Disappearances

In far distant Turkey,

In a Pamuk novel,

News preceedes the events:

People are in print first then in jails, everywhere.

In recent Kashmir,

In an official report,

Events write themselves off:

People are in print first then anywhere,

Or nowhere.

Of God and other details

Sometimes,

One just wants to write

the essential lines and

leave the rest of the page completely blank.

One doesn't want to

write the, if, an, it, so, just,

meanwhile, sometimes, to, and, of etc.

One just wants to put to paper

the sentence around which the poem got woven

like God writing Earth

out of nowhere in this horrendous space.

Later one day 

When some bugs, ants, flies, spiders,

crawl the spaces,

as one is breathing down,

does one understand how

they appear to be

God's own prepositions

God's own conjunctions.

Only later

does one realise that somehow,

all the details matter -

Even the seemingly wrong ones.

A poem is a gift held together by details.

Life

I desire to be perceived -

the way a tyre

smushes a coarse road:

Either I lose a stone or two

or you -

your tread.

"It would be life."

Illustrations

A tilted model 

of a digestive system

Hanging in the corner

On a dilapidated wall

Of some remote school room.

Roadside,

Without windows,

Locked at the front -

Dust ridden.

That is how

Overexposed

We are:

Hanging inside worn-out space

Among sattelite debris

In some remote corner of the galaxy.

Spinning like food.

A coin tossed in the air -

Lust ridden.

Except -

The veins of the body 

Look horrendous

Than the surface of the earth.

The Unknown Employee

A Kashmiri Professor misreads W H Auden's poem 'The Unknown Citizen'

(Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un

This gravestone

Is erected because he was a practising Sunni)

He was found by the Department of Higher Education to be

One against whom there was no official complaint in his Service Book,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the Kashmiri sense of a practical word, he was yet another 'kalle' in the system,

For in everything he did he served the Greater Muslim Community.

Except for Curfews till the day he retired

He worked in this Industry and never got fired,

But satisfied his employers (high or low) at various GOVT. COLLEGES 

Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,

For his Committee reports that he annually overpaid his CA,

(Our report on his pay statement shows it was sound)

And our overeducated, polite non-teaching workers found

That he was popular with his mates and loved to gossip.

The Press are convinced that he bought a government funded newspaper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,

And his health-card shows he didn't die, plying in public buses, even in pandemic situations.

All SOs and other officials declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the NPS, GP Fund, arrears, allowances, increments

And had everything necessary to be a Professor,

An expensive Mobile phone with an active WhatsApp account, an attentive listener and a house on loan

Our officials at higher places are content

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there were elections, he went for duties: when there was B2V duty, he went.

He in fact married, to prove his manliness, but added only one child to the population,

Which his family and in-laws declare was not the right number for a parent of his profession.

And our senior professors (now working as Principals) report that he never interfered with their institutional policies.

Was he updated about his subject? Did he teach well? These questions are absurd:

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard

From his extensively-active-social-media-no-post-yet- locked-profile-picture mashallah happily married male/female collegues.

Domestic Violence

Experts say

Domestic violence 

Takes place mostly

In crowded, noisy places.

Declare one needs 

Elf ears to hear anything at all.

The maids

Of estates and mansions

Disapprove of the same.

Say they hear it all the time

Even with their defective ears.

Meanwhile -

The Earth moves at a masculine speed.

Crescendo

You meet me

Like a solo tabla piece

Inside the electric buzz 

Of a popular pop song -

The way

A frail heart breaks,

Inside this cacophonous world.

Within just 20 seconds.

The song landscapes,

Goosebumps emcamp 

By the sweat rivers

Of your treble and low bass touch.

I hum,

Pretending to love the song.

Ordinary Shenanigans

It is late September morning.

The air smells of

Impending winter.

We are doubtful, divided -

arguing, advising,

assuring, ruminating

Whether a half-sweater 

Or a full one 

Would have been handy and

Wise to wear

Or whether it'd be too hot

As the day approaches.

