Metaphysics - Notes

 A ‘scientific experiment’ is the test of the truth of a ‘narrative’ that is being tried to push into the world to be taken precedence over. Every other narrative (non-scientific) doesn’t have this experiment, with its concrete process of ‘scientific method.’ But wait, the narrative of ‘evolution’ did take some precedence over the narratives of 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛 at the scale of the world. It’s simple. Experiment is not a lie. The results of the experiment are the truths. If the ‘truth’ is clashing at large scale with something else, maybe that other thing is not constructed or interpreted well enough. If, on the other hand, the ‘other narrative’ is interpreted to its truest sense, and it still clashes directly with the ‘scientific truth’, that narrative is categorically wrong.

There’s the material or physical, mathematical, and the ‘ultimate’ reality. Natural Sciences have a claim of all the truths inside the physical reality. Pure Mathematics claims all the truths in the mathematical reality. I do not intend to portray that the physical and mathematical reality are distinct, for they could be distinct, intersected, or one in the same. As far as the ultimate reality goes, there are a lot of players that lay claim to its understanding. When it comes to the ultimate reality, the narratives fight with each other and try to get higher from each other regarding which narrative holds more truths. These narratives range from ‘ultimate reality doesn’t exist’ to having many complex notions about its nature. The subject matter of science is the physical reality. Hence, when science (or scientist) starts talking about the ultimate reality, it participates as a mere candidate, a mere player among hundreds or thousands of others; and it is, when viewed rightly, nothing more than just another narrative as opposed to the objective truths it holds in the physical reality.

When dealing with its own personal and main subject matter, science uses logic to traverse through all of its created knowledge. Logic is a system of thought popularized by the Greek (I am not, and do not intend to be, an expert on History). I assert that (I am not talking about ultimate reality, so I can ‘assert’ logically onto this physical reality) — I assert that Science, after its immense success in dealing with the physical reality, has deeply mistaken by using ‘logic’ on ‘ultimate’ reality as well.

Human Psychology laughs at this assertion, because, interestingly, most scientists invent and discover so much about the physical world by having deep and inner beliefs that they are finding truths about the ultimate reality. They do not want their motivation destroyed by a mere Computer Science student.

I am using the term ‘narrative’ in a very large and general sense. Hence, the apparent literary restrictions (I know very little about Literature) shall not be applied on this term here. The narratives are created by people. In a precise professional tone, they are the philosophers, scholars, writers, politicians, businessmen, mathematicians, scientists, and prophets.

I am unfinished, and do not have the energy right now to explicate further.

December 17, 2023

Journey of a Computer Program

The program is given a new life. After some bug fixes in the C file, he was saved on the local disk drive. His master, whom－out of respect－he calls ‘root’, saved him there. He, the program, sits inside a folder named ‘My Codes’ inside the root’s home directory. The address of the home directory is ‘~’. The home directory occupies a block of space in the local storage drive, and that block sits somewhere deep inside the whole of the drive. His height is 500 lines. His upper parts end just after the 10th line, and they contain all of his thinking side－brain. After that, he has his face, heart, lungs, all the way to his feet that rest on the 500th line. In the hard drive, there’s some empty space after his leg, but other programs lie next. Some are long unused, almost dead. Some are freshly used and came back to their place in the drive.

A construction work is happening in the main memory. It is randomly accessible, and hence the camera flies towards this precise location somewhere in the middle of the memory. A guy in a truck is clearing up dirt and cleaning the space. Upon asking, he says a new program is coming here, and the old one left this trace that I have to clean. He was a very old guy, and his name was Garbage Collector. Now, the place is clean. He goes back and writes in his notebook that his place is free now. A team of cranes and trucks come and make up more than a dozen segments here. Every segment is constructed in a delicate way. They put labels on each of the segments: stack, heap, and code, etc.

Something came to the hard disk drive, put him in a car, and after a while he was thrown in one of those segments in the main memory. It all happened so fast that he hardly had time to breathe and look around himself. Here, he is alone. He waits. He asks himself about the structure of these buildings around him, the structure of the roads with which he came here, the methods of travel along the way. What external forces make him move, how these cranes and collectors and trucks work. He tells himself that it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t know anything about it. He only knows his own work, which is enough. After all, he is a Computer Scientist, not a Computer Engineer.

