Hell raiser rides again

Imagine that you are 7 years old, sickly, bespectacled with exactly as much interest in studying as you have in cutting your left ear off and even less in playing sports, you are in for one hell of a fucked up childhood. Imagine not going to school because the fat asshole in class spits in your lunch and beats you up till you swear never ever to come to school again. Imagine suffering that humiliation for 4 years. Imagine being so enraged that you finally take that bastard kid down in the soccer field and bash him on the face with your puny little hands so many times that not only does he swear never to come to school again he actually doesn’t. Imagine that feeling of triumph; imagine strutting around campus like you are Bruce Willis and life is a Die Hard 4.
Now imagine being 12, pudgy, bespectacled, with as much interest in studying as you had when you were 7 and even less in sports. Imagine feeling totally useless because your parents are constantly asking you to study or play sports, your friends are non existent because you beat up way too many kids over the past five years and now they hang out with girls who you hate since you have four sisters at home who have friends that seem to derive sickening amounts of pleasure from pulling your cheeks and calling you bubloo. Imagine being so frustrated that one day on your way home from school you talk your driver into letting your drive even though you know your father will make your life so miserable that you’ll wish for death. Imagine finding out that not only can you drive you are fucking predisposed to driving well. Imagine hitting 60 with the windows down on the very first try, imagine cutting in front of a huge Hino Pak bus, imagine the power, the freedom.
The whole damn world opens up to you the first time you let go off the clutch without the car shutting down. Suddenly life acquires the meaning it was meant to have but hadn’t yet, you have access to places which your father never had the energy to take you to. You drive up to the school gate and let the driver take the car in and every kid coming in on the bus watches you with their mouths so wide open that you could park your car in them. Suddenly you become cool, friends start popping out of the brick walls, they don’t even care if you beat em up, and the girls they were hanging out with are abandoned to groups which you can now follow around Lahore, all the way to their homes and harass until their fathers come out with loaded shot guns simply to wave it in the air like idiots while you screech away blowing gravel and smoke in their faces.
Oh god! And then you discover sound systems!!!! Woofers and tweeters and amps and crossovers and bass and treble. Now you are not only mobile, you are mobile in style. And people have another reason to shake their fist at you and cuss behind your back. But you don’t care, oh no, you have this metal kingdom to rule over and while you are in it ain’t no one got nothin’ on you.
But then you hit the 20 year mark and all that becomes so infantile that you don’t even tell anyone that you can drive like they never thought was possible. You are no longer proud of the fact that you floor the gas every time you see a gap in traffic large enough to stick your big toe in, instead you are overcome with guilt being so irresponsible, so reckless, so immature.
But still, you are a trained blood hound and no matter how your mind tries you can’t fucking stop your instincts from doing what they are bloody perfect at. And after a particularly harrowing day full of feelings of inadequacy and failure, you find this car in the rear view mirror swerving in and out of traffic with such skill that it looks choreographed. Then that car passes you much faster than prudence permits to slam on the brakes and swerve sharply enough to slice a warm tomato into a gap too small to permit entry to a Chihuahua let alone a car. You hear the tell tale sound of tires yelling for traction in a dying attempt at avoiding calamity and hold your breathe for the sickening crunch of metal against metal. But it never comes, instead horns blare in anger and in jealousy and tires squeal in triumph as the car is hurtled towards the next available slot of space which the car may or may not fit into but you’ll never know until you try.
Now what happens is that a signal is sent to your brain from your foot, asking for permission to apply enough pressure to the gas pedal to make it taste the carpeting. Your brain, depending on the experiences it has stored in its memory banks, is now asked to calculate a response which is most intelligent under the circumstances, and tells your foot to shut the fuck up. Now your foot being simply a tool is unable to undertake anything of its own accord, but your heart… your heart cannot only undertake an action it can override the brain’s commands when it is given ample and justifiable reason to do so. And in its emotionally fragile state, your heart desires not safety but the thrill long ago abandoned to adulthood. And therefore it uses is Veto power to tell the brain to shut the fuck up and the foot to press on.
Your eyes then acquire a squint and a glare as they fade out all the useless periphery and focus in on the road ahead where the cars become static obstructions with spaces in between for you to utilize on your surge forward towards satisfaction. With radar efficiency you locate these gaps, and your brain is left with no option but to use its faculties to keep you alive by calculating the probability of fitting in instead of crashing in faster than the speed of your car. And soon enough your whole body is tuned into the act of driving as fast as you can through a gridlock that extends for miles. All your instincts come alive in this scenario which is much more familiar to them than the one you subject them to now. Your confidence spikes with the adrenaline and there is nothing that you can’t do and you slip and slide and skid and zoom in and out of lanes like a horny rabbit chasing after rabbit pussy. And soon enough, not only have you caught up with the car that stepped on your proverbial dog tail to make you retaliate in a fashion so idiotic, but you actually beat it to a spot which he didn’t even see.
