Tangent

"Contemplation is the essence of story-telling," I say.

"I could listen to your stories all day," he says, "but it is your contemplations that I love."

How would I someday explain the contemplations that have led to this state of mind? It is hardly a spiritual eat pray love journey. But if you only knew how far I have evolved, inside. It is a thing of wonder. A shape-shifting metallic creature.

Sometimes I write my own stories. Sometimes I write other people's stories. In most of the books I've read, there are always two characters. No, no, not the protagonist and antagonist, nothing that bleak. There is always the person who is content to live in a default comfortable cave, and there is always the person who feels there is an ocean out there. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. All the Buendias in 100 Years of Solitude. They all rattled the bars of their cages like any normal living breathing intuitive beast would. As for those who have accepted their fate without a struggle, I do not know what to say of them. Are they sub-human? Are they half-dead? Or are they just peaceful? Or are they just coping?

I could write stories about the cave-people. With the polite interest of an observer who finds them anthropologically interesting. But socially numbing. Their allure lies in the very fact that their accepted realities are swallowed whole, peppered with either a smile or a petty complaint. And my evolution centers around the notion that I used to consider that normal. Alienatingly normal.

Nobel

"They've announced the 2011 Nobel for literature," a friend said.

"Who is it?"

"Tomas Tranströmer. Swedish guy. Because, 'through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality'."

"Wow. How cool are they in giving their reasons for the literature prize."

"Garcia Marquez won 'for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts'."

"I love it."

"Jose Saramago 'who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an illusory reality'."

"I think reviewers have to put 'hard-core pseudo-intellectual' in their resume."

"I wonder what they will write when you get yours. The 2046 literature Nobel is awarded to Teez 'who, with her lyrical compositions, softens the harsh realities of those who feel out of place in their own cultures'."

"Not bad. Thanks for giving me 34 years to work on it."

Sandbox*

I woke up today and lay in bed listening to the calls for prayer from surrounding mosques. It is the anniversary of the month that I returned to Indonesia.

I’ve spent a year trying to feel comfortable about coming home to Jakarta after spending a year away, with its impossible traffic, relentless gossiping, endearing chaos, and wonderful tireless people that hold you spellbound, forever torn between love and hate for the city. I’d escape to Bali’s beaches now and then, but it remains just that: an escape.

I’ve always viewed life as a lucrative sandbox with a spot of quicksand in the middle, which the curious mind will happily venture into, letting itself become sucked into new realms. Or to borrow that famous American’s famous line: the known unknowns. Who knows how many quicksands have led us to this particular spot in life? So often I have ventured into new things simply because other people knew and I did not. In the sandbox the only thought is of yourself, it’s your playground and yours to become the king of the pit.

I realized today I didn’t really want to crave comfort in Jakarta, or anywhere else in the world. I didn’t want to be thinking of myself all the time. I want to be thinking of other people. Just being useful without expecting comfort in return. Is there ever really such an achievement?

I’m judgmental about giving, brain-verdict said. I excuse myself on the basis that it might be too forward, or allocated incorrectly, or not the right contribution. A few months ago I made vague plans to teach children pro bono at the local mosque on weekends, and it never happened because I was sure the kids wouldn’t like me. I never give out money at traffic lights, because I’m vaguely sure the beggars are part of a syndicated gang and the money would go to some mafia. I’ve wasted countless opportunities.

I’d like to give as if it was a natural part of living. I could see that as a sandbox I haven’t conquered, but the thing is I shouldn’t be seeing it as a thing to conquer. It’s not about me, right?

*This is piece is originally posted on the3six5

Therapy

I've resumed piano lessons with my dearest mentor, who has recovered from his illness, coming out of a long dark tunnel with a new piano and a new wife. But the term piano lessons is a bit ambitious. What really happens is that I drive down there and we end up spending 3 hours playing music and eating delivery chicken noodles from a styrofoam box. We gossip and digress and generally pity people with no music in their lives. Like his own son, who prefers software.

I harbor no ambitions of musical greatness and he knows it. We simply have conversations and fill gaps. When I play a melody he fills in the bass lines. When his melody is about to end I know it: something about the subtle finality of that third note from last, like a bird about to make a sweet turn in the sky, leaving a pattern imprinted against the clouds. I see it, in its invisibility, I mirror it. I come to meet it and make it last a little longer by repeating the pattern, somersaulting in the sky at a higher octave before taking off to my own heart's desire.

Isn't that the essence of a good conversation?

The launch of a thought, met with other ideas. Agreeing in the middle with enthusiastic nods before branching out again with new and old thoughts. Harmonized, encouraging, comforting, in a way that is as if to say, "I understand, I know what you mean, and here is what I think."

"Isn't jazz like everything in life?" he would say, "doesn't it help you improvise when dealing with people and doesn't it make life a little less serious?"

I really am not sure if I understand life that well. But I no longer needed to say anything. Nothing on life, nothing on my fears, nothing of my insecurities about love, my insipidness at work, self-imposed cages, millionth outbursts of half-baked ideas, thirsts I have no idea how to quench, forever belonging and not belonging.

