I knew almost nothing about it, except that it originally came from Pakistan. I didn’t know its
shape and size, its likes and dislikes, and whether it ever had any fears or dreams − an enigma,
indeed, it seemed.
Well, let us start from the very beginning−in Pakistan.
The contract we signed in order to work for the Asian Bank in Pakistan contained a
shipment clause which stated that we were entitled to a three−and−a−half ton cargo space for
furniture and personal effects. To both of us who were used to traveling light, this seemed to be
an unnecessary waste.
We enjoyed ethnic colors and flavors wherever we went, and would prefer to use native
arts and crafts in our house decoration if we were to live in that country. We really could not
think of any furniture and personal effects that we could not live without. Why did we have to
incur such exorbitant costs, although not from our pocket, in order to ship our things across the
ocean? We therefore used this allowance for all the academic books we could collect, and then
donated them to a Pakistani university in Islamabad upon our arrival. One year later, our work
was done and we were ready to return to the States. We once again found this three-and-half ton
of shipping allotment waiting there for us. By this time, we had purchased several intricately
hand−made Pakistani carpets, which were beautiful beyond compare. Of course, we had to ship
them home with us. Since these carpets were not enough to fill up the cargo space, we wanted to
think of something else to include. One day, we happened upon a marble shop at the local
market. There were marble slabs of various colors, from green to white, and red to black, all with
interesting grains and patterns, and we quickly lost our heads right then and there. Before we
knew what we were doing, we became the new owners of twelve boxes of pink marble that came
from the quarry in Quetta, a place in Baluchistan, south of the Afghan border. Now, we thought,
since we were crazy enough to buy these heavy boxes of marble to ship across the globe, we
might as well go all the way and get some wood which we had always coveted.
The market was a bustling place filled with loud noise, honking cars, crowds of people
and small shops on both side of the alley with goods spilled out onto the pavement. It was
distinctly lacking women; only a few figures covered with black burqas from head to toe floated
in and out of the market like ghosts. Not far from the marble shop in the market stood a wood
shop. The stall was dark and small, with a few wood planks of different lengths leaning against
the wall. The wood wallah (seller), an old man who wore a turban on his head and had an
impressive big beard, told us that he could order any type of wood for us, as his warehouse was
really the forest in the faraway mountains. He became visibly frustrated with us and thought we
were crazy, because we wanted to buy wood, but wouldn’t allow him to order a tree from the
forest to be cut down. He thought for a long time, during which we drank obligatory tea and
exchanged obligatory pleasantries, and the old man told us about this ancient Shisham tree. The
log from this tree had been dried under the sun in the village for quite some time now; however,
nobody wanted to buy it because a part of it showed signs of wood borer infestation. He told us
that Shisham was a slow growing rosewood tree from northern India and Pakistan and its hard,
dense, red hued wood had been highly treasured for fine furniture making throughout the
centuries. If we would like to buy it, this wallah said, he could order it to be cut into thick planks.
However, he carefully added, as an ethical and reputable wallah would, that he could not
guarantee that the planks would be completely free from wood borers, even though the log had
been dried for a long time now and would be treated with insecticide before it was sold to us. If
we shipped these planks all the way to the States and found borers in them, that would be
regrettable.
We thought this wallah was so unusually honest that it was truly remarkable. We did not
really mind if the wood we bought had been eaten by some borers. Now, with his words of
caution, we began to worry if the borers we inadvertently transported into the States would eat
up our national forests and lead to a major environmental disaster.
It was amazing how one single log could be cut into twenty-five long planks, and it was
even more amazing how heavy these planks turned out to be. They were shipped by a truck to
the Custom and Transportation Division. Soon afterwards, a gentleman from the Custom
Division came to visit and told us in no uncertain words that these planks were too heavy and
bulky to be contained in the three−and−a−half ton container. We invited him inside the house
and served him obligatory tea, and Harold spoke obligatory pleasantries to him in his native
Urdu language, which obviously made a big impression. Harold asked him what kind of material
the container was made of, and the gentleman said it was pine board. Harold asked him if he
could build a container using our Shisham planks instead of pine board. He stuttered for a while
and said that nobody in his right mind would use such good wood for a container since the wood
would be scratched and ruined during the transportation. We said that was alright with us. He
continued to protest and said that the Shisham wood was very hard and would take a lot of work
to be made into a container. Harold took out a hundred−rupee bill and asked, “Would this
compensate for your extra work?” The poor fellow looked at the bill and could fight no more.
To our friends in the States, however, we were amazing people who would transport
stones and wood from abroad. We eventually used the pink marble for the fireplace in our
Sandcastle, an adobe house we built ourselves in southern New Mexico. When we sat in front of
the dancing flames, the pink marble greeted us, its grains forming patterns and pictures
reminiscent of the Himalaya Mountains and Punjabi plains. The Shisham wood, on the other
hand, stayed in storage, after my Harold applied a good amount of borer−killing solution to
them. We found the sheer volume and the heavy weight of these planks simply daunting and did
not know what to do with them.
