Grandpa, Nash, and Newton

Grandpa, Nash, and Newton.

I was a quiet child. I was, as they would later call it, selectively mute. I don’t know why but these technical categorizations of human experience always amuse me; they sound ludicrous, even when they express tragedy. They make you feel little, they put you behind bars made of words. This particular one makes me imagine a little boy, with a frown on his tiny round face; his forced bowl haircut betraying the waviness in his hair. Strung along to a boisterous wedding ceremony by his parents, he meets everyone by saying: “Hi, it is nice to meet you, but you may leave me alone now.” Then he wraps his arms around himself and tilts his head upwards as if about to painted by an amateur yet balding French painter in a dingy Parisian studio. Well, that might have been easier than feigning sickness whenever my family decided to drag us to this or that inane social event. Weddings were the worst; the child me had rather simple reservations about them; he thought them to be too much: the colors, the sounds, all the bodies, the rites, and rituals. How could one person feel so much and not have their head burst open?

But I would talk. I would speak within the shelter of our home; the walls of our home felt like a long deep hug that warms one on the coldest of nights; it would feel like the first sip of hot coffee that I would sip many years later on a frigid Chicago morning.

I would speak with my mother, and with my brother. I do not remember what we spoke of, but I did speak. My mother says I said rather strange things. With the assertiveness of adulthood, I do, of course, question what she means by strange, and when I do, she is nice enough to change her words; she says: “Not strange, I mean interesting! Interesting!” Well, I don’t know what’s worse, so I do not question her any further.

I don’t remember if I spoke much with my father; he insists that we did, and that I just don’t remember. In pictures of us together, I do seem attached to him, so it’s a fair bet that I did. My brother remembers more than I do; I had been afflicted more by the merciless yet rudimentary shedding of images deemed unnecessary by the more mechanical parts of my mind, ones that just wanted to ensure survival by making sure that thoughts that ought not be thought remained unthought.

I did not mind going to my grandmother’s house. My nano’s place was safe; I could speak there, and I could also laugh there. My grandpa, my nana, had left us before I was born; I never knew him as one knows people who live and breathe, but I knew him through a touch and sight that transcends presence. I would often rummage through the old brown, rather clunky, drawers in my nano’s house, trying to find any and all belongings of his; trying to understand who he was, how he dressed, or whether if he wrote anything for us. I don’t know why but I wanted him to have written us something; I had hoped that he had left us something, anything: some ancient wisdom that only elders knew, but I didn’t find anything; only my nano was left.

My mother told me that he had known Persian — that he was the only person in our family to do so. But how? I knew that the language was taught at schools back in the olden days, but his knowledge was much more than the perfunctory “این صندلی است” (“this is a chair”) or at least, that is what I was told. Maybe it wasn’t.

My training as a historian began with my grandmother; I would pester my nano, like little children do, tugging at her sleeve—emerging from nearby nook and crannies in her maze shaped house; like a tiny house elf, I would startle her from behind despite her tall stature; I would badger her to tell me tales of all those who came before us. Who were they? Why did they have “Khans” in their names? “We are not Khans, it does not make sense!” I would say with an air of self-assuredness. Of course, I had not yet been acculturared to the complex world of South Asian naming conventions. I do not remember what she said in response to my vexing queries, but if I were to guess now it was probably some iteration of “menu ni pata” (“I do not know”). Did she even hear me? Her auditory capacities were intact, she was not even that old, but I was not sure whether she, like most other adults, heard things that children said.

After my nana had passed away, she would often remain sick for extended periods. She also spoke in a very thick Punjabi. I do not know which of the two was the bigger barrier for me; it would still take me some years before I would get fully fluent in her language, and she would remain sick for a long time. But till then, I had to make do; I made note of whatever I could understand about him, and about everyone else. I would always confuse my relations; it was almost if my brain would seize to function if I pushed it to move past two degrees of relationships on our genealogical tree. But I never took this inability as a slight on my logical abilities; afterall, it was not my fault, I would think to myself, that we had strangely interconnected and vast families.

I would also learn Persian much later; I like to say that it’s for my research, that it helps me connect to the immense beauty of Persianate culture, but I know that, in my heart, it is, in some sense, for him. I would nick tiny possessions that belonged to my grandfather. It was not like anyone really saw them; they just lay aimlessly in nondescript places across the house. I wagered that no one would miss their presence; to them, they were just like other inanimate objects, unworthy of much thought, but to me they were a bridge that held the possibility of taking me to him. I took his stainless steel watch; it was broken, and therefore, partly for that reason, worthless to anyone else.

The number on the date window stood still; it had not moved in a long time; it was not the date on which a motorist had run him over, when he was rushed to the hospital; neither was it the date when he passed away a few days later. He had only just gone to run a few errands, as dads do, but he never came back. It was not the date when the hospital rang home and when my mother answered the phone; pregnant with me, she had been staying at her parents for a short while my father was at sea many a miles away. She heard the scratchy voice on the other end tell tales of what had transpired. I imagine her clutching the telephone receiver in horror: bewildered, lost for words, rendered motionless.

