I

After I died,

Beneath chisels and stones they were carving,

I came back looking for colors of blood.

As the minutes trickle down my severed wrist,

I haunt the yakshini*, dancing undead.

But why doesn’t she talk to me?

The air ejaculates horrors of many last nights.

Yet impregnated with calls of muezzin and music of shanka,

Shouldn’t the air be demolished?

It might poison zombies.

Yakshini knows it all too well,

She chooses to leave me to crystallize in horror

As she dances in the pillars of Quwwat-ul-Islam.

II

But why Taj Mahal?

Why ruin the illusion of ethereality in which love chooses to wrap herself?

My complaints won’t find their way to Sahir’s tomb.

But his ‘Taj Mahal’ would haunt love eternally.

“Ik shahanshaah ne daulat ka sahaaraa le kar/
ham GhariiboN kii muhabbat kaa uRaayaa hai mazaaq”

(An emperor on the strength of wealth/

 Has mocked love of the destitute).

And the sourness of grapes is corroding my ink,

“meri mehboob kahiiN aur milaa kar mujh se!”

(Meet me hence, my love, at some other place).

But why not unfetter time?

The keys have been crumbling in our hands,

But glory won’t let us discern age lines on the face of time.

Pietra dura  still dazzles in hopes of soliciting sunrays,

Yet the marble bubble hangs

On dead strings of separation laced with desires that have been fading over lifetimes,

But Shah did not even turn around to appreciate this marvel?

Or did he?

Mere Mehboob, who carved this?

A lover or a ruler? No one may be.

Mere Mehboob, let’s not envy this beautiful drop of hypocrisy.

I’ll enshrine you in unsymmetrical fragrant corners of my heart.

III

Knuckles crack as I desperately push my pen across the zebra crossings of time,

But it’s been too long

I won’t ever reach the rhythm of time where Waris Shah still writes about death,

Death as the union.

But  History has no rhythm,

Yet it keeps playing cassettes of divine love

In my radioactive blood over and over again.

Have I not devoured the copper book covers which read ‘Amir Khusrau’?

And poured its yellowed pages in my dry wine glass,

And have I not tried to become the field beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and right doing?

But all I know of the language of my love is:

“Nami daanam”   (I don’t know)

But all I want to do is dance to a song, lyrics of which I do not know,

A song in Bangla may be, or French or Farsi

But do I not know? Or I know all too well,

I’ve known love,

And I’ve known You, after all.

IV

My voyage fueled by fat history journals

Punctuated by breaths of present

Comes to an abrupt end.

But does history want to repeat itself?

She once told me,

All she wanted to do was to get rid of the scavenging gazes,

And to plunge into its bloodstained pages,

And drown

And die

But they keep her alive on ventilators,

They, insensitive of her pain,

Feeding on her memories of times they want remembered.

They erode her right to be.

And as in the distance a qawwal dies in his failed attempt at voicing love,

History is forced to vomit broken phrases,

‘But shikan’ and ‘Ghazi’ is all I can hear

From behind the sound proof door of ICU.

I can see the blood that history just spat in the waves of times to be.

But she is dead, brain dead. Is she not?

But they prey on her decomposing body,

Scavengers!

But who are they?

Who am I?

Am I them?

_________________________

Footnote :

·         Yakshinis are mythical beings of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain mythology.

·         Muezzin a the person appointed to call for prayers.

·         Shanka is a conch shell which is of ritual and religious importance in both Hinduism and Buddhism.

·         Quwwat-ul-Islam was the first mosque built in Delhi.

·         Sahir refers to the great Urdu poet Sahir Ludhianvi.

·         Shah refers to the 5^th Mughal Emperor, Shah Jahan.

·         Waris Shah is the writer of Heer-Ranjha.

·         Amir Khusrau is a sufi mystic, poet and historian of 13^th century India.

·         Qawwal is a person who sings a form of sufi devotional music.

·         But shikan means iconoclast.

·         Ghazi means a warrior.