जीते रहते

है पिंजड़े में बंद एक सपना, और कुछ आंसू |

और कुछ सिसकियाँ बिखरे इधर उधर |

पर वो सपना अधूरा नहीं है, कुछ पन्ने कम हैं, पर उम्मीद पूरी है |

थोड़ी उम्मीद, थोड़े सपने, बस यही कुछ गहने |

और थोडा दर, थोड़ी सी हिम्मत |

पर आँख में वही दर्द का अंजन, बोली में बहती रहती |

बनके आह, बनके जीवन, हाथों में हाथों से खेलती रहती |

मुस्कुराते रहते, खिलखिलाते रहते, गिरते रहते, रोते रहते |

पर जीते रहते, थक के हार के, जीते रहते ||

Eyes

         Peering within my own tumultuous mind, a simpleton maze, perhaps a child’s play, I find pastures of myriad colours.  The hues that look monotonous and monolithic are coloured in mysterious ways, of love, of hatred, of dismay, of solidarity, of such thoughts that reflect my benevolence and promiscuity in the same tone…

I look back to those tones and think, like others, like inordinate selves around me, those colours reflect something grotesque, but art is grotesque. Yes! I am art, a work of a divine construct but of infinitesimally less abilities. I spurt from the underbelly of a struggle to shine bright, to feel ecstasy, yet crash in the abyss of conventions and contemporaries. I am different; I am the hackneyed difference that you will never perceive. Yes! I am lecherous, I am respectable, I am egoistic and proud, I am forgiving and humble. Can you see the shades? No! You can’t. I can’t find the shades myself.

I stare down my throat and I see something torn, something vitiated and undulated. Not my soul, could be my resolve, could be what you call as loyalty. My heart, as they call it, goes many ways, trapped in an abstruse maelstrom, it remains in flux, falling prey to follies. It beats for you, but it beats when you are not there, it beats when I do not want you, it even beats when you walk away. So is it loyal? I don’t know, I cannot say. I don’t utter the words of love, I don’t sing them well, but my heart beats rhythmically, in strange ways it beats, mostly for you, but yes, it always beats for me. Your eyes do not arouse me, your voice does. Sometimes your eyes do too. But when you touch me, I see reality, my heart beat screams, and it arouses me, always. But my heart beats without you too. I am not loyal, but my heart beats for you a lot.

Last night, when you touched me softly, I could not feel your finger. I felt something press against my skin, like a gale blowing violently into my face. I could not understand that touch. Did I want someone else to touch me? But my heart did beat aloud once. It settled down when I spoke to you, in my thoughts, as always. Do you think it beat for you? All the selves floating around me, in my sky, that blue, blue sky, seem so faceless. Which one are you? I know I am not the same as you touched last night, may be slightly different, may be a bit stronger, a bit more loyal. Yes, that is I, another me residing in your mind, you touched that me last night, but my heart beat when you touched that me. Perhaps, I am that me in your mind, and this me too, who woke up here. But then, my heart beats otherwise too. I choose not the think, those floating eyes in my sky, like two terns flying south, make my heart beat. I call out one by your name, both look back. But both are not you! Did I call out the right name? I do not know what is that named I called out, but they both looked at me, with a smile. Yes! Two pairs of smiling eyes, different, yet they answer to the same name. May be, my heart beats for that name, a name I do not remember, yet I call out whenever I see those eyes flying south. But my heart beats for a voice too, not the voice that touched my last night, yet it replies to me when I call out your name. Who are you, whose name I always call out?

The sun has set in my sky. It is still bright outside, bright enough to find minute thoughts streaming down to the tip of my fingers while I write your name on a dusty, parched mind. I saw another pair of eyes, bright glassy eyes in my sky irradiated by a dusky moon. They did not answer to your name, but kept smiling at me, kept pushing at my systolic heart. They left awhile later, smiling as ever, a heart not beating that hard, but I felt it was not meant to beat, because it would beat only for you, yet those eyes felt warm.

I stared down my throat again; there were remnants of unknown eyes, and echoes of strange voices. My heart is loyal, it beats for vestiges I cannot remember, eyes I cannot see flying south in my blue sky. There is a new tern flying in my sky, it also smiles back when I call out your name. I do not know whose name is that. My heart is pounding today. I will always remember your name, under blue skies, under orange ones, sometimes under starry ones too. There is a new tern flying south, a happy tern. I do not know if the other terns are still happy. Are you happy?

