In the land of โAdabโ, a venerable versifier is speaking hearts and minds of masses with her mystical verses. In her meditatively-calm room, sheโs murmuring the song of storms. The song is a rendition of her verses woven with mystic musings. Thereโs an apparent throbbing heart in the melody transcending sensory perceptions. It talks about…
Mother eavesdrop on the archangels: โIs the burning city short of coals? They gather the autumnal leaves and set fire to the past.โ Cashmere slides from green to โyelloveโ to cold crimsonโ fiery like a heavenly hell. โDon’t you see the sluggishness of the season? The winter is knocking at the door. The city is…
In Kashmirโs literary circles, some people are asserting that a poet from Sonawari might be the worldโs only poet to write and read poetry in circles.ย The poetic vision burnished in Zareefa Jan, 55, when she was out to fetch water from her village brook.ย Carrying a pitcher on her head, she soon drifted in…
{1} WHISPERS OF A BROKEN SPRING nothing is moving, even solitude seems immobile and infallible. my room has stayed on with the nonchalance of the last winter. ใ คใ คใ คit smells of roasted potatoes and damp laundry. silence walks around barefoot, with a candle perched on its head. ใ คใ คใ คeverything has become more imminent. the air outside is…
We have great facilities here. polished rods, double-coated with grease and oilโ specialized wires for electrocuting; pliers, easy to handle, precisely sharp. and burners, we got rollers made of walnut wood and nails of varied sizes. A machine, portable and specially designed, with valves to insert truth- attached to a pit, through a pipe, where…
โฆbut if the war is really over why then do we await more loss, more death to mourn, more severe trials, more tears to mourn… The tradition of Urdu poetry has been one of the most longstanding and popular poetic traditions of the subcontinent. It emerged from the court of Mughals as a necessary negotiation…
The grief of my country is sitting in the corner of my stomach. A pigheaded bacteriumโ it is going nowhere. A garrison in my small intestines;a dogged settler army of worms laying ambush. I cannot throw up, there are razor-wires dipped in my throat. The goddamn grief blocked! From the broken spoon,I have been eating Herr Coloniser! I will digest you; your bones with fluoric acidsโwill dissolve you in…
Rather than delving into descriptions of landscapes or moments alien to us, resistance literature places itself squarely within the politics of the dispossessed. Much as I share an aversion to classical English literature, as an inhabitant of one of the formerly suppressed spaces, itโs hard to avoid an evocative line or two from it. In…
My son took a bathput on new clothes,left home,riding a horselike a prince;came homeas kilos of ripped flesh. one foggy winter day,some two decades ago,my brotherlost his fingers;an eagle feastedon his eyes. meadows, haunted hamletswhere the grass grows uphill-armed men storm the villageand take men out of their houses,beat themand force them to carry their…
I. why elsewhen elsedo you put our narratives on a weighing scale?exceptwhen there’s your familiar bloodpolitically differentiated from our familiar bloodtogether calling out for help on our streets.(pray ask when has blood ever left my streets?)Quite a time for you to suddenly wake up, no? I heard your reality is throbbing like an inconsolable ache…