Nonfiction
Back to Nature
It feels good to be back home. After months of being surrounded by cityscapes and never-ending concrete jungles, I had a newfound love for nature only otherwise experienced by a hippie who just dropped acid for the first time.
Living in a region with low urbanization, and at the outer edge of the city in a sector called D4, I have always felt very close to nature. I am reminded of this fact by the shrubbery surrounding my neighborhood as well as the numerous pest infestations.
However, my expectations have disappeared faster than empty plots in the sector. Once, D4 was a newly added sector and there was hardly much construction. It was bland and yellow with its dried grass and seasonal streams wrinkling through its surface only to quench the thirst of thorny dying trees. It wasn’t ugly for sure… just beautiful in an unlikeable way. Nothing had hardly changed.
I used to live next to Namsan Mountain for God’s sake!!! Ah, and what a sight that was! A towering green hill, sometimes garnished in snow and sometimes dotted with blooming cherry trees—cherry trees so beautifully pink that it seemed they had been spray painted by some punk from Itaewon (or from Hongdae, we can never really be sure). The best we have at home is this unimpressive hill not too far from where I live. It's about time someone diagnoses it with male-patterned baldness: green locks of long grasses grow on its steep cliffs, but the top is utterly flat and empty. Thorny dry bushes. We have one tree though, a kind of tree called Kikar.
“None has gained success from the companionship of the unworthy
Grew a grapevine on kikar; every bunch was pierced by its thorns”
- Mian Mohammad Bakhsh
Mian Mohammad Bakhsh was a great Punjabi Sufi poet who lived most of his life only a few kilometers from here. Due to his credentials, I'm just going to take on his authority that kikar is a really shitty type of tree.
It is a matter of great pride that the kikar tree I look at right now could have been the very one that inspired Bakhsh’s couplets by pissing him off so much. As such, the D4 kikar’s valuable contributions to Punjabi literature cannot be ignored.
Also, the kair plant which blooms only in autumn suddenly blooms flowers, the same pink of an Itaewon (or Hongdae) punk’s spray paint. An old cow herder I met told me the history of the area that once was D4. A century ago or more, this land was the fief of a rich man from a nearby village who had a son. A peasant from the distant village, now an easy 30-minute drive away, traveled all the way to this man to gift him a goat. Impressed by this humble peasant’s gift, the landlord granted him all the land between two certain seasonal streams in the area. Considering that it was all wasteland, this peasant probably got ripped off badly. Coincidentally, this area roughly aligns with the modern-day sector border of D4. I believe this story is sufficient to serve as D4’s national myth and source of its identity. However, I cannot verify if this story was true or made up. I cannot verify if I made it up to reach the word count. My editor is strict.
The area has no lack of fauna either. The two main types of avians in D4 are the gray francolin and the black francolin—both of which are actually brown. Although not flightless birds, they prefer sprinting across the yellow grasses rather than flying. I guess they’re just lazy.
Monsoon here feels like God’s own EDM concert with a booming base and helluva lighting show. This shorty is followed by orchestral performances with choirs of toads and percussions from crickets while ants dance in their nuptial flights around glowing light bulbs, looking for mates. By the morning, there will be a carpet of ant wings on the floor as these ants fall to the ground exhausted from all the swirling and perhaps even MillyRocking, so most homes keep their light off to avoid them. In my opinion, this is nothing short of mass cock-block on the ant species by us humans.
Historically, these ants would instead gather around lamps and candlelight, often dying in their flames. Consequently, the self-immolation of these flying ants was a popular metaphor in Urdu poetry for self-destructing passion, whether of a man to God or of a lover to a beloved. Since the introduction of lightbulbs, self-immolation and mentions of ants in poetry have decreased significantly. Therefore, I argue that the lightbulb is the single greatest threat to Urdu literature.
The point when I first moved to D4 as a kid feels like a distant point on the dark horizon above the plains of my memories. As the world turns, this point seems to disappear into empty space.
Living in a region with low urbanization, and at the outer edge of the city in a sector called D4, I have always felt very close to nature. I am reminded of this fact by the shrubbery surrounding my neighborhood as well as the numerous pest infestations.
However, my expectations have disappeared faster than empty plots in the sector. Once, D4 was a newly added sector and there was hardly much construction. It was bland and yellow with its dried grass and seasonal streams wrinkling through its surface only to quench the thirst of thorny dying trees. It wasn’t ugly for sure… just beautiful in an unlikeable way. Nothing had hardly changed.
I used to live next to Namsan Mountain for God’s sake!!! Ah, and what a sight that was! A towering green hill, sometimes garnished in snow and sometimes dotted with blooming cherry trees—cherry trees so beautifully pink that it seemed they had been spray painted by some punk from Itaewon (or from Hongdae, we can never really be sure). The best we have at home is this unimpressive hill not too far from where I live. It's about time someone diagnoses it with male-patterned baldness: green locks of long grasses grow on its steep cliffs, but the top is utterly flat and empty. Thorny dry bushes. We have one tree though, a kind of tree called Kikar.
“None has gained success from the companionship of the unworthy
Grew a grapevine on kikar; every bunch was pierced by its thorns”
- Mian Mohammad Bakhsh
Mian Mohammad Bakhsh was a great Punjabi Sufi poet who lived most of his life only a few kilometers from here. Due to his credentials, I'm just going to take on his authority that kikar is a really shitty type of tree.
It is a matter of great pride that the kikar tree I look at right now could have been the very one that inspired Bakhsh’s couplets by pissing him off so much. As such, the D4 kikar’s valuable contributions to Punjabi literature cannot be ignored.
Also, the kair plant which blooms only in autumn suddenly blooms flowers, the same pink of an Itaewon (or Hongdae) punk’s spray paint. An old cow herder I met told me the history of the area that once was D4. A century ago or more, this land was the fief of a rich man from a nearby village who had a son. A peasant from the distant village, now an easy 30-minute drive away, traveled all the way to this man to gift him a goat. Impressed by this humble peasant’s gift, the landlord granted him all the land between two certain seasonal streams in the area. Considering that it was all wasteland, this peasant probably got ripped off badly. Coincidentally, this area roughly aligns with the modern-day sector border of D4. I believe this story is sufficient to serve as D4’s national myth and source of its identity. However, I cannot verify if this story was true or made up. I cannot verify if I made it up to reach the word count. My editor is strict.
The area has no lack of fauna either. The two main types of avians in D4 are the gray francolin and the black francolin—both of which are actually brown. Although not flightless birds, they prefer sprinting across the yellow grasses rather than flying. I guess they’re just lazy.
Monsoon here feels like God’s own EDM concert with a booming base and helluva lighting show. This shorty is followed by orchestral performances with choirs of toads and percussions from crickets while ants dance in their nuptial flights around glowing light bulbs, looking for mates. By the morning, there will be a carpet of ant wings on the floor as these ants fall to the ground exhausted from all the swirling and perhaps even MillyRocking, so most homes keep their light off to avoid them. In my opinion, this is nothing short of mass cock-block on the ant species by us humans.
Historically, these ants would instead gather around lamps and candlelight, often dying in their flames. Consequently, the self-immolation of these flying ants was a popular metaphor in Urdu poetry for self-destructing passion, whether of a man to God or of a lover to a beloved. Since the introduction of lightbulbs, self-immolation and mentions of ants in poetry have decreased significantly. Therefore, I argue that the lightbulb is the single greatest threat to Urdu literature.
The point when I first moved to D4 as a kid feels like a distant point on the dark horizon above the plains of my memories. As the world turns, this point seems to disappear into empty space.