Untitled

Perhaps it was the anguish in the blood of those who lost their minds to betrayal or ecstasy, or merely the ultimate wish to die, hidden in the garb of insanity, creating private hospices in their own minds. Whatever be the reason, Rajjo never seemed to qualify as the common insane kept away from the world in the murky depths of a women’s asylum.

I always wondered how mad men and women saw the world. Anyone could have figured it out for the inmates, but not for Rajjo. She never differentiated normal from insane, weird from commonplace. All she did was to stray away in the depths of oblivion, may be stars, or newer moons floating in the cosmos of her officially deranged mind. But, was she mad? I guess she had some story to her, like everyone else. For example, there was a woman in her 50s who was dumped here a few years ago. She tried to burn her family members alive. I wonder what could be the circumstances under which she was driven to do something like that. And then there was another, a beautiful and young woman, who tried to kill herself repeatedly. People say she was driven to madness by her in-laws. All of the inmates had a story to validate their present condition. But, what about Rajjo, do they know anything? All they know is that on a warm evening she was found sitting at the asylum’s gate wearing nothing but a flimsy kurta and a pajama.

It was the year 1946, a cold winter somewhere in the Punjab district. India had still not been divided then, the Muslims, the Hindus, and the Sikhs were still living in some sort of assumed harmony, and Rawalpindi was still a small city. It was Rawalpindi where Rajjo lived. We know that because she told the authorities of the asylum herself. Yes! She could talk, make coherent statements, and answer questions as they required to be answered. Then, what was wrong with her? Why was she there?

The story behind Rajjo was small and stark. Her story was similar to that of a million others who got severed at the heart by the Radcliffe Line. But that wasn’t the whole story. Rajjo came from an impoverished Muslim family living in the outskirts of Rawalpindi. A family of only daughters was not a boon to a poor barber in the village. Rajjo was the youngest of all, but not the most loved one. In fact love was inexistent in that family. All they could serve every night over supper was some cold dismay heated to palatable tolerance. Rajjo was beautiful with a dusky, unblemished skin, glossy lips, but with dried up cheeks and a sweaty worried forehead. She cared for her overworked father and her sisters who were to be married off in respectable families. It, however, did not go as planned. She got married off to a rich man in return of some favours. This man was old with three sons and enough assets to feed an entire village, a part of which went to Rajjo’s father too. But Rajjo did not complain. She did not complain when she was reduced to an old mop that lapped up every refuse, or when she was stripped naked by every eye that turned to her in that house. It was not a family, but a barn yard where a lone sheep is left to a multitude of rams waiting to be ravished. She took it all, occasionally calling out to Allah for either ending her or ending her, but that end never came.

Once lying on a hard bed out in the yard, she felt something warn on her neck. When she turned her head she was shocked pale to see one of the sons staring at her. He gave a smirk and walked away. She was not used to that. It was fine when she caught the middle aged men staring at her bosom, and not shying away even when she noticed. But they never came so close before. She could feel it was because the old man was dying and she feared the aftermath of his death. She did not have to wait long to discover the horrors. Her husband died leaving her like a road kill to the vulture like sons. Turn by turn the three raped her, dousing her screams in the grave silence of the night. She stopped screaming later. Even the servant took his chances with her breasts or her hips. She kept quiet because she had a young daughter to bring up and out of the hell she was in, she could not afford insanity. Independence from the British raj was imminent, but that did nothing assuage her personal sufferings, the three sons of the deceased old man, Rajjo and her infant daughter had a last momentous moment in life. In the chaos of the partition when violence occurred outside, some of it occurred inside too. The three sons went at her for the last time, to please themselves, while she fed her daughter.  They were drunk in lust when one of them slapped the child off her breast onto the floor bursting its head. The others pinned her down and started chewing onto the frail remnants of her soul while she witnessed her child bleed. She was stunned to quietude, while the three men ingested her body. Suddenly she came back to her senses and banged a heavy charcoal iron-press onto one of the son’s head. Warm blood splashed everywhere.  She then ran into the kitchen and fetched a butcher’s knife and cut off the phallus of one and the throat of another. Together with her daughter, they all bled to death, and she bled to liberation.

It was the independence of Pakistan and India. She gained her independence too, but like many others, paid a price for it. She did not go mad with that incidence. She just wanted to leave the normalcy of the normal world she was living in. That was her madness.

