Farah

I keep my feelings bottled up. I keep them to myself so I can go and explore them, experience them, gloat over them at a later period. My name is Farah. I have a problem. No one knows that I have a problem but I do. I was born in the year 1916 but have never really experienced what it is like to live with a family. My father was a bastard and my mother, well I don’t know who she was. My father died when I was 6 and I don’t know why.

The only thing that kept me going all my life was my little brother Farooq. He died. And, then I cried. And the tears never stopped streaming down. My whole life has been tear-filled. All my thoughts tear-filled. My hatred tear-filled. My joy tear-filled. I have rashes on my face from the constant flow of tears. All of this is of course in my head.

I tried to fall in love, not once but thrice. It didn’t work. Some say I am insane, some say I am weird and one said I wasn’t easy enough. All three are dead and I don’t know why. A detective came to question me the other day. Something to do with me being the common factor in all the death cases. He died the next day. May his good soul Rest In Peace.

I pretend to live in a world where I am exceptionally beautiful and I am exceptionally intelligent. I pretend to live in a world where I get all the attention. I pretend to be Marilyn Monroe (with brains). But in reality I am nothing. Just a tiny dot on the face of this earth. All my life has been a blur to me. I am now awaiting my death. Maybe in death my life will be more eventful. I once watched this movie that depicted death in colour and I thought to myself that is where I want to be.

Yesterday, I met a guy. Before the end of this year I know I will be married to him. Today, in the morning when I was browsing through the morning papers I saw an ad. I’m not ready yet to tell you what the ad was all about but you will know in due course.

I try to think back into my past but nothing seems of importance to me. So when I converse with strangers I create a fictional past. I tell them about my father being a Mughal emperor and having three wives and 60 concubines. They all seem to look at me in a weird way and they all move on. I have no friends and I don’t think I want any. I had one friend back in school. I can’t seem to remember her name. She died. And, I don’t know why.

My life has been a whirlwind of fake dreams and emotions. From one foster family to another, I moved all over the country. Each one betraying me, each one humiliating me. I had a father who brought me up for a short period as his sex slave. And then he died on top of me one day. I don’t know why.

I was in the news a couple of months back but I didn’t really care. I have better things to do. I have to go home and toast the bread and ‘butter my slice, anticlockwise’. I like music. It soothes my nerves. Makes me think of peaceful things like bells and crows, cemeteries and amputated toes. I write a lot these days. I know not what I write about but writing continuously is what I find myself doing after a long and stressful day.

My name is Farah. I have a problem. No one knows that I have a problem but I do. My problem is that I am not meant to be in this world. I am neither good nor evil. I am just me. I may do things that upset people, incite them, anger them or move them to tears but I mean no harm, as I don’t know what harm is. I am neither good nor bad for I believe these two words are man made. I believe that what I may deem as a good deed, others may look upon as bad. What difference does it make anyway? All I want is to find my way out of here…to a place far away from here…where I can rest my weary bones…

[Note to the general audience - The images that I have posted are not my own. These have just been randomly selected to suit my posts.]