Things ordinary people do -

In a place that flaunts

Velvet dresses and corduroy shirts.

Numinous

When you are around

Everything ordinary is a unique experience.

I pass through a door in a crammed city and

Find myself in the middle of a dense forest.

A needle kisses me and I

Burst into colourful jelly fishes.

I ring the bell of an unknown house and

God opens the door, smiling.

I warble a dirge and

It suddenly turns into a love song.

I consume food and

Flowers bloom inside my stomach.

I pass by a graveyard and

Blush with their animated greetings.

Rest of the times,

The world is an ancient stone wall

I keep bumping into

Even with my eyes open.

Singularity

I won't tell you about

What happened in the protest.

No!

The chants of Azadi

The teargas

The shelling

The blood

The routine

No!

I would rather report to you 

What happened before it all:

How you savoured 

Loads of cheap Nadir Monji

By a roadside shop

Smacking your lips

After eating loads of Chetin

While your eyes glowed with life and declared:

Now is the time to Rule.

- a moment of truth

Before everything turns 

Into nothing but images.

Poor images.

Pixelated images.

Viral images.

Shared images.

Commented images.

Birthday kinda Poem

I once thought

I'll be an awesome singer.

A breathtaking tabla player.

A fabulous designer.

An erudite poet.

An interior designer.

A dangerous spin bowler.

I once thought I could be anything,

Anyone.

Yet 

Here it is

Another birthday

And here I am

Sitting in a peculiar remote place

With barely anyone around

Except frightful mountains -

Drowned in paperwork

Adding subtracting numbers -

Money somebody

Owes to someone else.

Solving riddles in a strange dialect.

Construction work that

Tires the ears.

Screaming that keeps even

Birds away.

(A 'Christina's World' kind of ambience

set in Kashmir

with added local macabre)

Thinking about nothing else other than

The necessity

To keep my organs from failing

By eating and drinking at regular periods of time.

Trying hard

To be alive

For the next day.

Aphasia

The clothes know

How to talk

To the wind,

Flailing outside on the rope

Fitted at both ends

With nothing but long sticks.

So are we,

In almost the same manner 

Unlettered 

To talk to you, God

In this life -

Beaten, hung on the rope of breaths

Fitted at both ends

With long sleek versions 

Of nothing but ourselves.

The Road to Perdition

The rustling of self-doubt

The recurrent barking of thoughts

The mattress of hard feelings

The unanticipated scratching of memories

The honking on the highway of embarrassment

The clueless snoring of disappointments

The quilt of inexpiable mistakes

The perpetual gnawing of insomniac grief

The penumbral ceiling of responsibilities

The cushion of unfulfilled dreams

The distant fusillade of guilt

Nothing beats loneliness

Like a dreadful night.

Weather Chronicles

By night -

Here:

One foot 

Outside the 

Warm blanket

Showing solidarity

With your weather.

There:

You mumbling 

My name 

In sleep

Sweating the clouds

With embarrassment.

By day - 

Arguing about the weak phone signal.

While it is windy here

It rains there.

Parents

. . . sometimes we need to wear our parents’ clothes and look at ourselves for a long time in the mirror.

                                                                 - Alejandro Zambra

                                                               Ways of Going Home

First come the wrinkles or

Those are what we notice first.

The white hair streaks afterwards.

You kiss them on the cheeks

Then suddenly their neat tears fall.

Then comes the elbow pain

Or groin

The heart palpitations thereafter

Then those terrible tiny little fights.

Then the cataracts

The vigils next

Or the early clanging of utensils.

The upset stomach.

Then the plaques

The irises stiffer

Then the teeth start falling off.

The skin spray-paints itself unevenly 

Loosens

Then the joints stiffen...

Then one day

A phone call, an inkling or

While you are away 

Buying groceries

Some random neighbour half-hugs and 

Takes you home

Against your wish.

Then comes the reckoning.