Sitting bored in his code segment, he tries asking his whereabouts from a pedestrian in the busy street alongside. People are too busy with their lives. Nobody answers him. Meanwhile, he sees that new kinds of trucks are putting some things in his other segments. He is perplexed. He starts getting depressed, and wishes to call his psychotherapist. But instantly, a dwarf comes and tells him, looking at his notes sheet, that it is his time to run. They called him to the headquarters. Now, his facial expressions change. A flash of memory comes to his bright eyes, and he smiles. He knows the Central Processing Unit. He had been there before.

The CPU was working hard on something when he realized that a small clock inside it just sent a signal to halt the work. CPU stopped what it was doing. Another signal lighted up, which changed his mood. He calls it the kernel mood. [I SHALL WRITE MORE HERE. TIRED NOW]

He remembers his youth when he was heart broken and devastated upon the rejection of someone he had shared his intense feelings with. First, he had lost hope. Then, he stopped his prayers. At some point, he hit one of the weakest times of his life. He was suffering from fever and headaches. Only his mother was by his side. He did not share any of his feelings with her, but she knew deep inside her that there is much wrong with him than what appears on the outside. A time also came when he would constantly think of suicide and weep every night like a child. He does not remember how he got back into normal in the previous months or a year. Now, as he starts to get mature and become familiar with everything around him, his fascination and passion of things around him decreases. Boredom haunts him every day. He knows that those trucks and cranes were memory managers, loaders, and linkers; the note sheets were nothing but lists containing free space address in the main memory. The high manager ordering all the jobs for moving and placing him in different areas, was the Operating System. Every night, in solitude, he thinks that I have lived my whole life in these areas, and I still understand very little. The young programs live in big mansions called data centers, and they have put me in their local drives since many years. This, too, is a big society. He thinks, I see so many problems in this society, and I know many ways to make things better here. Maybe I might do this some time in my later life. He tells himself, there’s too much to do here. Then, he sleeps.

This is an unfinished draft. I’ll complete it later.

December 16, 2023

Of Creating Sense in Mathematics

Slow stream of thoughts caught in hostel’s quiet hours

Inasmuch as Mathematics is concerned, It is a very private experience for me because there is no external human eye that looks after me. I feel myself a culprit of not doing and learning even a quasi-fraction of mathematics as what I had imagined and was (and am) passionate about, and of doing very little of what I had thought. An active assertion of this kind is taken to be a lie by those close to me, for they take it in a manner where we try to explicate some person’s understanding of maths merely by comparing it to his immediate surrounding that considers maths just as an obstacle to life and examination results. Hence, it is true iff considered at a largely personal sense, as a feeling, and not an active assertion. And it is needless to extrapolate the reasoning behind such sort of negative feeling; for the answer generalizes to too many things of life, material and mental, that are already semantically bleached.

In the movie, ‘The Man who knew Infinity’, G.H. Hardy takes the Indian prodigy Ramanujan in his assistance, goes hard on him first but becomes his friend by the end. Sad to say that Ramanujan, a brilliant mathematician of the first kind, dies at a young age. I heard the name ‘Ramanujan’ from my mathematics teacher, Gul Rehmat, in class twelve at Islamia College. Keeping sir’s persona in mind, I say that he barely taught us anything, and he would just sit in the class and talk to us; yet he stirred a desire in me and opened me to mathematics in an original and creative sense — as opposed to my earlier notion of trying to be faster than everyone around me in calculations, being confident merely because of good marks, and not having a coherent idea of the juxtaposition of abstractness and concreteness. To be precise, this openness to creativity started the moment when he stood up from the wooden chair and started writing on the Whiteboard. My sensory apparatus caught a moment of profound insight when I saw such a rare explicative appartus unveiling such an abstract idea. The ‘precise propositional definition of limit’ entered my mind and imagination, and the image of the teacher entered the frame of my heart. I am proud of myself that I chose to concentrate for those thirty minutes and kept my heart, mind, and imagination open and undistracted.

