Daily Times

You find yourself sitting alone in a room and all that exists around you is the sound of your own breathing, the erratic oppressive beating of your heart and the clicking of your toenails against the wall. You cannot see beyond this moment; it is all that exists. It also happens to be the moment that Jupiter and Venus are about to pass each other in the skies — a rare event. And at this moment it would be a great tragedy if you could not experience anything outside yourself. Probably an even greater tragedy than the fact that, lately, you do not feel connected to the world around you. Then you get a text message; it is the picture of a celestial romance. You stare at the two fiery bodies, their bright halos comingled like oppositely charged magnetic fields, and you know that you should go outside and bear witness to this incredible moment. The caption reads: “Two solitary worlds merely 760 miles from each other!” For a moment you are afraid that they might collide, leading to a cataclysm in the solar system. But then you regain your cognition and foolishly text back, “Good thing they have their own orbits, right?”
She stands atop a rooftop in Shahdrah, peering through a telescope. She is sending her friends pictures of the worlds that she has documented. Sometimes her captions are as simple as “moon right now”; sometimes they are rather spiritual. Some will understand their significance but many will not. Today’s observation, however, is special. This is the culmination of countless nights spent hunched over her telescope, searching for Jupiter. The moon is usually visible but Jupiter can be hard to find through the thick haze that perpetually hangs over Lahore, obscuring the view of world beyond our own and severing our connection to the universe. Only an experienced astronomer can figure out how to position a telescope to locate the mysterious planet. Now, illuminated by Venus, Jupiter can be seen in the naked sky. On this 30th day of June, 2015 millions of people will be watching the two planets, entangled in their slow dance, sharing a unique moment of awe and silent reflection that is almost a collective silent prayer.
This is an unmatched moment for any sky watcher and she will talk about it endlessly for several days to come with anyone who will listen. She is a dedicated, albeit amateur, astronomer and it vexes her that there none of the best astronomy programmes are available in Pakistani colleges, which makes her reluctant to apply to college or decide what she will do after completing her FSC. Astronomy is more poetry to her than science. The movements of the planets and the stars are stories, metaphors even, of the human experience. She does not merely seek scientific answers for why Venus and Jupiter act this way, although she knows all of them.
Jupiter’s circumference is nearly 11 times that of Earth’s but Venus is about the same size as our planet. If you peer at them in the sky without a telescope, they seem so miniscule, grand but miniscule. But Venus looks brighter in the Earth’s sky. Time moves slowly for Venus. One of her days is 116 Earth days and 18 Earth hours. A day for Jupiter is merely nine Earth hours and 56 Earth minutes. And they pass too darkly in the endless night to ever reach each other. Jupiter’s heart is forever on fire, his body is a mass of compressed gas, the most volatile form of matter. Venus is a pensive observer, a silent drifter. She searches for something and she does not know what it is. She is searching for what she is searching for. The watcher too, does not know exactly what she is looking for but she enjoys the search enough for it not to matter.
As far as her parents are concerned she might as well be watching television. They have their set notions of what she should be doing with her life. She must do well on her exams. She must get married one day. But she lives in a world of her own. Her favourite astronomy topic is the possibility of life on other planets, astrobiology, and the astronomers’ dream of finding a way to live on the moon. If ever given the chance to relocate to the moon or another planet, she would take it but first she wants to explore her own world, her Lahore, which she furiously insists Shahdrah is a part of to anyone who might feel differently. So she travels to the Walled City on the metro bus, looks for residents who can tell her the history of the ancient architecture and spends hours googling the history of Icchra, which she believes is the oldest part of Lahore. Her expeditions are considered “crazy” by her family members, some of whom suggest that she go abroad for college because she will always be a misfit here. But truthfully, she is not that interested in making plans for the future or choosing a career to aspire to. Her life is about the journey and what she discovers along the way. Like Aurelius, she wants to “Watch the stars, and see [herself] running with them.”

The writer is an Assistant Editor at Daily Times. She can be reached at amar_alam1993@yahoo.com