That horror would transmute into a physical pain that would be sedimented in the recesses of my unborn body. When I finally did live, it would spur back sporadically over the years: insisting to be felt, demanding a recognition of its presence.

I kept the watch; its crown was also dented; was this where he had landed when he fell to the ground on impact? If so, it were to link the end of his life with the rest of mine. I never figured out the story behind the date that peered back from the broken dial; maybe it was just the day when it decided that without its wearer, it, too, no longer had a place in the world.

Why did I love him when I knew him not? Maybe, it was easier to love those whom I did not know. I was a child, and like all children do, I also believed in the power of expectations. But, even when I tried my best to stretch back and forth in time, I could never know him. He was not there; I never felt him like other people feel the ones they lose, but I wanted to. I felt guilty of not feeling so; there was no phantom pain, no sixth sense of someone looking over my shoulder, nothing. For him to exist, I had to conjure him up; I could not unearth him, so I had to be the conjurer. I don’t know whether that makes him unreal or the realest.

I still love him, and perhaps now, it’s a different sort of love, but I do; now I think it to be a love rooted in a cognizance of my own impending mortality: I will join him beyond the veil soon enough; I do not know whether we will be sorted into the same mejlis, the same gathering of good men; I hope we are for he is sure to be onboard the train carrying those who did not acquiesce to the evil that ensnares the hearts of men. He is sure to be in the kingdom of joy, where we forget the pain that separates us. Yet, which kingdom falls in my share remains a matter yet unsettled.

As a slightly older historian now, I realize that knowing someone by possessing knowledge of their being, of their habits—the way they speak, the way they twirl their fingers when they argue, the way their cheeks curl up when they smile, the way they bite into their food, or the way their eyes light up at things that make them happy—is not the only way of knowing; knowing is done in memory, and our memories are boundless, but even if they are bounded, the space they afford us to paint the canvas of our mind with vivid images of those whom we have lost is enough to last us many lifetimes. But memory is not imagination, you object. No, my dear friend, memory is exactly that; it is imagination.

My nano had lovely tall trees in her house. The mecca of nature in her house was a jamun tree; purple black plums rested on its short bent branches and had the rather curious habit of falling all over the grass without much care for what happened below its trunk. Charles Hermann, the creative concoction of the theatrical John Nash’s mind, said something remarkable about things that fall down. When Nash broke down—unable to temper his emotions, and at a loss to come up with his “original” idea: governing dynamics, Hermann, like any decent illusion would, offered Nash to beat him up: to let loose, to feel, to be human. After they exchanged a few half-hearted blows, they joined hands to throw out Nash’s desk out from their Princeton dorm room window. The desk had been littered with failed theoretical scribblings, evidence of Nash’s failures and his misfortune of not being understood; to throw the desk out was to stop playing the game.

After they did so, Hermann gasped for air and cheekily exhaled:“That was heavy!…that Isaac Newton fella was right.”

Nash, also winded, with a quizzical grin that soothed his pain, replied with a matching grin: “He was on to something!”

Hermann shot back: “Clever boy!”

Then, weakened by their exertion, they fell to the floor, unable to reign in an explosion of laughter sparked by a match of self-amusement. Nothing could have been more liberatingly hilarious in that moment, and for just that second, Hermann was as real as any real person ever could be.

Nash and Hermann were both right about Newton. In my nano’s lawn, the fruit would also keep falling down. For what seemed like all year round to me, it kept falling, making everything it touched purple. It would simply not stay up; I wished that it would not fall so often; that way, we would always have an excuse to look up the sky; that way, we could always find respite in the consistency of their gentle bobbling against the soft breeze that would visit us habitually. Even if its visitations could not be predicted, they were always welcomed.

I remember being in love with everything purple. Perhaps, it was because of the jamuns, or maybe, it might have been because of my rather out of place fascination with Roman emperors. My parents were no connoisseurs of ancient Roman history, but I think they bought us a book with images of these dazzling men. Donning their imperial togas, dyed in a bright regal purple, their faces shining incandescently, they stood tall and proud: Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Auerlius; I did not believe them to be human; they did not look like me.

Just like these men, the jamun tree is also no more; someone had it severely pruned; what is left are just its bones. Even on the most blistering of summer days, it remains captive to an endless winter, with dreams of its spring lost to time.

Lahore was still a peaceful city back when we were little; it was even quiet at times, if you can imagine that. Fireflies still lighted its evenings. We would often try to catch them, but it was to no avail of course. I was always a bit scared of them; I thought my fingers might burn like they did when they wandered too close to the old halogen lamps burning too hot at nano’s house. I never found out if they did hurt.

I liked going to the park close to my nano’s home. I would find joy at seeing the animals they kept there; I wanted to keep a pet animal of my own, but I did not ask my parents for it; I assumed they would say no. But because I could always come here, it was okay. I was relentless in pleading my mother to take us there. I told her I wanted to see the peafowls, even if just for a few minutes. I had loved the feeling of my imagination catching fire at the sight of their intricate feathers expanding and collapsing, moving gracefully like the diversely hued leaves of a tree caressed by the arrival of autumn.