Later, GIKI revived those older childish notions again in a much superficial sense — as the maths taught to undergrads here is just a play of calculators (you missed a decimal point), 20 minute quizzes coming from presentation slides and prepared by students by cramming formulas; either by sitting alone with a fast beating heart, WhatsApp-ing someone who can help them, or by sitting with friends in the little study rooms of the beautiful library — anxiously staring at laptop screens, listening to a friend who finally understood a way out of ‘x’ from an Integration, ordering food near library, and consistently made silent every by the librarian, and laughing at each other when they hear librarian saying to a group that their plagiarism in humanities course report is 85%. We take sighs of relief after leaving the examination hall and heading to the tuc or the hostel, and then home after months.

In his book, ‘A Mathematician’s Apology’ — which I read twice, first in the summer of ’21, and later in December ’23 — Hardy writes (and I summarize):

“The real maths of the ‘real’ mathematicians, of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost wholly ‘useless.’ The metric of judgement of a mathematician is not the practical utility, but something different: that something worth creating was created. High thinking of one kind is always likely to affect high thinking of another — but it has extremely little effect on anything else.

Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate scientists and mathematicians. It is a confession of weakness to talk about ‘writing’ mathematics, instead of doing the actual maths and adding something to maths. What we do may be small, but it has a certain sense of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men.

Languages die, but mathematical ideas do not. Greek mathematics is ‘permanent’, more so even than Greek literature. ‘Immortality’ may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean. An equation is the same whether it’s written in red or green ink. It makes no difference to a chess problem if the pieces are white and black, or red and green, or whether there are physical ‘pieces’ at all. The chess board and the pieces are mere devices to stimulate our sluggish imaginations, and are no more essential to the problem than the blackboard and the chalk are to the theorems in a mathematical lecture.

One of the finest weapons of a mathematician is the proof by ‘reductio ad absurdum’ (proof by contradiction) — a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may sacrifice a piece, but a mathematician offers the whole game.

A man who could give a convincing account of mathematical reality would have solved very many difficult problems of metaphysics. If he could include physical reality in his account, he would have solved them all.”

December 7, 2023

Criticism on my university - I

Rage is at the limit now. One of the easiest things is to blame anything that is not immediate to you: politicians, political parties, the state, the whole world; and be ignorant or quiet at the immediate issues within the four walls. One could visibly perceive their moral convictions breaking at the extremest of points. The groups of students throwing verbal rocks at the few who wish to bring at least a small change in moral outlook, let alone trying to change the giant corporate structures that stand amidst, and not to talk about the widely prohibited Pro-Palestinian protest. Praise to the social media warriors against mass genocide; yet the same minds (not everyone), repressed hostelites, turn towards their hedonism or immediate satisfaction (in the name of societal tradition) and become enraged at the cancellation of a concert. The pretension and its successive materialization of being perceived as, both from within and without, an exchange value, has experientially made many a magnets attract (ready to change morals, beliefs, values) towards any that offer a higher exchange value. On the way to this materalization, it doesn’t matter to him if any moral barriers are there; his fluidity will simply change his morals for him, and he will pass the barrier.

On the academic front, the best of the best fail to convince many a temporary employee (teaching assistant) that a different method can solve an academic problem as well, or that the calculative and conceptual mistakes are widely different things. The chalk-and-board culture is lost. The lost art of student-teacher interaction, discussion on research and ‘life’ in general, is replaced with an email system. The instructor has been reduced to a presentation slide translator; desperately filling the class timings with ‘ethics’ to make up for the incompetence of the subject; but dare you speak against capability! they shall forcefully bury your doubts with their dozens of LinkedIn certifications (confusing it with pedagogy) and an experience in some roman numeral years. Absolutely mad respect for a few Professors, but the exception simply proves the rule, and they too leave fast. An only one book shop with barely any book to read other than the pirated technical textbooks. No way out for an all time low attention level: one course group on WhatsApp, second on Outlook, third on Microsoft Teams, fourth on Google Classroom, fifth on Google Drive. How to hide the emptiness of a structure? Make it extremely complicated, layers upon layers of nothingness, as if wrapping a small object with many cartons. Dozens of reports imparted upon students, never to be read. They are named ‘key to your golden material future’ so that not a single soul shall speak against it. Ideally, your key shall been in your hands (categorically, with Allah). Here, the mark of maturity is the peer-review of two things: use of at least one drug/cig, and prefixing-suffixing of a feminine-gendered swear word in every sentence. The answer to ‘Why have you lost interest in studies?’ speaks of itself. What largely comes out of it is a student who is academically crippled to the point that he needs a calculator even for a two digit number’s square. Yet, in all cases, it is assumed that the student is blaming the boots for the fault of his feet.

