Ideally everyday

how to human

On our first day in Chitral, my dad and I went for a morning walk, proudly wrapped up in our keffiyehs that he brought back from a trip to Jordan. We wanted to find the river and explore the market, where we bought some tissues and washing powder and biscuits. It was a good time for chai, around 7 am or so, and so we asked the keeper of the shop whether any place nearby would be open to serve. He said it might be too early, immediately followed by an offer to give us chai himself. City slickers that we are, we politely refused, unused to the casual hospitality of the village.

So the man offered another alternative, a dhaaba right opposite the shop that was apparently just about to open. We agreed to wait. Eventually, a walk up and down that street led us back to the same shop, where the guys insisted that we just have tea there. So we did. The man dragged out two small chairs towards a little round table by the bakery section and poured us two cups from his personal kettle, followed by four pieces of cake rusk, handed to us over the counter on a piece of tissue paper.

Immediately I thought of the generosity and yet very simple kindness of this act: see two people who want tea, offer it to them. It had me thinking about the acts of everyday vs. ideals.

Ideals are what a lot of the world aspires to, the reason we seek to understand the world so that we can live up to something greater, so that we can say yes, I can become this. For example, if we’re talking about the state, let’s say the ideal of ‘human rights’. Imagine creating your whole identity around freedom and democracy and this lofty sense of (non)values, and then being okay with killing children so that the world can have more of those things.

It’s tricky, because when I go from the city to the mountains, I can’t help but want to love everybody there, and lump them into a category of purity and goodness that is absence in the harshness of the metropolis. And while there’s a lot of goodness indeed, and unmatched warmth and kindness, there’s also girls whose brothers don’t let them go to school in the city, and who know they won’t study past Matric because they’re going to get married to someone twice their age.

It’s tempting to want to make generalizations and stories and believe that there is an ideal way to live, and some sweeping statements, I think, do hold true. Like the warmth and kindness; that just seems to be there across the board. And it makes me wonder… if one can be so kind, could it make up for their patriarchalness? Or for their misplaced love for unsavoury political characters?

Then I also remember that humans have been existing for a long, long time, before we had words for things, before we had neat systems to tell us what’s right and wrong. People have always been tending to things, to their homes, their wheat, their flowers, their neighbors, and their guests, and I suppose at the end of the day that’s all we have - our little worlds and how we tend to them. Sometimes, this world will expand, and then we must tend to that expansion. But the things we do are always small. We lose sight of that when we get caught in ideals, I think. Because not only do we never really get there, but we stand to risk the loss of something basic and human and true.