Homebody Makes a New Friend

Do you remember how you became first became friends with someone?

I realize now, sitting in bed and trying to drown out the noise of screaming politicians on the talk show that Ammi is watching that I have some really good friends. Thank God. But mostly I can’t pinpoint the one time we actually made that initial connection. What happened in that one moment that made us friends? Can’t remember. I tend to just chance on the realization that I’ve come to like someone enough to share my thoughts, feelings, and inane babblings with them without fear of being judged.

But today, I made a new friend and this is how it happened.

Friend: ‘All men are bastards!’

Me: ‘But YOU’RE a man.”

Friend: ‘Be that as it may. They’re all bastards. They will lust, not love.’

Me: ‘I know some who don’t lust.’

Friend: ‘They’re emancipated.’

Me: ‘Wha?’

Friend: (slices hand through air) You know. Emancipated.

Me: ‘Do you mean..castrated?’

Friend: Oh yes. Castrated. Not emancipated. Or emancipated in the physical sense, you could say.

And there you go. Connection forged. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Homebody Tries to be Inspired – and FAILS

So based on my second post, a good friend wrote the following comment:

Dickinson? Your example reads like egocentric claptrap to me!!!Unless we go out into the world even just to observe others how can we write? Shall I give you a three word challenge to make a flash fiction with? Okay in case the answer is yes, pleiades, lagoon, exchange. Now write me something including those words you very talented writer! At least 300 words.

Warning: what follows below is utter nonsense proving that my muse has abandoned me to stark raving lunacy.

The pleiades were petulant because they had seen their reflections in the cosmic lagoon. Each had seen her face in the water and convinced herself that she was the best looking. The problem arose when they all said, at the same time "I am the fairest in the Upperworld!" Of course, that did not sit well with the others who entertained that particular notion about themselves. What followed therein was an exchange as fiery as the constellation they were named after.

‘Take that back! You have a snout for a nose with a wart in the middle and the hair that comes out if it as thick as a tree on Mars!’

‘There are no trees in Mars you physically compromised nitwit! Esmeralda will agree with me.”

“Yes, yes,” pitched in Esmeralda, cleaning her nose – a feat of epic proportion because her thumbs were as thick as pokers and her nostrils small: kind of a camel through a needle-hole affair. “I agree that Lavinia is far from luminous and you, my dear Plutinia are a nasally challenged! Excuse me while I breathe – been feeling short of air lately….BUT, you know how it is. I shined the brightest in the lagoon!”

“Shone you dolt!” pitched in Sisterella, who had hair coming out of her armpits. “And it was not YOU who shone brightest. It was me!” She stroked herself under her arms.

“We’re not talking about lack of hair fall sister dear. And you’re being a bit of a grammar nazi. You sound and look like a shrew!” Purilenda jumped into the extremely heated fray.

“Yes indeed, indeed,” agreed the sixth sister. “Shrewish is as shrewish does. But a nazi kills people on earth. So you mean to say that Fervinia is killing her own grammar? But let’s not have this debate. Brains take away attractiveness in a woman and I certainly don’t want that to happen to me.”

The seventh sister listened to all of this helplessly. She was the fairest of them all but her tongue had been cut out because she’d once sung a Justin Bieber song and caused a galaxy to erupt. What she was also noticing, with growing alarm, was that each sister’s temper was causing them all to glow. And we all know that with the seven sisters, it was glowing, going, gone.

On earth, seven sisters who were about to lose their shoes and meet seven handsome men commented on how the seven stars shone brighter than ever before.

The End

Sigh. See what I mean?

The Uninspired Homebody

You know, being a homebody had its perks for different people in the literary world. Case in point: Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte. I think it has something to do with the name ‘Emily’. These women were cooped up in their homes. They had very little else to do besides daily chores and a few necessary visitations to the local parish and some relatives. Despite this, they led rich inner lives and wrote literature that can blow your mind away.

That’s another reason I blame my mum. Perhaps if I too had been named Emily, I might have turned out to be a great novelist or poet – I’d have SOMETHING to redeem my sorry, sedentary, homebody existence. But seeing how our nation has a knack for distorting perfectly respectable, simple names, I don’t know how I’d react to people referring to me as ‘Imlee’. Just imagine how I’d have been teased in middle school:

‘Imlee kee chatni,

Cheeni dali,

Phir bhi khatti

Imlee ki chatni!”