I would always fall short of breath trying to elevate myself up the wired fence that kept the peafowls away from me. I would clutch at the fence, trying to stay steady, and my tiny fingers would curl along its thin wires. I would try to peer in, and if I tried hard enough, I could rest my cheeks against the barrier and push my nose just inside their world. Gawking, my eyes would remain fixated on their graceful movement, only breaking my gaze to glance back to see if my mother was calling yet. When she did call, I had to let my hands go; the spots where the fence had brushed my cheek would redden as I broke contact to run back to her; those marks were all I that could take of them with me.

We would go to this park often, sometimes just before sunset when the sky would be set ablaze by the descent of our star. We spoke amongst ourselves: my cousins, my brother, and me. We would climb up the slides or hang carelessly from monkey bars, and spoke about things children spoke about. What do children talk about anyway? It’s hard to remember now, both in memory and in imagination. I suppose that is testament to all that is lost in our jostling with time.

I would be amazed by the wide expanse of the ground that they used for the polo games. In my mind, it was endless. We saw all kinds of horses there: short ones, lanky ones, and even striped ones; their riders wore clothes that seemed from a land far away, and the sunglasses they donned would make me feel strange. My grandfather had also worn sunglasses, but those were not like theirs. I had seen a picture of them once; he looked like a gentleman, albeit a rather mischievous one. But I never found them; I wonder who took them.

The still blue sky of the city would touch the lanky trees that lined the edges of the park; the sheer joy we felt looking at the horizon would be an allusion to the dreams we saw as children; it was all for the taking: vast, endless, and infinite. When it would be time to leave, we would steadily clutch the thirty or forty rupees that we had in our hands. It was almost ritual to buy a cold juice and chips from the canteen housed in a decommissioned school-bus. Stationed at the edge of the park, it was a peculiar sight; it was bright yellow with flower patterns painted all across its facade; maybe they had children do it. “I could paint that,” I would think to myself.

The park was called the Polo Ground; now it is called the Pakistan Park because they wanted to be sure that it was not in India; just like much of life, geographies, too, are a tricky business. I had always thought polo a rather strange game. Why would one exert animals in such theatrical idiocies? My mind would slightly change when I learnt to ride a horse myself. I was scared at first; and like all novice riders, I would fall, get stitched up, and the cycle would repeat until the animal would start accepting me, if not as a friend, then at least not a threat. If it didn’t trust someone, its strides would immediately reveal its feelings. Falling off was a lesser rejection than the horse allowing one to ride without accepting them. But I would stop riding horses with time; it felt unreal, and not in a good way. I did not need to ride them; I could just seem them.

Growing up meant that I could no longer be quiet — I had to be more; I had to unfold. This came with problem of learning how to be social — what a dreadful proposition, I thought at the time. I had learnt well to read cues: changing intonations in speech as they spoke about how their life had been so busy could mean different things; the here and now would always provide enough input to make sense of what someone felt, but I was either highly accurate in my estimations or an absolute imbecile who would miss life for it was; there was nothing in between. Having in-betweens would demand a kindness I had not yet learnt how to hold in my heart.

But as I did grow up, the prospect of emanating my being outside the borders of my body was still something strange and new, not new in the sense of being untried, but rather, the newness I felt was akin to the nauseating sensation one feels as they fall seriously sick for the first time; the medicine they are meant to ingest is supposed to hurt before it starts to mend, and just as the coagulation of blood often leaves remnants in the shape of scars, so does learning to live differently. This newness was forced upon me by the vicissitudes of time, by its demand to not stay still, and I had no choice; either I could comply or be rendered timeless. I knew the words to be said, but I did not know how to speak them; the division between my thought and speech was as jarring as an emotional cleavage that is erected when a couple madly in love separates.

Some linguistic-minded philosophers argue that speech is the highest form of communication: unadulterated by the pen and untarnished by one’s ability to edit retrospectively. I do not know what think of that; I only know that it is truly the one form of exchange that pierces the heart the most: It exacts its dues from both the speaker and the listener; it gives them something of the other, but it also claws away fragments of their own being, leaving them less than whole.

Many years would pass, and I would talk more, and it was precisely when I was learning to expect again that Newton was to make a cautionary reappearance; “every action” demands “an equal and opposite reaction,” he would whisper. Well, as it turns out, the smart fella was on to something again; he was right and not only in the realm of the physical, but for all of life; his message was to hold for everything across the skies; it was to hold for everything beyond us, within the galaxies inside us; it was to hold for even beyond the stars, which, in their burning glory, escaped both the limits of our vision and imagination.

From then till the remainder of my sojourn in time, the physicality of my words, the pleasure brought by the communion of my speech with those I liked, or even loved, would always be tinged with a concomitant silence inside, one suffused with pain.

It is in such moments that fear still seeps into the crevices of my mind, but I remember my grandpa, and I remember Nash’s laughter, and I think about the little boy I was and the dreams that he saw, and I remind myself that I owe them to not be afraid, even if I be scared.