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Down
fantasy lane Who wants to
be a million things? A
vicarious pleasure Up in the
air Living
fiction One
day as a celebrity
Breaking
track and field records
The
invisible woman
Behind
the wheel of a ...
After
successive battles with the metallic minions…
Down fantasy lane No hobo fantasy By Ali Sultan This is fantasy: a large crumbling off-white building, surrounded by palm trees. On one side, in large sprawling letters, are the words ‘Acid House’ spray-painted in deep crimson. Old age and torrential rains have rendered the ‘c’ totally unreadable so Acid House has become Aid House, which invites randomly, various NGO workers and other strange characters looking for monetary aid, but they don’t find much. The building, barely
furnished, small rooms, large windows. The windows barred with old yellowed
newspapers to block out the sun, the rooms with nothing much than creaking
beds and empty ashtrays. Six months living in such a place is fantasy, a mixture of living without responsibility or morality, through Steinbeck’s Cannery Row or the back alley of the Old City. Friends, strangers, roamers are all allowed to stay as long as they want to. As long as they have to. But nothing happens during the day, only vampire hours are deemed appropriate, the world upside down, all dark. There will be conversations or silences whatever one chooses and music, endless music reverberating through one smoke-filled room to the other, slowly shifting its feet, fluttering, drunk on sadness and self-doubt. This is no hobo fantasy either. Everyone has enough money for everything. It’s the fact that no one needs much of it. When someone feels edgy with the building or the fact that no sun comes inside, and the fact that always seems to remain cloudy, there is a battered car for nearly aimless road trips, no one goes out except for second hand paperbacks, cigarettes or DVDs. Through the silence of empty cities and the chun chun of massage men and the blue lights of police vans and the smell of dead animals, where one could bite one’s heart with one’s teeth, but nobody would notice. There is a large basement in the building that houses a large home-cinema system. When everyone feels tired of talking or not hearing, of smoking or drinking or sleeping, of blaring jazz and R D Burman, of life, then everyone files into the basement and films are played till dawn, good ones and bad ones and horrible ones, and everyone’s eyes get glued, watching life or something like it, flickering twenty-four frames a second. We all smile, friends, strangers and passersby, because 86,400 seconds of the day, here in the crumbling off-white building with the palm trees and battered car, here nothing really matters.
Who
wants to be a million things? I do. And, I am sure a lot of us do as well. A musician, a film maker, a novelist, a rich man in possession of a farm house straight out of a movie set — you name it. The interesting part is, it doesn’t take much to fancy yourself as a million things that you are not in real life and might never be. All it takes is a bit of ‘prompting’, so to say. Give me a few good compliments on my looks and I have already envisaged myself standing next to Angelina Jolie, holding her babies maybe or ducking from the paparazzi flashlights. I know of people who believe they could become great film makers, based only on the feedback they have got on their ‘random’ ideas — that may just be an isolated shot of a face or a building or a ‘one-liner’. Far fetched as it may seem but an A-Grade in the English language class in our school set me and my teachers thinking I would go for a Masters degree (if not higher) in literature in the future. Yes, I used to write poems also but since they didn’t have a clue about it I’d consider the MA thing their fantasy. (Though, eventually it became true is another story altogether.) From what I have come to understand, fantasy is somewhere rooted in our ‘reality’. Just like good humour. It wouldn’t exist for us if it didn’t belong here and now and to something we have ever come across in our lives — through images and sounds and smells and, of course, ideas we’ve been fed on through books etc. I remember fantasizing about the Swiss Alps for a long time, because of the divine visuals I had seen in some of the popular Bollywood movies back then. Call it a lack of imagination or something but I can’t seem to develop a fascination for a place just because someone else has been there and is talking about it in the most superlative of terms. So, an Austria or a Greece would not be a part of my fantasy. I am sure a lot of us have fallen for the most beautiful girl next door at some point in our life, but we didn’t get involved ‘truly, madly, deeply’ until she gave us that million-dollar half-smile or a to-die-for side glance or even a stray look from afar. She didn’t have to do much else and one would already start to feel extra special, fantasizing about Mills & Boons kind of candlelight dinners, dating spots et al (not all of it can be mentioned here!). With time our fantasies change, because our reality changes. Romance is one such fantasy. In other words, we fantasise about things in relation to our changing reality. If you are a small-time singer, you will fantasise about cutting an album that becomes a platinum-jubilee success; and if your last single ruled the music charts, you are likely to imagine yourself as the strongest contender for a Grammy award.