Then one day

Your child kisses you and

Then the tears.

Again.

Incorrigible/Us

A local politician

Spewing venom

Before distributing 

Party-logo printed masks among people . . .

Someone

Mortifyingly

Trying hard to stop

Her baby from

Hitting the live camera . . .

Some random guy

Shouting

"Am I audible?"

In a webinar

Blabbering nothing but empty words . . .

Local administration

Seizing a dilapidated shop

Malls

Beaming with people . . .

The weary participants

Trying hard to re-connect . . .

The unmuted

Mute students

Desperate for their attendance . . .

An institutional head

Issuing written order

Against the absent faculty

Wheezing at home . . .

A mask and gloves wearing man

Counting our sins 

On a sanitized rosary

Boasting about God . . .

We are

As we were 

Before the pandemic -

Stubborn.

Ignorant.

Selfish.

Unsympathetic.

in absentia

Now that you are gone,

I rest in your bed.

I sit in the places I remember you sitting

Have offered prayers

I fiddle with your leftover things.

Clean your room.

(Dis)arrange things.

I do all the things

Unecessary -

Teaching myself failed lessons everyday

Each moment on

How not to miss you.

I then exit the room,

Leaving the door ajar

For you

To return and retort:

Has anyone been in my room?

I can't find my things!

Thus teaching you lessons

Every time

On how not to leave me

Alone.

Till then,

Things will go missing.

Thereafter,

Words.

Microcosm

These days

Pain feels non-degradable 

Like a polythene bag filled with trash

Lying at the bottom of an ocean

Not knowing how it got there

In the first place.

Enduring that pain

Feels like it being photographed

For documentary purposes

To showcase the degradation of humanity.

Hiding that pain? -

Hiding it 

Feels like the ocean itself

Stashing the trash inside -

Not knowing where it ends or begins.

Right now,

How Alice weeps a pool of tears?

- Makes sense.

Inferno

A glamorous bureaucratic party

Over tortuous interrogation cells -

Bolaño once

wrote about it.

Here,

A pile of angry words

metered meticulously

cursing the oppressor

Dipped in cheap government ink.

 - 

The perfect structure of desultory resistances.

Workout Videos

You will either be bored

Or cry.

Yes, those extremities 

Of real life -

That can't be scrolled at ease.

 

If only we poor

Emaciated people

Start uploading it -

This cruel world

Our inexpensive gym.

Sighs of a diffident Lifer

It makes no sense

Calling people who don't pick up

Or thinking about them.

Or looking into the washroom mirror

When the usual chores are over

Holding your tears back and

Drowning them in their infancy.

The best way

(There could be others as well)

is to forgive them.

Forgive yourself.

Absolve them of their sins

Not because you are somehow

Optimistic about life

But to keep yourself sane.

Keep their memories safe.

In times like these

When hate is contagious

Like some airborne virus.

Or to turn them

Into fiction in your head,

In your life.

That way

They are always available

Always free.

Always attentive.

The only condition 

(like Orpheus) however

is to never answer them back.

Just keep listening

And forgiving

And continue living

As hard as it gets.

This:

(what you otherwise call 

the ordinary sighs

Of a diffident lifer).

Adam's Curse

When imagination is pitted against

Bouts of depression

What always wins

is silence -

Benumbing silence - that pierces

The arbitrary meaning of words.

People often ask

Why don't you write regularly?

Like others

For the poet's tiny corner

In the factual world of newspapers.

What they don't apprehend

Is the bloody landscape of the mind

When seen against the charred pampas of the heart

Set in a body

That wakes to grief

Like someone rudely awakened

In a jest

With blood shot eyes

Making sense of the world

That does not at all sleep.

That a poem is not poetry.

One needs to sift the words

Sacrifice them on the altar of feelings

Unless meaning runs through them like blood.

Imagination is not always enough.

Give a title.

Sentence

Comma

Fullstop.

