My Defeat

My degrees offered me opportunities to work in the Middle East, Australia, the UK and South East Asia. Also, I have been happily married and blessed with three children and now two grandchildren.

Prologue

Life is a battlefield. Every living species fights a different battle; therefore, I can only talk about mine.

There are two battles that I have been fighting all my life: outer and inner. I am winner in my outer battle but the inner battles leave me wounded and defeated.

Outer Battle

I was lucky to be born in a family where my parents could offer the basic necessities of life. In addition, I was blessed with three distinctions: discipline, diligence and motivation. And, then my fate took me – first to what was then West Pakistan (1966-73) where I did my college and university and then to the USA (1977-82) where I earned an MS and PhD in Petroleum Engineering.

My degrees offered me opportunities to work in the Middle East, Australia, the UK and South East Asia. Also, I have been happily married and blessed with three children and now two grandchildren.

Metaphorically, my life has been a mango seed in the hands of a farmer who sowed it in fertile soil. When the seed sprouted, he watered it regularly and protected it from the grazing cattle.  In time, the tree provided shade to his cattle, allowed birds to nest and hosted blossoms with fragrant flowers for bees to suck honey. Finally, it produced scented, sweet mangoes for men, monkeys, crows, flies and even nocturnal bats to enjoy.

Inner Battles

While I have been born with positive traits, I have also always been a sensitive, sentimental and emotional man. But my serious limitations have been timidity, poor reflexes and ineptitude in handling tools. So, I ended up being an introverted passive thinker as opposed to being proactive and assertive.

Leadership is a quality I lack. I do not regret this, for it offered me the opportunity to spend time with my kids – to read them stories, play with them, take them to parks and drive them to after-hour school activities. It also gave me time to keep my journal up to date and, as my childhood habit, attend to household chores, raking dry leaves and gardening. I would go running with our dog, Spotty, give him bath weekly and keep him clean. While I failed to become a manager at work, I became a devoted family man.

But in my inner world I would endure agonies witnessing injustice and cruelty on this planet. The hate, anger and jealousy that I possess pained me too. The following episodes are excerpts from my diaries to reflect on my inner struggles.

Cowardice, Dacca 1960

I am in Grade 4 at the cantonment primary school. I watch silently as my classmate Abul Bashar is bullied by a couple of other boys. I do not have the courage to stand up for him.

It hurts me today just as it hurt me then. This episode remains one of the most shameful regrets of my life.

Famine, Sudan 1998

There is a serious famine in Sudan. The photographs of skeletal children with their out-of-proportion heads and bulging eyes are too painful to bear. Through their pain, I see my selfishness. Through their suffering, I begin to suffer.

Destruction, Brisbane 2001

As I water a lone sugar cane that I planted a while ago, I realise that it is foolish to consider oneself non-violent on the basis of becoming a vegetarian. I ask myself: Do the ants that I stamp on or drown suffer the same pain that humans endure when they are crushed under tons of rubble or swept away by a tidal bore? I know they do, for I see them running for their lives.

Even if one lives on vegetables, God knows how many lives are destroyed as lands are ploughed, plants are watered and crops are harvested. I begin to see that living is rooted in violence, for life is sustained by life.

Violence, Brisbane 2001

It is cold morning. I step onto the lawn to get some sun. The plants, leaves and flowers, wearing dazzling dew, gently waving in the soft breeze, looks beautiful. Then it occurs to me that I am blocking the sun, a vital source of their nourishment. So, I move aside. But it is not enough. I am still blocking the sun, this time from the grass. And worse, I am crushing it under my feet. I return to the driveway, under the shade of trees. I prefer plants to block the sun from me, rather than I should block it from them.

Killing Ground, World 2022

While the world struggles to cope with Covid-19 the New Year begins with the Ukraine invasion. The world news no longer focuses on the bleeding wounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. The ongoing casualties in Syria and Yemen have become the norm, while it is needless to mention the endless Palestinian saga.

Since Cain killed his brother Abel the Earth has increasingly become a killing ground. Man now has the capability to destroy the world many times over. Beyond the age-old bayonets, bullets and bombs, there is now a new paradigm in modern warfare: 'Gitmo,' 'WMD,' 'drone attack' and 'collateral damage' – meaning 'no innocent blood on my hands.'

Epilogue

As I reflect on my life, I realise that my instincts, impulses, and emotion control my reactions. On one hand, I suffer for the suffering world and, on the other hand, I suffer for my weaknesses. So, I ask myself: how do I know that the life on this earth is not another world's hell?  Or, perhaps, at the beginning of time, an all-powerful Author writes an epic masterpiece. Once the writing is done, He brings the story to life such that all the fictional characters become real. I am one of countless fictional characters playing a scripted role and, my wound, my pain and my defeat are all part of that eternal, epic masterpiece.

Or, maybe, in the beginning, the omnipotent God, with His countless senses and dimensions, creates a seed – call it the 'primal seed.' He infuses it with life's essential ingredients: instructions, knowledge, code, memory and, above all, adaptability. In time the seed evolves and diversifies within earth's varied environment, giving rise to diverse species – plants, land and aquatic animals, birds, insects and humans.

Therefore, human knowledge and wisdom, actions and reactions, joy and suffering, victory and defeat are nothing but fruit, like the fruit in the trees – some are sweet, some are sour, some are bitter and some are even poisonous. But they all offer, in different ways, nourishment to the living world.

In that sense, Einstein's scientific achievement, Tagore's literary brilliance, Gandhi's non-violence and Hitler's brutality are all to do with the seeds they were born of. Like a river, life runs its course and all living species, big and small, beautiful and ugly and loving and fearsome are essentially equal. It all boils down to the primal seed God created in His infinite wisdom.

Tohon is a short story writer for The Daily Star and the author of Emil Joseph Burcik (2021), Life's Invisible Battles (2020), The Jihadi (2016) and The Landscape of a Mind (2015).