In Goat Days, Benyamin ponders our ability to adapt to little things in life

We stealthily make comments about another person’s eye, sometimes also called another person’s perspective. Virginia Woolf while out on an evening in London City decides to observe it. This includes the act of observing the happenings around and no more, meaning that no perspectives taint London yet. All of this happens on her journey to accomplish something extremely substantial, namely buying a pencil. So while she is on her way, she looks around and is cautious of not diminishing the raw beauty of the city by putting her own perspective to it, making the evening about nothing more than what meets the eye.

But generally, we suffice our urgency of knowing another person’s world by creating one that is suitable or at least sustainable for us. For in our world, we can rationalise what we think of their’s without any interruptions. However, while reading Goat Days, I wondered if I could imagine our Malayali protagonist, Najeeb’s world. A world where he is literally possessed by an Arab and whose rules only that Arab understands. In short, a world where the “my” does not refer to one’s possession of oneself, but rather to a “my” that is possessed by another. Could we understand his world and what it would mean when Najeeb would say—“my Arab”?

Interestingly, it seems that his world can somehow be understood. Najeeb soon realises this when he hears the story of many such Indian nationals recounting their tales of agony in the prison whilst awaiting their visas. This is after they have lived in the gulf trying to fulfil the same dreams as him. Najeeb’s greatest worry, however, is whether he should or should not recount what all has happened to him, if what he says is something that has passed only with him and whether he is in a better position to pour out his grief or not. Many of us, including myself, would be able to understand the problem of his grief since we now live in a world where pandemic is part of our common existence and the question of whether we could talk to another person about our grief, a general one. It then seems only obvious to note what Woolf writes about the modernist world in the same essay, the one where she wanders around in London. In it, she says of the current state of humanity, that it is,“Kind, tired and apathetic”.

Our protagonist’s fate seems like the worst one that can be dealt him, until he mutes the shouts of his own world and opens up the space for other (people) world’s stories and lives to enter his’. Muting becomes important for both, sympathy as well as relief. Drops of rain falling on Najeeb’s body becomes a painful experience in the desert, when memory explodes into a thousand little numbing sensations. He writhes in pain as the memory of his body triggers the memory of a past when water was available aplenty. I, too, writhed as if recognising Najeeb’s bodily memory. It so happened that while I was out eating spaghetti, the taste of the Olive Oil touching my tongue, months after an era of my life spent in Spain came to an end, made it impossible for me to eat it. That bodily memory also left me asking, as it did Najeeb most of the time, if we could understand and feel his suffering and pain. So inexplicable is the quandary, that it seems that he even mockingly asks us to imagine his longing for just a bit of shade in the desert;

“You can imagine my suffering if that was what I dreamt of and longed for.”

Could we really imagine it at all? Ironically enough, in a world that is together socially and virtually, the grief that one lives with oneself remains hidden, remains personal somehow. I still do not know, neither could I talk about the circumstances in which I left Spain and came to India. Everyone suffered in that 9-hour long fate as me and Najeeb feels the same as he enters the freeness of the captivity of the prison, yet his sorrow is his’ and the sorrow of so many others — unheard, unquenched and best kept at a silent bay.

Najeeb’s fate leads him to forget about any memories of his homeland, all worries seem small in front of the worry that lies naked in front of him; an Arab in possession of his being. For Najeeb these are sweet and, therefore, all the more painful memories of his country. I remember distinctly breathing a sigh of relief and sensing fear, having realised that I was far from Delhi in the January of 2020, when Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in the capital. It was something that one could not imagine happening in the current times, but they had happened all the same in the history of modern India. However, the feeling of relief was greater this time, the tiredness of the debates based on facts, facts and facts of who had done it first, overshadowing the nostalgia and fear for my city. Henceforth, I found myself also sympathising, but only with the wholesome past of India and not the secular present of a democracy of facts. Subsequently reiterating in a foreign nation, much like Najeeb that, “No one else could have realised how far my dreams were from the reality of my situation.” These, however, were the bigger things and bigger causes of concern.

Simpler dilemmas in life like washing one’s backside after finishing their natural businesses, take precedence in Benyamin’s story telling. He tells us about how the smaller, daily dilemmas can go on to become a sight of great concern and withering of the self over time. Who Najeeb is fades due to lack of water and his consequent inability to wash his backside after taking a dump. I perhaps started fading, too, by a certain lack of my way of clothing, eating and even driving. Though unnoticed before, smaller nudges about all these aspects articulated as a general comment sweetly enveloped in care, became corrosive over time. Therefore, one never really did realise when one was shaped into SOMETHING; as Najeeb had become a goat and I, too, had become a predetermined perspective. A way of being that was earlier natural to me became something that I was constantly conscious about. Those simple, unrecognisable and banal movements of the head, the body and the heart, that otherwise went on uninterrupted, became the greatest and most significant change in my-self. After all, it is usually that one stream of words, which when paid heed to, that changes something fundamental in you, something as natural as washing one’s backside after the “early morning ablutions”. The veteran actress Sharmila Tagore shares one important instance which came into my current repertoire at an opportune moment. It talks about the time when she switched from eating fish regularly to other eating options, an otherwise small change for the rest of her family in-law, turned out to be a change big enough for her.

Najeeb confides in us, so we could share too;

“I was apprehensive of sharing this with you. Then I decided I must, merely to explain how apparently trifling issues agitate and distress us.”

And so, Najeeb’s unsent letters of his well-being inadvertently become our letters home too.