Dear Stranger,
I would like to tell you about a tendency that I have. Somehow words come naturally to me when I am speaking to someone. It has happened quite a number of times that I am thinking about a particular matter and if it remains unresolved and if I happen to meet a friend in this state of uncertainty and if our conversation moves on to what is happening in my life I put my thoughts about that particular matter so smoothly and effortlessly as if my tongue was waiting for a listener to finally open the knots in my thoughts. A listener opens the gates of my speech and a considerate one like you encourages me to put to this page the state of my mind, heart, soul or whatever is the real origin of human thought. What do you understand from the term ‘primal consciousness’? I have told you some time that the word ‘consciousness’ is always on my mind. I call it the basic unit of life. It is that which directly emanated from the actual source of life. It exists in all living things in varying degrees of sophistication. When I look at a cat or a monkey, I say to myself look this consciousness is unaware of itself whereas my consciousness is superior and is aware of itself. It is like this: if my consciousness stands in front of a mirror, it might see some vague shape which would be sharper if my consciousness is individually superior, but if a cat’s consciousness passes a mirror by chance, it would not find any distinguishable form in the reflection because there is none. And by primal consciousness I take it back to the time when it began appearing on the earth for the first time. In those days it existed as a form of potential energy. Primal consciousness was not like your or mine, it was like that of a cat or a monkey but with some germs of awareness, with a capability to develop into a self-aware consciousness. I do not know how it reached its current state. Maybe it grew parallel to the evolution of physical existence of life. A discussion on this front would take us to the theories of creationism and evolution, to the stories of original sins and artificial ones and I know in whose favor you would ridargue. I want to tell you that it is this strange thing called consciousness that I share with you. Your true being and mine emanated from the same source. You have your body which is exclusively yours. I have my body which is only mine. But if the lines on your hands are drawn to infinity, they would touch mine at some point. Imagine the longest line on your hand and stretch it in space until it touches my similarly stretched line.
A Street in Kamber
All that lives is holy, this line from a Steinbeck novel has stayed with me and has pushed me to think about primal consciousness. There is another word in Sindhi language which comes closest to what I mean by consciousness. It is Saah. It is pronounced Saa-hu, the hu is not with emphasis, the sound of u is only shallow. Saah literally means breath. I do not know its exact etymology, but I associate very deep meanings with this word which are more metaphysical than physical in nature. Last year when I was in Berlin, I was looking for bookshops which sold German books in English. I was roaming around in the streets. I stopped at the pavement for a while to smoke a cigarette and as I inhaled, I spotted an old man standing beside me at some distance with a walking stick in his hand. It seemed as if he was also looking around for some place. Suddenly I felt a very strong human connection with that old man. It was not because, based on my assumption, we were both looking for something or because I felt pity for his frailty or meekness. I felt that connection by virtue of a single thought, which was this: our source is one. The deep-rooted religious myth of us and them vanished and I did not feel myself estranged in the new city. It is this same connection that I feel for you, a primal human connection, disregarding your gender, untainted by prejudices of language, religion, race, sect, nationality, unaffected by desires of the body, a pure, virgin, human connection. But I would not hide one true thing which I felt when you asked me to write. My organism treated your request as a sapiosexual command, and it told me that the obeyance of the order would give me pleasure. The place where I am writing to you from is my birthplace. These days, with the summer at its peak, the streets seem to be made of fires. The eye of the sky is ruthlessly looking at the inhabitants. There is no solace even in shade. I would say though that looked at objectively, the shade heat could be compared to embrace of your lover. My father often jokes about mechanics of relationship that a person might have with his aunts. He says if your maternal aunt kills you, she would throw your corpse in the blazing sun but your paternal aunt if she kills you would throw your poor corpse in the shade. Only after six in the evening does the sun sheaths its weapon. O Fire! be thou cool on Ibrahim becomes O Fire! Be thou cool on Adam. Most people here sleep in their courtyards under the open sky. The sleep comes slowly as people lay in hopes for a cool breeze. The breeze comes in like a reluctant harlot and abhorring its suitors runs away. I stare at the sky thinking what will happen to this consciousness when God has wrapped this universe like a newly cleaned sheet and put it in the wardrobe until the limits of my mind take me to sleepland with their hopeless lullabies. I am and will be a sharer of
Your Consciousness,
Safdar
Stairs in Kamber
