Drape of the forgotten souls3/28/2024 Never before had I seen such a fiery play of colors….such sharp contrasts.ĭawn and dusk would drape the same landscape in entirely different costumes. The landscape was right out of a fantasy world. People would stop to watch in amusement, and I would silently pray for them to leave me alone. I used to drive down initially, stop at all the places that were phenomenally picturesque, and take pictures. Unsure of what lay ahead, I stepped into my new job. I applied for the job and I remember feeling happy that there would not be any night on-calls since patients were just picking up. 38 Bahadurabad helps me pick up the pen where Zeeba left off. In 38 Bahadurabad, are the perceptions and the memories that time took away from us, and that can never again be found in the external reality of our lives. In an author’s work, if we can find a bit of our own worlds- the part that is private, personally meaningful, that we cherish deeply, and that cannot be described casually or carelessly, the author becomes family. My own equivalent of this is the sense of loss I feel when I think of the Bangalore and the India that I left behind. The other article was about the forgotten soul of Karachi. Sometimes, the words I write, are my means of holding on to her- to all that she stood for. This resonated with me because even though my mother is alive, I am already preparing for the time she will be gone. One of the articles was about how 38 Bahadurabad had acquired meaning as a tangible world that was used to access something intangible shared by a mother and a son. I downed both the articles, holding on to every word. These articles were written by Taha Kehar who had never met Zeeba for real, but whose writings had accessed her world and her mind in a way that only writers are capable of. In the course of my exploration, I stumbled on two articles that touched upon Zeeba’s work. The family that I had never met, but the family that I perhaps knew better than the people I know for real. Like all the souls I had never met and who became my family because their perceptions, quests, and private sorrows throbbed in me, Zeeba became my family too. But in 2004, when Zeeba was alive, we lived in the same city, never having heard about each other. In 2010, I had already returned from London. As if to complete the story of losses, I learnt that Zeeba had passed away abruptly in 2010, from an aneurysm. I was intrigued by Zeeba, and I looked her up. Zeeba wrote about the loss of the meanings created by forgotten cities and forgotten characters. The only other work that evoked a similar mood was the television series Buniyaad. Those were years when our subcontinent retained something of our cultural and spiritual essence our cultural soul had not yet been eroded by bloodshed, war, or the forces of globalization. There was much that they had survived, defeated, and outlived there was much that had enriched them from within, no matter how poor or uneducated they were on the outside. That was an era when people lived more authentic lives, and knew the art of transforming their poverty and adversity into stories of valour. Her words captured the sublime elements of personality and human interactions that went into making the ordinary pattern of life extraordinary. Zeeba’s description of her childhood that drew sustenance from the soulful characters whose lives were entwined with hers, evoked in me a personal sense of loss. Somehow, our lives were enmeshed in a strange way. I recognized a strange, uncanny resemblance to my own self…or perhaps to the elements of life that were a part of my formative years in a country that was very different from what it is today. The more I read the book, the more I was intrigued by the author. Through the book, I met a young author who chose to write under the name of Zeeba. But somehow, I had stared at the book, and the book had stared back at me, until I could no longer evade it. Nor do I recall why I chose to read it now when I hadn’t read it in all these years. I do not recall when I had purchased the book, or why I had purchased it.
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