And all of a sudden, you are in a race. In your mom’s car, which you took because yours doesn’t have a working AC any more. You surge and squeal your way over Jinnah bridge, which once jammed with traffic is more impregnable than a nun. Then you swerve into the turn lane to beat every one else to the green light at the Lux billboard. You circumvent a stalled rickshaw by drifting through a mound of excavated sand to find yourself half a second away from slamming into a donkey cart at 90 kilometers per hour, which by the way has an impact force equivalent to falling off the ninth floor. There is bumper to bumper traffic to your right, a gas station to your left with a line at the CNG pump extending on to the road and ahead of you is certain death for at least the donkey. So you do the only sensible thing, and you pull the hand break and your tilt the steering to the left and your car swerves 90 degrees on its axis to the left to find a car parked at the gas station with a child in the back seat with such a horrified look on his face that you decide if worst comes to worst you’d rather drive into the donkey cart. So you do the only sensible thing again and swerve the steering to the right, jerking the car out of traction again and slam the accelerator to make sure the tires are spinning too fast to not skid and with two wheels almost air borne, you hit the ramp leading into the gas station, take flight and land with a gut wrenching thud on the dirt shoulder past the donkey cart, past the parked car and past impending and seeming inevitable doom. Before you can realize what just happened, you shift down and push the gas again to take off sending enough dust flying in your wake to bury the Arabian sea. You spot the rival in your rear view mirror struggling to catch up and you smile like your are Mario Andretti and start planning against the red light you see in the distance.
You continue to swerve you way towards the entrance to Defence and find the turning lanes jammed with traffic. So you go past the turning lanes up to the signal itself where cars are piling into where you intend to be but you come at them with such force of determination that they all stop dead in their tracks to allow you a millisecond of opportunity to slide left onto the road with the help of a controlled hairpin.
You rival follows suit and manages to eat up at least 20 seconds worth of distance between the two of you. So you zoom forward, head to head, towards a traffic jam barely 60 feet ahead telling logic to demand that you step on the brake pedal, as hard as you can right fucking now. So you brake as hard as you can, letting the competition feel like you’ve given up while his car quickly lurches forward. But his triumph is short lived because when you seemed like chickening out you weren’t chickening out but you were planning much further ahead than your rival possibly could and you head into the service lane which has rows and rows of parked cars but no traffic. You fly over pot holes to beat everyone to the check post causing the traffic jam and you smile the smile of victors because you know there is no chance in hell of losing now.
So you coast to a stop at the next traffic signal to take the turn leading home, satisfied with yourself and your still present ability to burn the rubber off the rims. And your competition sheepishly drives up besides you, and points for you to roll down your window. And then he tells you that it’s the best damn piece of driving he has ever witnessed in his 18 years of being alive but you find yourself feeling anything but proud.
Then you grudgingly head back home in shame and yes also in remorse because you are way too old to be pulling stunts on busy city roads but there is very small part of you, a minuscule portion of your heart that feels warm and fuzzy, and maybe even proud because that part isn’t jaded enough to not enjoy the fact that even though the years have piled on and so has the sense of civic responsibility, the blood coursing through your veins is still that of a hell raiser and your instincts though condemned to dormancy are still sharp enough to beat an 18 year old kid to the head of the line.

yeh meray junoon ka hai maujza
jahaan apnay sir ko jhuka diya
wahan mainay Ka'aba bana liya

of seduction

So when she looked into his eyes and found the look of poetic lovers lingering therein she made the only choice available to her unenlightened mind and confused experienced treachery for sincere emotion. And to her palpitating heart she told the lie that when morning comes she will not love him any more or ever again because she knew all her heart desired was to not regret the moment where it knew right from wrong and let her make the choice.
And then he traced the map from here and now to eternal memory upon her cheek, making sure to linger along the fringes of her lips without quite letting her taste the salt of his skin, in the process making her soul move inside of her in an act of violent desperation that felt somewhat like an earthquake that shook her right off her defenses and into and onto the mercy of his rhythmic seduction, which irrespective of how vehemently she wished would last forever could only last as long as her desire to be swept away upon the frail and fickle wings of assumed love consumed her.
In the pit of her stomach, along the fault lines beneath her womb but above her hungry core, an entire troupe of nymphs danced in gleeful surrender to the silent music of answered prayers causing her knees to give way and her bones to ache with an ancient and unknown distress which healed as it hurt, perhaps just to make sure that no scars remain, no wounds, so even if she would never have to wonder where those golden sunsets went, and that pitch black darkness of expectation without reason, she would not crumble beneath the weight of her own conscience.
