Daily Times

Sir: We all are stories. We are not like stories as something different from a story rather we are stories. The structure of a story mirror reflects life which has a beginning, series and occurrences of events and an end.

The stories which we read are life spectacles narrated as a fiction. They are psychological — emotional introspections. There must be a life to have a story. A life that dauntlessly anchored into the abyss to create meaning for it, a life that has reached the climax of its own journey, only then that life has a story to narrate.

Ordinary lives are not worthy of narration as these lives are trivial in their existence and waiting for the death to close its unworthy traverse from beginning till end. Ordinary life is a life that is sketched through the perspective of others. Ordinary life represented what belongs to others, not ones own. It appropriates itself on the truth of others.

Ordinary lives, consciously and unconsciously, only wait for the death, whereas the lives worthy of narration trying everlastingly to defeat the death by creating their own lives, their own truth. The whole life which we live is a story that unfolds every day with a new chapter with experiences that are new and some that are not entirely new. There are never old experiences. There are never repetitions; this is us who remains unaware of their novelty. Repetition is cessation for an organic being like us. But the stories which we are living faced the difficulty of narration.

Difficulty of seeing it in its conscious and unconscious unfolding. Difficulty to understand the shadows looming in our thoughts. How to narrate our present? The present which is not entirely disclosed with all its happenings.

Present is incomplete until it becomes past. Present suffers with becoming. You cannot narrate the becoming. To narrate the present, it must become the past. May be its difficult to comprehend that how life is a story that is a form of fiction.

So, it may be called that life is also a fiction? No, it’s not. Life is real and fiction is something that is unreal. But when we say a story it has life elements in it that are not completely fictional in nature rather they are narrated through the medium of a form of literature that is known as fiction. Every story is life emanating from its plot and characters depicting the truth into which reader immersed and feel as if his life is moving in that narration.

Why we as a reader feel so connected by a story? Because we are feeling the same essence of pain or pleasure, agony or laughter, of displacement, of origin and death which the writer has courage to narrate. These writers turn their reflection towards their own life in retrospect to narrate it as a story. Writer is always at a vantage point in present to reflect upon the past. The past that has been disclosed with its entirety and there was nothing remained as a possibility, nothing remain unconcluded.

The narrated story of the past is something that has been placed and concretized. The past that remains unchanged and the writer only have a chance to choose the moments from so many depends upon the life the writer has led. There are moments to share in a story but they remain like a scar in the past and in the memory of the writer who can only narrate it as sincerely as possible to keep it at bay from being a fiction but can’t change it. Therefore every story is a life experience from the corridors of the past. The resonance in every story is life in narration.

SYED PEERZADA AURANGZEB

Karachi

Published in Daily Times, August 11^th 2017.