Memoirs

With an inclination, with strange proclivities of the night;
With a strange desire, I think of you;
I think of your eyelids drenched with some blood;
Of a dream you killed last night;
I think of your lips with stains;
Of the words you never spoke;
I think of those moments when you were left behind;
In my thoughts, in my mind;
I think of those days when you never came;
To the brink of my smile, to the edge of my shame;
And then, that night, you were there;
Half naked, sitting by my besotted gaze;
Waiting, for some hope and a life;
Waiting for another breath and an old strife;
But I left, in haste, in waste;
With a trail of a scent, of disappointment;
I stepped off the last stair, with no words to spare;
With no hatred or amour, but a soft clamor;
Of a desire, to lie beside, the dreams those have dried;
The words those have died, the hope I have denied;
But you shan’t be there, in my memoir;
On an orange evening, staring outside;
Towards the horizon, sinking and bright;
Bearing the proclivities of this strange night…

Foregone

Tonight, lying by your side, dreams are not what I see.

I see hope, in a doused light of dismay, in an air of despair.

I see you, naked yet surreal, I see us, torn yet alive.

I see you waning, faking smiles, blurring in your own shadow.

I see you without me, fighting tears, fighting sorrow.

You don’t look back, you tell me not to follow.

But I am tethered, forlorn and weathered.

You want to tear me out, from your flesh and my doubt.

You say you want a new beginning, call my love blithering sickening.

But I see you bleed, without me to heed,
your calms and crying, in your eyes never drying.

Could I be there while you forget and regret.

Could I be there while you seethe and breathe,
in an air of a scent, of us reminiscent.

This day shall pass, like wind over some dead grass.

But I shall follow, like a thought so hollow.

Like a spirit of the past, like vestiges that last.

Event Horizon

 “I cannot perceive beyond the shadows I live in, I cannot seek beyond what I cannot see; I cannot live beyond what I cannot choose. When you walk past me I am merely a thought that shan’t linger beyond the next vision you encounter, may be a bird, a falling leaf, or just a musing, but I shall not live that long, for you to look back and wonder. But that does not mean I am not there, that I do not breathe, or that I do not exist.”

Lost in my reverie I could hear all this ringing in my head, throbbing like a bickering thought, incessant and belligerent. It troubled me, like the sight of a dead bird, or a diseased stray dog. But it wasn’t a dog, a bird, or a pile of uncouth, unsavory entrails in an abattoir. Staring into the oblivion with a deeply entrenched vision, wrinkled skin, emaciated and hopeless, she sat there in the middle of the road. Her eyes had dried up; not that I expected them to rain like that of a dryad on a famished earth.

Staring at her I could very well picture a fading black and white painting, her eyes glistening in light and I could see the minute shadows between undulations on her skin. The silence on her mien travelled down her back to her feet in a vibrant way, leaving out all the worldly noises in their pitiable places. Was this some meditation, or some trance that made her an unperturbed and an undisturbed monolithic idol?

 A part of her clothing covering her head would move a bit in the malaise breeze barely revealing her hellishly black yet bleak hairline. Her chapped lips, her parched cheeks and her inundated thoughts were like a painting in the Louvre. Just that here there was no one to draw interpretations from her eyes, the color and hue of her skin, and the unending impossibilities of her dilapidated life. This epic seemed like it would stay this way for eternity, but it did not. Amidst all the burst of colours she moved her knee a bit revealing something. All I could sense was a fettering stone in the continuum of sanity, of the self-proclaimed normalcy of one’s existence. Whatever she had on her lap just lay there in peace. Was it a child, an animal, a toy, or an apparition of a thought so strong and resilient that it took the shape of a vision I could not wipe off the parchment of my mind? She seemed to cherish the presence of that object a lot, she held on to it for a long time, longer than time; maybe she grew this old holding onto it for this long, a thought, a mere lifelessness in one’s lap. Did she just turn her head, did she just nod, in dismay, in despair, or was it an illusion of my overly hopeful hope trying to mend the retardation created by her in my mind’s sanctum?

Pondering on all this I kept observing her. She looked down; I could see her eyes fade into a cascade of disbelief coupled with realization. I saw her hand move, the veins sticking out of her skin, as if they had relinquished their duty as the bearers of her blood. Her frail fingers twirled a bit, perhaps to feel the thing on her lap. I could imagine the immense pain she had to undergo to make her move from her current poise. But, how could I imagine something I could never feel? She moved her hand to and fro, in a way of reassuring herself of something. But she abruptly retracted; for once I saw the tiniest spec of life in those eyes, teardrops waiting to dry off like a thousand such before. It was strange how people walked past her without looking at her, without looking at those eyes and those lips, and that thing on her lap.

