A Muslim playboy from Pakistan meets a mannerly Indian Hindu woman in London. Chemistry aside, fireworks ensue, that leaves them with a token in form of a son. The boy matures, despite the upheaval, by absorbing and imbibing the best of both the worlds. His attempt to get acquainted with his father is rebuffed. It is indicated by the man that he is not welcome in his life. Knowing perhaps that the wounds might yet be stinging; he endeavours to give it time when time had other things in mind: his father’s own bodyguard, who claims that he is un-Islamic, assassinates the man. His balanced and sensible mother, on the other hand chooses to side the right wing political movement. All of this takes a toll on him emotionally, and only thirty years old, life has indeed taught him well to separate the wheat from the chaff.
A man of great illumination, he keeps his
head on his shoulders and becomes his own man, something that prods me to challenge
the very filament of the inferior and deceptive world we inhabit. Was it his
fault that he was a product of someone’s lust? Wasn’t it them, and not him, who
had to be reprimanded? How can parents’ wonder, as Locke said, why the streams
are bitter when they themselves have poisoned the fountain? Fortunately, not in
his case, because hailing from the upper echelons, where access to the vices
was only at arms length, the young man could have possibly lost himself in
anything that provided him a temporary escape, and yet he picked, and so very eloquently,
to channelize his energy into something that others could draw inspiration from.
As the pages of his book are open before me
and my eyes are following his rather blatant account of life, my head takes a bow
about how he must have gone through the torment and internalisations before
becoming what he has become: his own hero. And yet the double-faced society
calls him a bastard.
Bastards!
Bastards!
