Compulsory Planetary Reading: Mohsin Zaidi’s ‘A Dutiful Boy’
“Saying the words made me feel like I’d been released from the dark pit of my imagination, allowed for a moment to stretch and scream.”
“Did I choose for my heart to beat or my lungs to demand air?”
I utterly inhaled this exquisitely-crafted memoir over the course of several long walks by the loch in the rain this past week of regularly-scheduled panic and pandemic.
“My mind was a prison but it was also the only place where I was free.”
“I imagined each day of my life as the page of a colouring book, each with a unique, intricate and indecipherable pattern. There were a finite number of pages. I wanted the remaining pages to burst with bright blues and reds and yellows instead of the blacks and greys of the ones that went before…”
It’s heart-shreddingly good – a visceral exploration of the messy and mellifluous intersections of sexuality, race, class, faith, family, identity, and belonging as a Muslim boy from Walthamstow embarks on the long treacherous voyage to come out to his Pakistani parents.
“I don’t think one can fully appreciate what it means to cry uncontrollably until it happens to you. It isn’t your eyes that shed tears. It isn’t your mouth that groans. It is your soul weeping.”
“I’d spent all this time worrying that I was in free fall, but now I realised I was flying.”
A Dutiful Boy is one of those books I wish everyone on the planet would read – one of those books I wish I could press into every single prejudiced hand imploring them to sink into its words and soak in its pain until they can’t stand to harbour a solitary sliver of hatred in their hearts for evermore.
“Out of the bathroom window my eyes fixed onto a lone star. It shone so brightly, all by itself in the night-time sky. I became hypnotised by its aloneness. I knew that somehow, by living this half-life of mine, I had jettisoned the most important part of me. I had abandoned the little boy I had once been, full of possibility and feeling. He’d been banished to the prison of my own making. Wherever he was right now, it felt like he was looking at that star too. As if for the first time since parting ways, we had been reunited. A surge of hope came over me. It might not be too late to save him. It was startling how real he suddenly was and how important it felt to find my way back to him. He was a little boy, crouched on the ground, his arms wrapped around his knees, in a damp, cold room. He wore shorts the same shade of green as the Pakistan flag. It was painful to reflect on how badly I had treated him, the hatred I had shown him.
When he’d tried to whisper to me I’d slapped him down. When he’d sought my attention I’d called him a jinn, or the devil, I hated myself that much. The boy had wounds that had dried and scarred. Wounds that kept healing because he refused to die, because his life force was stronger than mine, because he was made of the truth. Any light in my life came from him. I offered my hand. I would not mistreat him any more. He took it. I told him I was scared too.”
Imagine a world where we just loved each other, listened to each other, let each other live.
Imagine.
“We each have a story to tell. We’ve each felt like the outsider, with onlookers twitching from behind their curtains in judgement, as we stand alone in the street. So what are these stories? I have a feeling there is a lot to be learned by listening to them.”
This by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò jumps to mind on constructive epistemology, connection, and collective liberation.
“What matters is not this story, not my story, but the story of what happens next.”
