Dear Nazia,

This is not an elegy for you. I am just trying to make peace with the President of the Immortals here. It was unimaginable that I would mourn your death so soon. A death which ruthlessly pulled you down into that deep water, drowning all your dreams, hopes and happiness. I still gape at this cruelty. Your sudden departure into the oblivion. It numbs me that such a horrid moment waited you there in the form of that blue stream. From all the moments you spent with me I gathered that you had enough mettle to survive such opposing currents. But ‘nature’ can be real sporty, tossing with lives, it destroys the ones who refuse to be defeated.

I know when you have plunged into that water you somehow wanted to save your child, even by losing your own life. I never experienced what really are the pure instincts of a mother. But I have known you as a devoted mother for your child. I have seen you beaming with pride and joy for doing so much for your daughter’s delight. You built stories for her and sang tunes that brought her a world of immense pleasure and knowledge. May be the Gods don’t like such ideals to thrive and shine so long in the world below. So they snatch you away and watch our sorrow with warrants for the divine act such as; it will anyway happen, it has to happen, for all of us it will happen, only that it happened so early here. But too sudden, too unbearable, at times too far from comprehension.

One would prefer an Aristotelian catharsis only on stage. But never with the real people out there, with such traumatic reversal of events. The good characters need to suffer and fall only in the wild imagination of a mortal author. I know my friend, that how you embraced authors and their words with much zest, and basked in the twists and turns of wonderful plots. Never would for yourself have wanted such irrevocable ending for your own story. No one would have wanted it even as a nightmare. And here I struggle to believe it as a bad dream, but haunted forever by the cold truth that you can be here only as a memory. A butterfly who is pitilessly thrown into a chill winter even before it could feast enough on its counted flowers in this yard.  

Rest in peace my friend. I have only love and prayers for you. 

As my Muse slowly started toddling back to health…

The Existentialist’s Pride

-Thought- and Grief–so familiar to each other-
But more silent than silence to confess to each other-
The ravishes they conspire and do to her together.

Still she unlistens her world from its ever heaving heaviness
Bears it all bare -imparted- more alone than alone
It takes much pride to break her promise-
To keep her crystal shine pristine self away from it.
And she fights the existential blight with the unyielding shield
Never let the world know her woe-
Was ‘must’ for her woe-

I bore you two long ago in this little sag of memories
For the thinking men say-
-‘thought and grief are the responses of memory’-
So cozy they stay in the sunlight hours
I leave you there all through the city hours
Silent and smooth rolled in my velvety quilt
I leave you there with my lonely guilt
To keep you from my toiling silt.
And then there is this time
Of the dying sun unleashing your chime
With me squelching in nocturnal slime
And then there is no rush or shush or hush
When slowness is in its lush
When memory exuberant fattening the blush
There you bounce out sentient in my bloom
That I wail and writhe in pain in gloom
You tormenting me in an ever winding loom
And still I keep you so safe - so loved-
Though you spurned my peace long ago and still so proud
For I am the human to forgive and you –the Gods- the love- rightful to be left unkilled.
For never let the world know her woe-
Was ‘must’ for her woe.

Such Habits...

To search beauty in others-
-Is a habit that can be slowly nurtured
To constantly navigate from one positive to another
To erase the received injuries that mortified you
To abnegate your ego
To sublimate one’s disappointment for something larger
Like a well-made philosophical argument like:
“To be dispassionate and stand offish to oneself
In the precipice of gelid truths”
Where you lose yourself in the enticing beauty of such words
And to embrace the heart at the other end.

But at some point you might realize
Or get shockingly awakened to the sheer ugliness
Of how you made everything of yours expendable.
It’s almost like a fish who thrived cozily-
In its delusional fluid where it felt it was home
But where at any time a bait-
In the shape of a fly or flesh
Can hook you with its savoury charm
To pull you out from your self-made truths and lies
To something that is intolerable and unbreathable.

Isn’t it always fatal to have such momentary distractions?
To quietly face oneself?
To acknowledge your regressions?
To not to cover but to heal?
And by the time YOU want to celebrate YOU
You simply have to be released into the water,
For you are so accustomed to some veneers
That you think you are not made for any other surfaces.
You see-
Once something is a habit, it is not dispensable.

When it is Ambivalent...

