Mansoor Nazeer's Blog

This is from the material of about fifteen years ago. I don't know if ever I'll get the time to work it out into a novel. If I do, I'd like to call it A Most Peculiar Man. Thank you for reading!

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Stepping out into the open air was to him like a miracle. He felt as if he were breathing after years, as if he had stopped taking notice and being a part of the real world long ago – where he believed nothing endearing or pleasant could ever exist. And he at once cursed the hotel for it. Looking back at the day, it seemed to him as if it had been the longest day of his life, and perhaps the most significant thus far. The hotel was located in the midst of a very busy market and that is why, even though it was late in the evening, many shops were still open and there was quite a bit of activity all around. Swapan stood on one side of the road and began looking about him with a most agreeable and unfamiliar lightness of being. He wanted to soak himself as completely as he could in the consciousness of his recent liberation and the multitude of exciting possibilities which his mind kept flashing teasingly before his eyes. He was determined not to let anything or anybody take away from him, or ruin, this peace in his heart, for he had not savoured it for a very long time. And even in these brief moments, while he appeared to gradually sink into a new-found calm and joy, he was, whether he knew it or not, struggling precariously within himself. Perhaps he suspected, out of a sickening old habit, that even this little possession of his was ephemeral, that any moment it would be wrenched away from him; not by someone else or by something unknown, but through the machinations of those poisonous, deceitful and conspiring thoughts which always arose in some dark corner of his own mind. To say that he had not always known it would not be entirely correct. In fact, it was this ever-present consciousness of a hateful, insuperable enemy within which made his sorrow in certain situations so pathetic and acute.
He groped in his pockets for cigarettes; there were none. So he walked up to a small shop only a few steps away, bought a packet, caught an extremely satisfying glimpse of his face in a tiny mirror hanging in the shop and then found himself smiling at and asking the seller until when he would remain open. At this, he received a brief, insignificant reply, thanked the man for it quite gratuitously, and returned to his earlier position. There he lit up and waited. With the smoke that poured out of his mouth and nostrils, he felt as if he were expelling all that was oppressive, bitter and venomous, and had accumulated and festered within him for months. Most shopkeepers were beginning to wind up their business for the day, and Swapan watched with a childish avidity their never-changing rituals which today had a novel charm for him. The breeze was not strong but his heightened sensitivity to all the goodness and benevolence around him caught it keenly and filled him with a sense of well-being. Looking about with a smile on his lips, he discovered that most of the people whom he saw looked happy and contented. They all appeared to him to be smiling. He liked them immensely, all of them, and was convinced that were he to approach them and strike up a conversation, they would be very pleasantly inclined and treat him as a dear friend.
“How lovely all this is! And to think that I was oblivious to this for the sake of that accursed job. All these people . . . they work hard all day. In fact, I am sure they work harder than those pigs at the hotel. And they do what they love doing, which is why they all look so happy. That’s the difference, the secret. And now, having made a good amount of money for the day, they will go home, tired and contented, and tomorrow will be a new day. How simple it all is! And yet how meaningful and full of joy!”
With this fleeting, innocent observation, the damage was done. It at once triggered off something sharply distasteful, and before he could realize it and fend it off or suppress it, the thought had begun to hurtle forward, growing unstoppably like a snowball, propelled by that same dreaded and mysterious force within him. He panicked and grew restless, as if looking for some water to douse a little flame which otherwise threatened to leap and roar and consume him before long. But it was too late. The blissful reality of the outside world, which had only moments ago filled him with peace and bonhomie, now began to undergo a terrifying transformation. The shops, the men, their faces and gestures, their activities, the breeze, the night, all began to acquire a crushing suggestiveness and meaning. A new reality arose out of the old one – a reality which he thought he had left behind in the hotel, forever, when he exited the place, but which seemed to have crept out unnoticed along with him, like a devoted, sick dog, and had now found him again. He remembered that unlike those happy shopkeepers, he was now without a job. He had been thrown out, like garbage. His eyes had indeed seen this truth for the first time now and had done so with such stabbing clarity that Swapan thought he wouldn’t be able to bear it. And standing on the side of the road with a smouldering cigarette between his fingers, he saw himself as the most unfortunate and wretched person on the face of the earth, with nothing at all. The prospect of having no job and no money was at once given numerous devilish interpretations by his feverish mind. His room, to which he had longed to escape all through the day, suddenly took the form of a dark and suffocating chamber from which he would never again have any reason to emerge. Not one of the people with whom he had worked for so long would ever care to think of him or ask after him. In fact, he was convinced that they had all, already by this time, not only come to know of his expulsion but were also celebrating it, for they had all had a role to play in it. They had planned it together secretly for months. Today was their day of triumph. And precisely at this moment, he thought he could hear faint strains of music coming from the hotel, which immediately conjured up before him a grand ball in the lobby to mark the occasion. Never before had he experienced his solitude with such immediacy, such excruciating intensity; it seemed to clutch at his throat and at his heart, and his thoughts rushed at once with pathetic desperation to his only friend. But they refused to stop at him too and hurtled on further to his little princess, and from there to something else which made him dive into the pockets of his trousers. There emerged a small piece of crumpled paper which he crushed into a tiny, invisible ball and threw away. Once again the tormenting stillness of his room and his lonesome bed arose before his eyes. Something drove him to look at his image in the darkened glass-front of the shop behind him. And as he did so, full of apprehension, he was startled by the dim reflection of a dwarf-like being. He quickly turned around to see if there was someone who had sneaked up and standing behind him, whose reflection he might have seen. But he was alone and it was his own image. He felt he had never set eyes upon something so ugly and unwanted. He could vaguely discern the features of the ghostly face which curiously also seemed to be straining to look back at him. Revolted and wounded, he shut his eyes and turned away. For a moment, he felt compelled to leave, to simply walk away without waiting for Zahid. He would walk through the city all night, in silence and darkness. Nobody would see him and nobody would know of him or ask him anything. And maybe some good, some clarity would emerge out of it. He vaguely recalled reading something of the kind in a novel a long time ago. But his body was rebelling against his wishes. His fever was returning, and his eyes burned, and again he felt weak and hungry. Then suddenly feeling as if he could not stand on his legs anymore, he collapsed on the steps of the closed shop.