My reverie had turned into a trance, a limbo where sanity, logic, and all ideation collapsed into one singularity; a metaphysical singularity, synesthetic and bright. Suddenly there was a question that flashed in my mind. What was so amazing about her? Was she beautiful, was she holy, did she achieve something great, feed millions out of an empty bowl, walk on fire, or spoke to God? No! The only thing she did was to dissociate me from my perception of reality, from my version of starkness and brought me to a world of cogitations that I had never seen before. Some bystander might pity her, throw some money at her. Some writer might pen down the apparent miseries into a journal on human sufferings, or some social worker might want to “rehabilitate” her into a popular world. I wouldn’t do anything of that sort. I would just sit at a distance and witness reality unfurling all its colours as it did then.

 In such moments of illusion imagination is like fungus, it shall grow wherever it can. I would imagine her dancing and singing. I would imagine her in a beautiful red dress. However, my imagination would fall in the colourless pits of her darkened eyes that would swallow every thought beyond her current state. I turned blind to the dancing, deaf to the singing, and the redness of the dress turned to a shade of grey like  a wilting leaf in scorching sun. Her presence was profound like an Event Horizon where nothing could escape, eventually collapse to nothingness. What remained was a mangled perception, a tangled up motley coloured realization of everything, carnality, happiness, serenity, anger, lust, humour, melancholy, and eventually a stupor.

I looked at my watch, five minutes had passed. Strange, all it takes is a look and the passage of banality stops, the entropic world halts, giving way to a stoic and controlled dystopia where everything happens slowly, in our knowledge and with our consent, even if it may destroy us.

I was possessed by a realization, an understanding of the situation I was in. What importance did she bear, that I was so captivated by her existence, an existence that resembled that of a billion others? Her presence was as important as her absence. It never mattered to me whether she was there or not, but till she was, I was tethered to her.

“I do not intend to be you, to see the world as you may, to feel the world as you would, but I would be you, to feel what it feels like, not to be you, not to feel what I felt not being you. I shall be you, just to celebrate not being you. But I fear, what if being you is better, is more fulfilling, or, what if being you is no different. What if I can never give up being you?”

Her presence, her sheer existence made me sick, made me feel that the lack of starkness, the lack of truth is an easier life. She did not have a life, she had clockwork. What was happening to me, why was her absoluteness in truth giving way to doubt? I had started to sympathize with her, with her condition, her solitude, and her burden. I wanted her to feel better; I wanted her to be better. The standards of morality would mark me as immoral, but it was true, what generally stood out as her misery, was her beauty, the reality that she carried with her embellished her all the more. She was devoid of any wants and desires then, she did not know riches or comfort, and that is how I wanted her to be because she made me feel nice. I was feeding onto her being. I do not care! She shall die like that, she shall perish in want. How does it matter to me? It shall be a glorious death, quintessentially true, how death should be, without people to mourn, without people to glorify. I wanted her to be there for a little while longer. She made me pity myself. Yes! Self-pity is the opium of life. Why was I there, staring at her for this long? Because she made me realize how foolish I was in desiring all that I desired. I could have been her, living for those few minutes and then dying; only to be thrown away like the carcass of a road kill. I knew she had no qualms in dying; it would not have made a difference to her. I guess it was the thing on her lap that forced her to live. Why did she bear it? May be she never wanted to, may be fate had its way with her on a weak and feeble night. I do not care for her miseries, they are not mine. However, the more miserable she is, the more I pity myself, and hence, the more I opiate. After all, I am immoral by the standards of what gives meaning to my life. Does it take immorality to see real beauty? Perhaps it does, perhaps it takes a sick man to know what it is not to be sick. How can I feel what she is, unless I am what she is not, and become what she is?

I walked away, my Catharsis was done, and maybe she died, or grew older to die one day. I do not care, the Catharsis shall not last that long for me to care. What shall last is a memory, of a day when I saw what it is not to be me, to be something worse, and realizing how worthless being me was, but how necessary worthlessness was.
____________________________________________________________________________

The Light

That we couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't imagine, but only smell, lying surreptitiously beneath our feet, beneath our coruscating hopes and visions. Truth that they have is a version of their own endeavours, their own volition to create a perfect world in all the disparity and dystopia they live in. But that is truth after all, undeniable, infallible, unquestionable. Yet, not true.

