Of treats—and grounds—and sealing love

All my life my sister has been to me a provider of treats. I cannot recount to you (or myself for that matter) the number of gifts I have had from her. From the elaborately concocted fictions about the universe from my earliest memories, through the songs, ideas, poems, concepts, interests, loves, laughs, philosophies, news, and nuggets she litters my life with, to the You Tube videos I almost invariably watch downloaded on her laptop, my mental life is strung with gifts from her.

Very often, I've believed as many as six impossible things she's told me before breakfast. Or fallen in love a couple of times. Yesterday it was with something which I watched with toothbrush in my mouth and mist in my eyes, which Sheetal also shares with you, so enjoy!

That sequence of events is beautiful for so many reasons – Sahir, Madan Mohan, Meena Kumari and Sunil Dutt are not the least of them. Oh! But the idea of it! In the ghazal world there isn’t a more intimate act than to work in another's zameen. It is always an extension of love. It is like wearing your lover’s T-shirt. And the audacity and the longing in writing in the meter and rhyme structure of an unknown lover is just too delicious.

The sweetness of the episode was impossible to resist. So this, dedicated in gratitude to my sister.

Ek tere noor ki hasrat ne jagaya hai jinhe

Dil ke nairang tilismaat kise pesh karoon

Apne jazbaat-o-khayaalat-o-khalwat se saje

Bazm-e-dil ke ye da’waat kise pesh karoon

Justuju ne tho duboya hai humee mein humko

Doobke ubhre jo ilmaat kise pesh karoon

Teri furqat mein ris-ris ke jutaaya hai jise

Woh nihaan abr-e-barsaat kise pesh karoon

Har koi aab-talab phirta hai zoya ya’an par

Phir umadta behr-e-zulmaat kise pesh karoon

Waking on

They’d begun to ask me if this blog is dead. I did not think so; I thought that perhaps it was just very very sleepy. I am giving it a slight prod to see if it stirs and breathes.

Often when you sleep with a thought you awake on the theme, and so I find I still have Hirshfield for you –

To hear the falling world

Only if I move my arm in a certain way,

it comes back.

Or the way the light bends in the trees

this time of year,

so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart.

I carry this in my body, seed

in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seemingly safe.

But they guard me, these small pains,

From growing sure

of myself and perhaps forgetting.

Six months

Modernism or modernity, one or the other of them, taught us to abhor the cliché. To resist the comfort of periodicity, to suspect sentiment on cue. And duly we detest the 14th of February and refuse to be charmed when six year olds produce mother’s day cards from classroom assignments. Emotion can be manipulated, manufactured even; it is perhaps wise to be aware of this. But I have begun to suspect that the subconscious is far more difficult to train than our minds and that it feeds off a moss-field of regularity and cliché and simple moisture and sunlight will do the trick anytime.

++++++++++++++++

It has been six months today since my mother died. Emotion has lived on the surface of my skin during this period. I cannot say the overriding emotion has been grief; there have been times when I have felt I might burst from love or pride or gratitude or loneliness. Other times, I have been hard-pressed to classify what I have felt to beyond anything more find-tuned than plain emotion. And all of this has found release through remarkably unclogged channels in tears. I have cried a lot; copiously, instantaneously, summarily, methodically and on occasion uncontrollably. It has got a point with me where far from being surprised or embarrassed by these tears I have at times failed even to notice them till I contacted the moisture on my cheek or noted puffy eyes in the mirror.

One of the subsidiary exercises in all this crying has been to study what occasions it, or what the usual triggers are. I find that these triggers are very usual indeed - beauty, courage, music, children, kindness, renditions of love and clothes. Other than these, surprisingly to me – dates. Apart from a few birthdays I am not very much in the habit of remembering dates.

But I found myself (without having given it specific previous thought) unmitigatedly emotional for the entire day when our parents’ anniversary passed us by recently. This surprised me somewhat, like I said, because I had never really marked the day particularly, and neither had my parents.

Today again, I am brittle. What does it matter that it is six months to a day? What causes this heightened awareness? Do we subliminally need to mark time? To know when to tie knots, create nodes, lock segments and release new selves?

On days like these I like to have some hand-holding and when I reach out and find a hand it is nice.

I found this today.


All the Difficult Hours and Minutes

by Jane Hirshfield

All the difficult hours and minutes

are like salted plums in a jar.

Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves,

they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass.

Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.

First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

Keeping with Urdu

My next was going to be an acerbic rant on the Ghazal in English. But that was before, in the very process of composing it, I succumbed too. The Ghazal is such a therapeutic form of verse that I realise that it must enormously tempt poets of temperament. The real poets of talent of course find no crutches in either language or form – but we don’t speak of those just here.

Since I am still embarrassed by my English attempt, I will give you instead a good old-fashioned recent one in Urdu. At least it will have the advantage of being quite incomprehensible to a majority of the people who will glance at it, while affording me the satisfaction of giving it a life beyond the bytes of a Word document.

Ye baad-e-tabaah sab raah barbaad kar jo chale

Shukr! Zahmat-e-intikhaab se aazaad kar jo chale

Abd-e-misr sa gumaan hota aaj kal humse

Dil-e-sang-e-giraan ko seene pe laad kar jo chale

Keysh se khuda tak ka faasla tai hoga kaise?

Pairon mein zanjeer-e-khudi saad kar jo chale

Gila tho nahi hai koi woh jo chale so chale

Zahan-o-dil ko roshan-o-aabbad kar jo chale

Koi gul na khila ab ke mausam-e-bahaar mein

Chale tho tamaam chaman nashaad kar jo chale

Ab kuch zabt ka tamasha bhi dekhajaye Zoya

Zor-e- vaheshat mein tarq-e-fasaad kar jo chale