Faiz

Though I had promised myself to restrict this blog to my own works only, there are certain instances when we give in to the great wave. This nazm is by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of my most loved and most profound inspirations, (btw, I found out I was related to him three years ago), and its a prayer, this nazm. It epitomizes what I believe at this point in time. That relegion is not the same as spiritualism, and that relegion in itself, can be defined in a myriad of ways. That a prayer, can fly from the heart, anytime. That prayers are not confined to ideological or theological barriers. That who I pray to, may not matter, as long as I understand what I am praying for.That we, in this world right now, need to bleed with those who bleed, and to cry with those who cry, for it is only then, will we understand them, and only through understanding comes action.

Show me the light. But show it to me through the living.Through essentially, the heart. Through compassion.And then, I shall believe.


"Aaiye, haath uthaaein hum bhi
Hum, jinhe rasm-e-dua yaad nahi
Hum, jinhe soze-e-muhabbat k siwa,
Koi but, koi khuda yaad nahi.

aaiye, arz guzaarein k nigaar-e-hasti
Zeher-e-imroz mein shireen-e-fardaan bhar de
Woh jinhe taabe garaan baarii-e-ayaam nahi
Unki palkon pe shab-o-roz ko halka kar de.

Jin ki aankhon ko rukh-e-subh ka yaaran bhi nahi
Un ki raaton mein koi shumma munawwar kar de
Jin k qadmon ko kisi raah ka sahaara bhi nahi
Un ki nazron pe koi raah ujaagar kar de.

Jin ka deen pairwi-e-kasb-o-riyaa hai un ko
Himmat-e-kufar miley, Jurrat-e-tahqeeq miley.
Jin ke sar muntazir-e-taigh-e-jafaa hain un ko
Dast-e-qaatil ko jhatak dainey ki taufeeq miley.

Ishq kaa sar-e-nihaan jaan-tapaa hai jis se
Aaj iqraar karein aur tapish mit jaye
Harf-e-haq dil mein khataktaa hai jo kaante ki tarah
Aaj izhaar karein aur khalish mit jaye.

Aaiye haath uthayein hum bhi....."

(Faiz Ahmed Faiz--14 August 1967)

On "..suddenely seeing them again.."

Grains of sand,of the hourglass, mixing.
Twisting and turning,
The paths that we walk on.

Meeting, sometimes.
Unexpectedly. Suddenely.
Violently.

Taking us by storm.
Again.

A Dialogue between Two Gods

Dionysus: Lunar ubiquity and saving grace
a tempestuous aura yet devoid of embrace
hollow and lifeless; an entity without trace
a smile that heals wounds; lustful evil beneath the surface
acquaintance and sweet union bonded by frayed lace...

i had a dream. i woke up and wrote this..

Ishtar: Throught the eye-holes in the patch of lace,
An emerald begins to burn.
Deep and throbbing, a single bead of liquid fire,
Turns Red.
Pallid and grey, the ashen-faced lace,
Blushes coral.
And so it will burn. And so we will all.

Hear the heat, and refuse to feel it.


Dionysus: Those who wish to Follow me, My Ghetto Gospel
I Welcome with my Hands
And the Red Sun Sinks at last into the Hills of Gold
And Peace to this Young Warrior
without the sound of Guns..


Ishtar: The sound of the Gun, is but a calling,
For the meteor bred the human Race.
Find the voice of the splintered crystal,
As it recreates itself in the waterfall.
For the song is silent and shall remain so,
Until the reed reaches out.


Dionysus: The human race is forsaken.
The crystal speaks not.
Its voice is shut.
It is silent. There is silence..
The waterfall blinds it from vision.
Take my hand and Show Me the way...

Ishtar: An eagle burns on the stake,
And as it does, blood sears through the crystal.
The crystal begins to feel.
Can you see yet?
Or is the waterfall still heavy?

Dionysus: Sacrilegious beauty, alight on desire.
A flame called passion, and wings of fire.
A crystal niche, yet another lustful pyre.

I see now.. I can see clearly now


Ishtar: The pyre flaunts the ashes,
Of burning crystal, and the blackened dream
Of a sacralegious flame,
Erupts into life.
Ashes to ashes not,
These ashes fly the wind,
And become our wings.

What is it that you see now?...

Dionysus: The ashes' glint, the firebird's cry
A glistening cinder on its ascension to the sky
Incarnation of life, a toast to time gone by
Our wings we inherit, and tonight, i fly.

Us. i see Us..

