Wednesday, 30 December 2015

Letter No. 1212

Our first born son
Managed to separate us indefinitely

My daughters
Rarely come to see me

I feel like an abandoned father
Forced to retire prematurely
To wait patiently
Till senility catches up with me
And I forget everything
Our beloved son
Our charming daughters
And all the time
We could never spend together

Monday, 28 December 2015

Misguided Romantic

Trees are not the soul of jungle
I’m in search of the soul

I go to the market
To sell myself

The undelivered notes of love
Are more valuable to me
Than thousand notes of currency

The misguided romantic
Finds a deserted temple
For eternal love-making
The perverse absence of God
Blossoms the fruits of longing

I search for empty nests
Where no bird lays eggs
An empty glass of wine
Is a proof enough
Of someone’s quenched thirst

The silence of lovers
Is the final exchange
Between two misguided romantics
 They don’t look at each other
They look towards the fine line of eternity
From their intended misguided angles

Tuesday, 22 December 2015

Mad Messenger

I want to meet her
Desperately
But I’m not going to tell her that
That would be foolish

I’ll wait
Wait till someone mad enough
Would take this inexplicable responsibility
Of telling her about me
Without mentioning my name

She knows my name

Sunday, 13 December 2015

Last Demon

To love is to be fearless
Fearless of one’s own demons

After loving you with all my heart
I realize that
Nothing can take you away from me
Nothing in this world...
Except your past

I’m helpless in front of your invincible past
It’s the only demon I can't contain
It turns me tragically into somebody else for you
Somebody far removed from what I am

I can’t fight your past
I can’t beat it
I can only hold on to my fearlessness
With the hope that one day
Your past will be our shared memory
Witnessed intimately by us both
And you’ll see me as I am
Not as I ought to be

Sunday, 6 December 2015

Happy Birthday To You!!!

Charu!
This isn’t a birthday call
There can’t be one
You made it sure
I can’t reach you
But my love has its own ways
Of finding a way to speak to you

When I want to wish you
I randomly hug old people around me
And shower them with unexpected gifts
So when they are ready to pass on
One of them would agree
To be my messenger
And deliver my love notes to you
Written in tears and smiles

I wish
You would send new born babies
With kiss marks on their cheeks
In reply to my endless messages

Friday, 4 December 2015

We’ll Always Have Delhi

When the barrenness of my arid life
Begets no rain
When I find myself lost
Like a quivering fish out of her pond
I remind myself
We’ll always have Delhi

When the colours of the evenings
Bear no resemblance to happiness
When mornings arrive undeclared
Like an unannounced guest
I remind myself
We’ll always have Delhi

When I find myself lonely
In the dark rooms of my house
When I finally stop crying
After long periods of exhaustive wailing
I remind myself
We’ll always have Delhi

When the mirrors start scaring me
Like the ghosts of the past
When I frighten myself harrowingly
With my own dissociative thoughts
I remind myself
We’ll always have Delhi

When I fear the banality of my life
Licking away at my heart to cold-blooded numbness
When my uninspired stale commitments turn into
The horrifying monster of soul-destroying dullness
I close my eyes and remind myself


We’ll always have Delhi
My love
We'll always have Delhi

Wednesday, 2 December 2015

Historicity Of Our Love

We weren’t thrown out of heaven
We never ate the apple
It was too high on the tree
And we were too low on the ground
Under its lonely shade engrossed
Lying in each other’s arms
Passionately talking about
“How it would be like if we live somewhere else?
Somewhere far away from here”
The snake kept circling us tirelessly
Hoping we would stop loving each other
And his evil design would come to play
But we never stopped

So trust me love
We weren’t thrown out of heaven
Our meeting is the living proof of that

We were only kept apart
Mercilessly
For thousands of years

Thursday, 19 November 2015

Genesis

Do you know
How a hammer pounds
The head of the nail
Hard, over and over again
To creates a small sharp permanent space
In the heart of the wood?
That’s how you came to me

I just wonder
Who held the hammer this whole time?

Sunday, 15 November 2015

Meri Jaan Aur Na Ro’o

Meri jaan
Ab aur na ro’o
Tumhe meri muhabbat ki kasam
Saans to loo...

Jab tak Quran sirf kitaab
Ibadatgah sirf masjid
Jihad sirf kafir ka katal
Islam sirf mazhab
Aur musalmaan
Gaar-e-Hira ki tanhaiyon mai girey
Ishq aur dard ke aanso’on se
Mehroom rahega...
Insaaniyat ka khoon hoga
Insaaniyat ka khoon hota rahega...

