“There is nothing like our houseboat, he murmured. Love is an old and worn-out game, but it is sport on the houseboat. Fornication is held as a vice by councils and institutions, but it is freedom on our houseboat. Women are all conventions and marriage deeds in the home, but they are nubile and alluring on the houseboat. And the moon is a satellite, dead and cold, but on the houseboat, it is poetry; and madness is everywhere an illness, but here it is philosophy, and something was something everywhere else but here; for here it was nothing.” — Adrift on the Nile, Naguib Mahfouz.
I picked up Adrift on the Nile by Naguib Mahfouz not out of curiosity but out of a crippling desire to quell the voice which reminded me that it had been a long, long time since I read a book. The book discussed the lives of a bunch of young men and women: an actor, a civil servant, an art critic and a few others who spent their evenings and nights in a houseboat, Adrift on the Nile—as the title suggests— discussing love, life, the world around them, the world they never saw at all… all in semi-mysterious ways under the influence of cannabis. They passed around the pipe, languidly chatting, occasionally laughing and generally at ease with themselves and their sins.
Like most good books, Mahfouz’s novella not only conjured up images of acacia blossoms and gleaming lights from the Nile but also forced me to evaluate traces of my shaky reality jammed amidst the writer’s lines. The way I saw it, the book was about a bunch of things: the fall of the Egyptian bourgeois, religion and sin, conflicting morality. But nothing was as striking as the houseboat which took care of their laughter and gently cradled their gloom.
Before me I saw Mahfouz’s houseboat shrink and dissolve in the Nile and in its place rose spaces which cradled me, put me to sleep. The noisy Irani café, a friend’s terrace at 3 in the morning which favoured unshielded conversations, the arms of someone intimate, the jhoola at home on a quiet afternoon. These were to me what the houseboat was to Anis Zaki (the protagonist) and his friends. It was an asylum, a refugee. I couldn’t inhabit these spaces for too long but as long as I was there, I was secure. Secure in my madness, my sanity, my joy and most importantly my gloom.
These spaces don’t wash away gloom like rain does dust. They have a knack of reproducing your gloom, maybe even amplifying it. But along with that amplification stems the strong held conviction that maybe this gloom isn’t all that bad. It like anything else is a part of life, part of a meaningful life and it feels better to accept this gloom than to try to force your way out of it. Without this gloominess, I wouldn’t be me. And who else could I possibly be? My gloom is free in these spaces. I don’t bite my tongue, I don’t censor my crude moments, my sharp tears. I watch them rise and fall: dip high and low and wait for the sense of calm to come to me the way a kite-flyer waits for breeze.
Spaces like the houseboat move you so much that you feel compelled to protect them. Sana, one of the characters in the novella at one point asks why the rest of them wanted to invite a dangerous woman to the houseboat. This insecurity of hers is important to note because it mirrors to a large extent how commoners feel about their country, their home, their family. They aren’t easy constructs to live with because they harbor so much pain. But they are ours. And so are the smaller spaces like the houseboat. So every time I find my ‘houseboat’ (whatever it might be at that point of my life) threatened, its existence terrorized I find myself wanting to preserve it the way it has time and again preserved my blue moments. To these spaces, I owe loyalty. I owe it commitment and to let the outside world ruin its existence seems to betray everything captivating about it.
The sad part about spaces like these is that they don’t last forever. It’s beauty is in its impermanence. And like Anis Zaki and the rest, there comes a point when we have to leave our respective houseboats and find newer asylums to reside in. And perhaps, part of us rests with that space. With the dissolution of that space, a part of us dissolves too. But the reassuring aspect of life is that there will always be newer houseboats which honour our gloom and teach us to do the same.
*to Abhishek E.A.
asifwordssuffice 