the prayers that I (never) pray(ed)

I have distinct memories of Achu telling me to pray for her.

“Allah listens to your prayers. They come true. So pray for me, please?”

I remember my eyes tearing up, my heart brimming with some wholesome feeling and giving here a wide smile. I prayed for her multiple times, when she asked and when she didn’t. I still do, for her and her little one. Because it reminds me again and again, of how Allah listens to my prayers, even when I repeatedly fail to believe or remember it.

Last week, after ages of being numb during prayers, sometimes having to rack my brain to form coherent sentences out of my muddled thoughts to ask Allah, other times mechanically asking for things that I wanted (sadly mostly centered around the Dunya), the things that I should generally ask for (like Deen, Janna, health among many others) and the things going on around the world, on a whim, I frustratingly prayed to make me feel my prayers. To feel it’s depth and it’s hope and it’s despair and it’s strength. Two days back, after carrying around the burden of a few things (thoughts) the entire day, I finally took wudhu and prayed Asr after which I cried and cried my heart out. For the little big things affecting my life, for the guy who was punishing me for god knows what reason, for my uncertain futures, for the frustrations of my inability to prioritise, for the numbness, for the lack of clarity, for Falasteen, for my Uppa and Umma. My tears wouldn’t stop, my heart and eyes ached and I wondered where all this was coming from. For a moment, I realised that Allah had granted my prayer. I was feeling it all in it’s entirety. The gates had finally opened. He atleast answered one of my prayers, I thought. Well, maybe He will answer the rest as well, my heart caught onto that string of hope. In those breakdowns, I found a piece of self again though the next day I go back down the rabbit hole of worries.

Sometimes I think about how I should write down all that I pray for, just to notice and realise how much of it Allah fulfills. I go on and on with the never ending lists of things that I want help with, never actually comprehending how many of the things that I prayed for once are a reality now. How many things that I never even imagined to pray for or couldn’t put into proper sentences to ask were nevertheless granted. How the very act of praying and letting it be, gives me a sense of calmness, a sense of courage, a sense of belief and a sense of understanding, even if sometimes I don’t get what I prayed for.

As I sit in the dark, on my prayer mat in my prayer dress, feeling the light breeze in the quiet of the fan’s whirring and the hum of the night, I think of the time when I once wanted to name my kid (if I have one, in sha allah), Dua. Before it became a trend, which is the exact reason why I chucked the idea. Then, I think of how I also wanted to name my kid (if I have one, in sha allah), Dunya. And I keep thinking if it’s right to name my kid after something that Allah told us is transient and not important. But it nevertheless is where we learn, where we strive, where we seek, so maybe it’s not a bad idea. In Sha allah.

a living, breathing human

So in a ‘Julie/Julia’ impact, I am back here to my blog that I think (hope) no one reads. Something that I have kept since when I was a child, but rarely putting in anything substantial for a few years, but something that’s just been there in my thoughts all throughout.

Sometimes I come back to read all that I had written, to remember who I was when I was younger. To feel that energy and direction of my little mind. I had no inhibitions about writing my thoughts and putting it out here. I was serious with what I thought, I was stubborn about making it make sense and pening it down. I had the focus, I had the energy to dwell in that silence, I made the time for myself and my thoughts, and to weave it and string it coherently. And I constantly wonder about the beauty and wiseness in it all, frequently questioning if I actually wrote so well. So this blog is a testimony to the person and life that I was. And what I want it to be, is for it to be testimony to the person and life that I constantly grew up in and lived – like a memoir of sorts.

