It’s going to be nearly three years since I entered the U.S. as an eighteen-year-old undergraduate student, armed with a desire to become a writer. Even though this longing has guided most of my life, in the face of the present day economy, I realize how it is, in fact, a flippant fairytale. This revelation has caused me to turn to the dry faucets of journalism, as facts and non-poetic reporting seems to be more economically rewarding than the lyrical fiction that I held so close. There are times, however, when the multicolored ventricles of my Indian heart cough and wheeze, churning up a song or two.
Backtracking up my esophagus and windpipe, only to rest on my tongue and bruise my lips, these songs—that are often composed in Hindi—remind me of the land that I left behind. Today, as I sit outside my college dorm, the surprisingly flavorless song that wraps itself around my tastebuds is a sufi classic that I might’ve listened to when I was a girl of thirteen: Kun-Faya-Kun, which when translated into English means Be, and it is.
Influenced by the Rigveda ideology of the origins of a world where even nothingness did not exist, this classical piece makes me think about what nothingness actually means. When we sit across from each other, and talk about nothing—saying that we want nothing, and are feeling nothing, what is the image that crosses our minds? As an individual who always likes to connect a picture to a word, for me nothingness was a vague air-filled plastic bag that hovered mid-air. While I lived with this notion for a major part of my life, I realized how this did not adhere to what nothingness was supposed to mean—because, at the end of the day, a vague air-filled plastic bag was something, right?
Throughout the limited course of my writing career, I’ve always managed to describe that everything comes my way, but when this song created a space where even nothingness didn’t exist, I found myself struggling with the right words to form my interpretive narrative. After all, how does one describe a world where even nothingness did not exist? As an individual entity, nothingness is supposed to be devoid of substance, weight and identity—but by referring to the existence of nothingness, I believe that the lyricist, Irshad Kamil, is trying to indicate how nothingness has weight, substance and, most importantly, significant presence.
Recently, I had the pleasure of attending the South Asian Literature and Arts Festival in Stanford University, where I listened to the director of this song, Imitiaz Ali, talk about its conceptualization. In Ali’s words, the heart of Kun-Faya-Kun began pulsating within him when he was a child. After reading a line in the Rigveda which alluded to a world where even nothingness did not exist, Ali found himself visiting the library everyday to re-read, and re-visualize the uniqueness of this Universe. This childhood fascination transcended into an adult reality, forming the Kun-Faya-Kun musical that most of us, as Indians, continue to be inspired by.
While Kun-Faya-Kun was an essential part of the background of the India that I grew up in, I think that I have only just begun to recognize the vibrant threads of this creation, as they curve and curl across the seven seas, to seep into my life here, in the U.S. Above everything else, I would say that this song, despite raising several questions, is possibly one of the only artistic creations that inquires and answers in the same breath. What existed when even “nothing” did not exist, the song asks—and, I think, the answer is Kun-Faya-Kun.