Once in a while, some wood−loving friends would come to visit, and we would then take
them to the storage shed to show off a bit. No one had ever seen this kind of wood; they would
inevitably marvel at the sight of this dark−red rosewood, touching its interesting patterns and
grains, and commenting that only walnut would have such unusually dark and hard texture.
We were happy to share our loot with friends; all our wood−loving friends carried some
of the planks home, while the rest stayed in storage, gathering dust. There they stayed, for three
long years.
My husband, Harold, said one day, “Should we do something with these rosewood planks? What
a shame to let them just rot away in storage? What in the world can we possibly do with them?”
After much discussion, we finally decided to use the planks as panels for our bedroom
wall.
Actually, we knew it was sacrilegious to use such rare rosewood as wall paneling.
However, we did not have the skills required to make furniture.
Even the simple task of applying them to the wall turned out to be much more demanding
than we anticipated. To start with, Pakistani carpenters obviously believed that the principle of
wood cutting was to make as many planks out of a log as possible, and as such, every single
plank had a different size, length, and thickness. Furthermore, this old rosewood had been dried
for such a long time that it had somehow morphed into iron, or so it seemed to us. None of our
woodworking machines or tools could cut it, and we had to ship it to a specialty shop to make
them more or less the same thickness and much smoother. When we got the planks back from the
shop and tried to nail them on the wall with a hammer, every single nail inevitably bent. We
finally had to drill holes into the planks with an electric drill, and only then were we able to use a
hammer and nails. The process was so slow, and the planks were so irregular in shape and size,
that we felt like we were putting up a jigsaw puzzle on the wall. However, the finished product
was simply stunning beyond anyone’s imagination. Rustic and yet elegant, the wall was now
adorned with swirling coils of the growth rings, a marvelous abstract painting. The light yellow
marks left by the wood borers were highlights in the dark red grain. It was reminiscent of
floating lights on a pond and drifting clouds in the sky.
I often gazed at the finished wood panels, and tried hard to imagine the ancient Shisham
tree it once was. What was it like, when it stood exuberantly with all its glory under the hot
Pakistani sun? Did it hold many bird nests in the arm of its
branches? Did it provide shade for the
townsfolk that walked by? How much of the sky had its branches grasped as they soared
upward? Its leaves, were they long or round; were they small and lined-up like feathers? When
spring arrived in Pakistan, what kind of flowers did it put forth? Did these flowers fall to the
ground and carpet the town alleys? Did they fall on the backs of donkeys as they walked by with
bells tinkling on their necks? During evenings in the depth of autumn , did this tree immerse
itself in the silvery moonlight and listen to the sighs of its falling leaves?
Life has this amazing ability to make us numb to anything that has been with us for a while.
Under the mounting pressure of a busy life, with so many matters competing for my attention, I
eventually started to look at the wall without really seeing it.
Life is like that. It is notorious in making us run around in circles like a rodent in a
hamster wheel, without knowing what we are doing. Life is really this massive grinding stone
with rough edges that bit by bit, piece by piece, every minute and every hour, relentlessly grinds
us down. We slowly change into distorted shapes, with weight gained, bodies stooped over, and
wrinkles all over our faces. Our dreams gradually dim, fade, and become distant. Eventually you
don’t even recognize yourself any more.
But life must go on.
When was this? Which particular night was this? In the silent depth of the midnight
stillness, I suddenly heard a sound---
It was a very faint sound, trembling humbly, as it appeared to come and go, sometimes
close and sometimes far away. It was as if it could only be heard in the dead of night when the
whole world became absolutely silent and when you tuned your antennae to a certain frequency
or wavelength and listened with all your might then you would be able to hear this rhythmic
z…z…z…z…z…
I suspected that I might have a ringing in my ear. Then, I started to wonder if an
electronic device, such as the alarm clock or the telephone next to my bed, had emitted some
high−pitched sounds.
I woke up Harold. Half asleep, he listened for a while and pronounced that I had a rich
imagination.
I disconnected the alarm clock and the telephone. However, the mysterious sound
persisted, as if it were a sound inside my head and only I could hear it.
I could not figure out where the sound had come from, and the more I thought about it,
the more puzzled and frustrated I became.
It was quite some time later before Harold also heard the sound. He was just as mystified;
he got up in the middle of the night, gently touching this and probing that, all the while straining
his ears to listen intently in all directions. All of a sudden, he burst out laughing and declared that
we now had an illegal immigrant in our midst.
