Ameen in Heaven

An image of scented smoke — gentle and sensual wisps, hung in air — looks like the image of bones in an X-ray film. The fair ladies in brocaded, laced, silver-frilled, white cambric dresses are so beautifully delicate that if touched hard they could metamorphose into a clean water, then scatter and vanish. Their seraphic eyes are large, and their faces change with each stylistic turn of their heads, that, a moment later Muhammad Ameen cannot tell who was who. There is an abstract painting on the golden wall — studded with diamonds and precious stones — in which two lovers seem kissing each other but actually aren’t. On a close look it turns out to be a painting of an abstract goblet. Everything inside and outside is so perfect and absolute that he is painfully confused. 

Ameen has found all the scriptural promises true and fulfilled. Here he is again a thirty-year-old youthful, sturdy Ameen and not the man who was touched by a bullet at forty-two. He no longer stammers, all the impediments from his tongue have been removed. And he doesn’t care whether he makes sense or not. He is surrounded by the promised streams of milk and honey, large-eyed houris, like scattered pearls around him, and trees, heavily laden with fruits of large sizes, far-reaching scents and brash colours, and pretty birds perched on their branches, warbling sweet birdsong into the dense foliage — all that he had repeatedly heard of in his Qur’an lessons and Friday sermons in the worldly life. He now lives in a spacious, palatial house. He lies down on velvety divans against soft, satin-cased bolsters. There is hardly a moment he feels alone but slowly all these absolute pleasures are becoming a routine affair and beginning to bore him. Of course he has already had answers to his countless complicated questions he had always suffered thinking about, and had ever waited and wanted to ask. Those questions have been answered in a language he could not have even wished to speak in his worldly life; but above all he has understood the answers well and has been convinced. Ameen has met many of his relatives and friends and acquaintances who have reached here before him. He is surprised to see many of those who he or even any well-meaning person in the world had never ever, by any means, expected to make it to the heaven. Yet they have. He is more surprised at not finding those who everyone, almost all the well-meaning persons in the world, had bet that they belonged to heaven. They have all died in the world but are absent here. Without problems and with everything perfect and absolute and gratifying around him, Ameen believes that there still is but one major problem in the heaven. And it is that here there is no place for problems but he has the same mind to think. 

~

In his worldly life, Muhammad Ameen exhaustively thought about identity confrontations, race combats, communal clashes, civilisational conflicts, power tussles, oil wars and what not. He would ponder and ponder over great existential and moral questions, the questions about good and bad and their origins and ultimate purposes. Ameen was a self-styled student of philosophy. Self-styled, because each university in Kashmir had everything except a faculty of philosophy where he could have pursued the subject on post-graduation level and even beyond. He had studied the subject from his higher secondary level towards the end of his college, had been guided by mediocre teachers who knew nothing about philosophy and consequently learnt by teaching himself and from occasional parleys with his jobless, wise friends who were much elder to him. 

His parents were peasants and couldn’t afford a private English-medium school for him and for his three elder brothers and two younger sisters. Like his siblings, he had his primary education in an Urdu-medium government school at Natipora. In a way Ameen was split in his day-to-day social dealings: humble to humble, aggressive to mediocre, a lover and yet a pleasant liar to his wife, a loving, caring, nagging and beating father to his two sons, a brusque and argumentative yet a very obedient son. He felt shy of confessing his love to his parents and brothers and sisters. For he had been brought up like that. He had experienced elsewhere that many who confessed love more and more fondly loved less and less practically. It’d make the whole affair of love more verbal and less actual.

Instead he would say things, which were opposites to those confessions. But the knowledge of any harm to his relatives would send his bowels rumbling with worry and fear. Once a doctor misdiagnosed his eldest brother with “ulceration in the stomach”, which was actually a minor case of acid reflux, Ameen got more sickened than his brother. His brother recuperated but himself, Ameen dehydrated in depression. Once in a dream he saw his mother dying and then that whole day, after waking up from the dream, he furtively cried in the attic. In soliloquy he told himself he could not live without her and for that matter if he had to die he should die before her. In his high school days Ameen read about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. He developed an interest in philosophy and it only grew and grew. Later he would study all the great minds he came across, borrowing their books from his friends and libraries, and sometimes not returning: Spinoza’s conceptions of self and universe; his ethics, Hegel’s absolute reality, Nietzsche’s perspectivism and will to power, Kant’s reason and human experience, Schopenhauer’s will, Rousseau’s social contract, Marx’s study of labour and capital, Russell’s analytic philosophy, Heidegger’s philosophical hermeneutics, Ibn-e-Arabi’s unity of being, Shariati’s sociology of religion; he studied Muthari, Ghazaali, Afghani, Iqbal and many more, he also indulged in the works of great litterateurs like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, Joyce, Saramago, Mahfouz, Naipaul, Camus, Ghalib, Faiz and a constellation of others. He learnt that Louis Althusser, a German philosopher, often lost in stupor of thought, once while massaging his wife’s neck unknowingly strangled her to death and later the court too acquitted him for her murder, accepting that the philosopher had done so unintentionally in a certain mental condition. Ameen disliked such extremities. He also despised the fact that Saul Bellow would be so absorbed in his literary work that his wife and their son had to seek his appointments to see him. But still, despite hating such extremities, himself, Ameen easily tended to give into them. 