A
vicarious pleasure Sounds lame, I know, but I don’t have fantasies. I lost that ability a long time back or perhaps never had it. To me, the pleasure of fantasies is vicarious. I feed on other people’s fantasies and am quite happy doing that. The best home for fantasies is in the books. Nothing compares to the world of fiction. Some of these works have become a part of me in a strange way and I want to and do go back to them; to my surprise, I rediscover them each time. Mostly, I prefer a new book and the desire keeps multiplying. A good film is another house I want to live in. But it’s more like a vacation-house. You have a nice time and then come back. Unlike a book that becomes a home. I do have small desires that seem like fantasies to me. I want to wake up to a day when there’s nothing to do and I could just sit and let the time roll by; basically, to get to a state where I could fantasize. Somehow my fantasies, if they may be so called, are all tied up with the things I do or can’t do. I want to read all the books that I left half-finished in all these recent years. I want to read up every book that I bought or borrowed. I also wish to be able to write with more ease and flair as some of my favourite writers do. What are fantasies anyway? Are these only unfulfilled desires and dreams that one loves to reside in? To me, however, the past is the future I seek. My mother, looking tall and beautiful in her pink sari and long flowing black hair, is both an image from the past and a fantasy. If there’s anything I could reverse, it would be my ageing parents. What luck if they are able to control their own lives and mine too! And, how I long to bring back my own carefree past which, to be honest, did not seem so carefree then. How foolish of me to yearn for ‘absolute freedom’ which turned out to be so horrific when it came and did not look one bit like freedom. Everything does not exist in the past, though; there always is a list of unfulfilled desires. As small as having a peaceful evening with the family and as ambitious as a road and train journey to India, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, Africa and so on (air travel is a nightmare). These will not be short, ‘touristy’ sojourns, mind you. They have to be spread over months and years. See, it’s beginning to sound like a real fantasy. Sometimes I dream of a time when I could leave everything, go into a library and read and research and write. This will be more of a focused work and I’m even clear about my area of research. What should I count this as? No! Fantasies must remain fantasies; these must not be confused with ambition.
Up in
the air I have a gadget which lifts me from the ground the moment I put it on. With a remote control device in my hand I go up and down, left and right, at the push of a button. I fly from one place to another in fraction a of a second, to reach my destination. But I am no spider man or batman ready to avert a disaster; rather I wish not to be noticed by anyone for some child may wish to shoot me down with his air gun. So many school boys use their air guns to scare birds or kill wall lizards at home. There are things that fly — like airplane and helicopter — but they are used for long distance travel and are very noisy. Parachute holds no attraction for me. First you have to go up by some other means and can come down through parachute without covering much distance. My gadget makes no noise and takes no space other than my body. I had been hearing about the countless innovations being made in the world every year. At the click of the marvelous internet one day I discovered this pair of glasses that make me disappear the moment I wear it. You may be wondering why not ‘Sulemani topi’ Amar Ayyar of Tilsm-e-Hoshruba wore. No, my glasses serve many purposes. They protect my eyes against dirt, wind and sun and become binoculars at the push of a button on my gear. Above all, they give me the comfort that I am not seen by anyone except another person wearing these glasses. Yes, I have friends who race with me up in the air. Fortunately, we see each other so no air accident has ever taken place. Being invisible is great. All my ‘aero friends’ as I call them since I meet them up in the air, make sure they wear these glasses because if the government spots unlicensed air traffic, it will panic and create a department of air traffic police which will invent rules and all the fun would come to an end. In my journey to a place I don’t follow the typical roads I take when I am in a vehicle. I define my own route and every time it is a bit different. It’s such fun to swish past all the lousy traffic in the city creeping below on the city roads, to leave them and their pungent smoke way behind. As I land on the rooftop, I hear a play station game announce, ‘You Win’. Living
