Mysteries solved or unsolved

Being a student of literature I have always struggled to understand the magical realism expounded in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels, but the story below — I bear out to be true because I know the narrator and his brother full well — has convinced me that surreal experiences do happen in human life.

One day an old student after getting a lucrative job came to see me to express his gratitude. During our motley musings and nostalgic memories, he abruptly went into a pensive mode and upon my little insistence on divulging the cause, he exclaimed with a heavy heart that he had one dark secret of his life. That secret actually being an unresolved mystery of deprivation of love and connectedness stymies his self-actualisation — the highest level in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.

Embarking upon Freude’s psychoanalysis I let him speak his heart out because unanswered questions and unresolved mysteries of the inner world asphyxiate the soul. The actual but surrealist story is narrated here in his own words.

“In our strained childhood, my elder brother would wash whatever I touch. Even if by chance I touched his belongings, he sanctified them by sprinkling water on them. If he didn’t find water near, he spat on the touched things and wiped the saliva with his hands. He never liked to shake hands with me. Even at Eids, we never embraced to greet each other.

“Castigated he was for his idiosyncrasy everywhere by everyone in the family. Though he lagged behind in studies, he possessed a real knack for making and flying kites. He grew slovenly in his habits while I was overconscious with personal hygiene. He was always taken to task for misdoing the errands.

“On the credit side, actually he didn’t hate me as he would cry if someone beat me or snatched something from me at school. I was punctual in offering prayers but he wasn’t. He neither told lies nor involved himself in youthful shenanigans. He was unversed in the ways of the world. Contrarily I sowed my wild oats clandestinely.

“As the occult always has its say in such cases in not-so-well educated families, he being the first male child of my brotherless father was considered under some magic spell. We both were taken to soothsayers, astrologers and so-called spell casters to be exorcised of all daemons but to no avail. Nobody knew the reason, not even I. A clairvoyant, however, prophesied that he would be all right after his teens. And it did happen.

“When we entered the twenties of our life, things started to metamorphose to the surprise of all the family. At one Eid, upon my mother’s advice, he embraced me with full vigour. Afterwards, whenever we shook hands, he pressed my hand hard: the hardness even I feel today but I am perplexed as I was then why the clasp of his hand was so hard and bony.

“Nobody likes to talk about those days. I am still confused what was that after all. If he had been better off than I am financially or family wise, it would have been an easier thing to understand. One intriguing development in him was now he started telling lies. But my heart aches seeing his poor plight. He has a disturbed family life while I have comparatively far better.

“I often draw parallels between this Gothic mystery of my life and Akshay Kumar starrer movie Brothers: movies enacting love or jealousy among siblings always appeal to me more than the romances or action thrillers. However, the motive of estrangement between the fictional brothers is absent in my case: in the movie, the brothers are agnate siblings while we are full siblings.”

Epilogue

The dramatic irony is that the unentanglement of the mystery can reveal something shocking — some disfiguration of the portrait of the soul like the one in The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. The self is the crucible of our qualia. On the nature of the self then depends our experience of the world. Walt Whitman decrees to “dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

Published in The Express Tribune, March 4^th, 2024.

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