To Be a Bird by the Arabian Sea

Hope is Eternal (Mahmoud Farschian, 1988)

On a warm February evening in Karachi, the deep azure of the Arabian Sea blends so seamlessly with the night sky one would not believe they are separate entities. Birds adorned in white rest gently upon the lapping waves, sometimes rising slightly as if to dance above them, but only slightly, and only sometimes.

They decorate the scene with such ethereal ease you’d hardly remember they have wings — wings that can take them anywhere, liberating them from the city they chose instead to share with us. I ask my Lord to forgive me for the envy I feel at the thought. It’s as if they belong here just as much as those who swim beneath them, though I know that the tides will change and they will leave, and I will too. Ivory against navy, they nearly glow, emissaries from heaven extending their grace to the sorrowed eyes of this frail city’s frailer humans. The sounds of the still evening cascade around us — symphonies so delicate in their embrace they feel nearly transcendental. But they remind me too, of those that long to be sung, and are suffocated instead.

And so I return, not without resistance, to my original woe, of what is and what appears to be. In this life, in this body, in this land, I must speak in metaphor. I am stripped of the right to clarity, to honesty. Language becomes victim and aggressor in my throat, lodged there as a ghost now haunting every rise and fall of my chest. In this life I am what others see, never what I say. I am afforded the praise given to the mourning doves and yet barred from offering a song. Days pass and the phrases make a mockery of my stubborn hope with their refusal to die; they resurrect themselves with each sunrise as if to mock the breath I almost take but am never allowed. In their apparent immortality lies the very tyranny that birthed this truth.

Amongst men who have forsaken God and forged all they have, with gazes that never lower and tongues that know no truth, I save my life by swallowing my spirit, dying a million deaths to prevent another. What a heavy grief to carry something half dead half alive, something you cannot bury, something that cannot breathe. So I make my offerings, smiles and silence, and in the peak of this anguish am reminded of the saints whose names I carry, whose memory offers sacred solace in the midst of such profane. It is their glory, and their glory alone, that lingers in my blood and my bones, the only oxygen keeping me alive amidst this unceasing entombment. In the shadows of the birds I almost hear them whisper, echoed reminders sneaking out of the blue; nothing is truly hidden. It is not I alone, but God too, who bears the knowledge of what ought to be said, and what, for now, cannot be.

There is always a dawn to come, even if one does not live to see it. The prison guards and profiteers, the judges and juries who impose the existence of these metaphors shall ultimately submit to the only truth there is and ever will be. When that sun rises, no threats, nor image, nor honor, shall hold me hostage, neither shall any grief bear any weight. When that sun rises, when liberation lifts the physical and announces the truths I must now only lament, my million little deaths will be forgotten. They will vanish into the blur of blue that once was, and I, freed at last, will fly like the birds of the Arabian sea.