Meri jaan
Ab aur na ro'o
Tumhe meri muhabbat ki kasam
Saans to loo..


P.S.:

“Righteousness does not consist of turning your faces towards the East and the West. But righteous is he who believes in God, and the Last Day, and the angels, and the Scripture, and the prophets. Who gives money, though dear, to near relatives, and orphans, and the needy, and the homeless, and the beggars, and for the freeing of slaves; those who perform the prayers, and pay the obligatory charity, and fulfill their promise when they promise, and patiently persevere in the face of persecution, hardship, and in the time of conflict. These are the sincere; these are the pious.” (Quran 2:177)

“Had We sent this Quran down on a mountain, you would have seen it trembling, crumbling in awe of God. These parables We cite for the people, so that they may reflect.” (Quran 59:21)

“…[This is] a Book which We have revealed to you, [O Muhammad], that you might bring mankind out of darknesses into the light by permission of their Lord - to the path of the Exalted in Might, the Praiseworthy” [Quran 14:1]

“We have sent down to you a Book, containing your message. Do you not understand?” (Quran 21:10)

 "Do they not ponder the Quran? Had it been from any other than God, they would have found in it much discrepancy.” (Quran 4:82)

Wednesday, 11 November 2015

Diwali Confessions

Your silence pains me more
Than the maddening noise of bursting crackers
This hallow flamboyancy of happiness is bearable
Than the unexpressed pain of your separation

I imagine you sitting at your window
Looking curiously up to the sky
Brightly lit with frenzied fireworks
And wondering
When someone lit the million stars in sky
Whose love was being celebrated?
What meeting lit up the universe with million galaxies?
What eternal carnival is this that never ends?

I imagine you then think about us
Our maddening unbridled love
Our insatiable unquenchable passion
And smilingly shake your head in amazement
As you get all your answers

Tuesday, 10 November 2015

Waiting at Patel Chowk

Every story doesn’t have an ending
Some stories live forever
Some live longer to become legends
Yet some are killed even before they are born


Strange as it may sound to you
Our story is still alive
But its pulse is low
It won’t survive unless we meet again

I wait for you like a reading of an endless story
The metal seats at the metro station
Whisper stories about us to the fellow travellers
We are rumoured in most metro diaries
Clandestinely, you and I are metro celebrities
If there would a secret metro travellers club
Our pictures would be hanging from every wall
And people will be imagining stories
About our prophesized meeting

But waiting is lover’s debt
No one knows what is going to happen
Life is stranded like a metro station
I wait for you at Patel Chowk every evening
Waiting for our story to come alive

I wish the hallowed mechanical voice
At the station
Instead of repeating annoyingly
“Please mind the gap...”
Says,
“Your wait is over.
She is coming in next metro.
Please board the train as soon as it comes.”

Monday, 9 November 2015

Every Distance Is A Measurable Kiss

Let’s measure it
How far you are from me
Let’s measure it precisely
Scientifically
Accurately
Unit by unit
Let’s not leave any room for an error
Let's be as exact as a surgeon’s cut
Or as accurate as an old obsessive mathematician

But let the unit of measurement be a Kiss

So my love
How many kisses away you are from me?

Tuesday, 3 November 2015

Kashmir: The Nation Of Lovers

It doesn’t settle down
It doesn’t satisfy
My hunger for you is insatiable
Uncontrollably I make love to you
Till I find Kashmir in the valley of your mouth
I kiss the soil of your tongue inconsolably
Like a mad poet in exile

The minarets of Hazratbal are wet
With the moisture of my hysterical breaths
I can’t stop making love to you
That’ll be an unpardonable sin

Under the canopy of my unfailing passion
You shrink like a maiden Dal Lake
I hold you in my arms
Like water hold the smooth curves
Of a magnificent houseboat

There are shrines in your eyes
Your tears cleanse me five times a day
I enter the sacred mosque
Standing under the perfect beguiling arches
Of your Kashmiri eyebrows

Our love is the last cry for freedom
The last voice of certitude
From a blooming flower to the sharp-edged knife
We resist with all the evolving rituals of love-making
Every protest starts with the conspiracy of our lips
Till our sloganeering bodies
Colour every walls of Lal Chowk
With the verses of our love

You’re the country I never had
You’re the nation I aspire to
Like Kashmir
Don’t cry for me
While I’m away

