Artwork: Dosain
10 hours ago
On certain days, at certain hours, I enjoy taking the R8 bus from the Carnival bus stop to Hiya 1 bus stop, Phase 2, Hulhumalé. Allow me to explain. On every weekday, that is Sunday through Thursday, at times other than noon or between five and seven in the afternoon and evening, a hush falls over the bus stop. It is quieter than my home, which my wife cleans spiritedly on weekdays, singing quite horrendous 80s Hindi songs. Now that she has resigned from her post as Head Librarian at MIT (the Maldives Institute of Technology), she pursues a life so tedious she must mask it with utmost cleanliness. But I have turned away from my task. On those days and at those times, you can travel without concern for who might come sit beside you because, on these days, at these times, MTCC's double decker R8 buses have enough rows on the upper and lower decks to have rows of seats your own. Being that the workers are at construction sites and offices, the students are in schools and colleges, most people are elderly and prefer the lower deck. Of those hours, I am partial to riding between three and four thirty. The day must be sunny, or the sun should at the very least shine from behind its hazy niqab; that is not a bad phrase. This is so because during those hours, sunlight touches the earth at an angle, which domesticates it, so it is weak yet it illuminates the world in an exuberant, easy to bear luminescence. And from my usual seat, a row behind the front on the upper deck, on the top of the hunch of the bridge, I see everything as I did the afternoons of my youth if I were to go – THAT is my wife, calling for me.
At last. I have returned. She was constipated and I had to go to the mart downstairs and buy her some coffee, some stimulus to help her excrete. I cannot remember how many times I have advised her not to eat foah so much, our human digestion is very simply not ready for it. She may in fact get cancer, the doctor has warned, but she says at fifty-two she is half in the grave anyway and the mad woman, and she is quite mad, though perhaps brilliant in a certain, restricted sense, an ordering intellect that imposes itself on everything except the body and its proclivities – but that is another matter. Now, you might wonder what compels me to take this route and why I know it so intimately. It is because of my father, a very old, lonely man who wants the company of his only son. He pays my bus fare himself, buying monthly RTL travel credits to cover all sixteen trips. I agreed to the arrangement because it was the right thing to do. That is, if he were coming to see me, I would have done the same.
Yesterday, I sat on the bus, behind empty seats. The light was dimmed by the clouds, it was regal, this light. I was reminded of the day when my father took me to a photography exhibition at Iskandhar School in the 80s. All the photos were in black and white, and the light lent this curious, silvery sheen to them. With remembrance, the memory itself seems limned with silver, like last night and its wonderful gibbous moon. All of that took place in moments in my thought, but such a moment takes time to unwind in me. Unlike the youth of the day, or even persons my age, I need no music on my bus journey – it is a distraction from the wonder before us, the raw splendour of our world. Even the mentally deficient know this. At his Hiyaa Flat, I told my father exactly that. "Rubbish," he said, listening to Lata Manjeshkar, one of the few singers from my childhood I still recognise, to my dismay. "Rubbish, if you only listened to music, if you in fact really lived, Zubair, you would not write the way you do." When IN FACT, what my father does NOT know about writing I can use to line my walls twice over. Music – someone told me it is what all other art aspires to. Maybe it was my father but now, as I stand here on the balcony, I see the trees rolling with the wind, their canopies wild, turned, tossed. Not music, but rhythm.
“Can you go downstairs and get me a coffee?”
Good god.
The Maldives Independent is now accepting short fiction (or serialised longer stories) from Maldivian writers. Whether you're published or not, if you have a story that needs telling, we want to read it. Send submissions to editorial@maldivesindependent.com. Fiction runs on weekends.
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