Perhaps, After the Next Funeral…
We know each other by strange, embarrassingly intimate details of sound that are a bond and a barrier in their own right. The shout of no sugar in the tea, don't forget, no sugar. The shrill squirming protests of childhood, freshly indignant each morning against getting up, getting dressed, eating, being pitchforked into the day. The increasingly irate series of demands to not forget things: shoes, pencils, lunchboxes, eyeglasses…. The persistent honking of one determined to be a public nuisance instead of ringing the bell, knocking on the door, or calling someone inside. The surprisingly tuneful humming that accompanies the sounds of floors being swept and laundry hung up. We have no names, we have no faces for each other. Inside this string of rectangular boxes we live divided into our own little groupings, and though we open the doors and windows at will, the walls between us are as inexorable as national borders. Death – death, paradoxically, is the one thing that brings us together. Before a garlanded, white-shrouded corpse we gather, once or twice a year, to pray, to eat – and to wonder. We match face, age, gender to voice and construct little police line-ups inside our respectfully bowed heads. Is it you? Are you the midnight honker? Are you the one who asks everybody one by one if they want their eggs fried or boiled? Are you the child who is always in trouble for failing math, or the one who keeps falling out of trees? Are you…. We wonder, we are wondered about, and we head back home still wondering. Tomorrow, when we cross each other in the street, we shall offer no greeting, or perhaps manage the flimsiest of nods. Despite our loneliness and our lively curiosity, we shall not meet. We shall not be friends.
Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Black Bough, Zin Daily, London Grip, The Madrigal, Acropolis Journal, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/HibahShabkhez