Now is a piece of paper we call a map and it is crushed and discarded inside two parallel lines. It molds between yesterday and tomorrow, between before and after, between past and future. In Urdu, tomorrow and yesterday are a collective called kal. Independent of context, of clause, kal is not assigned a time and it is suspended in the air, flying over crashed paper planes. Kal rejects self-identification. Kal performs the function of a scratched out lost-person poster. Kal rests with the anxiety of what could have been or what will be, until claimed through language, by me, by you. But never Amreeka.
The whole world is Amreeka.
It is Amerika.
It is Amrīkā.
But America thrives as just America and it has only one language, the world language, and I find that there is nothing common in my speech with America. When a fraction has a common denominator it is united in the state of its existence, it is simple. I have spent a fraction of time in America hoping for a better tomorrow and then I wake up and it is tonight in Pakistan and Now;
kal is floating over the earth’s axis and I am divided.
Had is something acquired, something owned, something experienced. It is possessed. Had is greed actualized, until it isn’t. I had had enough. Had multiplied is the sound my tongue makes when it loses speech at the sight of my tomorrow in Amreeka and I find that I am rambling over the word of the Christian God when I am barely even Muslim.
One language and the world language are synonymous but they belong to the first world only. I have confirmed what I have always known by splitting God’s words open and Now;
I must tend to this sacrilegious wound
1 آپ کی سمجھنے کی صالحیت کو تباہ کر کے
1 Translation: by ripping away your ability to comprehend