Monday, 2 November 2015

Accursed Forever

We are not always two lovers
Sometimes we are other people

Life has blown us into million parts
We are scattered all over the roads of time

The ruins of our memories
Are meaninglessly preserved
Like an old decrepit monument
Whose significance is nothing more
Than a forgotten reference
To the glories of its past

Parts of us are perpetually decaying
In the boxes of our illusory unrealized future

At times we both become one
A small dark room
With two doors on either sides
One leading to the other like an unending maze

I stand like a hollowed tree truck
In the middle of a dark dense forest
Where no one hears me fall
And all the nests of hope are destroyed
Birds find their nests elsewhere eventually

Between my reluctant touch
And your unrepentant kiss
Life hangs like a dark cloud
Over the cold city of time

When you said
“I’m likely to be away.
Please don’t worry
If you don’t hear from me”
I believed you
Like a promise of an accursed famine
And the painful knowledge that
There won’t be any rainfall anymore

Thursday, 29 October 2015

Checkmate

Letter:

Dear love,
If you love me
You’ll stop hating yourself...

Reply:

Dear lover,
If I love you
I’ll stop loving anyone else...

Monday, 26 October 2015

2.5 Meters

After
Our long
Maddening arguments
Endless Negotiations
Melodramatic fights
And painful heartbreaks
She and I
Agreed upon
2.5 meters
Of insanely unimaginable distance
To be maintained
At all costs
Till the seeds of sanity
Grow into a perennial tree of wisdom

But my love
Aren’t we forgetting

The tree of wisdom
Almost always
Bears the fruits of eternal madness

Thursday, 22 October 2015

An Invitation To Opposition

I want you to refuse me
Defy me
In the most obnoxious ways

I want you to prove me wrong
When I tell you
In the most fashionable stoic manner
Life is a river
And we can’t stay at one place forever

I want you to disagree with me
Vehemently
In most detestable ways
If I try convincing you that
You and I are not meant to be together
And that there is a better future for you
Somewhere
Elsewhere
Away from my arms

I don’t want you to give up on me
I don’t want you to get seduced
Even if I play out magic
Through my words upon you
To persuade you
To convince you
Don’t agree with what I tell you

Sometimes in my obsessive search for the plot
I lose faith in our story
Don’t let me lose that faith
Stories don’t perish ever
Only plots vanish with the passage of time

Time is the worst storyteller
It follows no plot

So don’t believe me
When I tell you
We ought to let go of each other
Because my love
We aren’t murderers
We save lives with the weapons of our tongue
Let’s not turn our weapons upon us
Let’s not die before our story is over

Let’s leave these annoyingly perplexing plots
And meet in the middle of one simple story
Like two strangers who meet each other
At the end of an old staircase
And fall in love with each other forever

Love Is A Subtle Conspiracy

Roses conspire with thorns against me
Their fragrance and painful pricks
Remind me of you and then our painful separation
Gardens don’t console me anymore
Without you
There is no solace in this world

Sun has found its own ways of teasing me
Moon comes down every other night
To remind me of our nights of togetherness
Stars behave like gossiping women
Who have stopped loving their husbands
They gossip about us like a scandal accidentally revealed

I don’t care mostly
But when at times I feel tired
On this long endless journey
And I rest under the shade
Of the tree of your memories
Leaves fall like forgotten letters from our past
Our untimely separation has hastened winter this year

Life has become a slave to your words
I serve them blindly even today like a devout muslim
Hoping one day
The roses of our togetherness
And thorns of our love-making
Devour me completely
Before I’m conspired against again

Tuesday, 20 October 2015

Lessons In Burning Alive

1st Degree Burn
KASHMIR IS A PARADISE
Populated by innocent incorruptible angels
Who can only row beautiful shikaras
And offer blind devotion in hospitality

2nd Degree Burn
KASHMIR IS A PARADISE
Populated by malicious corruptible individuals
Who are manipulated by evil foreign forces
And cannot control themselves

3rd Degree Burn
KASHMIR IS THE PARADISE
Populated by fanatic beef-eating fundamental Muslims
Whose only goal is to conspire mischievous schemes
And divide nation...

Prognosis
KASHMIR IS THE PARADISE
Populated by young mysteriously missing persons
And mistakenly burnt dead bodies
Who can’t speak for themselves now


P.S.: On October 9, 2015, a truck driver and a conductor were burnt alive in a petrol bomb attack in Udhampur by right-wing extremists over rumours about beef. 
Zahid, the conductor of the truck later
succumbed to the injuries and died on October 18.