Harold said it could be wood borers that we imported from Pakistan. It might also be
eggs laid by wood borers, and now they had hatched into bugs. The sound we heard was the
noise they made chewing the wood.
Instantly, my hair stood on end. The panels that my head touched every night had bugs
chewing in them! Who knew when they would get out and became illegal immigrants in my bed?
Harold tried to calm me down and said that he only heard one bug. He explained that this
kind of bug grew extremely slow, and it might take a long time before it would get out of the
wood panel. Besides, he reasoned logically, even if it escaped, there were two probabilities. The
possibility that it would escape out of our side of the panel to reach our bed was only one in two.
Citing unbiased statistics made Harold sound almost scientific. However, it did not pacify
me at all. I could only think about this unseen bug, which for all I knew might well be equipped
with six hairy legs and an ugly proboscis. Right at this moment, it was chewing the hard wood
next to my bed and could come over uninvited any time.
For my sake, Harold bought extra strength bug killer from Home Depot. He put on a
major show of spraying and splashing; he even dug holes into the panels with electric drills and
injected the killer solution inside. All these activities turned our bedroom into a battle ground;
smoke in the room obscured our vision. An awful smell lingered and made breathing impossible.
If the solution wouldn’t kill the bug, it certainly would kill me. I picked up my pillows and
moved to the couch in the sunken living room so I could sleep.
Two weeks later, when I returned to our bed, I heard the same faint sound –
z…z…z…z…z…
In the dead of night, when even thoughts and feelings were frozen in the dark shadows, only this
creature from another country deeply buried d inside the wood was relentlessly boring away and
making the rhythmic noise – z…z…z…z…z…
Every single z was the sound of it chomping a mouthful of wood. As it chewed its way
forward, it created a narrow passageway, barely wide enough for it to wiggle ahead, but not
room enough for it to turn around and back out either. How could it live in such confinement,
never seeing the light of day? How could it possibly survive by eating such dry and hard wood?
But if you could stop and think for a moment, if you were born as a wood bug, what could you
possibly do apart from eating wood as you bored a tunnel through it?
It was just that I couldn’t help thinking about it. Deeply buried inside this hard−as−iron
slab of wood,
living, breathing, wriggling, and emitting its faint calls, was a bug.
However, in the depth of the night and in a foreign land that had no other creature of
your kind, I said to the bug, who could hear you? and who could understand your cries?
Ah! The dark night was so lonely, so bottomlessly deep. In our mundane existence of
muddling along in this world, squeezed among the bustling crowds and toiling to make a living,
buried deeply in everyone’s hearts is a cry, waiting to be heard, waiting for someone to
understand.
I was reminded of Lord Byron’s poem, where the prisoner is chained to a stone pillar,
deep in a living grave, below the surface of the lake in the Castle of Chillon. I could almost
visualize him, going through years without hearing a sound or seeing a face, ceaselessly tapping
the stone wall in this dungeon, his heart silently crying, “I am here! Can anyone hear me?”
But we usually don’t utter a sound, and we only hear the dead silence of the deserted
valley.
Once in ancient China, the bell from the Cold Mountain Temple tolled at midnight and its
sound drifted through the dark and frosty night into the ears of a traveler who happened to be
moored by the Maple Bridge. Instantly, the sound stirred in his melancholic heart and poured out
as a beautiful poem, Mooring at Night by the Maple Bridge. At the Xun-Yan River harbor, in a
bygone era in ancient China, the sound of the Pipa instrument passed through maple leaves and
reed flowers in the autumn crispness of the evening to reach a lonely poet. The music brought
tears to the Chiang-Zhou
magistrate, which soaked the poet’s long blue robe.
In the total stillness of the surrounding darkness, when a sound from the outside finally
reaches us, is it merely that sound we are hearing? Or are we hearing its echoes reverberating in
the deserted valleys of our own hearts?
Life continued to put pressure on me and my schedule became busier by the day –tenure,
promotion, publication, meetings, conferences, professional registration and practice
certification. A gentleman also invited me to start a business with him. Every task had the
magical power to multiply into one hundred tasks. I traveled to South America, Central America,
China, and Africa for consultancy. There were endless meetings to attend, new projects waiting
to be done. Work kept piling up, new things on top of the old, until I could no longer find
anything. The article I wanted to write was not written, the letter I needed to reply to did not
receive a response, the book I wanted to read did not get read, and the photos I wanted to
develop remained in the camera.
Life was like a streetcar named desire speeding ahead of me. I tried desperately to catch
it. However, it forever stayed ahead of me, seemingly within my reach if I could only try a bit
harder. With the elusive distance of just a few inches, I tried with all my heart but could never
quite get to it.
