Fizza Shabbir Lost Word

Lost Word

Fizza Shabbir

Makina wasn’t dead, but she might as well have been, or so she thought to herself. Had the earth’s gravity not pulled her to the ground under her feet, perhaps she would have floated long ago, approaching some distant planet by now. But that was not the case. She was here, and this was real. She was withering away.

It started when she was 8, the first time it happened. On the first day of school, in the middle of April in Al-Wakarah, when the country practically felt as though it was placed on top of a giant God-sized cooker, in the midst remained Makina and the forgotten word “from.” When the teacher questioned her, like she had every other student in the class so far, to tell their name and where they were from, Makina felt an ache in her stomach that could not be remedied by any of the medicine found in the nurse’s office, or for that matter even inside her grandfather’s Hakeem shop. She couldn’t understand what the question meant, for she didn’t understand what “from” meant.

Frantically searching her backpack of vocabulary for a word she never anticipated using, she came to the conclusion that she never had it in the first place. How was she to make sense of something that she had never even known. How does one reach a location if there are no roads? The ache in her stomach at this point had found its way to her throat, finally resting in her mouth, as the words would not come out. She had always known what to say, but today was not one of those days. Today was a day that she would remember for the rest of her short-lived existence. While those around her appeared in wonderful writing and lovely drawings, Makina had come to think of herself as an accidental mark that

had been left by someone trying to create something beautiful, but failing miserably, and in the midst forgetting to erase the unintended blot—a fluke, she was. Like one of those “happy accidents” people would always talk about, but, unfortunately for her, there was nothing “happy” about this. It was, as it appeared to be, only an “accident” An “accident” that could not even bear to answer a simple question and could neither stand the silence. Yet, for some reason, it was the latter that pulled her out. The need to say something always, to fill in the blanks. Where are you from?, Makina stared at the question that had leaped in her hands and gulped the ache forcing it back into her stomach, only to utter the one word she had known to be true to herself: “Makina.”

As she sat back down, it is important to note that the repercussions of this incident wouldn’t be known to her until much later in life, as a girl would be rendered useless because of her language.

The embarrassment had eaten its way through her heart in the car ride back home, and that day when Makina stepped inside the walls of her house, there was no “Salaam” or “Hello” or “Hi.” She was determined to get to the bottom of this and so the routinely “hellos” and “what happened at school” had to fall aside or for the most part, wait. For now, it was only her, the word and the unsolved mystery of its disappearance. And so when she finally got back home, she ran to her bedroom and sprawled all the words in her bag on her white bedroom floor. The words stood out on top of the marbled floor as she moved through each and every one of them, looking carefully for the one word she couldn’t find. She wondered if she had misplaced it, accidentally put it in her other bag which contained only Urdu, but how could that be? She had barely touched the other one. How can a word just suddenly disappear? Was it a case where the word grew its own legs and had walked off, as some adults might say to scare little kids when they wouldn’t care for their

language? But how could that be? It was only a story, right? Right. But somewhere deep within some corner of her mind, a blurred image of a girl and a word displaced began to take shape. The memory trying to come alive in bits and fragments like one of those burnt film photos. Makina could only make up parts of what her 8-year-old brain allowed her to—the rest she had to fill in with her imagination. No difficult feat, Makina thought to herself, she was always good at filling in the blanks, but she had failed to recognize the dangers of toying with memory. The thought that she might find something she would have been better off without knowing had not even occurred to her. She was determined, but like all determined heroes of the past, she was bound to fail. The sad part however? No one knew it would happen to her this early.

As the image started to take place and Makina began to fill in the blanks, everything became just a little bit clearer. Although no way near to solving the mystery, it was now at least clear of when it had happened—the fatal incident of the lost word that would pull apart herself from herself.

Memory was unclear, but the questions poured unprompted. Nothing could prepare her for this moment. The pandora’s box was open and the lid was nowhere to be found. Was the word stolen from her as a little child? Yanked out of her little baby hands? On the day her family moved continents and enlisted her a lifetime of non-belonging, did she also lose something else? Or was it because of it? “From” nowhere to be found, a lost child no one bothered to look for. She wondered had her parents brought the preposition with them instead of her what would have happened. Was it her fault? Did she accidentally leave it somewhere? In some terminal’s bathroom? Between the food trays of the airplane? In the middle of immigration lines? Did it accidentally slip from her passport or purposely hide inside a security conveyor belt?

Makina was fading. Starting with her eyes and then slowly her nose and moving to her lips. Makina didn’t know herself, and so her face started to disappear. Who knew how much a simple word meant to her existence.

On her last day, Makina nestled a prayer hoping one day even after she was gone, the word would find its place back to her lap, and maybe she would finally be able to know where she belonged. She wondered where “from” rested and if it too withering away like her.

Almost

Baraa Al Jorf

Digital art