It’s been days since she was around the idea of ambivalence in matters of familial bliss in life. Of course the generality of the thought is initiated from her own episodes of lonely cooking hours in her kitchen.Though an enthusiastic cook at times the drudgery of doing it every day and the conditioning of it being her sole responsibility has always annoyed her. ‘’Ambivalence’’- the hidden play of it without one’s knowledge and its oddity with which she still tries to be in terms with. Nevertheless she decided to give shape and colour to her languid yet serious meanderings on the subject. The act of cooking just like any ‘performance’  one has to do to maintain and sustain love, cordiality and life itself is often gender biased as most women like her have perceived and experienced.  She being never compelled to indulge herself so much in it has often given her great relief. Still the need for performing it every day though in its simplest form still exists in her conscience. She does not know what propels it so mechanically every morning but the thought of not doing it gifts her a sense of guilt she thought she would never be having in her rebellious mind. It’s as if it is intricately designed in her instinct that not doing it frightens her of labelling her as so ‘’ unwomanly”. She thought she could always think beyond such labels and the indifference she felt in philosophising the inessentiality of manhood and womanhood could rescue her through an absence of such guilt. Was she wrong?  Is she strongly a part of such societal conditioning? Why she fails to transcend it? Life is a constant act of rediscovering and reinventing oneself. But she hates such blotches of shameful recognition of one’s ordinariness and inability to ward off institutionalised thinking.

It is at this point that she realises how she could half empathise with her own mother. The thousand hands her mother had amidst the cacophony of being a working woman. And how she misses the very comfortable lingering of her own self all around her house guiltlessly, looking quizzically at her mother’s “over concerns” and relentless housekeeping. She could discern it now more vivid. She could only half empathise with her at present since the motherly concerns are still inexperienced. She has heard women around her complaining about the bodily traumas of child bearing and rearing and the absurdity of glorifying motherhood all through its different phases. The wonders of women’s body-bleeding, life giving and nourishing as a spectacle is easy to romanticize. But its mental-physical exhaustion and mutilation is beyond comprehension to an institutionalised society. And is yet unknown to her. And the fact that everything is institutionalised is already dissected and critiqued. The ordeal of cooking which is often self-imposed has caused much commotion which is only an instance picked out from numerous other chores. Is she herself the victimiser and the victim?  Why does she insist so? Why many women confess they have such similar conscience even those of liberal circles? The knowledge of such ambivalence is nothing new. But it is excruciatingly conflicting when one experiences it in lonesomeness which is the default human condition. She simply couldn’t stop amazing herself in such cognitive dissonances.  

The Chair

She always sits on the edges of chairs at her home

As if she cannot fully insert herself in a coziness and slowness

As if she needs to be always ready for immediate response

As if to fetch this and that

To frequently empty the chairs and fill in half again

With her mind pulled and diverged towards various points

As if she cannot be converged anywhere to savour anything fully

It's as if she is always aware of a perpetual temporariness of sitting

Her duty bound body making sure of others' permanency in those deep sockets

Then there is her department chair

The only place where she soaked herself up in an illusion of constancy

Where it seemed she is capable of drowning herself in her favourites

Words, conversations, arguments and a lot of brainstorming

Pinpointing this, applauding that, analysing many and cherishing some

The chair where she would forget its perpetual temporariness

With hardly any consequence.

Misplaced

 As a person of melancholic temperament her mind always searches for the darker, the commonly unseen side of things- which makes her a keen observer of whatever is lacking in all aspects of life. She constantly craves for beauty, harmony and absolute authenticity in everything around her. Her mind would be twirling around in deep speculations regarding how a person or a thing associated with her life is not in tune with her inner music, not in pace with her rhythm of living. And the sorrowful feelings arising from her such lamentations would flow like a meandering river culminating into that deep pool of turbulence she carries within her. Her husband would say that it is the fictions that she stuffs her mind with which cause such illusions- that it is necessary to let go of certain dis-harmonies in life- that life is not supposed to be a continuous thread of ideal feelings, people, situations and so on. It would again pain her that he is ignorant of that fact she is already accustomed to such truths like ''life is not supposed to be a continuous....'' a thousand times before he uttered such words. That such truths were devoured by her mind in her constant acquaintance with all kinds of literature that she came across so far. That she has already pondered many times upon the philosophy that it's such a great paradox that sometimes literature can make you seek for the ideal though it rips of all the ideals and shows you the bare in everything. It makes you understand as well as makes you sensitive. Yet she has seen people around her literary circle who are voracious readers and fiction lovers but are capable of utmost indifference -when it comes to life they can temper their sensitivity in such way that they wear the cold cloak of objectivity and rationality. She is amazed by such practicality-but she sighs how she lacks the talent.

              

             She recognizes that it would be quite an effort not to feel certain feelings. It needs rigid attention to caution your mind against feelings of disappointment and disillusionment. Yet sometimes she tiresomely pushes herself to filter out all the unpleasant- all the improper- all the weeds that would hamper her healthy survival. It is like shielding her mind and senses, armouring them not to yield to the cacophony around her. Sometimes when she encounters silent moments with her-like while doing dishes at her kitchen or while walking out alone after a class that she would brush off all the surfacing feelings of some disappointments regarding not being understood properly, or the lack of action from someone's part according to her expectations and so on. She would reaffirm herself that guarding her mind against such expectations would bring peace. Then she would smile- being reminded of how her train of thought came from something like Buddha's advocacy on renunciation of desire or Jiddu Krishnamurti's call for freedom from the known and so on. Such whiff of residual thoughts from her readings of wisdom literature would in fact be her solace for some time till her mind looms back to the former abyss of strong melancholic undercurrents. 'Let me hold myself here to thrive in this a bit' she would pray. 

