School Without Breakfast

Chapter 3.

The Lack of Self Care

I have started developing a real patience for FaceBook. An online socialising web site which, let's face it, everyone reading this knows more about than I do. There's a button you can click there, it's called "Play the FRIENDS game" or something along those lines. The point? You guessed it. Random questions based on your friends profiles and a multiple choice with faces to pick the correct friend for the correct bit of trivia from their profile.

After the first 3 minutes, it got VERY boring.

After the next 2, it got depressing. I had only 2 right. And that too because one of the questions repeated right after itself, but it gave me the points none the less.

I love my friends. But they will never know this. Sometimes I think I just have very little patience for socialising. I have maybe 4 friends I meet even NEAR to a regular basis, and the rest of my friends are people that Orkut tells me they are. I'm impressionable and I hate to argue. So I got with it.

I think I've always been like this. My primary education or "IBTIDAI TALEEM" (which is a word anyone failing Urdu Literature as badly as I always have will know very well) was at Beaconhouse Public. That was a nice school. Some of the closest people to my heart are people I know from there. Even if I don't meet them everyday, I pray for them every single night. That is when I'm not too busy doing some form of drug or alcohol. But I rarely pray for myself.

Maybe I should start.

The school, - after a point when we lose our innocence in life - like any other institution, was not without its fair share of politics. Something you will learn I have come to hate about mankind. I remember once when we were in the higher classes, we got our first dose of a real life SCANDAL.

A girl and a boy, were caught making out in the bathroom.

I don't think I've ever been more awakened to how different I always was from most minds than the moment this became news. You see, to most people, the scandal was that a boy and a girl were caught making out by a teacher.

To me, the scandal was that it was in the BATHROOM. And if you ever went to the Beaconhouse Public School, a place which was more public than school, you would know why that was a bit more disturbing to me than the earlier part of the news. You would think, that those peons were actually being paid to do something about the conditions of the bathrooms in that place. You would think it, but you'd be wrong. Then again, if you actually saw some of the students that went to the school, you wouldn't be too eager to clean up after them in the bathroom either. No matter what class of person you might be (CLASS being a word I hate with all my heart), there are certain things even a peon shouldnt have to do.

The strange thing is...the only people who would be willing to actually use the bathroom in that craphole, were the people who you wouldn't want to go near anyway.

I spent entire years of my life, going to school without breakfast, from the fear of having to suddenly go to the bathroom and having no options but the ones provided. So I never ate breakfast, and all it did was lead to my inevitable academic downfall, what with it being the most important meal of the day and all, but it was worth it. Infact I think the only time I ever went in there was to avoid an Islamiat class because as usual, I hadn't memorised parts of a language I didn't even speak, and the teacher, being an Islamiat teacher, rarely got laid for recreational purposes, and so took it all out on the poor unsuspecting students.


Another personal quirk of mine that developed thanks to my lack of self care and my deathly fear of those toilets, was the entire 5 hours in school I used to go through without a single reminder to what my hair was looking like. I often thought people were staring at me because I'm fat, which, sick as it sounds, I find to be a better reason to stare at someone than because their hair is all messed up.

The only time I ever cared about the hair on my head, as is the case even now, is when I accidentally walk in front of any reflective surface. That's always when I realised the horror of having looked like the many different people I've looked like throughout the years and because of what? Because I didn't care? Because I was never in the habit of constantly combing or setting my hair with my hands or fingers out of the loose complex that my hair might be looking off? For worrying about more important things like my imagination, and the people I can help with it?

For not caring about a gust of wind hitting my face because it felt so good at the time I didn't bother to think about what it was doing to my hair, and how the shallow people around me would react to it?

I like to think of it like this. If God throws wind in my face, I love it, I won't start worrying about my hair and make it everytime that happens because if God wants my hair to look like that, who am I to defy Him, right? Because anyone who defies God, is challenging God, and if that be the case then that person is trying to BE God. And that, is shirk, right dear friends? So anyone who ever does their hair EVER again is SHIRKING! Right? So doing your hair is shirk.

I could grow a beard, learn the positions for namaz correctly and travel to interior Punjab and polish my people screaming skills. I could make them think that killing people who do their hair is the only way into heaven, because let's face it, their prerequisites for calling a man a prophet are that the man must have a beard, a megaphone, he must not SAY he's a prophet and he must tell us where to vent out all this anger we have inside due to lack of sexual relations. Atleast with women.

I could train these poor dumb souls. And one night, in two very large port containers, I could drop them right in the middle of Nazimabad. A part of Karachi where, undoubtedly, the largest number of oil loving hair concious men reside.

I could do it.

But I won't.