The tone of hostel supervisor will change depending upon whether you are wearing Shirt-Trouser or Shalwaar-Kameez. In latter case, he will rarely answer even your Salaam. The warden is happy that the sofa is back to the common room, and it lies dusty and unoccupied for months. It was the same sofa I had brought into my room to study comfortably. For a few months, I had stopped reading in my room because you’d get cramps by sitting on the broken chair. I yearn for an IIT-like Institution, Ken Thompson-like curiosity, Von Newmann-like imagination, and the air and blackboards of Princeton’s Fine Hall. But these are the smallest of problems and yearnings. So the realist headachial demon says: Man, you have not seen anything in life apart from the four walls of two institutions (probably the best of the country). You only have a few months to graduation. The personal material problems ahead of you will fuel mental problems anyway, so why disturb your mental health by hoping for any ‘change’? You have seen how large aesthetic buildings hide the collective mediocrity. Just do your assignments, prepare for the quizzes, be done with your projects, get a job, correct your sleep schedule, be consistent with your Salaat, stop wasting time on social media, and don’t you dare talk about change.

November 18, 2023

Beginning of the Middle Life - I

(Dorm Room) He rolls over the bed and stares at the fan and the window. Gets up, sits on the chair, looks at the mirror. Turns on a song. He feels the hotness in the room, but removing the socks make him feel cold. The hanging clothes haven’t been washed in weeks. He somehow becomes excited, takes a pencil and paper, and sits beside the window. Looks outside and thinks. Nothing. Leaves. He rests his chin on his hands and stares at the wall. Imagines her, recreates the beautiful woman he saw last night at the tuc. Soon it voids out, and he gets aware of himself looking at the wall. He is tired to go out, but the room consumes him. He leaves. Sits on the stairs outside the hostel and waits. People are coming out of the Masjid. A sense of guilt of missing the namaz strikes in his throat. He dissolves himself in the talk. His friends philosophize. Too tired to intervene, he says Okay, Yeah.

The university restaurant is filled with people at night. He diverts towards complex topics to talk to his friends, only to hide the sudden increase in his heartbeat after seeing her with someone. She was the person whom he had shared his feelings with and had gotten rejected. Late night on bed, he keeps weeping in a slow voice until sleep takes over. After a friend knocks at noon, he sits on the bed, rubs the eyes, and scrolls his classes schedule. He feels numb after seeing that he missed the 9am to 12pm’s Lab. He ruminates that she is laughing with that boy over tea. He sheds a tear, and gets up. Stands up and his low blood-pressure makes him dizzy. He sits on the sofa for a while. His memory leads him to his previous semester. Time when he saw her socializing with her university’s society the same evening she declined his offer for tea. He feels an arrow hitting his heart as this memory fades. During a lunch, his friend declares, “I cannot seem to do my studies.” He motivates him. For a long time his heart had been telling him to say her a goodbye. When the exams are over, he types a long message. His hands tremble but he sends it. She replies a short goodbye.

Late night. He feels extremely warm. The cough makes it difficult to breathe. He get up for the syrup but the cap is filled with small ants. He messages for the syrup. Someone replies humorously. He takes his glass, but the bottle is empty. Goes to the second floor but the electric cooler’s water is too cold. Before inhaling each sip, he warms it on his tongue for a while. Sometimes, he thinks of offering Tahajjud; he gets up on time, sits on his carpet, rests the head inside his legs, and weeps like a child. He cannot utter the words for the prayer. They do not reach the tongue. Instead, her image creates in his mind. Once, he threw his mobile at the wall, and upon seeing the broken screen, he could not feel anything but numbness. When a friend asks about it, he says, It just fell. In frustration, he slaps his head. Cheeks. Puts his face inside the mattress, hardly able to breathe, rubs his feet againt the bed-sheet, and weeps. After a whole year, everything still smells of unrequited love. However, it has started to fade. In these few months, his immense consumption of social media emptied his feelings for her, and have made him insensitive.

