me and nothing could make you see me, there in that moment beside you. You asked me how can one, after all this, go on believing that their love, that their mohabbat was enough? I smiled and looked down at my hands. I told you that I was selfish, and that no one else mattered when you were not around. Perhaps it was because I had imagined that if I had you, it would be enough for me, the world would make sense, even the loss of words wouldn’t matter. Isn’t that what the poets had written about? Isn’t that what Faiz had meant? I remember very little for a while after that. You reached out and slowly kissed me. And as I leaned into you, my hand on your cheek, I could feel that something had severed in that moment between us, your body moved away from me, and you walked away. Sometimes you can tell precisely when someone is about to break your heart moments before they do. But I didn’t feel the ache, not when I boarded the train, not when I bumped into someone on the sidewalk, not when I reached the entrance hallway of the Museum of Sound alone and gave my ticket stubs at the counter. Not even when I reached the listening stations of the music and poetry of the Delhi poets. It was only when I inserted the ticket at the listening booth and the the hologram figure who looked exactly like a young and gentle Iqbal Bano smiling and precisely when started singing Muddat hui hai yaar ko mehmaan kiyey hue that I felt the ache arise slowly and suddenly, inside my chest, my arms, and my throat felt hoarse as if I had been screaming for a long time, but the only sound that could be heard was from the singing hologram in the station.