My feet don’t tire

*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism

(*artwork by Incé Husain)

So it’s all over. None of them are happy. Every single one is alone and burdened for eternity. I carried them in my heart for thirty episodes; I thought often of their volatility, I learned from them. Now, I sit back and think “I’m so sorry things ended like this.”

Mein is not a romance in the Western sense. Mein is self-destruction, vengeance, power, its origins, how love is tested, ravaged, sacrificed, born by it. The lovers in Mein are never truly together. They spend thirty episodes fighting for a shared life; tormented by family, by themselves, by each other. They are taunted, attacked, pressured, manipulated, bloodied by psychological warfare and the violence of wealth.

The number of scenes where Zaid stares at his ceiling, jarred and plotting; Aira stares out the window, pale and tearful; Mubashira stares at the trembling arch of her fused hands against her forehead. It is not in their nature to cower. It is not in mine. All they do is fight. Zaid fights with obsession; Aira with spite; Mubashira with rage; all of them for love, eventually or always.

They are held hostage by their households, and this is not merely the context in which they fight for love, it is the language of their love. Family bonds are not trivial. They do not break easily, they are not forgotten, they are indistinguishable from the self.

Happiness is brief and stolen. There are scenes when their eyes light up with disbelief, urgency, hope: Zaid has finally found peace, Aira has finally found safety, Mubashira has finally found herself. All three are immersive. I can predict their reactions and feel the nature of their pain. I know not what they’ll do, but how they’ll do it. This is a rare intimacy for a TV show. The characters and I are interconnected beyond the show’s artistry: I see myself in each of them with an odd specificity. Zaid’s principles; Aira’s grit; Mubashira’s ferocity; the way these traits become extremes, become all that’s left, and then plateau to surrender.

I also surrender. I remind myself, often, that surrender is not equivalent to failure. To fail is to lose. To surrender is to fight tooth and nail until there are no more teeth and no more nails to give; and to fight this way can never be losing, it’s nature is too all-consuming for the terms “losing” and “winning” to be defined.

This is a hard lesson for me and Zaid. We think “there are always more teeth and more nails to give”. We cannot rest until we find the truth, the full truth, and its verdict on our lives. We search; we plot. We’re focused and relentless. We move mountains for the ones we love. We will not be broken; we’ll find a window in the harshness of every abyss. Our stamina is systematic and our will is iron. Surely, we’ll come out of this alive. We’ll come out of this with peace and light in our eyes. Surely, our salvation is imminent. This is how Zaid defies his father, bears the monstrosities of his father’s controlling rage, and dismantles every highly-coordinated lie meant to tame him. He says to his household: “I don’t know what warped world you’ve all built around me, but when I find the truth - and I will find it - I will finish you all.”

But then Zaid is cornered. I am cornered, too. There’s nowhere to run. There’s nothing to plan. There’s nothing more to seek. There is no option but to stop. And it is not the war that has stopped us: it is that the war was pointless. The person we fought for does not care for the truth and our sacrifices. Their verdict on our lives is silence and futility.

This is all Aira gives Zaid. She does not take his offering of burned familial bridges, that he lays at her feet like a shrine. She does not care for all that he’s done for her. Grief is her moral compass. The violations she has borne are so extreme that she allows herself everything. She allows herself revenge, impulsivity, cruelty; this temper only rises. She decides that anything Zaid-related brings brutalization. She has been battered for loving Zaid: Zaid’s father had her brother killed, her home destroyed, her village ostracized, her career finished. It does not matter that this was not Zaid’s doing. It does not matter that Zaid’s heart is pure and he believed only her amidst the barrage of lies. It does not matter that Zaid unveiled every one of his father’s plots at the expense of his family and was discarded, devalued, disowned.

Aira is exhausted. She believes the world is cruel; her love for Zaid has become a time capsule of that cruelty; her life has become a vendetta to take whatever she wants as compensation. Halfway through the show, she said to him as he stared lovingly at her: “I thought I would be so happy to be with you, but I feel nothing. My heart has become a dead thing.”

In the finale, Zaid is on the brink of telling Aira that now, they’re finally safe. He’s fixed everything, they have nothing but each other, they can run away and be happy. She says: “Don’t ever come to my house again. You won’t find the Aira you loved here. She’s gone.”

I don’t condone her. But I remember, perhaps, a similar state of self-immersion that allowed me to wreak arbitrary violence. I remember being so overwhelmed that my commitments were many but the ones I pursued were randomly chosen like a game of Russian roulette. It was not discipline; it was not clarity; it was to claw at the edge of a cliff.

Mubashira’s fits of rage made me smell metallic blood in the air. She was a wholehearted tempest; she took no prisoners. She screamed, smashed glasses, hit and kicked, harassed, hurled death threats, vowed destruction. Her signature line and manic eyes flared: “just remember, I actually am crazy.” She was haughty, condescending, sophisticated, glimmering with jewels. She wanted a queendom of loyal admirers to fawn over her beauty and power. Her rage caged everyone into worship. And when her fits subsided and she found herself entirely alone, she cried on her father’s loving shoulder. She wondered aloud why no one cared for her. She wailed that even her mother abandoned her when she was young. Her rage, always, became the earnest hysteria of a lost child.

My volatility was never of this nature. Mine is quiet. But I would daydream of a release like hers. I would reincarnate it in my mind’s eye - the smashed glasses, the manic eyes. She had a presence, she made things happen, she was a force to be reckoned with. Her steely eyes did not falter. Mine don’t either. 

Then Mubashira faces Zaid - his stubbornness, his eerie calm, his steely eyes that also do not falter. He will not be bent. So when an ulterior plot had them spitefully married, Zaid watched her controlling tantrums nonchalantly. He threatened a reputation-destroying divorce. So she stooped, begrudgingly, to conquer him. It defied her nature, it brought her to the brink of psychosis.

She became embroiled in his fight for Aira - as a sly villain and then as an accomplice. This role offered her the most stable purpose she had ever known; Zaid, ever-principled and at its centrepiece, became someone she trusted and revered. She softened; she became earnest, gentle, loyal. There was a sudden fragility and newness in her milky face, as if she had just woken up. She wandered the world slowly, watchfully, carefully. Childlike, she daydreamed a life with Zaid full of laughter, banter, dancing, flowers. In the finale, she tells him: “I have a confession. I know I was never who you desired. But in forgetting myself, I fell in love with you.”

Now, Mubashira perches alone on a moonlit bench, her hair hanging in raven rivulets. Aira wanders her house with skeletal eyes. Zaid is on a boat at sea. They will never cross paths again.

I think to each of them: “now rest.”

I think to myself: “now rest.”

Mein, in Urdu, means “me”. It also means “ego”. Thus, in Urdu, we can never reference the self without referencing the ego. For me, it is inherent, then, that transcendence from ego lies in referencing others. Also, the word “we/ us” in Urdu rhymes with the word “pain” (“hum” and “ghum”, respectively). Isn’t all this a linguistic premonition, a warning for the poets to unearth? Transcend the self by loving others, but beware that others will bring pain?

A line from Mein‘s soundtrack translates to:

We passed

Pain passed

Wherever I walked.

My feet don’t tire. ♦