Star

It was a dark and starry night, so beautiful that one would want to spend the rest of their life under it, not going anywhere but gazing at those glittering lights that make us mere men feel part of something so universal that we automatically lose ourselves in the beauty of wholesomeness, not particularly coming to terms with the beauty of the artistically lit starry sky. In the midst of the lost people walking down the lane and gazing upwards at the laurel they so often overlook, there was a man who seemed to not care for the starry sky above him but more curious about the ground that lay below his feet. He was a young man, neatly dressed in a shirt and trousers, neither too simple to be a common folk nor too bourgeois to be a tourist, as there were a lot of tourists during that time of the year; no, this was definitely someone different, someone who had something in mind about everything, about the way he combed his hair, about the way he dressed, about the way he walked and about the way he ceaselessly and carelessly stared at the ground.

His name was Hakim and he belonged to a well established family in the town that had a reputation of being earnest and modest, not involved in anything shady or under the table, a rare quality among the people in this city, this sin city where everyone was out to hustle someone else. Hakim pursued a degree in medicine from the local medical college and was an average student at that. However, being an average student, he was pretty well-known around the college for his jubilant and loquacious nature which when combined together with his good temperament became the very identity every student in his college wanted to have. Not that these charms and the popularity was handed to him overnight, they were a culmination of his stand-up nature among other students and his gentle heart when it came to helping others. He always wanted to bring some or the other kind of change, to better people’s lives in any way that he could, or at least try to create a sense of wanting in those who were wronged, a want of justice, and those who were exploited, a want of equality, and when this want became more and more obvious through the unification of more and more wronged and exploited people, there emerged a movement, a movement of which he was the central character, although he never wanted it. No, he was much more of an artist.

He didn’t know why he was stuck in doing medicine in the first place. Oh yes, parental pressure, a young man had to think about his future, and what future does a man have in writing stupid stories but the future of hunger and starvation, the boy’s parents thought and they thought well too because they were not in a position to have their son wander off into the Bohemian life as they were already living one. They weren’t off very well and their family business suffered heavy losses, along with serious life-threatening trouble to Hakim’s ill father and so Hakim had to look for a job that granted him stability, not out of desire but out of compulsion, and a doctor’s job was all the stability that his parents demanded of him, and so he was enrolled in the local medical college, through a monetary tribulation of donations and thus ended the artistic dream of Hakim.

This was psychologically conflicting to Hakim, and added to that were the confusions people around him, his relatives created by telling him what a right and just choice the boy had made when he knew in his heart what a wrong choice he had made and that he would eventually come to regret that choice sooner or later, and the only thing he could do now was to live his whole life with this devil inside him, with no way, no means to went it out.

His college life started with him absolutely loathing it and finding it an assault to his free will, which he made a point to have duly noted by the professors by being an outrageous renegade during the lectures and with teachers. He was a smart boy, undoubtedly the smartest in the class and used his knowledge, combined with his smartness and made a weapon so sharp that it cut like a razor blade cleanly through the master-slave style teaching in the college by challenging the textual stance of the teacher whenever he got the opportunity to do so. Being a first-year student, there was a certain level of dormancy he had to follow, according to the system if not with the teachers at least with the seniors, which he absolutely broke too by associating himself the seniors whether they liked it or not. This created havoc among other first-year students and he became a symbol of greatness for them, a messiah and kind of a problem solver and so now the other fresher students started to come to Hakim with their problems.

Problems were all different; with different tones and different levels of implications but the bottom-line of the problems faced by the students was one- the system. The nature of the college administration had become too autocratic, too hegemonic for the students to bear and something had to be done from students’ part to end this hegemony, Hakim thought, much due to his own grudge with the system, his own suffering due to authority, due to lack of choice lack of freedom and if anytime Hakim felt these emotions of liberation grow the strongest, it was now more than ever. He knew what he had to do, but he had to talk to the seniors first about the idea; it has never been done before, they said but he didn’t care for there is always a start to everything but the preparations had to be big, they had to be ever reaching to high heavens so that sufferings of the students could be abated once and for all. 

Three days later, the college went on a strike the likes of which whole city had never seen before. The college gates were barricaded with motor-cycles, tables and college furniture and the big red flags hung from all sides of the college windows like a danger sign for the things that were about to happen. The principal had to be held by peons after he saw the sight and saw what had become of his college, an urban guerilla warzone with all the barricading and the hordes of students in front of the crashed gate of the college protesting and shouting slogans, some bearing red flags and waving it valiantly across the faces of the standing professors and administrators who had not an emotion on their faces, not even horror at this civil spectacle. Hakim was standing atop two tables stacked on top of one another and held a microphone in his hands and he started speaking “We are the students of this college. If anything, we are the owners of this college. It is for us that this college stands and its primary duty is to provide us with the kind of environment we want but lately it hasn’t been that way. Lately, we have been, had, we’ve been took, we’ve been led astray, we’ve been taken advantage of, we’ve been bamboozled, we’ve been hoodwinked and every right that we hold were stripped off us. Well, it’s about time we fight for our rights. Now they can defeat us, they can threaten us, break us down but they cannot break down our ideas because ideas do not shatter, they do not falter, ideas are incorruptible and ideas are bullet proof. Our student rights will prevail and will safeguard any student who is harassed in future. We do not ask for much, but whatever we ask of you now, we ask with force. We want student power!”

And the whole place roared with slogans of ‘student power’ and ‘student liberation’ and that place became a witness to one of the most radical student protests the city had ever known. The protest didn’t have the desired effect the students wanted. After the protest, the college was shut down for about ten days and although no disciplinary action was taken against any of the agitators, the message that any future act of this sort won’t be tolerated again was put across firmly and the silence of the holidays did the rest. After the holidays, the students took to their usual routine, although for Hakim, his protest earned him a position of prime repute among the students as nobody ever held before. The system won but Hakim didn’t lose either.

Two years later, Hakim was a figure of importance in college matters and not only the juniors and his peers but also the teachers looked to him as someone whom they knew was worth knowing. Hakim did for his fellow students what no other boy before him ever sought to do, even though they were under the same circumstances and felt the same autonomy crushing them but only some people know that winning or losing a fight isn’t important, what’s most important is fighting a battle.

The figure in the cleanly dressed shirt was still gazing the ground. Hakim was lost in the black asphalt, as if in that black asphalt, he saw a reflection of the stars that were shining over him or maybe it was something completely different altogether. Maybe he didn’t wish to be dazzled by the dazzle of the stars, but look at the ground beneath his feet, firm and resolute being able to take the weight of the world, maybe the ground is not as romantic as the stars but it is certainly much more heroic, and much more symbolic to our lives because it teaches us that there is a world that we see and the world that we are in, and that the starry sky is the world that we see, and that the ground is the world that we’re in, and sometimes we need to take a minute from gazing what we see and actually come to terms with what actually is. 

Reviews

[Nikki]

The beginning is a bit confusing, but once you get into it, it's really good!

[kamran]

If you see the story, the bit at the start connects with the bit at the end, to compile the symbolic unity of the story, i.e. the relationship between the star and the ground, and their respective temperament.