Ishtar: We raise our glasses,
And the wine writhes with the cinder,
The cinder, that reaches up,
and burns in our hold.
Dare we be the ones,
to have found the Elixir,
That makes the mortal bold?

I see Us too..

Dionysus: Mortals can never be bold.
Love is the content of the Elixir.
But the intoxication is of a greater strata.
Are we but Gods? Drunk on Love?
Is it but in our hands, the wine that we hold, the antidote to mortality?
Is that really us, in the luscious-red lace bond...?

Ishtar: Two hands, feeling.
Through the folds of what they were told, was Time.
Sifting through the grains locked in the hourglass,
To find the winged one.
Through blood, and catharsis,
From the heart of the Pyramid,
to the circle of light,
Amidst the rush of the human tide,
As it grows and harbours hurt.
Standing on the bridge of loss, one day,
And leaving the land of no-dreams, the next,
They search.
They would have been Gods, had God been there.
The mortal flies not when the hourglass shatters,
But when he understands that the hourglass exists.

Ofcourse its us...it IS nothing but us.

Dionysus: i love Us.
and i love you too.

Ishtar: *smiles*

The Restoration

He gave me free frenchfries. The Afghani french fry seller. Because he didn't want me without frenchfries when my sister was munching on them. I tried desperately to pay him but he wouldn't hear of it.

Sometimes, certain people restore your faith in the human race.
Thank goodness for them.

Khayal

Maqsad, aur darwaaze ki aout mein betha aik khayal.
Jo chupta hai, bhagta hai,
Aur jab pakra jaata hai, to baarish k khanaktey ghungroon ki tarah,
Machal saa jaata hai.
Khayal.
Jis ki awaaz aaj aftaab ki garmi samait kar,
Rangon k bareek dhaago mein piroti hai,
Jis ki boondon mein bahaar behti hai.
Aur hum, jo khayal se dur hain,
Aaj khamoshi se
Usse dekh rahe hain.


K humme bhi awaz ki talaash hai.
Uss rang ki talaash hai.

Stories

He sits outside the circle. The light from the burning fire in the centre just grazing the tips of his heavy, snakeskin boots. He pulls down the narrow leather strap of his backpack, and tugs out a pack of cigarettes. He takes one out and lights it, watching the flame from his kerosene lighter flicker for a miniscule instant.

A shivering flame confessing to the fire.

The old Apache woman sits inside the circle, and, with the fire, lies on the same centre. Her long, unkempt, slightly wild, gray hair mirror the heat, shadows dip and whirl on the canvas. Chinese theatre on gray hair.
She has a reed in her hand, as if all the stories that she tells are somehow sucked out off that reed and drawn up, being let out gently into the sparks that jump in excited passion from the heart of the burning fire.Stories of princesses, and old red haired men called the Ugandees, stories of white unicorns and lost tales of Indian Conquests. Stories. Hundreds of them. Connecting the patches of space and time with a single golden thread, weaving pathways for fireflies to trail through. Scattering through the untouched night. Touching it. Touching the virgin night. Feeling. Disturbing. Tearing a hole through history. And through that hole, the stories, they pour out.

She is surrounded by people representing many different spaces in time. Old men and women with her own gray hair, women in the fields, who had been working all day amongst the cornstalks, their faces red with the heat and soil, little children and not-so-little children, thin, black children in their grubby clothes, some other men, relatively young. They are all gathered there, the patches of space and time, mismatched and put together clumsily, haphazardly. Pieces of a jigsaw puzzle thrown together around a fire.
Listening to the stories.Trying to forget that a world exists where there are no stories. Only life.

The Apache woman is telling them how life too, is a story. She tells them about Adam and Eve, but for them, that is a world not their own. Its too far away, and imagination, though it may fly, always comes back to teh source that lets it fly, because it can no more exist without the source as teh source can exist without it.
They wonder if "life" as tehy know it, can be called a story. No, not really, they decide, shaking their heads in nonchalant dismissal, in "life", they don't fly.