At the end of the song it was like everything had been said.

Canvas

A weekend in Bali can be a blank canvas filled with sketches of your imagination of choice. And when I say imagination I'm not implying that mushrooms should be involved at all times. I mean there is anything for everyone if everyone doesn't mind not following anyone.

My friend Rio likes to say that most people don't know how to enjoy being alone. I think being alone is only fun when it is a choice. We agree that most people don't even choose to be alone.

So that weekend in Bali, he and I headed to echo beach, just the two of us as usual, armed with style. His scarf and shockingly stylish sunglasses, a bottle of wine, two proper glasses we bought at the mini-mart, an effective number of joints. The skies opened out limitless above us. I lay back on the warm sand staring at the white cirrus clouds rippling across the sky like the surface of a light blue lake being gently stroked by the breeze. The actual breeze was stroking my skin. The scent was as familiar and comforting as the sound of crashing waves. Nothing else I wanted to do, nowhere else I wanted to be.

"I wish this was an hour away from Jakarta and I could escape here every weekend"

"No. It doesn't work like that. It won't be as magical," he says.

"I wish people would be more relaxed about finding the one to marry."

"I decided to be gay so no one could pressurize me into getting married."

He says the silliest things sometimes.

"I know plenty of married men," I say. "They try. They tell me how interesting I am. God, they seem so lonely."

"That's because they thought they got married out of personal choice, but really it was a choice wrought by social conditioning. Society expects them to find the one after a certain age or milestone or checklist ... and they are encouraged to think that they've found the one... But they don't think it's important that in order to find the one ... they have to first of all find themselves."

He says the most profound things sometimes.

I think finding oneself needs a bit of imagination.

It's his birthday today, by the way. I think another bottle of wine is in order. We could make a toast to blank canvases.

.

Continue scrolling down for previously unpublished posts on Brazil :-)

2011

Not My Final Post

At 3 in the morning, my friend and I sat on our bed in our hotel room in Dubai, unwilling to sleep. I was transiting from Brazil, she had flown over from Bahrain to accompany me on my transit. It was the final leg of our year in Harvard, the accumulation of a life built from scratch that had developed into a utopic paradise filled with people we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with, just chatting around a table exchanging ridiculous ideas. After the summer started, one by one these people dropped off, went home, said innumerable ‘this-is-not-goodbye’s, turned their backs, boarded planes, and left a little vacant space behind that felt like a mistake. I visited most of them before heading home, in New York, Lima, Rio, Sao Paulo, Dubai, just delaying, just living. In Dubai the two of us realized our time was coming soon. We talked of our favorite moments and cried a little.

I told her how at the airport in Sao Paulo, our friend hugged me for an eternally long time, not saying a word. When we finally parted we said, “I will see you again,” and thought, “I don’t know when I will see you again.” I turned my back, glanced back for a final brave smile, and walked to my gate slowly. Some people were quarelling in Arabic in the queue, a nasal voice spoke in Portuguese announcing a flight delay, all around me the shops were closed and dark. One shop-window displayed bottles of dende oil. I remembered the bottle of dende oil in my luggage bought at Mercado Municipal, and my friend’s mother, her friendly eyes shining, had promised to teach me how to cook Muqueca with it. But we never got around to doing it. On the drive to the airport she had turned to me and said, “Don’t go.” I stood at the boarding gate queue with an assault of memories and tears running down my cheeks thinking, “What am I doing?”

In that hotel room in Dubai I asked my friend, “What am I doing?” She was still figuring it out herself. She felt out of place in her hometown in Bahrain. We started childishly complaining, stereotyping, compartmentalizing. She said Bahraini women became religious after some point because they had nothing better to do. I told her Indonesian women only think about getting married. We laughed and decided then that we would be okay, that the future is bright. We decided we would both find the career of our dreams, the perfect partner, and other banal resolutions more befitting of teenagers rather than grad school alumnus. In the end we knew we both had our Reasons for returning, and that’s all that mattered.

That was three months ago. In the beginning, there was the uncomfortable scrutiny regarding weight-gain and lack of interest in what I’ve actually been doing. There was the shock of meeting relatives who seemed to have multiplied overnight and sent a cascade of toddlers running amok. There was the ever-inevitable visit to the malls, watching girls dangling their Venetas and Vuittons at a certain angle so as to be in full unobstructed view of onlookers. There was the constant stream of private idle chat on facebook and twitter feeds, and blackberry chatgroups, which did not exist when I left last year. There was a little loneliness among the crowd. There was the guilt of having these thoughts, afraid I was being anomalous, aloof, judgmental.

This is now just white noise to be accepted as part of life, like the hum of a refrigerator that you grow accustomed to and eventually embrace or ignore. Time must not be wasted dwelling on past perfections or present imperfections. After all, I have future plans like everyone else. This place has soul, has untrammeled gold buried under the mud, has all the good problems to be solved. My real enemy, as T.S. Eliot puts it, is in the shadow:

Between the idea and the reality,

Between the motion and the act,

Falls the shadow.

Between the conception and the creation,

Between the emotion and the response,

Falls the shadow.