Of Solitude

and other things

Solitude

Did somebody come again, sad heart?
No, nobody
It must be a wayfarer somewhere, he'll go away
The night is past, the stardust begins to dissipate
The still lamps in the mansions begin to falter
Weary of waiting, all the roads are now in slumber
The dusty road, unsympathetic, has clouded all
traces of footprints
Put out the lamps; remove the wine, the jug and the goblet.
Lock your sleepless doors
No one, no one's going to come here now. 

~ Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Translated from Urdu by Baroon Farooqi) 

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‘In moments of sadness, I turn to poetry’ is what I told a friend today as I shared this poem with her. I bought this poetry collection by Faiz some time ago simply because it looked so pretty. I knew I wasn’t going to read it properly. Today however, I picked up the book and turned a few pages until I landed on this poem.

Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. There is nothing special in this poem except that at the moment I read it, it seemed to mirror my thoughts and feelings in some meaningful and beautiful senses - and that is what makes it special.

What is it about solitude that manages to (dis)enchant human beings? We are brought up with people around us all the time; and with time, it simply becomes natural to always have someone to talk to - family, friends, strangers. Indeed, we actively seek for human presence. That is one of the many things the pandemic taught us. There is nothing like real, raw, visceral human presence.

Solitude then is a moment of unusualness, an exception in the normal course of things. To be alone in this fast world can be both a luxury and a curse. To revel in solitude is to be with yourself. One is never therefore truly alone. Talking with your own heart and seeing your own mind can be quite a task, believe me. Subjects of capital and modernity (these words are signs of a new-found love for Sociology), we humans need these moments of silence and solitude - not loneliness - to just pause for a while and see what’s happening around us.

But, and this is why I was drawn to the poem today, loneliness is also torturous. Faiz’s Solitude reflects this sentiment. ‘Did somebody come again, sad heart?/No, nobody’. This verse speaks of immeasurable pain and tiredness. A man asking his sad heart if it can hear the footsteps of another person, only to tell it that it’s no one, perhaps a traveler on his own journey, someone who doesn’t have to do anything with the heart’s sadness.

The use of the word ‘again’ is worth noticing. It is the peculiarity of solitude that one is always in the search of someone. Every time someone comes a little close, the sad heart desires to cling on to them only to lose them forever in an instant. Again, someone comes and the cycle of hope, desire and pain repeats. All this while, the solitude becomes more weary by the day - the night is past, the lamps falter and doors are locked. ‘Sleepless’ doors, for true sleep is the preserve of those at ease. Otherwise, sleep itself becomes an iterative performance, an act one must observe with the fall of night.

I have written about loneliness before. That particular verse was written on a teary night, tonight is just still. There is a dullness in solitude. It’s not hard to be happy but happiness itself becomes a performance. Companionship is also not difficult to get, there’s lot of people one can call. But calling is not the same as talking. To talk is to understand and be understood. To be happy is to just be happy. To be not alone is to be with someone. Until that being transpires, one must tell one’s sad heart, ‘no, nobody’.

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To all my readers, my sincere apologies. I realise I am writing after a gap of many months and I am not sure when I will write again. Over the past months, I have opened this page several times either on my laptop or in my mind. There have been a lot of moments and thoughts to write about - a pride parade I attended, college and adulthood, the new year, my exercise of the sovereign power to vote and so on.

Here’s something I began to write on the First of January this year, hoping to post it:

And the calendar is reset again. It’s the first of January, 2022.

I wonder what it means. In some ways, it is just another day in all our lives — nature does not divide our days into weeks, months and years, we do. Yet, in many ways, a new year signifies fresh hope, a sense of renewal and new beginnings — even if it is all in our minds. For a lot of things are just in our minds and that does not make them any less real.

This is also the time when people reflect back on the year gone by. I find that a hard thing to do — a year is just too long, and sometimes I am too tired. But 2021 was a monumental year in in many senses. I turned 18, started writing this blog, got into the university of my choice and have had great experiences ever since. 2021 was also a year we saw the loss of our loved ones in the second wave of the pandemic and also a year we saw the heartening triumph of the farmers’ movement. It was a year of spewing hatred but also a year of great solidarity. I could call it a year of contradictions but I think, every moment of our life is a contradiction in some ways. We inhabit a life of irony.

There were times in the last few weeks and days of the year when I felt deeply impacted and wanted to write. I was just too lazy and tired to gather up the energy to do so. Even now, as I lie in front of my laptop on this beautiful morning, I am struggling to form words and perhaps, that will reflect in the writing.

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Another time, I wrote on my inability to write,

This blank canvas
Calling out to me 
Write! Write! Fill me 
Come on 
I can’t
I don’t know why - I can’t. 

… 

Words that relieve 
Words that are white 
On a black canvas. 

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And finally, I wrote on ‘place’ and ‘home’:

I have become a traveler now 
Home has changed

It was simple before 
Home was the place I loved 
The only place

Other places were ‘places’ 
Home was not

Turning 18
Becoming an adult
Getting into college
‘Building’ my life
It was right there but I just 
Never saw it coming

I was scared of it too 
Felt that home’s gonna always be home
And I could not possibly embrace 
Another ‘place’

In fact, I had to learn how to do that
Took help 
Put in effort 
Loosened my boundaries 

And it worked 
Last month when I came back home
It was a different homecoming 

It felt like a place 
A place I was coming to stay in for two months 
Until I was back again to ‘my life’ 

Things seemed different now 
I heard the same voices through a new filter 
The same eyes yet different glasses 

Rooms also acquired new meaning 
My room seemed more ‘mine’ 
My mom’s more ‘hers’ 

This boundary of hers and mine 
Was new 
It was a boundary of a ‘place’
Not home 

And now the two months are done 
I go back 
And I don’t know where is home 
It is here. I know that. 
I don’t want to go back
‘Places’ are complex
Home is not
Yet, I will go back
And embrace the place 
And in that embracing 
Change what ‘home’ is 
Change what ‘place’ is 

Everytime I come back 
Everytime I get up from my mom’s room 
And enter mine 
Everytime I close the door 
Everytime I stare at this screen 
Everytime I think about going back 
Everytime I go back 
I change 
And my home changes 

But - and this is what anchors me - home is still there. It will always be there. 

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This post hasn’t been the most structured or well thought out but I hope it says or does something for you. It does for me. I will try to write more regularly, that’s all I can say. In the meanwhile, you can check out an essay I wrote for the Café Dissensus on reimagining national history through fragment as analytic and fantasy as method here.

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