Weltanschauung

Most clocks know

They just show time -

They aren't Time itself.

Just like 

Some of us know

We aren't living -

We are Life itself.

Life among other things

a wall -

a door -

a chair -

a table -

a shelf -

a bed -

How essential

These ordinary things seem

To hold on to

When one suddenly feels dizzy -

To restore balance to this fragile life.

(Provided

One possesses these things and

Owns a house.

Otherwise,

An electric pole

Or sideways

Suffice.

Or probably a stranger.)

The Mathematics of Life

Perhaps

The one subject that

I utterly 

Failed to understand in school was 

Mathematics.

I could never fathom the 

Idea of it all.

The numbers.

The shapes.

The formulas.

Even today 

When we 2

While contemplating the square root of love,

With 80 eyes

26 brains 

3 religions

96 prejudices

200 fingers

1001 bank accounts

86 fists

32 missed calls

60 moral lessons

2 cultures,

meet at a traingular table

In the square park

Of this rhombus city

Bracketed in this oval world -

I fail to perceive

The lines that run parallel to us.

In the hastiness of a solution

I subtract you from me

Only to find that

Unlike the book

Life comes with no answers

At the end.

This formulaic World.

That shapeless God.

Contrary to Common Opinion

Not weakness.

Not flaw.

Not powerlessness.

After a certain age,

The act of weeping turns into

Art itself.

Tears become ropes 

Lowered from the cliffs of worldly appearance

To save the heart from falling off.

And contrary to common opinion

The art is a success.

Of Love and other Verses

It is strange,

how you remind me of religion.

Just the other day,

The dampness

of your cushion inundated

The dirty narrow streets 

Of my heart.

The way it floods in holy books

With poetic verses.

Noah knew it.

He knew how the mind fails as an ark.

For him it was not a flood.

It was an act of re-creation.

Maybe,

That is how

God plans everything.

All this.

Maybe,

Like biscuits in tea.

Love makes people porous.

Nothing like a Viral Meme

Write Kashmiris

In some catchy font

Over 

Kanye West

In the picture

Drooling inside the

Mandala of sneakers around him.

The way we wail 

In the graveyards of our dead.

In this age

Nothing moves us humans

(momentarily)

Like a viral meme.

Two Poets and a Crowd

(for Jaun Elia and Charles Bukowski)

This one doesn't cuss.

The other one does.

This one rambles names

Chanting them as verses 

Like conjuring a spell

One after the other

Snapping around

Urging people to recognize him

as a failure.

While slapping himself.

The other one maunders.

Sipping beer

Imploring for more

Warning people to behave.

Develop a taste for his ordinary words or

He will kick their ass.

This one is more interested

In anecdotes than Poetry.

The other one smokes, mumbles

Burps in the middle of his poem.

This one depreciates himself as a poet.

The other one gloats himself as the last one.

They differ

But not the crowd.

On both sides of the continent

They all laugh at these jokers

Baring their artistic souls.

Like people do in sitcom shows.

Surely

'The words have not been heard'

Surely

'The world has failed them both.'

The Unwritten

I like it

When your voice breaks

Over the phone.

In those moments

You could be saying anything.

I can make you say anything.

"I've found a God in you"

"Everything, other than love, is wrong in the world"

"No poetry can capture the sanctity of certain relationships"

It is like when one is writing and

The ink dries out.

And the pen mocks writing.

Instead

One can scribble anything with it now

Write the unwritten.

Compose personal epics.

I decide to call you again

Bad signal, I say

Only to find out

Your honeyed voice

Back again

Rambling about

The constant barking of dogs.

The insects in the sultry heat.

The colour of the toothbrushes.

Sometimes,

Clarity is not what one wishes for -

Voice-breaks are needed to overwrite 

The beginnings of love affairs

The-strangers-yet-to-meet kind of narratives

Over the everyday details.

But, somehow

The voice always comes back -

A thud

A resurrection

An awakening

Pointing us to appreciate

The beauty of the mundane -

The tired dogs.