As we grew older, the days passed by even faster. Time also seemed to take delight in
galloping ahead, from minutes to hours, from hours to days, from days to months, from months
to years, and many, many years before we even knew it. Occasionally, I woke up in the middle
of the night and could still hear the sound of the bug, so I knew it was still there, still munching
away at the wood, boring its tunnel. The creature was still the same creature, and its life
remained the same life. Such was our lot! Just like that!
At work, meetings seemed to be the staple of life. There were meetings after meetings, all
day long. There were even special meetings just to organize all other meetings. Once, everybody
at the meeting argued till we were all red in the face. Someone even jumped up on the
conference table. We were all convinced that if our suggestion was not adopted, the college
would face dire consequences and would simply cease to exist. The scheduled time to end the
meeting had long passed, but nobody was willing to give in. Their voices became louder and
louder, as if a war was about to break out at any moment.
Suddenly, I laughed aloud. Everybody was startled and looked at me as if I had lost my
mind.
I couldn’t explain it to them. We are actually all bugs, creatures cloistered in our own dry
and hard wood. We believe our world inside this wood is the entire universe, and we think that
other people should be just like us and be willing to eat the same dry wood and wiggle their way
through the same narrow tunnel.
If you are a bug and you do not know you are a bug, then that’s alright. Anyway, that’s
what the life of a bug is like---- not so good, but not that bad either. Life is just like that after all.
However, if you are a bug and you know you are a bug, then what? How would you live?
How can you live on?
I began to lose sleep. Knowing that you are a bug is truly painful and unsettling; no wonder
people prefer not to know.
That night, when the world seemed dead, I lay on my bed and tried to adjust to a
wavelength that I had not tuned in to for some time. I listened attentively for what seemed like
forever and heard nothing.
Only after a long while, there appeared a weak z…z…
I realized that this bug was about to die.
I used the digits on both my hands to count and decided that this bug probably had lived
inside this wood for about ten years. I never thought it possible that a wood borer could live in
the wood for such a long time; obviously, it was about time for it to pass away at this ripe, old
age.
We always assume that we will stay young forever and that time is on our side. We know
full well that all creatures that are ever born will eventually die, but we cannot comprehend when
death will strike. Everything we have, we take for granted, as if it is ours due to our inalienable
rights, and nothing could snatch it away from us. What we don’t have, regardless of cost, we
grab it, we fight for it, we pile it up, we build it.
Haven’t you seen those grandiose pyramids built by the pharaohs in ancient Egypt with
the sweat and toil of countless slaves? Nothing could prevent them from crumbling and
collapsing eventually into the desert sands.
Honestly, only gravity and time will last forever and truly emerge as the ultimate inners.
I submitted my resignation letter to my boss. He was shocked and asked me what had happened.
I said that there wasn’t anything wrong. I just wanted to do things that I’ve never had the
chance to do.
He wanted to know if I wanted a raise or a promotion. He said that I was the only person
in the office that both sides would listen to.
I smiled and said, that was nice of him to say. I told him that I would like to leave while
everybody still had such good will toward me.
Thus, I changed my work schedule from full−time to part−time, teaching only one course
a week, and I did not have to attend meetings at all.
Once the decision was made, I found out it wasn’t actually so difficult. Walking out of
my boss’s office, right away I felt as if a load had been lifted from my shoulders. By the time I
left the school building, I began to notice the brilliant sunshine on this early summer day and the
seemingly endless expanse of the desert sky.
When I returned to our house inthe country, I found out, to my surprise, that our pecan
trees had grown into lush shady trees. A pack of squirrels with puffy tails and big eyes lived near
the irrigation ditches. They were running in and out of water pipes in the ground. When they
caught sight of me, they showed no sign of fear, as if they were the real owners of the farm.
In the pond, which sat in front of our abode house, there were wild ducks and cranes that
had made their homes. From time to time, we could see Canadian geese, blue herons, and an
occasional stray seagull. Recently, the jujubes behind our house had ripened. From nowhere
came a family of four red foxes, a mommy and her three young babies, who obviously decided to
stay to take advantage of the sweet red dates. I often hid inside the house and watched the babies
stand on their hind legs while they reached out to steal our jujubes.
The newly developed lily pond on the southern side of the house was filled with koi fish
and planted with lotus. This was the first summer that the flowers bloomed; the petals were deep
red in the beginning, but bleached by the brilliant sun they slowly turned into a soft pink. While I
had not been paying attention, the lotus flowers had presented to us the exotic smile of the
faraway land.
And the bug really had died. Harold and I listened carefully and heard nothing. We
looked up and down the wood, searching with a flashlight, but we never found any wood traces
or boreholes that might have been created by the bug.
So, the bug finally died. It was born in the wood, lived in the wood, and died in the wood.
It ate nothing but the wood, lived in holes dug out of the wood and never saw one ray of
sunshine or a single patch of the blue sky.
I whole-heartedly wished that it never knew it was a bug.
