Women and Men of Rung

Sowaibah Shahbaz

Where are the prophets and saviors when you need them? It is nine o’clock at night. Albeit unhealthy, for some this is the start of their day for it marks the beginning of their livelihood. That livelihood snorts them through the space meant for dreams, stealing not just that, but the ability to have a choice. The choice to wake up at a healthy hour, work for the cultivation of passion, and rest when all people with completeness and autonomy do. This is the prayer of this melting heart, which like the brown sugar in the cup of cappuccino, the only companion through this silent night, is mildly distraught. I don’t have the words in English to capture this placid melancholy, which is disguised by my refusal to accept it, as something which is bearable. In actuality it is unbearable. So, my sister through knowing me for twenty nine years, has taken it upon herself to describe the death that takes place at night. Through observing that I swallow complaints than spit them and break my only bread in half, feeding others with both loaves. While ensuring all birthday cakes of all members in the house are placed in the fridge before the night strikes twelve. 

This murder of young men of rung (color), their dreams, their ability which is reduced to one term, “unintelligent”, is racing the jungle of life. This mass murder, through deploying these men to spaces that lack stimulation, love, cultivation is left unobserved by most members of society. The only people who dare to notice and have enough compassion to write about it are the sisters of these men. Who, with guilt, sleep at normal hours as they see their brother and father leave for work at that hour. It is a dangerous affair, going through each night while seeing the world capitulate to rest, finding yourself suspended in this observation of the soul killing of the earnest men which we call our loved ones.

I have to see the silver lining;, that some day, I will save enough to defeat this noxious cycle of work at night, before it defeats me. My murder is underway, I am sliced everyday, a death by thousand knives, one scar bequeathed at the end of each day. With the money that I don’t save, I buy my sister her desires. She cries too much and I’m not much of a conversationalist. I don’t even know how to ask her why. So, instead, I ask her in the evening time on the one Sunday I have off, “Do you want to go out for ice cream?”, “I’ll buy you the stuff, how much is it?” I want to tell her it‘s okay, you will be okay, don’t cry, I am not ready to die. But I know why she can’t stop lamenting even after the ice cream and the stuff;, she has alongside me witnessed our father absolve into the mass murder of men of rung all her life. The closest bond shared was her entering the household as our father would leave the household. All this in the proximity of the time that is meant for rest. So much restlessness for a space allocated for rest. 

The rest, is for the rest. It is not for sons of men of rung, or the sister that beats herself writing this. It is not for people living paycheck to paycheck because society has deemed them “undocumented,” “unintelligent,” “uneducated,” “underwhelming.” It’s so easy to “un” someone, but so difficult to live the consequences of it. So I pray at the hour when angels are doing arithmetic of sins and deeds, that      the women and men of rung may be free. That, rest be given to them, like the rest which are not them. I do this as the sun rises with the airplane protruding like an elite concubine, mocking her partner by releasing his secrets to the world. I turn around, a woman and man of rung wave at me with bags of trash destined to meet the nascent monstrosity of trash. My shift is over, theirs has begun. We are the women and men of rung.