The Structure

By Asfand Waqar

You stand on the ledge and look down on the street below. People busy in their lives walk fast from one end to the other, but from this height everything looks slower and a bit more interesting. You remind yourself that this is just a mirage and that from up close, nothing’s changed. No reason to think otherwise, as your over a quarter of a century existence in this city has taught you.

You feel this is exactly the type of moment where if this were a movie, your life ought to flashback before your eyes, projected on the silver curtain of your consciousness. But this is not a movie, and there are no flashbacks. You consider whether you will have to imagine it all yourself, bring up the images, all the faded visuals and the correct audio, especially those appropriate sound bites that define the moments that determined the path of your life, leading you all the way up to this ledge. You remind yourself that you don’t want to blame anyone else but yourself, so perhaps you will skip the audio entirely. They were all just trying to help you anyway, and you were good, so you listened to them all. You remember how you thought, way back in the second grade, that all would be just fine if you listened to what your elders had to say.

So you listened to them; you listened to it all. You took the advice, absorbed it like a sponge. For those moments when you got diverging advice, or suggestions, you even perfected a personal science of reasoning, devised a method to pick one suggestion above the other, without feeling too guilty for not following the other advice. You think you are just the outcome of others’ advice and suggestions, as though you are merely a result of their experiments. Just that you have to live with these results, and not them.

Then one day you overheard someone talk about you, in a way that you never thought about yourself. It was surprising, for you ought to know yourself better, but you thought they had a better view of you, than the one you had from the inside. This was scary, this whole idea of your existence outside yourself, and in others’ minds. The images they had of you that you yourself had not imagined let alone seen. You wonder if this might have something to do with why you are here on top of this building. A tall solid building you have lived in for your entire life, here, in this city. This is the last serious thought you think now, before you do something about it. If this were a movie, this building’s structure would stand for your persona, and they’d show it to you over and over before every other scene. Perhaps filmed from above to depict that despite its tall structure it looks quite puny to the audience, to the others, in comparison to the buildings around it. This film would be a lousy one though. You remind yourself one more time that you would not blame others for bringing you here. This is you, standing atop this tall building, smoking a cigarette.

This is when you smell the pungent odor of gasoline as you consciously inhale the polluted city air. You know you didn’t do much to change anything in anyone else’s life, but now is the time to do something about yours. You look down at the street below you one last time, as you step back from the ledge. You throw away the last can of gasoline, as you look around one last time to make sure that you had spread it all over the rooftop and down into the air vents too. As you calmly move towards the fire exit, you know life won’t be the same anymore. You hurl that half-finished cigarette as far as you can. Life gets interesting.

Asfand Waqar teaches engineering at COMSATS University in Islamabad, Pakistan.