During his college years Ameen also doubled as a teacher in various private schools, teaching social sciences to high school kids. The principals of these schools often received complaints from their students that Ameen frequently deviated from the topic and lapsed into philosophising history and politics. Something that was heavy for the school-going students to understand and tolerate. He would habitually leave the syllabus unfinished because he spent a long time “intellectualising” the lessons. By the end of his college Ameen had passionately and enthusiastically studied almost all the great schools of thought and all the isms. He developed his own notion of looking at life in the world and called his philosophy critical responsibilism. He believed in acts and deeds that were balanced on both belief in God and unceasing reason to constantly, crazily and critically evaluate the belief and his existence in the world. Ameen negated extremism of any kind. In the long, informal, late-night shopfront debates with his elderly friends about the existence in the world full of alternating, though disproportionate, suffering and happiness; he maintained it’s what it’s. And for all the great possibilities of imaginations about a better afterlife he would add to this phrase and say…if it isn’t then wait until it’s… But Ameen was highly inarticulate. He stammered since his birth and could never be understood properly. He couldn’t produce spontaneous explanations. He would quickly regard himself as stupid and shiver and bat his eyelids and become sad. And the outcome would be that he only ascended and progressed in the levels of wisdom and consciousness. He took unfinished thoughts and speculations as challenges. His philosophy could mostly be understood from his actions. There were some people around him who were greatly articulate but they just waffled and seldom made sense. For such people Ameen was a dismissive. He had a mixed temperament of emotion and wisdom coupled with arrogance. But above all in any circumstance he never prejudiced. If he would be angry with anyone he imagined himself in the person’s place and situation and tried to understand that he could have done the same and felt the same the other person’s place and situation.

For five years after college, Ameen applied for various odd jobs, which he either didn’t get or didn’t found fulfilling in the least. All the while he applied for posts of nursing, office attendant, a peon in the court, among many others; and to earn a little financial support for himself, he would go to give door-to-door private tuitions to rich families’ kids. Ameen ultimately got a teacher’s job in a government school where he received a good salary. And immediately his parents married him to an ordinary, semi-educated, pretty girl from the neighbourhood. 

One fateful day in the year 2012, the army picked up two young boys from Natipora. People poured out onto the streets to protest, demanding release of the boys. Ameen watched the scene from the window of his bedroom, overlooking the main road of the neighbourhood. As the crowd grew thicker and the protests louder, the army fired aerial shots to disperse the people. Ameen nimbly withdrew from the window, pulling it shut. And as soon as he turned away, a stray bullet from nowhere came piercing through the windowpane and sank into his back, touching his spine. Ameen fell.

Gradually, now he has begun to look for imperfections in the heavenly things about which he had in his worldly life always “problematised and intellectualised”. Also, no news comes from the world and that makes him further curious. He is dying to know what has happened to the unfinished business of wars on the earth. What has become of the game of thrones? What has come out of all the confrontations, all the anxiety, all the frustration and all the hate in the world?... He is dying for an update… Has Kashmir won its freedom by now? Who is the super power now in the world? What has happened to the Middle-East finally? And if, for an example’s sake, one has to die even in heaven, could he be expected to die in peace, knowing that finally the nuclear weapons have never been used, however, they have been left to rot and rust disused, wherever they were preserved in the world? And whether it has by now been realised on earth that race and caste and creed were just the greatest illusive constructs that so many had so foolishly nursed and so fondly harboured? And whether people have by now understood that they are going to be accountable only to their deeds based on their knowledge and not on the basis of interventions in others’ lives nor on the basis of unknowability? Or whether they still continue to fool amongst themselves. Each time he thinks about these issues he is doped with pleasure. He is torn between bliss and consciousness. But everything he sees here is unquestionably perfect and absolute. After looking at the face of a houri he cannot think about any better match. He is reminded of Hegel’s absolute reality. A houri’s face is beyond all the beauty and charm produced after the total beauty of the entire universe were to be concentrated into one face. 