Turn

The doors are shut, he said.
And she heard it, equipped from habit;
Adjusting the white pillow beneath her head,
And lying next to him in the dark, she thought
She had known.
This is not how I was, how I want to be, he said.
She heard it, and turned her face towards him,
Towards his favourite window,
The one without a curtain,
And saw the blue night and thought
It was almost spring.
Getting old, even boring, I guess,
With little money and leaden claims, he said.
She recalled his yesterday’s face, saw how
The icy weight had caused his jowls to sag
And put out the boyish flame in his clear eyes.
She had seen defeat, she thought, impermanent,
But defeat it was, and felt too what he said he felt
Somewhere in the middle of his chest.
She held his fingers, warm and limp,
And for a while he spoke no more.
Since lies had never been for him, she said
What she knew must be said.
It wasn’t much but sharply formed,
From want of consolation.
Later it rained.
When in the morning she awoke,
She suddenly could not remember
When she had drifted off to sleep,
And wondered how long he had gone on
Staring at the invisible ceiling.
He had slept too, he said
But his face said nothing more.
The gray and soggy day had crept under his skin.
She grew somewhat afraid,
For she had thought, from habit,
The shadow would pass with the night
Like so many others.
The day was begun, as it had to be.
She paced about her little room,
Book in hand, biting her lower lip,
Worrying her head about him, wondering
How he’d manage to write the long edit
Which she knew he must.
The late-afternoon call surprised her,
For he said he was feeling way better.
Swiftly and gladly, she read his tone,
As she could like the back of her hand,
And said she’d love it, when he asked
If they should go out in the evening.
She arrived early, and while she waited
At their usual table for two,
She noticed a few new faces
Among the youngish waiters.
She waited till he came, and when he did,
She read in his quick steps the happy news.
That it was over, she was convinced.
Then he told her about the email,
Told her that Olaf was dead,
“Shot himself at the airport,”
And added, with laughing, glistening eyes,
That it could hardly be true.
Only the other day at the Zürich airport
He had Olaf’s hands in his,
As they said goodbye and promised to meet again.
That evening the singers did not turn up
And the DJ chose to play odd songs.
Songs nearly forgotten,
Songs they had heard when they were much younger,
And did not exist for each other,
Songs that meant this or that,
Bound in the memory of each
With a thousand secret things
Some of which they spoke of,
Sitting until late in the café.
2004

It's astonishing how true the saying is that all writing is autobiographical (Bradbury?). But it is not often straightforwardly so.

I was hardly aware during the writing of 'Anomaly' how much and in what strange ways I was writing my own self into the characters of the book. I was hardly aware how I was creating metaphors for incidents from my own life - insignificant ones as well as not so insignificant.

A writer unwittingly divides herself into many parts and finds bits of herself in many of her characters - both male and female.

Is there something of me in the cop? Yes. Is there a part of me in the obsessed lover? Yes again. Are there bits of me in the killer? Well, yes, there are.

If I tried, I could possible also say what exactly is of me in these diverse characters in 'Anomaly', but that would be giving too much of myself to the world. As Thomas Mann once said, it is better for the reader to never learn of a writer's inspiration.

I would be very interested to know what other writers feel about writing their own selves into their fictional works - knowingly or unknowingly.

Why is the opening of 'The Idiot' so powerful?

"Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o’clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows."

And then we are inside the train . . .

It is so powerful because at the very beginning, words, which are after all disembodied spectres of the intellect, do not come to us as such, but as concrete sensuous images. The reader's eyes are not focussed on the words on the page, or are only mechanically so. The reader's eyes are a movie camera. The page is the screen upon which we watch the scene, and we hear the attendant sounds. And within ourselves, we also smell and feel some of the things.

The beginning of 'Anna Karenina' might have been equally perfect with its marvellously simple in medias res sentence: "Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house." Oh, but dear old Tolstoy! It is believed that he later added those celebrated, flabby lines which now open the novel—"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." And he spoiled it, as Thomas Mann once gently observed.