But to get back to Ms. Dickinson. She always wore white (she was probably as averse to clothes shopping as I am; complicated affair, that!) received guests reluctantly (ah! kindred spirit who lived too soon!) and towards the end of her life, didn’t even bother leaving her room. She sometimes spoke to her guests from behind her bedroom door, not even bothering to meet them face-to-face. How great would it be to receive spittle-challenged visitors who can’t keep their bodily fluids in their mouth when they talk at bay! They can spray your door while you yell at them from behind saying: “Waw? Waw you say? I can’t hear anything but slurping!” But I write no poetry and therefore have no skill to legitimize my impertinence.

And yet, and yet, hiding in her room, this is the kind of stuff she wrote:

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And being, but an ear,
And I and Silence some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here.

Can you feel the passion? The anxiety? The drumbeat of the heart? She sat in her room and wrote the world, the rhythm of life and the knell of death. No wonder she had no time for tiresome visitors. There were muses enough to give her company!

Emily Bronte was a teacher and homebody just like me. She did household chores, walked the moors and then came up with Heathcliff, who said things like:

“You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry, and wring out my kisses and tears; they'll blight you - they'll damn you. You loved me -then what right had you to leave me? .. misery, and degradation and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart -you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”

I re-read this and my heart is torn over and over again. And this comes from a woman who spent her time with sniveling snots and taught them Sunday school, only to return to arduous household chores. YET she wrote about a man who was elemental, passionate, turgid, earthy, wild and alive; a masterpiece who the muse introduced to the solitary Ms. Bronte while she walked along the moors. Perhaps he was the muse who wrestled with her as she struggled against the wind and passed the graveyard on the way back home.

Both these women were homebodies. They consorted with muses and they shook the world. Many critics say they wrote thus because they were homebodies.

And then there’s me. Little old me. Okay, yes, I’ve gained a few pounds, but I could still, technically, from one angle, be described as little.

Okay fine. There’s me.

I have no muse. I think my muse gave up on me a long time ago. I can imagine her (respectable, Shia, Syed homebodies like me do not receive male visitors in their bedrooms, even phantasmagoric ones, thank-you-very-much) begging me to get up and type something, whispering poems and stories while I just clean my ear with a cutip and complain of ‘that buzzing sound’ and spray the entire room with Mortein.

Oh well. Here’s to all the homebodies who didn’t turn out like Madams Emily. It’s okay. We still exist, even though the only thing we have to show for it is a sizeable behind.

Homebody is Hysterical

Worse than being a regular fat homebody is being a fat homebody teacher at exam-time with no life at all. You sit at the dining table (which is the closest you will ever come to having an office space) and pore over bad handwriting and grammar and then collapse in tears of laughter, hysteria and depression – in that order – over your students’ brilliant creativity.

Case in point: Describe a food and the memories it brings to your mind.

I am sitting before the table, staring at breasts. Not human breasts. Breast of chicken a la kiev. They are round. They are plump. They are chicken’s breasts. I look at them and then I decide to eat them. The desire of my mouth overcomes the desire of my eyes. I pick up a ---- (space left for me to fill because he can’t remember that ‘kaanta’ translates into fork) and cut into the bossom of the chicken. (Yes, you’re right. Bosom. Not bossom.) I cut a piece and put a dollop into my mouth. I am eating breasts. I am enjoying breasts.

Well, at least it’s written correctly, right? It’s better than this:

Write a story in which things begin to happen in slow motion.

She didn’t got time to climb the seerhi. She couldn’t breathe because hot air was passing. She needed to go up. She looked down at the stairs and then bent her neck (a remarkable feat of cervical flexibility) and then bent her leg and her hip and put her feet on the first stair. Then she singed to me: ‘Mohammad! Come help your grandmother! And when I come to help her, she finds it easy. She starts hovering like a hovering craft.