His intellect has become a reason of his suffering in the heaven, hence a problem, so he has begun to think about this single problem. What is the purpose of mind in heaven? Is it needed here? If yes, then why has it not been limited to only appreciate the perfection and absoluteness? Or has it been? Or could he be allowed to ask: what the hell is heaven actually? He thinks and thinks and is bored and perturbed. He frequently recalls Kant. Fundamental concepts structure human experience, and that reason is the source of morality…experiences are structured by necessary features of our minds…the mind shapes and structures experience so that, on an abstract level, all human experience shares certain essential structural features.

The only alternative to his boredom is hell but that in no case is an option. Though it is a place full of treasures of problems and imperfections but the problem is that, in contrast to the constant pleasure in heaven, hell is full of constant suffering. Constant, absolute, perfect suffering and misery wouldn’t at least let anyone find a moment’s rest to think, not to speak of thinking at leisure.

An angel appears in Muhammad Ameen’s palatial house in the heaven as he prepares himself to make love to an indescribably pretty houri. He is curious to remove the silken cloth, glittering from its sequins of gold and precious emeralds, and unveil a platter the angel has brought. The houri waits as Ameen fights his urge to ask the angel if it could bring him lists of any problems instead. Problems from anywhere in the universe — that somewhere a certain race of unknown aliens would have illegally occupied a planet of some other race — are most welcome. That somewhere there is some resistance war going on. Or even problems from some corner of the heaven itself where a certain group of jannatis, dwellers of the heaven, are complaining about small size of grapes in their vineyards or small size of seeds in their pomegranates. Or maybe certain streams of milk and honey have begun to dry up and there is a little crisis there. Or some jannati has been grievous ever since his entry into the heaven for he has been demanding a dark-skinned houri, but due to the unavailability of such a creature here, as only the fair-skinned ones have been promised, he has suffered at the cost of this small unfulfilled desire. Anything can do; something that he needs to think over. But such problems have never been reported to occur in heaven. Everyone here is content with what one has been blessed and bestowed with. But then he is yet to know if any of the jannatis he knows has the same complaint and the same problem as his, that of what to think about in the heaven and why? Is there any social contract on indifference among the jannatis. Are all jannatis bestowed with equal levels of consciousness here? And what kind of consciousness? Does eternal stay in heaven only suit to indifferent hedonists? And he literally swallows his tongue while resisting asking such blasphemous and stupid questions. But he tries to please the angel in order to create possibilities for asking such questions in future. As soon as Ameen begins to dust the angel’s left wing’s tip off a silver dust which he has just spotted, his hand is ceased and he is informed by a certain voice that while the angel has travelled towards him through the cosmos, it has accidentally brushed a galaxy on its way and there is no need to dust its wing as it is going to refix the cosmic thing to its position in the universe. The angel has to travel back, half a million light years, to carry out the task which wouldn’t take it more than half a second or so. This arresting learning leaves Ameen’s mouth agape. And he now thinks that he should ask his favourite questions about universe, that have always lurked in him, to the angel. What is vacuum, that surrounds universe, actually made of? And, in fact, what was vacuum originally? And if it was nothingness, then how far did that nothingness spread? Did it have its own infinity? If yes, then what would be the place where it met with the universe called?

He thinks of Spinoza’s conceptions of self and universe…When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it…

But he cannot ask any such questions, which can become a reason for his exit from the heaven like Adam. Thinking of Adam, he cannot now resist his temptation to think about finding the exact place where his forefather had eaten the forbidden fruit of wheat. Ameen still can’t do anything. He knows that each atom of his existence in heaven is being watched by God, who is utterly pleased with him and will not chastise him for merely harbouring such intentions. God instead rewards people for good intentions. Muhammad Ameen keeps quiet with his problems. And wishes that here were in a place where there is no heaven and no hell, not even the knowledge of self, a place of no existence, a place of no questions and no answers, no pain, no rewards, nothing; a place of complete silence and unknowingness, unconsciousness — all like a dreamless sleep… But the value of pleasure of being in such place could only be known in consciousness.  

~

…What is the purpose of mind in heaven? He murmured and murmured the question. The murmurs grew louder and louder. And he began to stammer. Sweating, he woke up to find his mother beside him, comforting him, trying to wake him up already, trying to hold away his hands from his throat — as he would often try to strangle himself in sleep — fanning away the flies that bumble round and round in the room for some time and then return and land on his face again. Ameen lay steady in his bed, vulnerable to lapse into one more long, deep slumber.

Doctors had decided not to take any chance with surgery of Ameen’s back. Removing the bullet, they believed, could cause paralysis to his whole body or might even lead to his death. He was prescribed to take medicines expected to dissolve the bullet to an extent. And that would take a long time. 

Ever since the incident, Muhammad Ameen has been in bed, lying on his back for a year now, staring at his subsequent monthly X-ray films and reports, trying to trace the position of the silent bullet.