Love's Burning Orchard
Another foray into my soul as I attempt to resuscitate the relationship I didn't have with my brother.
There is no grief that is exceptional. It is the hopelessness that grief gives birth to, which tricks us to exceptionalise our feelings. By positing the particularities of our pains as unique, we embrace the loneliness that our flesh has abruptly become heir to. And with a frightening clarity, we understand the destructibility of that fleshy vessel that contains us. Unanswerable questions are posed in quick succession, and to escape the necessity of answering them, we retreat into the lonely recesses of our mind, clinging to the un-witnessable yet unforgettable image of the corpse.
What will I think of before I die? What will become part of that collage of memories that flitter across the mind’s eye, before one becomes food for worms? Assuming I get to fade to black with a moment’s grace, I know that I will recall those brief moments in the ambulance carrying my brother’s lifeless corpse. And I will recall my mother’s howls before his funeral prayer. Recalling these painful images tempts me to curl into a ball within the recesses of my mind, to wait for death to take me, for joy to seep out from the pores of my skin, like his blood when life left him.
But relief, if there is any to be found, is in abnegating the loneliness that constricts the soul into deathly ideation. Regardless of the specificities, we must, against all our instincts, seek out the quotidian similarities which bind us to the living. Only in so doing, can we escape the self-erected prison in which grief incarcerates us.
Right until his death, I treated my brother like an adult. I hate the way Desi families impose relationships onto people against their will. And so I always told him to get in touch with me if he needed help, whether material or spiritual, without butting into his life. He rarely did but I did not think much of it, after all he was a young man who needed space. I was waiting for our love to blossom later in the spring of his life. Instead he did not survive the endless winter of his teenage years. Perhaps exhausted, perhaps sapped of hope, without so much as a goodbye or an unusual ‘I love you’, two days after turning 20 his life concluded violently.
I try to treat it all like the choice of a man, not a boy. While my parents refer to him as their baby — a totally innocent being — and my sisters see him like a boy who did something inexplicable, I have tried to see him as a man who did not wish to continue his relationship with himself or the world around him. Fundamentally, he exercised a right and, no matter how unfair any of us find it, nobody can claim that he was not entitled to the choice. He unwound the knot that bound us to him, in a way he saw fit.
Unfortunately for those who survive him, we are still encumbered by the threads of his existence. The ferocious suddenness of his departure is an open wound and these threads are intercalated within it, causing it to fester. There is no real treatment that can fully restore our bodies but, in order to survive, and very much out of necessity, we try to avert sepsis of the soul.
So here I am, sick as a dog, fighting back tears every time I hit on a poignant sentence, crying for help that does not exist, suffocating on the fumes of love’s burning orchard, that turned to ashes before the turn of spring. Words, endeavours at happiness, attempts at continuing a relationship with a dead man; all desperate manoeuvres to pick out the threads and suturing the wound with them. I try to preserve myself so that I can aid the rest of my family, ailing from the same wounds.
The process is complicated by the social and religious conditions of the society we were born into. For once, I cannot just let things be, I cannot simply let stray comments slide. When people talk about my brother within the family, they talk about an accident, they talk about god, they talk about heaven and destiny. In one breath, they express sorrow on my behalf and in the other they repeat statements laden with their superstitions that only rub salt in the wound. What this dynamic reveals is that the process of emotional recovery is in fact mutually antagonistic between parent and child. A funeral signifies an end for the deceased, but it is also the beginning of a contest: the contest of memory.
I am witnessing my parents, like many parents not exclusive to my society, emotionally cannibalise their children without recognising it. Rather than confronting the facts, rather than bringing the family together and leading the collective process of recovery, their grief drives them to universalise their particular world view and assert it as such.
My father, at one point referred to my brother as a martyr. For what cause, in what war did my brother die to merit such a status? He claimed, on the encouragement of a friend, that young men taken young in tragic circumstances can somehow count as martyrs. Which reminds me of a quote by Albert Camus:
“Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.”
So I suppose my brother fulfils one criterion for martyrdom in that nobody is really trying to understand him. My mother on the other hand has become obsessed with quotes by the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi. In her efforts to comfort me, in her own way, she sends me these quotes to help me accept the loss. But much like with my brother, she can’t bear to question the facts of his life or mine. Instead, a pre-fabricated conception of our lives is assumed to obtain, one that aligns with her belief system. The way he departed is disorienting, I understand that, but I cannot help but see their response as an act of erasure.
The process of emotional recovery for a child is therefore hindered by the parent’s survival instincts, which leads them to act with a degree of selfishness that the child is not accustomed to. It is a tragically ironic situation, where the interests of a parent are pitted against the surviving child on account of the dead one. The child is placed in the unenviable position of having to hurt their parent in order to preserve its own emotional survival. This antagonism is mediated through the contest of memory.
My brother is buried in a cemetery in Islamabad, a city he practically had no memories of or connection to, in a country he did not enjoy being in (though my father would make you think he discovered himself there), with a gravestone inscribed in Urdu, a language he could not read, speak, or even really understand. There is an ostentatious three foot tall headstone shaped like a hand with the names of the 14 Innocents (the most important religious figures in Shia Islam) and some inscriptions in Arabic.
My brother is buried like a proud, chest-thumping Shia Muslim and I worry sometimes if some sectarian lunatic (there’s lots of those in Pakistan) might one day desecrate his grave for this reason. Nobody really asked me or my sisters how they would like their brother memorialised, let alone if that would accord with my brother’s personality. It feels like we children were routed before the contest of memory even began and we are not on the verge of turning the tables.
I have to resist the temptation to speculate on his motives. Some of us feel more stifled than others by life and perhaps he just felt particularly suffocated. Alas, when one does himself quietus make, the burden of living is not forfeited but rather displaced on to the living. And though I want to live a happier, better life to compensate for his forfeited years, I am learning that there is no avoiding a share of the pains that he would have experienced in those same years. One aspect of those pains was enduring the legacy of a society that fundamentally harms the spiritual well-being of its young.
He suffered, as many of us do, under a culture that transgresses borders and nationalities; that claims to extol the virtues of familial bonds yet was devoid of love; that professed to be guided by a higher morality but failed abysmally at creating a moral society; that only ever subjugated the young to the old through rigid tradition and deference. bell hooks’ definition of love as a verb comes to mind, where she described love as “the will to extend one's self for the the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”
Sadly, for most young people in the world, it feels as if only they are the ones who must extend themselves for the purpose of satiating the irrational impulses of the old, as a payment for the privilege of being born. The self-detonation of the environmental time bomb planted by generations before is a case in point. The pandemic exacerbated this imbalance even further in myriad ways but now I am swirling the drain of speculation once more. All that can be said with any certainty, is that those who live must contend with the conditions that are left in the wake of the departed. Absconding permanently to the grave only alters those conditions for the worse and if one is to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing another then that option is foreclosed.
The orchard of my love burns and I feel I must rescue it, nurture it to health, even if it is not restored to its former self. Through the tears, the pain in my eyes and lungs as I inhale the scented fumes of its destruction, out of a sense of necessity, I try to spare the hard won fruits of mine and, in so doing, my neighbours’ love, in the hope that tomorrow’s children may enjoy some abundance of love… an abundance that I perhaps may no longer hope to.
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