Son

by Junaid Ahmed Ahangar

Prologue:

One may wonder what it must be like to strip yourself of all memory, make yourself an instrument of only the time and place you find yourself in, absorbing only the elements around you. You become acutely aware of the air you breathe. To extend your feet into an open space that doesn’t repudiate you, which doesn’t reject your advances but welcomes them with a silent embrace. And when you look around, you forget the action of opening and closing your eyes, as if it doesn’t exist. A primate in the skin of a time traveler who soaks in the minutiae of experience and sensations around him. That primate here is Silas.

And maybe all we want is an opportunity to lose ourselves in a tiny forgotten corner of this universe, and then find ourselves again, anew, only after having shed all our excess baggage. To be born again in this maelstrom of life. That traveler here is River.

Our story is one of neglect and wanton abandon, of the banality of indifference, and yet its immediate and far-reaching consequences. The aftermath of good, and its lack. Or maybe not.

Silas and Sons, the very inconspicuous-looking salon situated at the most pungent-smelling nook of the village street, had built for itself a reputation for being surprisingly effective and friendly. Its only saving grace in the starting days, though, was its name, pasted in a bright neon across the top of the salon. You might wonder how this name came about. It came about by way of a lack of ambition, a lack of originality, and a lack of effort—all in the same order.

Silas, having lived off benefits most of his life, finally had some savings to account for all of the unhappiness he had come to associate with life in general. He had been married for twenty-five years to his wife, Konya. She had quite the temper, and Silas had learned it the hard way. They had five children, four girls and one boy, River. With the savings he accumulated, he could have invested in a lot of things. But soon it became clear to him that having an abundance of options was a hindrance. He had never been familiar with the idea of ‘choosing,’ the poor never are. He did not choose the life he had. He did not choose the family he was born into. A particularly harsh childhood and chastening coming-of-age left him short of breath every time he sat back and allowed his mind to wander into the past— in the deepest recesses of his soul— or to try and situate himself in the passage of time. Invariably, he failed in that endeavor. To gaze into the past, to have his finger on the pulse of time meant acknowledging his pain, and what followed was a singular sense of loss. A cascade of moments, one after another. It felt like being hit by an oncoming train, over and over again, being born in the same moment, in perpetuity. Thus, he refused to believe people who associated their past and ruminated on it with any other emotion except sadness. Temporality is the saddest thing God created. What is fleeting can never be a source of joy, even in hindsight. I wish I could grow my memories all around me, like a lush meadow. Detachment from any moment in my life is nothing less than incarceration, he often whispered to himself.

Konya, he was betrothed to when they were children. Their offspring were something he always thought he had no say over, either. He had grown accustomed to the lack of volition, which is why he rushed to invest his savings in opening up a salon, wishing to rid himself of the unease and unfamiliarity that mulling over things brought him. The lack of ambition in this venture was something shared by Konya. She had grown to be a feisty woman with a very impatient streak. In her mind, Silas was already late in reaching a decision, even though it had only been two days since he acquired his savings.

For many, service and kindness might be a means to an end. For others, a virtue not in need or want. Yet, for some, it is the substitute for a lack, like a sycamore tree growing in the place of a ragged pine only because it grows fast and is sturdy, offering plenty of shade. If there could be unselfish trees, there could be unselfish human beings, and the two of them, Konya and Silas, were the antithesis of all that. Unyieldingly selfish.

The lack of originality in naming their salon Silas and Sons is something not lost on the reader, I am certain, not to mention River, being the only son. It was only when River's friends pointed out the obvious error of his parents’ ways that Silas decided on some course of correction. Silas and Konya’s lack of effort manifested in how instead of changing the signboard, along with the name, Silas insisted that River bring him a bunch of pelican beaks whose debris, he maintained, was the only thing that could erase the single additional s in Sons. An unveiling of taking myth as a ruse to find unmistakable comfort in.

River always thought, growing up, that there would be a definitive point—a line drawn across—where a person turns into a big boy, then an adult, then old. In a sense, life would demarcate for him his transitions, plenty of lines forthcoming. However, had never seen one of those lines, and had never come across one of those points. When he looked around and saw people, he was convinced they had. But not him. Perhaps that explained why he was so ill-equipped at life, explained his mistakes, explained his shortcomings and complete lack of foresight. Hapless. A part of him was convinced this is how people made up excuses inside their heads for not owning up. Well, I am owning up, not just to my mistakes, but all of me, which has led me to where I am right now. And I find myself struggling, still, to make sense of the lack of those lines. I must be the most out-of-depth twenty-year-old that has ever lived. He mocked himself thus.

The world moving along left him bothered, flustered at how everyone carried on with their lives oblivious to him. The world is passing me by, my life is passing me by, and I cannot do a single goddamn thing about it, he kept saying to himself, repeatedly. It was incessant self-flagellation, one slow day at a time.

The village monk, Yosemi, during their conversation once dabbled in the area of love. “Love is real when it is just out of reach,” he said.

“It’s a bit like making pilgrimage to a holy city. The rabbis, priests, and imams all exhort and command the pilgrims to leave the city quickly. Because familiarity is a death blow. Familiarity with the holy city would strip away its magnificence, make it less sanctified. Familiarity with the holy city would result in the awe of the city to depart from the hearts of its pilgrims. Such punitive measures are mandatory in love.”

Familiarity breeds disdain. Yet, he was smack in the middle of it.

No prizes for guessing, but poor River lived a miserable life, wholly borrowed from his father Silas, who remained indifferent throughout. To pile on the misery, for River, Silas forced him to give up on his education and instead become a barber, focusing all of his life skills on what was at hand, the salon.