Fast forward to now, I have been thinking about how much I run away from silence. Filling life with noise is something very easy these days. Just at a click, there is a heckload of information and content ready to shield you from your thoughts and life. You could settle into scrolling for life, looking through the pictures of everyone who you think is leading a meaningful life or you could choose to see something from the wide array of increasingly violent, gory, disturbing, and depressive series and movies on any of the OTT platforms. And then when you find something simple and stupid that you can just drown in, to escape feeling the emotions of your reality, you can keep binge-watching it with the endless amount of data at your disposal. Ah! To say that we lived through the times of 1GB/month data packs, downloaded songs onto USBs, torrent downloaded games and movies, and copied stuff from our friend’s place in our CDs and floppy. I remember a time when I got my first mobile and installed these new apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. I specifically remember asking my friend how many contacts she had in WhatsApp to message and she sent a screenshot showing quite a list when I had just four and I wanted more. Boy! Now WhatsApp messages make me anxious and I have a huge backlog that I constantly get back to ages later with an apology and a quick promise to myself to always get back on time (something that I keep failing and failing at).

And when all this running away and constructed chaos are done, when I come back to confront my reality and to the list of works that have now been ignored for mindless pleasure of procrastination, I fall down. I keep asking myself why I do this to myself, why I can’t just get all this done on time and spend some time with my family, or meaningfully on myself, to journal, to paint, to learn a new song on my ukulele, to meet new people, to walk around aimlessly listening to things around me. When I think of all these joyous things that I could do, I feel a shiver of fear. Somewhere within me, I do not want to do any of these joyous things, because then I will have to think, of things to talk, of things to draw, of things to write, of my thoughts. And that is where I have sadly reached, in this cycle of never ending tasks and commitments and content, a person who is scared of her own thoughts, who is scared to sit with it, to mull it over, to pen it down. There used to be a time when I felt my thoughts and the way I think made me special, now I think of them as the bane of my existence, something that I repeatedly run away from, because its hard and its tough and it needs a lot of will to put in an effort. But then there are times like this, when it resurfaces again, when I want to chronicle my thoughts, make it real, sit with it, hug it, cry with it, wonder at the ingenuity or the clarity in it and I feel like a human again. A living, breathing human who is trying to do her best to live. A living, breathing human who wants to leave writings that she will read years down the lane to remember who she was.

an obituary

Rahla Mohammed Usman

A few years ago, I came across a story on instagram and then when I was scrolling through her account, there was this one picture that impacted me, so profoundly at that moment, that it stayed with me for a long long time.

A picture of her eyes, tear filled, draped in red.

That was the first time that I saw a strong emotion in some one’s eyes, the kind that I had only read about. That was a day I realized again, that my words would speak even after I had gone from the world.

I read all her words, she wrote so well. I read that she wanted to be remembered even after her death.

That was the first time I used my art to do an obituary.

“one day,
everything will
come to an end.
and you will taste
every fruit of your deeds.”

– Rahla Mohammed Usman (@apapermask)

In loving memory of a girl, who will live in me.

2020

years later I will think of an year, of days that failed to make a presence, of random memories, but not a flash of my face, of a time that went missing, heavy with the absence of it // 2020.

And the post, because I am high on words and inspiration to write and make art but swamped with work that never actually gets done.

rat races

For quite sometime now, Instagram feels like a rat race to me. One where I am forced to keep up. One where I might just become hidden and lose everything that I have painstakingly put out there and built. One that makes me feel so unworthy. One that makes me feel so old school. One that makes me feel like I am mocking my relations. One that makes me feel like I have no relations. One that seems to be crippling my talents. Constantly questioning and forever not enough. One with a lot of strategies. One that makes me even fear the idea of going for a social media detox. How will I get my orders? How will I connect with other people? How will I merge back? What if I miss a lot? What if I am never able to recognize it after my break?

Well, every night I promise myself that I will never check my Instagram before I go to sleep. Everyday, after my little victories I think I deserve that. To go to bed, believing that I have done something worthwhile with my time, however little. To go back to bed, hoping I have done my talents a little justice.

It’s messed up. Totally.
I thought I could untangle it, but by far, I have proven myself wrong, every single day.

ministry of utmost happiness

It took three years for the time to be right for this one. This was the first book that Ishak gifted me and he wrote a little note inside – ‘For always staying happy, For always being you’. It’s been a constant conscious pursuit of it both ever since I have known myself – of happiness and of myself.