fiction I have always fancied becoming a character in a book. There are some existing characters I want to be for a few moments because the complete novels are usually tragic. One can play these characters on stage, but I don’t like hearing my own voice. I want a silent bond with an author that inspires him secretly and dies with him, leaving behind an immortal reminiscence. I could be Tolstoy’s or Hardy’s hero or a minor character that leaves after a few pages. Or, may be the heroine of Chekhov’s shorter pieces, a frustrated housewife who ties her hair in a bun and wins a lottery or some Petersburg elite who can’t decide which hat to wear, the blue one with feathers or the pink one with bow tie? Become Jude the obscure, sit in fields at night gazing at those yellow lights of Christminster that flicker like stars to share his dreams of intellectual triumph, not disillusionment. I want to be Madame Bovary on the morning she goes to meet her lover for the last time. I would take off my shoes and feel the cool grass, wet with dewdrops, be Austen’s Emma when she notices Mr Knightley’s grandeur in that final ball or Mrs Dalloway, walking down the London streets with yellow flowers that I crave to smell. May be become Anna Karenina on the instant she comes out of the train and feel Count Vronsky’s eyes studying me for the first time. I don’t mind being a
minor character either like the dog in Turgeneve’s Lady with the Dog
following my mistress everywhere or that drowning lady whose scream follows
Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall. Maybe become one of the letters sent by
Atiya Faizi, with her scent enclosed and embraced by Iqbal’s handprints. I can accompany Pinter when he weaves those threads of silence and words and console Kafka on those unhappy nights in Prague when he penned down the unsettling and unfinished stories. Perhaps, also buy him medicine. And escort Virginia Woolf when she goes to drown herself with stones in her pockets. If I can’t talk her out of it, I will help her find clean stones and read her favourite passage from her book The Lighthouse as she walks into the river. I will open a casino where Dostoevsky will be returned all the wealth he loses in gambling. I don’t mind being one of the courtesans who inspired Ghalib or the married lover Mir Taqi Mir acquired in Agra. My permanent abode, as a hobbit, will be a crevice in the Faraway Tree which Enid Blyton created. I will visit the towns that arrive at the tree-top, with my friends, Moon-face, Silky the fairy, and Saucepan Man. Sometimes, when sitting in the coffee house behind Readings, I see Marquez working on his typewriter. I yearn to talk to him, but I don’t, in case some fictional landmark gets aborted due to this interruption and literary historians curse me… Perhaps, we can have a drink later. And when someone asks me if I know Marquez, I can say: “Yes. And we had tea together.”
One day
as a celebrity When I talk about a fantasy, I think of a place like no other. A Utopian world. For me, a fantasy is like a must right. Everyone has fantasies and I don’t only mean the Rated ones but the not so explicit fantasies as well. For some it could be a sweet escape into a parallel world, from their world full of spiders and cobwebs to a place full of rainbows and happiness. In my fantasies, my ideal self takes over and I have all the time in the world to enjoy my stay there. I sometimes fantasize about writing a New York Times best seller. Living the rest of my life on the money I’ll earn from it. Soaking up the sun in Miami, experiencing beach life at Rio and High-stakes Poker at Centre table, Nevada. Music isn’t that bad an option either. MJ married Presley’s daughter and so the record for the most album sales stayed in the family. MJ is not more than a thriller succumbed to oblivion but once my album is out: a proposal from the MJ family might not be a surprising outlook. A household and goodwill worth billions — let’s call it a dream rather than a fantasy. Everyone wants to live the life of a celebrity. For me, a day would be good enough. Whether it’s David Duchonvy in Californication or Al Pacino in the Scent of a Woman — I envy the stardom. With an attitude of larger than life like King Khan, I want an army of perfect 10 models at standby in case my fortress is at risk from Victoria’s Secrets. It’s seldom though, but I want a girlfriend. This time for pure business. Someone like Zuckerberg’s ex-girlfriend who could gift me the betrayal so the world can look upon a new slacker weapon — Crudebook! They say that a perfect movie is the one that has an everlasting impact. Roland Emmerich was one of the few directors who inspired me to fantasize about living a day in 2013. A couple of days after the world ends or let’s call it the day when Emmerich’s fantasy falls flat on its face. Waking up on 1st January 2013 and calling up Roland to mock him in his face shall be a pleasure. Making him believe that even after spending millions of dollars — a fantasy will remain a fantasy!