The gutters lay glutted with the stench of human faeces, not churned up by their gleeful guts but by their decadent souls. Those bereaved souls which never spoke of truth but of denial of it, of mere superimpositions of reality with convenience, of belief with faith. Human bones mangled up beneath healthy skin, spineless and servile, standing erect only in imaginations profound enough to blind them. Dead women and children, and men alike, floating underneath our unconscious minds, the blindness gifted to us by our version of truth, we do not want to see the dead and the rotten, with their entrails regurgitated like it were some bad meal, killed by the denial of the living, killed by the conceitedness in their own lives. No one likes to step into that murk, not to clean it, but to find a familiar face. They are dead; they have departed into the dark oblivion of our short lived memories. Fragile as it is our vision of the world we live in, of that we lose and let go off while holding onto things we perceive important, when we quantify events and objects within them as right and wrong or true and false skipping mindlessly the possible starkness of the life below, within the sewers, within the drains, flowing out with a gushing sound doused by the apparent liveliness of our apparently lively lives above.

Then we sit back, and think, precluding every other thought from our current deliberation about the conundrum that we are in, about letting go or adopting and adapting. We like the liveliness, the surrogate consciousness, the outsourced truth and the quintessential delusions that make our lives go smoothly, yet we might cry one night, only to let those cesspools to fill up, bloat up like sacrificial lambs, filling up further like a hungry beast happily swallowing more, guffawing at how we like to kill, to murder mindlessly every day. Kosher human cadavers dried up of blood, of life, with gaping holes at their throat, waiting for the long and unrelenting decomposition, of complete obliteration, from memory and from world. Such is life, or what we think is life…

Necropolis

What lies beneath the myriad strands, of glory, of radiance, of fame, of brilliance?

What human remains on its penultimate heave, on its waning belief, momentously bereaved?

What Pantheons built in gleaming eyes, in glittering minds, on splendid grounds, hide?

Grandeurs of my obituary enshrined in a valedictorian stone, carved, and sequined.

Hymns and chants of eminence, vanguard catatonic minds through the lanky air.

Men wallow in grief; men cry in glee, men yelp in herds of mindless in resonance.

But what lies beneath the pageantry of anguish, beneath the lustrous sorrow,

beneath the fame and valor, beneath the distinction and honor?

Some bones, some dust, some death and lore; a heart, a relic deplore,

There is life in the shadow of martyrdom, in the blinds of posthumous wisdom.

There is soul within a hollow design, within a clockwork benign.

Yet the inanimate be venerated, revered in infirmaries adulated.

Mere cadavers commemorated…

To A Forsaken Glory

Look around, what do you see?
A forlorn glory reduced to lore and stories;
An East and West stained in Red, A North and South with power hungry Mouths;
A Center that is writhing in Its Painful Past;
A Crown that reflects Inhumanity Aghast;
But we do look ahead, towards Prosperity and Peace so serene;
Because there is a promise, a hope, somewhere in the Saffron, White, and Green.....

Despair

The light was thinning out, the doors closed upon me sooner than I could take my next breath. It wasn’t the usual feeling of despair, or that familiar weight on my chest I felt, which smothered me. Like a quagmire I was being sucked deeper into a blissful oblivion which promised peace and rest but I had this undying fear within me which persuaded me to escape it. A vision flashed in front of my eyes, was a familiar vision, of a child sitting in the cosmic lap of time and stretching its arm out at the stars. It was my representation of freedom, of a chest full of breath. How sadistic! What I need the most comes to my mind when I cannot have it.

It is a losing battle. I find no way I can escape this. However slow and tedious it may be, I feel light is escaping me very fast. You say I need to take it easy, it shall be alright soon, but you stand on the other side, where it is greener, where you don’t have to view the world through a tiny chink on a glorified wall. But you still ask me to calm down. I have trusted you, and shall keep doing so. Ironically, I have a smile on my face while I go down under, I have this assurance that even if I fall it shan’t be that painful, you are there to assuage my pain, placate my nerves that writhe in apprehension. Why are you so far away, where I can see you just as a memory lingering barely in the forgotten corners of my mind? Like a playful wraith I find you philandering with my suffering, pointing at me and laughing, clucking at my helplessness and watching the spectacle of me annihilating myself. Ever seen a spider spin a web around its prey? Graceful, isn’t it? I wonder how the prey feels, suffocated, afraid, hapless and hopeless, a being that has given up the will of being one? I try hard to feel that web around me, try to feel the pressure around me, but all I can see is your glorious, coruscant face slyly mitigating the seething pain. Do you want me to perish happily, with content and without remorse?  I shall do so, for you, for your happiness, for the trust you have in me, for the belief we entail. But tell me once, softly, that it wouldn’t hurt, I am afraid of pain, of blood, of darkness. Just tell me once that you’d be happy, that you’d like it. I know it wouldn’t hurt then.

Watch over me, while I fade away…