Ego: January 2004 Archives
It was kind of like in the movies; the movement itself was swift, but when the cold plastic struck him across the face in that featureless instant, the precious moment subtended by cause and effect, action and reaction, everything just slowed down.
I’ll always love you, no matter what you do. You’re my flesh and blood.
Fantastic connection. He can’t tell what comes first, the sensation of impact, the dull awareness of pain, but his head is forced sideways in deference to grand majesty, exhaling sharply from the depths of his lungs as if the blow were to his chest. He feels that; the twisting, the breathlessness. The momentary jarring of vision, like de-gaussing a cranky computer screen, comes suddenly clear as the head exceeds its own inertia, dazed eyes lifting in the moment of recovery to catch flecks of iron-tinged saliva intent on making their own way; decelerating, in their own time, to wall, to floor. Red on white.
No matter what you do.
Red on white. Mine. Please. Oh, fucking please, somebody, help me... find me here; the door; just push. Plea… ...I can’t do this alone… there are too many... people.
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Perhaps, but it's always a pleasure to be reminded of how good company and friends can turn most any time and place into a wonderful experience. Or simply make life feel, more than it already does, so worth living.
Augh, the sky is lightening already. Fuck. There goes Sunday.
I like to imagine my mother a harried and frantic termagant, slightly crazed and in distinct need of sedation. I like to imagine her this way, because it is exactly what she is not; despite working crushingly long hours, days and nights, striving to keep her interior design firm healthy, and dealing, at the same time, with problematic tenants, incompetent servicemen, particularly deficient members of our removed family and - why not - even a hectic social life, she manages to do so with efficiency and a remarkable degree of calm.
In time, they are forced to leave the trucks behind; keeping to the roads has become too dangerous, and at great risk to themselves - one danger for another - they enter the jungle to make slow progress toward the Naga foothills, the border, the Indian state of Assam. On a number of occasions, their scouts encounter the Japanese and they are forced to lie low. My grandaunt speaks of constant gunfire, the screaming of women and children, sometimes only tens of metres away, and of how it is to feel hunted. The family will make it across the border, on foot, after months of travel, but at cost; the girl who would be my eldest aunt, dead from diphtheria near Taunggyi, though she was not alone; maids, porters, other innocents, their children, lost themselves too.
Aged seventeen, my mother became responsible for the wellbeing of six of her seven sisters, and a younger brother. She and her eldest sister took charge of the timber business, and at a time when capitalism was being crushed by the general's Burmese Way to Socialism, actually turned a profit, the aim being to secure passage for each of the Ahmed children in turn, youngest to oldest, to Pakistan and the frantic, open arms of my grandmother. As the head-of-the-family elect, it was my mother who was thrown into prison in 1963, aged eighteen, for trying to preserve some of the family's wealth, having been turned in, rather unfortunately, by a misguided relative. She made headline news; to see my mother in her youth, all I need do is travel to the British Museum reading rooms, and there she is, in black and white, surrounded by 'stolen' jewellery. And when she was released, she went right back to what it was she was doing before, until she was the last of the immediate family still left in Burma. Delayed only by her trial, she finally booked passage aboard a tanker and sailed alone to Karachi, to join the rest of the family in exile. We are forbidden from returning to Burma.
Saya cinta awak, ibu.