This is when he chose to allow his fingers to dance the slow methodic waltz of barely curtailed passion upon her supple and eager flesh and this is when her heart stopped beating in time to the rhythm of life and danced instead to that of lust. In every consequent moment that his hands traversed the hills and valleys of her form, she felt the agitated calm of passion being ignited and satiated, sinking ever deeper, down to that empty space at the center of her existence which existed in order to complete another in order for it to complete her. She had not known the nature of this vacuum before this moment and in this moment she made the convenient assumption that it had existed for him alone and that he was the culmination of all her anxieties and all her restless nights and all her sinful dreams which made it incumbent upon her to bless her baths with holy verses in order to purge herself of the rapture of those dreams that lasted much longer than their residue or the innocent delirium of sleep.
Upon her skin danced his fingers and beneath it a fire that had been lit long before but without direction or purpose, as if by accident, or divine intention in waiting for the most perfect of moments to expose its hidden agenda and it was in this fire that she set herself to burn because as it grew in its concupiscent fury so did the relief which had its roots in her womb and its branches all across the universe.
In silent mockery of modesty, she smiled almost without smiling, with a coy awareness of the magnitude of the distance between what she had been and what she was about to become, and without even the slightest vestige of grandeur or any illusions thereof she allowed him to free her of the restrictions of morality which encumbered her body with cloth and hide to suffocate the spirit which was yearning to return and to forever remain in the state of absolute ignorance of everything and everyone and all the peripheral anxieties that come along with them. She had secretly yearned for didactic inspirations to abandon her and in the moment when his life line stretched across her heart they finally did, setting her free upon the world of hedonistic inspirations with the reckless abandon of a cannon ball hurled unto an enemy.
His lips marked hers with the indelible and invisible scars of beginnings and as soon as she felt their enthusiasm rob her of her breath she understood that as soon as she made him surrender to her sensibilities his heart would break and along with it the spell which they both found themselves enraptured in and which transcended every inhibition worth harboring. At that very moment she knew that she would never break his heart, that she would never want for him to stop because she understood that much like her happiness too is eternally fickle.
His entire being acted like a single instinct stretched across the horizon of infinite possibilities to perform as a unified orchestra of numerous machines of pleasure with her as the sole purveyor/audience/beneficiary of his efforts. However, his proficiency gave birth to an anomaly which rose from the pit of her stomach like doubt, ruptured the cocoon of complacence around her heart like fear and lodged itself inside her brain as permanently and unapologetically as regret. And it was at this precise moment that he whispered the legendary promise of poetic lovers in her ear to gain an audience with the origin of her innocence so as to transform it forever into irredeemable loss and despite the trepidation coursing through her veins along with the infinitely exponential pleasure she acquiesced to his request but in an act of unprecedented prudence and perhaps unequivocal masochism she spread open her eyes as well and found his face hovering less than the breadth of a breath away from hers, staring at her with the flaccid fascination that is the sign of a man firmly in the grip of impending satisfaction but completely devoid of the look of poetic lovers or any mutation thereof.
Almost in the exact instant as she had opened them, she closed her eyes because the sudden and unmistakable surge of pride refused to allow her the luxury of letting him witness the sorrow which had in one tremendous blow replaced all the pleasure in the moment and in the world to settle heavily upon her conscience.
And it was when he finally lay beside her, panting from the excursion, oblivious to any thing other then his own sense of fulfillment, staring up at the ceiling fan rotating too slowly to create wind or to turn back time, the sheer intensity of her anger rendered her comatose. So she remained motionless, like a little girl’s doll placed aside in a moment of forgetfulness, never to be found again, never to be claimed again, never to be dressed or combed or bathed again with the tenderness of yesterday or a few moments ago wherein she had felt simpler than ever before or ever again. Her arms lay stiff and motionless, bent in wards slightly, lost between the desire to minimize the vastness of her exposure and the futility of making such an effort now; ramrod straight she lay, unable to find an excuse to move, to get off the soiled sheets and run out the door to some indistinct place where she could be blissfully and absolutely unaware of herself.
This is when his breath found composure again, and his hunger grew anew and even more commanding than before, unencumbered as it was now by anxiety or the possibility of rejection, and bolstered further with the legendary confidence of victors, he recreated the look of poetic lovers in his eyes.
This time when she looked at him it was not his eyes as much as her smile that was insincere, for in her surrender there was no ignorance. There was no gullibility in her acquiescence but where as his motivation was pure or at least unabashed, the hidden agenda was hers to harbor. That place of absolute unawareness which she had acquired the sudden and insatiable yearning for, where she could be too oblivious of herself to be burdened with the fatigue of bearing ruthless guilt was only to be found under the weight of his sweat and amidst the grotesque symphony of his groans and inside the bittersweet embrace of her own selfishness.
So this time when his eyes fell upon hers he found in them not the innocent bewilderment of one discovering her own capacity for accepting fantastic possibilities of never ending love and infinite, self fulfilling passion but the eternally insincere look of poetic lovers. And this time it was her who murmured the legendary promise of poetic lovers into his ear and this time he was the one who believed it.