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.