The man watches the circle. The old woman with her long disarrayed gray hair in the centre, men and women and children circling her, a fire. The night is dusky, and a thinly woven shawl of pale smoke, rests on the dark.
He sits away. Making no move to enter the light. The night is an old friend. It has been for the past few years. His boots have taken him some distances. They will do more. The warmth is tempting, but he knows he will not trespass. He has seen them before, riders of the storms and wanderers through the stars, pausing to spend some time in these circles of stories and fire. And they have never left. No one leaves the circle once he enters it. The traveller, that is. The traveller who knows that life too, is a story, that life too, has wings.Those who think otherwise, sit in the circle at night and rise at day, because they cannot see taht the golden thread that connects the dots on time, leads to their own lives, weaving them into the stories too. But the traveller sees how the stories dance into each other, how the thread moves and how all paths lead to one place. He is a traveller, precisely because he understands that. He knows that deserts and the moutains and the waters he walks through, the directions his horses take, the lamps that light the fog, all guard the way to one source and one source alone. So he travels. He knows not where he will end up, but he knows that no matter which direction he walks in, he will end up there. He realizes that the end doesnot matter, and so he travels. He decided that these paths, these directions are important, and that he must see them all. They are the stories that the old woman draws out from the broken reed she holds. The traveller does not want to hear them. The traveller wants to live them.

He does not join the circle. He is afraid that he will remain there, content just to hear. He runs from this sense of satisfaction. He doen'st want to just see the stars and hear the storms. He wants to BE them.

The sound of the hundred-color toucan spreads through the sky like the trailing shower from a meteor, and blades of a new sun slice thinly through the ocean, wet and glistening. Like a nymph, the sun rises from the water, and the night, the woman and the fire, lift their skirts and vanish into the fading starlight. Men and women, and childen, they begin to scatter. Their "lives" have returned. Their wings evaporate in the sun.

And the man stubbs out his cigerette and buttons up his backpack. He stands up and walks into the dry, wispy ashes of an old fire, dead against a temple of blackened stones. Silence. He drinks it in. The stories have moved on.

For the traveller today, there are endless roads to the sun. He looks up, and breathes in the wisps of the night as it trails off into the horizon. Stories, he thinks, that have moved on for those who rose by day. But for him, where the day and night overflow into each other, the stories stay.

Him and the stories. One.

Memory walks into Idleness

So the wheel turns,
And the spokes swivel under
thought.
The mind clogs,
Stacks of dust and twisted strings,
pick at woven memories,
Unravelling.

Silence

We do not value life. And i stand here with my head down. Ashamed at what I have become.
Forgive us. For us. For you.

(To all those who died in the Ghotki Train Incident)

Disconnected

The way a moth hovers on the other side of glass,
And cannot break in,
Stuck in the air that thickens around it,
Struggles to open doors.

Like the weary traveller,
Sitting outside the circle of stories,
Listening to the sounds the old grey woman in the centre makes,
Not stories,
Sounds.

The stars, spangled in midair,
Strangled in twisting threads of fire and burning,
Understand the falling star,
And why it breaks to its death.
There are, but endless roads to freedom.

Where do circles lead?
And who, in the moths and stars and waiting horsemen,
Searches for the centre?
.

"Faani"

Sitting in our car, on our way back from Islamabd Defense Housing Scheme:

Mama: Kal akhbar mein aya tha k famine kuch saalon tak itna barh jaye gaa k log darkhton k patay khaeein gey...

Me: Amma do you know, there is enough food in this world to feed every single person on this planet?

Mama: Nahi chalo, woh to apni jagah hai naa, mera matlab tha k yeh jo floods waghera aa jaate hain inn k baad...

Me: Mama, agar floods bhi ayein, to jo kuch bachta hai, that should be distributed equally amongst everyone, but it isn't. Jin k paas power hai, money hai, woh horde karte hain, unn ki bala se baqi sab marte hain to marein!

Ayesha: Yeah, that's right.

No converstaion for a few seconds...

A few seconds later:

Me: Waise I think all species die out ultimately, and this perhaps will be a dying out of ours.

Baba: Aur to tum ne bahut kuch parh liya hai, I would suggest k tum Quran ki English Tafseer parho.

Me: Yeah, I was thinking of that. Mein ne parhna shuru ki thi, but then other things came in the way.

Baba: Bara explicitly stated hai Quran mein, k Allah ne yeh dunya khatam karni hai. Ussi ne banai hai, aur uss ne khatam karni hai. Signs diyay huay hain Quran mein, k yeh zameen apney orbit se nikal jaye gi, two planets will collide, and the sky will turn red as a result of the immense heat produced. Sab khatam ho jaye gaa kyunke Allah ne yeh sab khatm karna hai.

Me: Hmmmm......



An hour later, sitting beside Ayesha, watching her pray:

Me: Ayesha, one thing though, WHY does it all have to finish? Why does it have to end? Why is this world "faani"?

Ayesha: Because......