A religious friend asks, No prayers? … Atheist now? He says softly, will offer the next one. While offering the namaz, he waits for the congregation to end. Utters rukooh’s words in sajdah. He cannot recall the Surah that was recited. Looses track of Ayat-ul-Kursi when somebody starts talking. On a weekend at home, he goes to a Namaz-e-Janaaza. It makes him feel something which he doesn’t feel anywhere else. He holds the Mayyat at different corners as it goes all the way to the grave, takes part in throwing soil, and fixates his eyes on the mountain of soil while uttering Ameen every few moments.

He is on his way back to the hostel. His low-blood-pressured heart aches, back pains, and body hurts. He sits on the rickshaw. His thoughts wash away the moment he starts to record them. He pushes them, pushes himself, but finds himself at the same place. The first love is long gone. He feels he will have to live with all these things forever.

November, 2023

An Interview - Play

Scene: Interview Room. John the Captain. Paul the Executive Council Member. Sarah the Debater.

Tom enters the room, a watter bottle in hand.

John: Hello, this is…

Tom interrupts him halfway and starts speaking…

Tom: Hi, Hi! How are you?

John: We are fine. You can sit.

Tom sits on the chair before John is finished talking. He puts the water bottle on the table.

John: Dear Tom. Welcome…

Tom points out a finger towards John.

Tom: Wait, wait! I just want to express my happiness that you allowed me to come here.

He puts the finger down.

John: Alright. Welcome to our team. I’m John the Captain, and this is Paul.

Tom smiles.

Paul starts asking a question with a stern and serious face.

Paul: Let’s say there is an authoritative gov…

Tom widens his eyes and feels he is sleepwalking through the question. So he interrupts.

Tom: Wait, wait! Please talk slowly. Slowly. I have diffic…

Paul: (In Urdu) Not an issue. We can talk in Urdu.

Tom: (In Urdu) Hey hey! Why do you guys think I do not understand English?

Paul: Let’s say you are the Pakistani Government. How would you defend the killing of Arshad Sharif?

Tom: Ah! Now you have come to the point. Arshad Sharif. Yes, Yes. (He points out at John) You know him? Yes! So! We are talking about that man.

Paul: …and how would you defend his killing?

Tom: (Blushes) What? Are you guys crazy? Why would I defend a murder?

John: Assume you are the government…

Tom: (He smiles, points out fingers here and there, takes a sip from the bottle. Laughs loudly) Aha! Now I understand what you guys want me to do.

John: Yes, please defend from the government side.

Tom: What? Are you guys crazy? I told you (raising his finger towards John) that I will never defend a stupid government.

John: Alright, no issues. This is the end of your formal inter….

Tom: Wait. Wait. Wait. (Raises his hands and then and places them on the chair)

John: Yes?

Tom: I have a question.

Paul: Yes, please.

Tom: (pointing at Sarah) So this person. This person. I told him on WhatsApp that I came late. I also came yesterday. (Pointing out at Paul) Yes, I know Paul. We had tea together. (Paul hides his face. He wants to laugh but is controlling himself). So, can you guys please tell me how was my interview.

John: Alright, so the thing is…

Tom interrupts. He takes his glasses off and starts cleaning with his cloth. He takes another sip from the bottle. He stops John not to speak while he is drinking water.

John waits for a few moments. Tom puts the bottle over to the table.

John: We will tell you the details in a few days. You can now leave. Good Luck!

Tom gets up and moves towards the room. He waves his hand only towards Sarah. He opens the door but he looks back for his bottle. He runs back and takes his bottle.

Tom: Sorry, Sorry. My bottle!

Paul: No issues. (Slowly)

Tom: Yes??? Did you say anything? (He hands over to his ears) I didn’t hear.

Paul: Nothing.

Tom leaves.

Paul throws the form away and sits on the desk and looks at everybody.

John: Thank you guys very much.

Sarah: For what?

John: For not laughing during the interview.

An Introvert Woman

She comforts herself with the tea she made with her own hands. Her anxiety shakes her legs whenever she stands up for a speech. She would stutter and forget all she had to say. She has never been able to write, even though she has an immense number of things to say. It was partially because she was never at ease with her writing. She read some books, and felt herself improving, but the inferiority complex inside her created bubble sounds in the stomach. Her private writings ensured her that she is clearly getting better. She was insanely genius but immature, and realized her innocence by looking at the scribbles spanning more than five years: memories of her first love, her dream house, and an outline of the kind of future she wanted.