Breaking
track and field records I was a daydreamer throughout my school and college life. I would dream of topping the exams with distinction, but without much input. Similarly, I would visualise myself breaking track and field records set by my predecessors at college. This I would do while sipping on a bottle of coke and taking bites of mouth-watering hot dogs. I would comfort myself on the sidelines of our sports ground and see scores of promising athletes complete lap after lap to build up required stamina. My priorities continued to change over time and for quite long I used to confuse them with fantasies. These included winning full scholarship from some Ivy League university and finding a perfect match for myself from amongst the fellow students there. But, later on, I realised these were mere goals, though unrealistic, but nothing close to the cherished fantasies that one keeps close to one’s heart. You quite often challenge the rationale behind nurturing tough goals but never dare to realise that fantasies can never materialise. The very charm of fantasizing and letting your imagination run riot make you become addicted to it. One fantasy of my youth that I still remember is that of owning and using a time machine. I got this inspiration from TV series, titled Voyagers, in which the characters would reach a particular place on a date and time selected through a gadget. Had I got hold of this gadget, I would have skipped all the exams I had to take and never let the vacations come to end. Whenever they were about to exhaust I would simply opt for the date of their start and prove in my own way that: “History repeats itself.” I badly missed this gadget when I lost my paternal uncle to the deadly disease called cancer. For days, I could not believe a person who was so close to me could go so far from me just like that. Being a couple of years younger to my father, he would always come to my rescue whenever the latter was full of rage and bring surprise gifts for me when I least expected them. I would have gone back in time and never let that tragic day come. My bond with this fantasy started to loosen when someone told me it was quite possible to invent such a machine and the Theory of Relativity given by Einstein said a lot about this. Seeing a phenomenon, which was purely mine before this revelation, fall in public domain was something I could not bear easily. Another fantasy that I still cherish is about being invisible to others and able to do tasks without being noticed. The nature of these tasks may differ but the fun would almost be the same. I think about slapping people (only those who deserve this treatment) around, lifting loads of cash from wherever I can, following beautiful people (but not to places designated exclusively for them) and sitting amongst my friends and colleagues unnoticed and listening to all the backbiting they do.
The
invisible woman Once upon a time, Disney dominated my life. In case you are wondering, I am talking about my childhood; it not just gave me unrealistic ideas about life. I am referring to the ‘happily ever after concept’ they sell us; but also about love and romance, now that I feel I am coming of age. These unrealistic ideas were so sharply imprinted in my head at that time that they basically formed all my fantasies or maybe became the roots from where all my fantasies sprang. I was quite the I-live-in-my-own-world-so-thank-you kind of a child and preferred living in a fantasy world of my own making. My fantasies ruled me. I wanted to be a princess, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine and Snow White all at the same time. I would fantasize about a fairy godmother coming and rescuing me when I used to do homework and imagine she would put a spell on my books and my homework would happen itself. Strangely, all the classrooms in my early school years were always on the first floor of my school building. When the lecture used to get really boring I used to fantasize about being Rapunzel. Only if I had really long hair, I would dispense them from the window, ask somebody to climb up and give me company. When the teacher would interrupt my perfect fantasy, she would remind me of the wicked witch of the west trying to snatch every last bit of happiness away from me. As I aged, my fantasies grew, too. Now came the time of the perfect prince charming riding on a fine stallion whipping his hair back and forth, coming to rescue me from the evils of this world. But sadly enough for me, whenever I am haunted by the evils of this world, no prince charming comes to rescue me. Maybe only Kate Middleton can get closest to my prince charming fantasy. But then again, her prince charming is getting bald so there is no whipping of the hair, back and forth. I often fantasize about getting invisible. I even fantasize about having an invisibility cloak which I can don and take myself anywhere without anyone knowing where I am. But then I am not James Potter’s only child who survived the curse of he-who-must-not-be-named. Yes, I just made a Harry Potter reference. But wait, who doesn’t want to get invisible at times. I get this feeling the most when there is a decision being made about me, I want to sneak in and hear all that the people have to say about me. After all, who doesn’t need some criticism or, in other cases, appreciation? Everyone can do with a little bit of a fantasy. Life becomes simpler and happier.