The dead insects.

The sparkling yellow toothbrush.

Death of an Individual (English translation of Nida Fazli's urdu nazm 'Fard ki Maut')

Birds are counted

They have no names

All birds are alike

Sheep and goats are counted

They have no names

All sheep and goats are alike

Even Muslims are counted

They have no names

All Muslims are alike

In that Order Specifically

Hiding in my room

Furtively

Appreciating the solitude

While waiting for the guests to leave.

Waiting for some stranger

In a government building

For a piece of paper

Nervously fidgeting my feet.

Looking in the mirror

Downcast

Finding my face besmeared 

With the lust of money.

Life seems like a series of paintings

From Edward Hopper to 

George Tooker to 

Francis Bacon.

and in that order specifically.

Introspection

Like a swarm of insects

We arrived out of nowhere and

Lingered on.

Befouling everything around.

We snatched anything, anywhere.

Rested.

Looked around.

Trampled.

Gathered information of the unknown.

Maligned the rest

To establish ourselves as superiors.

Bombed places randomly.

Couped lands and bodies.

Built earthquake resistant egos.

Tore humanity like a rag.

Walked on the moon for a mere flag.

Later we contemplated on Aesthetics

Adamantly knowing the answers somehow

Nominated and received awards

As we wrote:

Who sows clouds in the sky?

Is sky earth?

Is God a farmer?

A Tale of two Homes

Our old home suffered from hyperhidrosis.

No matter how much

You ventilated it, perfumed it

It would still smell like cement.

The walls looked like discarded paintings.

We spent nineteen years there

Learning to bet on life and career

Chasing away storms, rains and floods.

In there: We were sailors 

In search of better coasts.

Until we found one.

With no desire to scratch or

Apply any ointment of love -

Our new home

Suffers from psoriasis.

In here: We are sightseers

In search of new sarais.

 

Handheld Aesthetics

Writing a poem for you, is like,

Putting the camera at a weird angle.

Something, that does not respect the

Traditional mise en scène but

Something that is perhaps handheld.

Documentary style -

A type of guerrilla filmmaking.

In the midst of the crowd -

Lies the image of your life

Part-fiction-part-real.

You zoom in with a low buget camera,

Guiding the viewer to recognize - the 

Mundane sublimity of being nothing -

But a human being. 

Spots of Time

A meagre 20-rupee note 

shivering on the dashboard

displays its lightness.

Covering around 35 Kilometers

With just one passenger in the car

he stops randomly by the roadside.

Coarses his throat calling passengers.

With mountains coming close,

as suburbs slide by,

the car zigzagging on the road

seems unnecessary.

As we reach the main stop

reluctantly he gives the note to another man

While I look at my watch.

"Everything is the Colonizer's fault"

We already have poets

Who speak truth to power

In various reputed literary magazines.

We already have our politicians' children

Who know how to stay relevant in media.

We already have journalists 

Who are friends with people at high places

In case they write something against them in future.

We already have newspaper editors 

Who know how to beat politicians at golf.

We already have people in uniform

Who know how to change their nationality 

As they return home.

We already have government employees

Who are oblivious to politics 

In the first week of every month.

What we need God

(If you are still up there) is

Some handsome typical

Rich, high caste Kashmiri dictator 

Who empathizes with our material zest.

Someone who understands 

Our helplessness to be religious and

speaks Arabic like poetry. 

At the rate of Democracy (2G in 2020)

Imagine an innocent child

With an IQ of 40

Competing in a spelling contest.

The judges have  just given him

The simplest of the simple

After seeing his face

The word 'The'.

The child stammers

Asks them politely to repeat the word

Again and again

Until they are irritated.

The child picks his nose.

Moves his fingers in the air.

Regrets eating rice before the competition.

Continuously asks for

Any alternative roots

Pronunciation.

Any other hints.

Until the judges are pronounced dead and

The child sucks on his lollipop.