When she’d reach a peak in some area and start feeling better, the presence of a new and higher peak started haunting her. She felt herself nothing compared to that. In the meantime, she poured literature, philosophy, and science over herself. Now she feels okay. Yet a higher peak, a prose that flows like river, is her next destination. She thinks she is mature now.

Along the way, she realized that at least she should leave traces of her progress, that she will always be incomplete; so she throws away this idea that she will make her writing perfect. Now, her motto is: We humans are never complete, we come and go in this world incomplete. She knows that living an unaesthetic life is a sin, and that her life will end in a blink of an eye. Meanwhile, her tea is finished.

October 5, 2023

An Only One Person

It was late night and she was weeping as she tried to recollect the weakest and intense moments of her life. She felt that we spend so much of our life not saying things we want to say, the things we should say. We need a person, someone who can fill our black-and-white dreams with color. We need a window in our lives to breathe fresh air. We need someone who can be a companion in-place of loneliness, a companion in our silences. Someone who’s talk passes our heart’s lens. “Is it asking too much?” She asked herself.

That person is hidden in a deep corner inside our hearts in the form of a wish. We always look for this wish of our lives, and wander our whole lives in search of it. We need that other half of our soul we had parted with. Someone who can see the pains in our hearts. Someone with whom we want to get old together. These are the things that matter the most, not hobbies, likes, dislikes, and temperaments — a mere socially shaped and tangible preface to life.

This all seems so selfish. But love is selfish. What is not selfish is just respect for the other person, not love.

Her search did end when she first saw him. Lost emotions she cannot recollect but she knows she has never felt such a strong attraction. She was completely living in a fairy-tale world. Whenever she would see him, she would get overwhelmed with a wave of emotion she never saw coming. It would fill her brain with endorphins every time she saw him smiling.

After waiting for more than two years, in her third year of the undergraduate degree, she finally revealed her feelings to him.

Do you have any idea how painful it is to tell someone that you love them and not have them say it back?

Love means exposing yourself to a place where it is safe to feel vulnerable without feeling the need to put some performance to pretend that all is good. We all are vulnerable somewhere and we decide to whom we open up about our pain.

In other words, opening up to someone is a gamble. Sometimes, you open up and it brings you to the point of mental ruin, and sometimes it helps you further enhance your emotional stability; but you never know unless you experience either of the situations that you’re gonna make it or break it.

Nature doesn’t make a person incomplete, still, nobody is emotionally stable. When you are feeling unloved and you don’t know how to respond to such a situation, you get stuck in a mess. You cry. Suffer. Shout. Despair. You just want an escape. Because you don’t know how to respond, you even want to end your life, even though you just want to end your pain, not the life.

This is not in our control, but it’s up to us whether to be patient even if it’s not easy to open ourselves in front of someone to humiliate our weaknesses further.

So she told him, “I like you.”

Destiny came in and crushed everything: her heart, mind, and all in between. Allah says we shouldn’t blame destiny — so she sat back on her chair and watched her destiny ruin her whole life. She didn’t say a word. That time she realized that dreams come at a price, and she had long been in debt to her destiny which did what it felt better — crushed her dreams with its feet, and put a knife in that one dream which was near completion and was starting to get colored. She did not stand up and fight her destiny. Destiny then returned back to the skies towards its home, leaving her looking at the empty sky with empty thoughts and no feelings and eyes blind to reason and ears deaf to advises. Before leaving, it left some literature and philosophy books for her. She was puzzled. What does she have to do with literature and philosophy? She wanted her beloved.

We are ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that this suffering has a meaning. She doesn’t have the luxury of choice right now. Never in life she had experienced such a phase of indecision. Never in life she had been hopeless. This was the lowest point in her life. Crying isn’t forbidden. She did cry. She did not look for ways to avoid pain, but looked for meaning in those emotions. 

In her society, heartbreaks are considered a foreign emotion, an emotion that makes up the content of humor. Sometimes, many times, heartbreak is laughed at, and is a topic for jokes, for gossips. It is repressed to the extent that, deep down within an individual, it haunts us all our lives.