Behind
the wheel of a ... The wrrrrrooom of it, the torque of it, the pull of it…and the list goes on. I put the gear lever into first and the vehicle starts conquering the land, completely dominating the entire rugged terrain. No obstacle can stop us from moving on and on. The bumpy ride makes me proud. The scene repeats, sometimes twice a day. I’m on seventh heaven. This is my off-road world inhabited by an unmatched 4x4 and myself, of course. With a monstrous 6.5 litre engine, nearly sixteen inches of ground-clearance, huge tyres, and a spacious interior fitted to a rock-solid body-frame, the Humvee packs a huge punch. The beast certainly stands out from the rest. Even though I can, like many other Pakistanis and in a true ‘patriotic’ fashion, blame the US for what happened or what didn’t happen in Abbottabad, I cannot help admire the country’s auto-makers for manufacturing a machine that has caught the imagination of people across the globe for the past so many decades. I am no exception. Four-wheel drives have always made me stand and watch their superb maneuverability and toughness. That leaves me conjuring up images of me driving up to a hill-top in some treacherous northern valley with my friends who appreciate my innate driving skills and the ease with which my muscular companion mounts the steep hills. Or I take my truck on the main boulevard in the city, forcing other vehicles to clear the way, or else! Understandably, another admirer of the vehicle proudly states that a truck like this doesn’t have airbags; it doesn’t need any. But my friends, privy to my fetish for off-road vehicles, keep updating me on the prices of these power-packed vehicles that run into quite a few digits. They often have to hook me from my off-road world and put me back in the real surroundings by reminding me that the car I drive every day from my home to the office has an 850cc engine, only a fraction of the ones I crave for. No use that. I take solace in the fact that, though no more on the assembly line for common buyers for reasons mainly financial, the go-anywhere Humvee continues to serve the boots in the heat of battlefields in Afghanistan and elsewhere. As I listen to my friends saying the chances of my going behind the wheel of a Humvee are becoming thinner (if there were any, though I don’t want to believe them) I have changed my choice to a four-by-four that is locally available and comes with a comparatively smaller price tag — the Land Cruiser. My friends say something once again but I look the other way. I’m already somewhere else. Taking a left turn into the sand dunes of Cholistan amid a roaring jeep rally, I let the vehicle do its work, wwrrrroooom!
After
successive battles with the metallic minions… If religion has been termed as the opiate for masses, fantasies are very much the opiate of the individual soul. The various intermittent phases of my life have been laced with a whole palette of fantasies, often stemming from the magical and fantasy oriented works of Enid Blyton and Tolkien. The wondrous and endearing world of the Faraway Tree series was contrasted with the macabre and mystical universe of the The Lord of the Rings. At times I would fantasize about finding fairies and pixies living in toadstools, especially in my childhood excursions to Nathia Gali and Doonga Gali. I recall once I even came across an almost foot-high red toadstool and approached it gingerly so as not to surprise the little nymphs who might be going about their magical business. I hoped to befriend any that would have the good fortune of finding and wished that they would be able to conjure up a spell for me, especially one that would give me powers of flight and invisibility. The imposing Faraway Tree itself with its top high up in the swirling clouds served to spawn another set of rapturous visions. The floating lands such as those of Take-What-You-Want and Do-As-You-Please that the Faraway Tree’s top led to, seemed to drift around in my own head, especially during my arduous history classes at school. Imagining myself plundering and gallivanting around these alluring places seemed a far more appealing notion than Mahmud Ghazni going ape over the treasure troves in the Somnath temple. Later on in my life, the sinister facets of the Middle-earth world in Tolkien’s epic tale served to cater to a different set of my fantasy aspirations. Already rendering the wearer to disappear from sight, the One Ring would morph into a means of not only sprouting an unbreakable sword within my hands, but also tremendous might and destructive power to vanquish any nefarious Halflings that dared cross me. Embarking on various expeditions in this realm of my mind’s eye, I would go along wooing and acting on my lustful instincts with any willowy elfish maiden that I would encounter. My legacy would actually precede my meanderings, and hellish ghouls and ferocious serpents that would be strewn across my path would all be vanquished in my fury. The science fiction exposure that I had through movies such as Star Wars, Aliens and Terminator and the Matrix series triggered a whole new set of fantasies intertwined with highly advanced technology. My very own mechanical appendages and a menacing body army armed to the teeth with lasers and mini projector missiles have taken centre stage in clashes with underlings of the Mutant World Order. Ensconced in a trail blazing aircraft, I would streak across the skies and blast the hordes of killer robots hell-bent on subjugating the lowly populace into worldwide domination. After successive battles with the metallic minions, I would either emerge victorious or be rejuvenated after near-death experiences, only to move closer to my goal of global libertarianism.
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