                 

Just a Lament

Rarely do I find people in company of simple things

With a pencil on a scrap of paper

To sketch a favourite face, a place.

Or

To dive into a piece of poetry

May be to Frost,

To climb on his Birches,

To pick apples,

To mend a wall.

Or may be to Shakespeare

Just to admire

What a piece of work is man!

To ponder upon Ophelia’s goodnight.

Or to hear Fur Elise

To get soaked in a tub of water

Just to close one’s eyes

To retain the splash of colours

A Van Gogh, a Monet or a Vermeer.

Instead…

Fingers just tap tap tap

To fritter words on white screens

Unintelligible though you think legible.  

Clicks fatiguing new clicks

Images gobbling up moments after moments.

Just a lament

By someone who walks a college corridor

Day after day

Hour after hour

In class rooms I feel

A whiff of youth indifferent

A scent of frozen minds

A heady whirl of bewilderment at a small silence

A trail of ennui as they yawn

There crumbles my finger, my white chalk, my blackboard. 

The One and the Other

Every pair of eyes hides a world of myriad worlds within
And no one can inhabit the other
It's exclusive
Brilliant in its own way
With its own ultimate suffering
Its own version of pain
Love and longing and flaming desire
Each an enigma to the other
And still you strive
To slice out a part of it 
Or it fidgets to slide towards the other
Sometimes accidentally
Sometimes with effort
Only to slither and fall apart
Only to be returned and glued back 
It never eases itself with the other
It may coexist, entwine, and luxuriate in the other
Only to discover this and that about the other 
Which pulls back one to oneself
And acknowledge and insist on oneself
The never ending coziness of one with oneself
And never with the other.

Wanderlust

Bring me sleep and I would bring 
- Dozens of thoughts 
Nudging onto my delicate eyes
Sugar coated 
Intoxicated
As pipe dreaming 
As violet grapes
Thoughts- blossoming red and wide
I see them in dazzling colours 
In bitterness and in sweet
Puzzling to my beloved 
It scrapes my skin inside 
And baffles his vision outside 
It consumes all my sight
Burns my bones
Rips my nerves
And can upset his love ridden heart 
But I see I see its vitality
All in white and in clarity
It emerges as the only beauty of the thinker
On which you first set your eyes 
It all began there
And the thinker will always be the same
In quiet persistent unrelenting thinking 
Come and know me
The thoughts never escape the thinker
And both can only be despised together
Sleepless and wanderlust. 

The Comprehensible?

       I see that loneliness is not a quiet phenomenon. It is absolutely noisy and chaotic. The long lonely hours of my egotistic contemplations…Wait…are the words comprehensible? Many say it’s incomprehensible…hopelessly tangled with crowded images and strange feelings. May be. For it takes great effort to see things from another eye. To hear those sounds from another ear. To feel those thoughts from another mind. “To feel those thoughts”; it can be done only by the metaphysical? It’s almost impossible to be rational and emotional at the same time.

     The woman in me switches back and forth to being emotional and rational. At one time it pines for the beloved, for a small touch and the feel of that familiar breath. The other times it convinces and consoles the heart that being only emotional can bring stupidity and misery. That I should reread Donne’s Valediction Forbidding Mourning though I have taught the poem a few times in class. The poem forbids any lamentation from the beloved’s part since the man who has parted from her and the woman who is in waiting are like two legs of a compass. The very celebrated metaphor that any literary enthusiastic would always cherish and wonder. Like the fixed leg of a compass makes the outer leg draw the circle in its perfect way and would reach back the same destination, the trust, the love, and the strength of the bond would wonderfully preserve their everlasting compassion and intensity for each other.

     Longing in reality can be unromantic, miserable and a series of disturbing tantrums. Reality can be beautiful when it gets the consolation from these metaphors and valediction forbidding poems. I have always groped for beauty in reality when it starts to slowly sink into those monotonous moments. I have groped for lines, words, or may be at least the sound of those iambs. That Shakespearean rag of me comparing my beloved to a summer’s day or me imagining him sighing like a furnace as the young lover in him longs for this chaotic woman.

     I don’t know the words here are comprehensible or not. The tiredness in me has brought me on a low key where my hands shiver to dive deep and scare the perceiver, the non-existent reader, the echoing empty theatre. Whatever that is difficult has got its quality of being difficult through times of effort, keen attention and perseverance. Some may loathe it since it would challenge their comfort zones of being all “normal” and never wanting to sieve through and accept the challenge. Whatever that is easy is easily admired and applauded because it can be commercialized; call it popular, the taste of the mass, and the comprehensible sweet ticking sensation of “can be understood”. Some artists can play at both ends.  I can try to be the one.