Freedom

I noticed your eyes when I first saw you. Those petal-shaped eyes were what I noticed, not your wheelchair. Your gaze held a magnetic cocktail of irritation, resentment, and melancholy. The resentment didn’t feel personal. It felt indiscriminate, encompassing everyone alike.

Your eyes seemed to scream, “Why? Why the hell why?”

I almost heard you yell, “Stop staring! You’re on your feet, so? You wouldn’t feel sorry for me if you were here instead, would you, would you?”

You carried your home in your wheelchair. Your arms were sinewy from working overtime trying to compensate for your recalcitrant body. For a tramp, you were rather well-groomed. Your clothes were clean, your washed hair flopped on your forehead, courtesy your caring circle of friends. From the window of my home, I’d often see your friends laughing and talking with you, feeding you, walking you around in your wheelchair.

You had a strange charisma. Even those who didn’t know you noticed you, felt something a little more than pity for you. Some folks even heard out your worries about your spreading diabetes. They gave you money for you to get well, not to be rid of you or their guilt. You sure had public opinion going for you.

For all the love that surrounded you, your eyes had that unsatiated, wistful look. As if you’d trade all the love in this world to just be on your feet, in charge of your own life, none less than any other.

During my evening walk, I’d see you rapidly pirouetting your wheelchair in varied patterns to perform some dangerous moves on a busy, main road.

Take that, you, you, and you, your antics screamed at all the tourists assembled on the road along the sea. Another of your stunts was to speed ahead holding the back fender of a moving car. Some watched in awe, some in fear, some thought you to be a pathetic case of machismo. You’d extricate yourself from the car with adroitness at the crucial moment. Once back to the safety of the sidewalk, you’d toss your flopping hair from your forehead to punctuate your triumph and dismiss people’s stares by looking away.

Another time, I saw a faraway look in your eyes as they looked at the ocean. Your cheeks were crisscrossed with the track marks of dried tears. Sometimes, I saw you dragging deep on a marijuana-rolled cigarette to alter your shackled reality for a few blissful hours.

I packed old linen trousers, shirts, tees, a comforter, and a blanket in an overnighter to give you. You were not seen in our lane for weeks, almost a month. Your luggage had been sitting in my closet, so I asked one of your friends about you.

“Haider passed away a day before yesterday, Madam. His diabetes (read gangrene) spread to his entire body. It was all over in just two days.”

Maybe it was not what I’d expected to hear. Maybe I thought that your life was never going to change. Maybe I took it for granted that you’d always be around to receive my charity, that you were not going anywhere. Maybe it was the shock of knowing that someone I waited for is now irrevocably out of reach. It made all the times you were around, seem like a privilege, now unavailable. My sense of loss was as strange as it was strong. It gave me an empirical understanding of the possibility that you and all of us who lived on Carter Road were bound by some inexplicable tie from some place of origin in this universe. Or possibly we were all the same energy floating around in smaller chunks in different forms. Or some other inclusive metaphysical concept. It was the only justification I could clutch at to make sense of the ties that held people not bound by ties of blood, not even friendship or acquaintance. It may be the reason why I felt for you, mourned you more than I ever knew you.

Your abandoned wheelchair seemed like an affirmation now. I imagined you rising from it in a white haze, showing the world the finger as you soar to your freedom. I felt happy that this time around, you wouldn’t feel obliged to disengage yourself at the crucial moment to escape death.

Go, run a marathon in your afterlife, Haider, beat that car that you used to trail.