And like I always believe, that with books, there is always a time for each and every one of them. I think I am constantly telling myself to extend that to everything in my life. All that I dream of, all that I try to make sense of, and all that I battle.

To the rightest of times.

dilli

In this perfect alternate world, where the world is peaceful and I am routinely disciplined, my course isn’t this messed up and hell bent on making my life stressful, there is a Delhi. A Delhi which I would go out to every evening after my class. Seeking and seeing, absorbing in all it’s life. I would walk around and around, with no fear within me. I would search within the depths of it’s markets, to stock up on my lifelines. Daryaganj would still have been that footpath laden and loaded with all things words and dear. The laps of histories,  manifestations of stories lived and living, a city so huge, breathing in and in. The city of nine cities that it has lived in it’s lifetime that humans know of, it’s strewn with bits and pieces of its pasts – one of the Lalkot, one of the Tughlakabad, another of the firozabad, of the siri, of the jahanpanah, of the dinpanah, of the shahjahanabad and of the british. But the delhi that you see now is that of a partition – of hearts, homes and souls. It carries all of this in spirit, constantly confused, terribly fused together.

It’s been almost 5 months. 
You see I have a love hate relationship with a city that I so fondly call dilli.

lost homes

Every night, for the past few days, when I get ready to sleep past midnight, mentally trying to make sense of all the work that I am to finish the next day, there is this particular change in the atmosphere of my room, that takes me back to a familiar place, a certain calmness taking hold of me. It gives me that feeling of being back in my room in Riyadh and it takes me back to my childhood, to the place where I grew up, to a home that has been for far greater years than here. I haven’t missed Riyadh in a long time now, but today,  after I finished my Isha prayer, sitting on my rug, my room again transformed into that space that I was familiar with, I suddenly started crying. I miss Riyadh so much. I miss that familiarity. I miss not having what I grew up with around me. I miss this lost sense of home, this incomplete bits and pieces of memories that I am never able to recollect, terrifyingly disappearing off my mind. The most heart breaking thing is that, I will never ever feel my childhood again, Riyadh has changed, all that and whom I grew up with has all disappeared. It will only exist in my memories, which fails me each and every passing day.

I hate this incompleteness of my past, of what I am, of where I come from, this feeling of not feeling whole in a place that is supposed to be your home.

for the longest of time

For the longest of time, I remember a little ten year old, in her favorite book shop, browsing through the titles of encyclopedias, thinking hard, on which she wanted.

For the longest of time, I remember her, watching her father pay almost a sum of 5000 rupees, for all that she had chosen. She loved her dad and she couldn’t wait to get home.

For the longest of time, I remember her setting up her first library in the little room that she had, carefully arranging them in categories.

For the longest of time, I remember her sitting with a book and a cup of fruit yogurt after lunch, wrapped in her blanket, the afternoon sun shining through the sole window to her right. She would read for half an hour and then take her nap.

For the longest of time, I remember, there was this one poster which she had found in a magazine, that inspired her to get going during her school days – the poster of a girl with a graduation cap.

For the longest of time, I remember, even when she lost the will to read and learn somewhere down the lane, she watched her treasured books waiting, not knowing how she had walked so far away.

For the longest of time, I remember, she would buy and buy, all that she wanted to know about, with all that she could afford, with the hope that she would come back again, to the world that she never realized that she had chosen to chase.

For the longest of time, I remember her standing in front of it all, her little space, that made her feel belonged, that made her feel herself.

For the longest of time, I remember and now realize, that it has always been the light of ilm (knowledge) that kept her going. Even when she feels burdened by all that she wants to know, all that she wants to read, tired of telling her heart, that she needs to take it slow, there is a light now, so clear, beckoning her, like it used to.

I now feel like her, this girl who I have remembered for the longest of time.

Alhamdulillah.
Barakallah. 🖤