Twilight of unseen realities

Embanking the flood of thoughts with the sands of letters

If God gave us all different faces and bodies so that we may recognize one other, he gave us all different minds with which to recognize one other. This creates an infinite number of permutations of seeing and judging people—every person in the world can tell apart one face from another, but no two people have the same opinion about a single person.

The similarities do not end here. Just like some people have an unusually long nose or uniquely small ears, so too do some people have a really long concentration or really short fuse. We do not consider a person with long and thin fingers deformed, such a person might not be a good stone miner, but maybe they can be great at needle work. Similarly, a person with an obsessive propensity might not be good at a job or station in life that requires dealing with people, but might excel at working with things and ideas, moulding them according to their mind’s shape.

Modern psychology has invented names for these differences between minds. That might not be a problem in itself, after all we classify something likes noses too as hawk, pug, Roman, snub, etc. The problem starts when we consider certain types of minds as diseased. One such “disease” is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), a name given by professional practitioners of psychiatry to paying unusual attention to the details of things and activities.

Will you still demand
the littlest of loves? 
When you know
you deserve
a cosmos of it.
~Bazila Bilal

Bazila Bilal, a 17 year old girl from Islamabad, Kashmir is a victim of this nomenclature. She calls it OCD because her doctor calls it that, but perhaps she understands that she is just different. Writing was recommended to her so that she may keep track of and feel in control of her thoughts and fears by noting them down. “Eventually, it became a kind of only relief for me. Once something irritates me or scares me, I feel like I need to pen it down, to write it off my mind,” she told Zaanvun Lokchaar.

An anthology of her poems, Delusional Blues, was published recently. The book is divided into sections, bookmarked by commentary (which she describes as “pessimistic and philosophical”) about her life, mind and poetry. The book is dedicated to “the broken, the bad, the lost and the abandoned…” She wrote this book on OCD because she thinks that all her life revolves around it. “I have started seeing my life through the prism of OCD,” she says.

She describes her thought process thus, “Since I am an over-thinker, I think over and over again on the same topic. I think from different perspectives and different points of view, and only after reaching the peak of my anxiety, do I concretize my idea and write it down.”

She writes:

Unnoticed,
they did burn
my desire for colour;
the constant fears
of the hues
of dark and grey.

You will hardly find any poems in her collection dealing with the realities of love or life in general. They are mostly about her mental processes. She composes a poem over and over again until she thinks it expresses what she intends it to express. The wonderful drive to leave behind no imperfections at work.

Every now and then, the long shadow of the politics of Kashmir falls over her poetry:

So,
since the day
they declared you utopian,
I embraced my fantasies,
making my love for you
a perpetual war
between me
and the reality they speak of.

There is a constant tug of war between her absolute knowledge that she is “normal”, and the seduction of being “special” by accepting the “abnormality” of her brain. To quote her:

The world of souls has given me a forever. A forever among the blues. My world is a hide and seek where forever is a hidden treasure and I seek it in my dreams. I live it and I torment it. A forever I mourn for, for they say my forever is an illusion. They say forever is a lie!