About You

The sun was terrific 

and I enjoyed waiting for you,

knowing that you'd come

sooner than later.

The book, an additional comfort.

Life dispenses

few moments like these - 

clear visioned, blissful, content.

Only in retrospection does

one fully appreciate the sun, the waiting

the book - this whole mess of life.

On days, however, when I feel 

too penniless to face a moneyed day,

I snatch some air from that day and

shower it all over myself.

It ruffles my hair

as if you are just beside,

waiting to surprise me

with a greeting that resolves

the entire problem of space-time,

at least for me,

without using any mathematical equations

at all.

A Borges-Chekhov Dimension

 A ‘time-bound’ reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘The Secret Miracle’[1] and Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Bet’[2]

One is a writer in prison, the other is a reader in prison. One is waiting for death, the other for freedom.

 

Borges’ character is a writer/prisoner awaiting his impending death by gunshot with a desire to finish his play before dying, so that he could justify, give meaning to his Life. With a desire to do this, he prays, and God stops time for him: the physical world stops exactly the moment the soldiers are about to shoot. He, thereafter, re-writes, edits, changes the story, characters, condenses the play, to his satisfaction, only to be killed as he is searching for the right epithet. His altered play observes the unity of time, place and action. His life, however, in the hands of he who ‘art the centuries and time itself’, doesn’t believe in these unities. Quite ironically, God provides the writer to observe his literary unities of time while dismantling, fragmenting the same in real time.

 

Chekhov’s character is a reader/prisoner awaiting his impending freedom once he completes fifteen years of his voluntary imprisonment. Unlike Borges’ character, he doesn’t have to pray to God to grant him time: the physical world has already stopped for him. Or, to put it differently, he has voluntarily stopped it for himself. While in prison, he acquires a love for Reading - the classics, history books, adventure stories, religious books etc. His imagination, as the responsible reader of these books, leads him to places - places even unknown to the free minds out there in the world, including the banker himself with whom he has betted in the first place. But after reading almost the entire literature of the World, he develops a disdain for everything – including, quite ironically, money itself. Thereafter, he leaves the confinement of the prison before the stipulated time, hence deliberately breaking the contract. In the face of death, the reader at the end of the story even disparages the books he holds in such high regard.   

 

In both the stories Time is the real protagonist. In Borges’ story, time is halted so that the character can finish his book and thereby give himself the illusion of living beyond the confines of time by carving a piece of Art from this mundane, unartful life. In Chekhov’s story, the prolonged time’s quality is further enriched by the efforts of the reader dabbling into the reservoir of knowledge, thus freeing himself from the confines of the prison-world by indulging in the perusal of literary works. Chekhov predominantly wrote in the realist genre. Borges abhorred social realism. The same trope of Time is being commented upon from two perspectives; one takes recourse to fantasy, the other tries to be as realist as possible. The outcomes vary exceptionally. Despite the differences, it is interesting to note how certain basic themes including, for example, the validity of Art, Time, Individual freedom, God, personal choices, find a common ground in their writings, especially in these two stories. Both the reader and the writer in prison, in times of crises, find recourse in Literature, or, to put it in a larger context, take refuge in ‘the prison-house of language’ itself. 

---

[1] Translated by Andrew Hurley.

[2] Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Untitled

(for Joseph Brodsky)

Birds, here, fly like your whispers.

The sky seems overdrawn with mirth.

Huts, far away, feel like undone stories.

The roads curl like eyelashes.

There are no vehicles of any sort here,

as if everyone has just arrived -

or never left.

Nobody waits for no one here.

The animals seem self-sufficient 

searching something - 

maybe, the word stray.

Both the suns are

dusking farewell to pupils - 

the shrubs, here, weep 

like dewdrops on plastic.

....

I guess I'm dreaming

although I rarely dream

or else, it seems

"It is an early evening in the town of your Memory".

Dog Walking

Life,

like a faithful dog, barks -

drooling excitedly

at each moment.

Meanwhile,

I clutch 

onto the latch of breaths,

petending to be the owner.

Loneliness - a Prose Poem

Loneliness is not an act of hunting. Loneliness is not a case to be solved. It is not an activity that one needs to overcome.

Loneliness is not Socrates going to the Oracle, it is him holding the hemlock amongst all. Loneliness is Galileo gazing at tiny specks of Moon for the first time through an apparatus. Loneliness is a horse with extra hooves limping with load on its back. Loneliness is not someone sitting alone on a bench, it is, in the first place, the very bench holding onto land, land holding onto earth, the earth, thereby, holding onto the galaxy - a galaxy that, if one listens to it carefully, sounds like the noise of water flushing out from an empty cistern. Loneliness is the sound of brushing one's teeth every day. Loneliness is also the monotonous movement of the thumb changing reels, on Instagram, without break.

Even if Loneliness can be resolved - at all, the effect always seems momentary. 

One poet* arrests an object to rationalize the attention he wants when he writes:

Bahut Shadeed Tavajjoh Ka Saamna Tha Mujhe

So Ik Glass Ko Paani Se Bhar Liya mein Ne

Does it suffice? 

Should it suffice?

By drawing an individual, an object into the vicinity of your Self, in order to exorcise loneliness, all one does is smear more loneliness onto them.

Despite all this, it is what it is - in us, around us, surrounding us. We are afflicted with it. It is our original condition. Gregariousness - a facade, maybe, how we try to ignore it. Some do it consciously, some out of habit, some unconsciously. But when the poet exposes himself to anyone else, he finds something else:

Apne Khala Mein Laa K Ye Tumko Dikha Raha Hoon Mein

Woh Jo Khala-naward Hain Unke Liye Khala Hoon Mein

Interestingly, the khala-naward cannot be separated, subtracted from the khala that encompasses all. It is what defines him/her.

or,

as the poet° would put it:

You get so alone at times that it just makes sense.

- a sense that would not make any sense if explained.

When one is alone in the house even the gurgling of one's own body seems strange. One seems, in those moments, more alert to the things happening, outside/inside, and gradually, the distinctions fade away. Probably that is how one pays obeisance to the inherent lonely nature of things. It is like mixing food that may lead to a brand new delicious variety. This, however, should not come at the cost of not being able to eat the original food items separately ever. Mixing food is Loneliness. To misquote Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a crowd

that roams amid the cities on pills

then all at once I saw a shroud

a ghost of putrid dunghills...

Loneliness is, also, someone retching on the winding roads to reach a particular spot (beautiful or otherwise), high among the mountains.

One’s loneliness could also be somebody else’s succulent gossip.

We don't reek of loneliness, we smell of it.

 

* Faizan Hashmi

° Charles Bukowski

Newspapered

A few days back,

I laughed so much

they began calling me

the front page of a booming newspaper

run by a far-right party.

Yesterday,

I wept word after word after word 

and heard

the publication stands ceased.

Today,

Just lying there

I could see 

some news-items designed

among flashy advertisements.

Clearly -

this newspapered Life is paperish,

so ephemeral 

that it reminds one of rumours.

A Poem about Grief

They say,

the sand beneath the rock

suffers from nostalgia of the mountain -

the sand, 

when it succumbs to grief,

rolls along the rock with its

suicidal tendency to go down

and down and down

till it reaches, encounters

more sufferers.

What then are we,

I imagine,

afflicted with

beneath these hefty relationships?

We, the stone throwers.