My the breath also begins to come in short gusts like a waterfall and the tears that flow from my mouth to my tongue like the wind of a fan. So I bend my knee and my ankle and spring up from my chair on which I am sitting and then walk over to the fridge and reach for a ‘Kit-Kat’ which is in inverted commas because I have decided I need to get marks on the punctuation as the well.

It’s homebodies like me who keep the chocolate industry going. You’re welcome, Nestle!

The Curious Case of Two Homebodies in the Night

The thing about homebodies is that we attract other homebodies. Most of my friends are stay-at-home mums, divorced or single. Or they are teachers and writers. All people-who-are-stuck, in one way or another.

I have ONE fun friend. Ever since she married, she ditched me. No, that’s not entirely true. She does generously take out time once a month to catch up with me, for which I’m extremely grateful. She is also nice enough not to tell me too much about her life, so that resentment doesn’t enter the equation between us.

So here I was, in bed, with my mother, my sixty-nine year old, conservative, be-back-at-8:3- mum, having left the house at nine to attend a mehndi with friends.

Kill me, just kill me, it’s come to this. Ammi’s the one dressing up and saying cheerio and prancing out the door while I’m watching a re-run of Vampire diaries because that’s the only darn Dvd that works.

So I called a fellow homebody, who answered her cell phone with a resigned, ‘Hmm.’

“Hey! It’s me, Shazaf!”

“Hmm…”

“Bad time?”

“No, I am depressed.”

These four beautiful words made me feel better instantly. I was not alone. My misery had more company than two handsome vampires and a girl with an unnaturally small waist. This was a real, live, breathing, talking human being, and she was all mine! And the best part about this was that she was in a homebody-mode, hence, there was no life to suck out of her. WE COULD BE OURSELVES! Hallelujah!

I suggested we meet, which was not too uncharacteristic a suggestion since my friend was also my neighbor. And meet we did. One look at each other and we decided that the only thing that could cheer us up was chocolate.

So we got into my car and drove off, giggling hysterically precisely because there was nothing to giggle about. Our conversation went something to the effect of:

“Oh God! We’re so pathetic!”

“Totally agree. BUAAHAHAHAHAHA!”

“Oh God! Look at that man scratching his crotch!”

“BUAHAHAHAHA!”

“Oh look! A baby in a pram.”

“BUAHAHAHAHAA!”

“Shall we drive into it?”

*Pause*

My friend, a mother of two, turned around to look at me. I looked at her, thinking I’d overstepped the boundaries. After all, killing of infants is a joke only single women find funny.

And then: “BUAHAHAHAAHA!” Apparently, mothers of toddlers find the thought of infanticide infinitely humorous too.

We drove to the grocery store in hysterical fits of cackling. And I realized I didn’t know how to park (problem with being a homebody, you don’t get out in rush hour and hence have no NEED to park). But what the hell? We were having an adventure! If a passerby were to walk by our car, he’d see two disheveled women in their thirties grinning maniacally at the pavement, threatening to kill it with my driving skills.

So I parked in the middle of the road and we ran inside. I picked up four Kit-Kats and a couple of Mars-Bars and drove back to her house and comfortably ensconced myself in her drawing room.

Another thing I can tell you: when two homebodies get together, you’re in for a great conversation. We don’t do much, therefore we think a lot. And analyze the hell out of everything. It’s delicious in a way that only other homebodies can understand. You know how it is. You’re curled up on a sofa with a chocolate in the hand, becoming all gooey and sticky on your fingers as you pour your heart out about what’s bothering you. And the great thing is that what’s bothering you is not much. No one is about to die (not that we know of) and nothing tragic has happened. It’s this niggling, New Age sense of something being not-quite-right that only women in upper-class homes have the privilege of experiencing.

We ate and spoke and ate and spoke. We paused only to drink water and talked some more. Before you knew it, two hours flew by and we had not said enough. It was perfect.

And instantly, I was reminded of the women of Kalash and ancient Greece. (You can get, from my digression, how post-modern our conversation was and how intellectual it made me feel). These were women who sat at home, tended to their husbands and children and worked a monotonous routine day in and day out. Then, for one month of the year, they dump their pots and pans and wailing infants and retreat, in a giant group, to a far off location. The Greek women went to an island, perhaps Lesbos, and sang and danced and ate and talked the heads off each other. They probably had sex with each other too, but that’s material for another blog. The women of Kalash also go off and braid each other’s hair and talk and dance and eat and give vent to all the emotions that do rise up because historically, women have tended to be homebodies. I’m sure men approved of this custom because their wives returned in much better moods.

