Well, I just finished reading my book and its funny how the ending, just a short ending, affected me so much. In a way I was pretty much sad and "disturbed" by the "happy ending"(shall explain later) and its been a while since I felt like that after reading something.

The plot revolves around a writer who abandoned his normal way of living in search of his wife, who left him with nothing and no warning suddenly. Along the way, he learned and re-learned things about himself that he did not know previously, and saw the reason for his wife's departure. He also met a person, another man, whom it was rumored that his wife had intimate relationships with. He hated that man at first, and the more he knew about him, the more he respected that man for he was on a mission to spread the message of love and had taught him a lot about the writer himself. That man told him where to find his wife, and went along with him (both of them were separated with her for different periods of time) to his native country. After separating for more than 2 years, he finally reunited with her happily. She told him that she was waiting for him all along to come and find her.

She agreed to follow the writer back to France, where they lived.

Then she said that she was pregnant. The baby belonged to the man who had guided the writer there in the first place.

I guessed this is the point I grew disturbed. No doubt this is a happy ending (reunion), but from the way the writer reacted, "I laughed, even though my heart was breaking", I could sense an overwhelming sense of disappointment. It got me thinking of what I would do if I were the writer.

Guess I am still rather conservative after all.

On the other hand, for my friend who had kept asking me what Zahir meant, this is it.

The all-powerful Zahir seemed to be born with every human being and to gain full strength in childhood, imposing rules that would thereafter always be respected:
People who are different are dangerous; they belong to another tribe; they want our lands and our women.
We must marry, have children, reproduce the species.
Love is only a small thing, enough for one person, and any suggestion that the heart might be larger than this is considered perverse.
When we marry, we are authorised to take possession of the other person, body and soul.
We must do jobs we detest because we are part of an organised society, and if everyone did what they wanted to do, the world would come to a standstill.
We must be amusing at all times and sneer at those who express their real feelings; it's dangerous for a tribe to allow its members to show their feelings.
What other people think is more important than what we feel.
Never make a fuss, it might attract the attention of an enemy tribe.
If you behave differently, you will be expelled from the tribe because you could infect others and destroy something that was extremely difficult to organise in the first place.
We must eat three meals a day, even if we're not hungry, and when we fail to fit the current ideal of beauty we must fast, even if we're starving.
We must dress according to the dictates of fashion, make love whether we feel like it or not, kill in the name of our country's frontiers, wish time away so that retirement comes more quickly, elect politicians, complain about the cost of living, change our hairstyle, criticise anyone who is different, go to a religious service on Sunday, Saturday or Friday, depending on our religion, and there beg forgiveness for our sins and puff ourselves up with pride because we know the truth and despise the other tribe, who worship a false god.
We must have a university degree even if we never get a job in the area of knowledge we were forced to study.
We must study things that we will never use, but which someone told us was important to know: algebra, trigonometry, the code of Hammurabi.
We must never make our parents sad, even if this means giving up everything that makes us happy.

Guess its a pretty long list the way the book described it. Look at it carefully and see how many of those things do we adhere in our lives. Life seems mundane when you put it down in black and white. Are we just doing insignificant things every day, without even realizing their insignificance?

Think about it.

Mr Black is a current undergraduate who resides in Singapore. This blog is a non-whimsical reflection of his life and the society in which he lives in at large.

- Confidental -

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