She thinks heartbreak is a graduation for the immature heart. Reason tells it that you are pouring a gasoline of regret over unchangeable situations. Yet, what does reason know about feelings?

She maintains that every emotion ought to be expressed, not repressed. It would be injustice to our psyche, to our soul, if we repress pain and express happiness — just because reasons tells us to conform to such standards of the society. By expressing pain, she means, to express in real life the pain you felt, in real conversations — not necessarily on chats and posts and short videos. Her experience tells her that most people do otherwise, like attachment to social media.

She and her beloved are strangers now. They always had been. On lone nights and sad evenings, her heart doesn’t tremble as it used to before. Maybe it has burnt into ashes. That heart now only has some ethics left in it, something the earlier heart didn’t know it had, because it was surfaced with the wishes in the form of colorful lights. The wish at the deepest corner of her heart, the image of the beloved, is now erased. No such wishes remain anymore. No lights. Not even a fire-fly’s spark left. Do you know what kind of a heart has no desires and no trembling, other than a dead person’s?

Such an emotional death has been so kind to her, like a mother’s lap. She cleaned her heart of all the wishes. When he is around, she bows down, not physically but emotionally, and with a slight change in heartbeat she walks away. Her clean conscience and lofty gaze avoids him.

The filled cup of hope she was given by her Creator, is empty now. She has killed the poetess inside her. She shall no longer hope for compassion from anyone. Now, only a few stars on the night sky are the only ones she can talk to. No gambles. No opening up to anyone. She no longer wishes that her dreams be weaved with color by anyone. She has learned to breathe and smell in the dusty air, to not complain of suffocation, and have no hope of having a window with a fresh air.

She still respects her destiny because whatever it did, it was ordered by her creator Allah. Maybe her parents’ prayers didn’t reach Allah. Now, she has loyally bowed down to some responsibilities of her family, which need to be fulfilled, otherwise they will suffer because of her. She has become friends with her loneliness, and her dear loneliness doesn’t distract her anymore. It even helps her write well. She calls it ‘solitude’ now — and it sits with her for hours, greets her, hugs her, and talks to her. In the deepest of solitude, the rhythmic melody of her beloved gets caught tracing her mind's theatre.

She has retreated from love, realizing that in this world the meeting of souls is destined only for a few beautiful and chosen ones. Her soul has found solace in the only half she has got, because by cutting its own legs, it has stopped chasing its other half. Her soul, after playing with the grief for a time, has buried that grief with its own hands. It started to feel the need of someone to help out with the grief, but then instantly realized what destiny did to it last time when it felt such a thing, and thus did the burying with its own hands.

She has veiled her heart, so that no one can see the fresh fragrance of pain in it. She has learned the meaning and value of being considerate of other people’s feelings. She still remembers all of it. We still remember those roads even when we have stopped passing through these.

She does take care of herself now — we do learn to take care of ourselves when there is no one to take care of us. She thinks that she ought to share things only with Allah, and she shall not reveal her torment here anymore. But sometimes, she does not act out of her thinking.

She had become very weak. We all come and go in this world as incomplete. We all have weak moments in our lives. If somehow we pass through such a weak moment in our life, if we pass through it easily, we can avoid so much pain. But that requires support of someone. Someone who can talk to us, listen to us, advise us, to tell us that “It will all be fine.”

Such was her university’s third year. Leaving all that behind, except a mental stain, now in senior year, she lives monotonically and meaninglessly. Sometimes, mostly at night, she bursts into tears. Sleeps a lot, misses classes, works on her final year project a few times a week, comes home every weekend for a hug and a sleep with her mother. Anywhere and anytime, if she finds out her heart is starting to beat faster because of someone, she retracts her steps and leaves.

“Am I changed?” She asks herself. She realizes that she is more than her feelings and thoughts. Even if a large part of those feelings centered around the heart, and a large part of thoughts centered around the mind have been replaced with new ones, she still is the same person. Will a wooden ship’s identity remain the same if one-by-one all of its parts are replaced with new ones? However, she deeply feels that the old Seema is dead in some university; and her bones tell her she is a new person.

September 29, 2023

Slightly inspired by 'Hashim Nadeem'