By meeting like this, my friend and I were paying homage to an old homebody custom. Except in the modern world, it’s not possible to go off and braid each other’s hair for a month. We just don’t have enough hair. No, two hours would have to suffice.

I returned, refreshed, expecting to find my mother frantically looking for me all over the place: behind the cupboards, under the bed (true story, once, as a child, she DID find me under the bed) and braced myself for a tongue lashing. I saw her lying in bed quietly. I asked her if she was okay. It turns out she’d gone to the mehndi and returned an hour later – she missed my dad (who’d passed away two years ago) too much.

So, after spending a great evening with one homebody, I climbed in with another; one who was bruised, hurt and missing her man. I hugged her tight and went to sleep. Sometimes, being a homebody can be an infinitely precious opportunity: it gives you time to take care of the people who really matter.

Confession # 1 - I am Homebody

So I came to the realization yesterday that I’ve become a homebody. Not an exciting I-am-spiritual-and-have-to-do-lots-of-cool-things-at-home-body. My movements have actually been confined to the narrow radius between my bed and the television that’s about three steps away. Exercise consists of rolling to one side of the bed, beating up the pillow into shape so it can form the perfect back-rest, then beating it up again a few hours later after I have crawled-trudged to the television to put in a new DVD in the player and then collapsed back on the bed. I knew I needed help when I had a near existential crisis the moment I discovered I was on my last Tudors season. No more Jonathan Rhys Meyers jumping on the bed, literally and metaphorically.

Of course, when the high of Lays and Pepsi deserts you and Jonathan bows out with a cruel smile and you are left staring at your bloated reflection on the black screen of despair, you begin to indulge in a bout of self-pity. What brought me to this? How did I, who was meant to run an NGO, be an actress and record my own album, write my own book and win a Nobel Prize for Literature, marry a gorgeous man and bring up a picture-perfect family, end up like this? So I did what every mature twenty-nine year old woman who had seen a lot of the world does: I blamed my mother.

You see, my mother was the protective sort. All the Dawn headlines proclaiming theft, murder, arson where ingested by her wide-eyed person as she convinced herself that if she didn’t take care of every step I took, I would be the subject of such criminal violence. Ever since puberty hit and I began, in Gwendolin Fairfax’s words, ‘to develop in every direction’, my mother became super paranoid. I couldn’t go to the beach because I’d be raped. A bunch of girls from IBA had gone to the beach twenty years ago and had been raped while their male friends helplessly looked on. I couldn’t go to restaurants because once a man had fallen in love with a school girl and abducted her and taken her to his haveli in interior Sindh and had his way with her. I couldn’t go to the market after nine because the shopkeeper, seized with a frenzy of passion, would shut up shop with me in it and chase me around the counter while I fended him off with strepsils, makhi-mars and bunties.

I couldn’t go to night-spends because all my friends had brothers waiting to rape me. When I went to my first co-educational school for my A-levels, the boys, whether they showed it or not, were also waiting to rape me, hook me on drugs and then party all night. It took about two weeks for me to realize that men were normal creatures who didn’t think with their phallus all the time (well, most of the time) and so I began to make friends.

But then came the problem with my ten o’clock curfew – I couldn’t go to parties or hang out with my friends and so school and university passed perfectly respectably, without a single fling or romance. I studied, did my assignments, watched some television and then went to bed. With the result that I have now become a teacher. I GIVE assignments, watch some television, then go to bed.

So as I lie in bed and type this blog, I realize that I am a homebody. Always have been, am, and looks like always will be. My life has come full circle. And, looking at the effect of this sedentary routine on my figure, I feel it apt to say, I AM a full circle.

Confession # 2 - This Homebody Writes about Other Homebodies

Being a homebody isn't just something that's funny. There are women who are confined to their homes in the name of marriage. I have been such a woman, but luckily, I got out early. This woman didn't. This is her story.