It was there, in the presence of people, that he felt truly naked. All of his inequities laid bare, colloquial claustrophobia setting in over and over again, reasserting itself. This was not the ‘coming of age’ that he had envisioned for himself; it was him unraveling. It was a great fall from grace. The grace of being comfortable with people, being socially affable, being the life and soul of gatherings, witty and light. Light as a feather. The fountain of his parents’ eyes, the spring in his step, the bearer of glad tidings for his orphan cousin, the solace of his barren aunt, the pivot for his friends. And in a fraction of a lifetime, all vanished and was laid to waste. Solitude, what once he thought of and experienced as something rather prosaic and disconcerting, was his shelter, his refuge. His marriage with solitude, though, was not a happy one. It was one stemming from feverish necessity rather than any form of intent or desire. It was like choosing one death, one pain, over another. Drowning over being burnt alive. Being eaten away, fangs over teeth, sharp claws over dull, or so he thought. One form of cowardice over the other.

River, for the most part though, did not allow himself to grow despondent, and, in due course, became good at cutting people's hair, shaving their beards, and—most importantly—chirping away endlessly with mundane conversations. But every now and then, this incredible urge swelled up inside him, right up to his throat. To walk away from it all. To escape this relentless whipping of clockwork servitude. To run away from this unforgiving tyranny to a liberating jump off a cliff. I don’t want to afford a smile in the face of all the grief I carry, he’d say to himself. I don’t want to be benevolent. The duty of attention to work, to detail, to the responsibility of my kith and kin. I am and want to be accountable to only my flesh and whatever comes out of, and is made by, my flesh.

Blood of my blood. I vie against the world for you. I pledge to be blind, deaf, and mute to the rest of the world. I cannot afford to let my guard down, even for a moment. If rage is all-consuming, then I am unforgiving in letting it in. One second at a time.

The one-year anniversary of the salon’s opening coincided with all four of his sisters getting engaged, which is how it went for the poor. Marriage, like life, came to them unannounced in one big package, forever unopened, which they were supposed to just carry on their backs without asking how or why. River recalled the long-standing village tradition of using pelican beaks to more easily sauté onions if there were too many of them to fry for a feast. The tradition was part folklore, part remedy. It would also tie up the salon, finally, he thought, having already erased the single additional s from Silas and Sons in his mind.

For all the brightness and warmth of the early April sun, the air still carried the winter chill on its frayed tentacles, which swept over his skin—a baptism, of sorts. But as happens with people who tend to sway with the color of the sky, a certain sadness loomed large. The rain began to fall, gentle and soft, but to him painted a rather sordid picture of his past. He wished for an absence of rain—and of life. Rain should cease to exist. All good things on earth should have already ceased to exist the day I was born. I don’t want to see anything beautiful. I want to turn my face away from the grace and wonder of nature. Let everything scorch under the sun. He groaned.

He drew upon the reserves of his own memory, his past foisted on the present to keep propelling him forward into his next step, a forward lunge, his next hurried step, his unwavering, but pitiless, descent into the future. How distant does a memory have to be in order to start being one?

He set out for the beaks only to be run over by a tractor. The poor do not have the luxury of grief, either. So Silas and what remained of his family mourned River for two days, after which Silas set out to learn the skills of a barber himself. It wasn't long before people, initially skeptical of having an old man fiddle with their hair and faces, began to admire the old man's skills as much as his tenacity. Konya's outbursts became more frequent, and with it, the salon's fame grew far and wide too. A few months later, as a farewell to his son, Silas finally decided to scrape off the single, additional s, and it did not require pelican beaks, just stones. Silas and Son was a standalone name of a standalone salon in a dreamy village on an insipid July day, and Silas finally allowed himself a smile.

Epilogue:

The anatomy of a memory –

In the humble opinion of this narrator, so often swayed by a plethora of experiences singularly unique to him and, yet, not so unique, we tend to shy away from what is immediate, what is most pressing in an attempt to make sense of our lives. To seek refuge in love, in ambition, in service, in belonging, and to allow our lives to be steered by any of it is so entirely disingenuous and ultimately futile. When, in fact, in the humble opinion of this narrator, the one imminent process that encompasses our life is memory. ‘Process’ is what Google calls it. And something about that does not sound right. It’s like selling it short, the definition of memory, just like we do with memories in general; we sell them short, embellish them, and forget them until we forget to forget. And how much we shape our memory or how much our memory shapes us is anybody’s guess.

From the seemingly innocuous peeling off of an orange on a hazy, June afternoon or the taste of a fig drowning out a gathering or the smell of a torrential downpour in mid-September or the time when we tried avocados for the first time to the deeply formative, like a lover’s kiss, or a dreadful injury or a shouting contest with the parents or abuse.

The long and the short of it is just this: Memory has a stranglehold over our lives. As distant (or as near) as a valley and a river that runs through it.

Memory remains fundamental, and the most enduring in a seemingly jaded chronicle of life. Yet, it remains a meditation on the most overwhelming. The kind where you could die just thinking about it.

In the humble opinion of this narrator, there is no emotion more crippling or life-giving or insidious or redeeming than memory at different points in our lives. But is memory an emotion, this narrator asks?

BIO: The author, Junaid Ahmed Ahangar works as a doctor in a tertiary care institute in Srinagar, Kashmir. He graduated from Dhaka, Bangladesh and completed his MD in Medicine from Srinagar, Kashmir. He also has an MA in English Literature from India and is currently in the second year of MA in Philosophy. He devotes his time between his profession and passions which over the last few years has seen a conscious departure towards writing poetry and prose. He is also a singer-songwriter and occasional guitarist with other interests apart from literary pursuits like music, film-making, podcasting and theology.