Read it Live

It is forty-five degrees of laziness and desertion outside. Everything is bathed in yellow and melting in the sunlight. No one can feel what the laborer sweating in this heat can feel. No one can even pretend to sympathize, no words can attempt to capture their toil adequately. It is very comfortable inside the car where people of words are sitting. The air-conditioner is working with a slight hum.

He does not have to look at his wife to know that she is crying. There is a usual comfortable silence.

“You don’t care at all, do you?” she slowly speaks at last.

“About what?” he inquires politely, still looking at the road.

“About all this, about me,” she replies after a pause, not finding any words that would eloquently describe the situation.

“I do. Of course,” he replies, still very politely.

“Do you not love me at all?” she inquires, trying to get him to speak beyond monosyllables.

“Of course I do. You cannot doubt that,” he says turning towards her a little.

“Sometimes,” she replies, pauses, then continues, “but I love you all the time. Why can’t you do that?”

“I love you all the time too, whatever you mean by that. But I can only feel it sometimes. Is that so bad?”

“No, I guess it’s not,” she says, staring at the deserted yellow road. “But it is, can’t you see what it’s doing to me?”

“I can. And I can’t understand why. I just think life is bigger than that, than loving all the time,” he says, a little irritated, a little helpless.

A fresh bout of tears rises. She is determined not to let them fall. The effort chokes her, she coughs violently. He removes his left hand from the gear and pats her gently on the back. The cough subsides, the tears become silent, still falling.

“I don’t know where we go wrong,” he says helplessly. “It makes me sad to see you like this.”

She takes a few moments before she can reply through a tear-soaked voice, “I have my doubts about it sometimes. If you felt anything, you would do something about it.”

“What do you suggest I do? Do I not take care of you well enough? Do I not provide for you everything you desire? Tell me one thing I haven’t done for you since…” his voice starts to rise. He knows it’s not the right time so he stops mid-sentence before it hurts her more.

“You haven’t loved me the way I wanted you to. You don’t talk to me,” she says, staring blankly at the windscreen.

“I did not know talking was a part of loving you. I love you in the way I know, the way I love.”

“Which is?”

A reply forms in his mind but he knows it’s not the right one. ‘How does he love her?’ he thinks hard for an appropriate answer. But what is an appropriate answer for that? Is there ever an appropriate answer to loving someone. He knows what she will say if he asks her the same thing. “I love you with everything I have, heart, body and soul.” He could say that to her, but it wouldn’t be true. He knows she loves him with all she has, which is why she is suffering the way she is today. But he can’t, he needs to reserve a portion of himself for his own family, for his work, for the world outside and the matters that need to be taken care of on a daily basis. He can’t love like her. But how does he love then?

The silence is misleading; it gives birth to so many unwanted thoughts.

“Have you ever considered divorce?” she suggests, expecting an outburst that usually follows such an unconventional idea.

“I have,” he says calmly and truthfully. He has thought of that as an option to end her misery, “but that is not possible.”

“Because…?” she asks, half-glad to know he has not considered it seriously.

“Because we love each other and it makes no sense at all to get a divorce when there is so much love.”

“Then?” she takes up the monosyllable end now.

“Then even if we are miserable, we will be miserable together.”

“That’s the most impassioned speech I’ve gotten out of you in months,” she smiles a little.

“It’s not impassioned,” he says with a stiff neck, “it just makes sense.”

“Do you know you’re emotionally dead?” she says, quite serious for such a cliche statement.

“No, I’m only emotionally divested,” he replies.

The world outside cannot imagine the pain these people of words go through. So they suffice with complaining about the heat and toil outside, while we suffice with translating our internal toils into useless words.

In the darkest recesses of my moods,
When dusk glories and the sun shies,
When the strolls into darkness begin to rise,
When the earth lazes in its orbit and
The hint of a friend’s touch to soothe
Fails and soulful melodies refuse to purge,
I think of the bloody continent which once housed
Two girls and two loves, swelling with the souls
Of Iqbal and Ghalib and flipping nights of fear
Carelessly away with their hair,
Dreaming of breathing their essences into the spirits
Of the dying poets and seeking to live for
Not only each other and the love they shared,
But for their family of Islam, their people of Quran,
And of course the brotherhood of Pakistan.

In the darkest recesses of my moods,
When lyrics and poesies mock me and fly away,
Just out of my reach, and my mind reels off
Images of blood baths in weddings
Back home and the burning screams of the drones
My head churns and blends so fast, my brain
Bleeds into a yoghurt that you like strawberry pink
And I once liked spicy red.
I think of the two girls, safely tucked into the First World
And feeding off their dreams and what remains
Of their souls and essences. The two girls and their love
And their cherished hopes have all been sold
Into the material markets of the Developed world.
Since they evade their aims, words escape them.

In the darkest recesses of my moods,
When a slow released sigh into the silent ear
Fails to tickle and entice a smile,
When the peace of a bleeding sunset
Cannot calm the roaring storm,
When the heart aches to vent
And the fingers tremble to write,
Idioms and aphorisms, verses and mothered love
Refuse to bless me and I am left an empty ore
Unable to live, except perhaps by inhaling
And exhaling my existence.

It isn’t time yet. But the time is near and all this slip slides towards it. Beyond it. A little boy in a big world slip slides towards it. It in turn, spitting stones, hurtles at him headlong, and soon enough. The tide comes in: he, a man, old enough, slip slides off the face of his little world; at one forty eight in the afternoon he dies. Late evening, “he was love,” she says. The one he loved. “For today, then, in his own words, love is dead.” In a room full of tears no one has the heart to bring up the facts. His mother, her mother, and then her love console her into the first hints of the night as the last rites conclude.

Grandma Geraldine’s Geraniums

Grandma Geraldine
lived in Georgia
and grew exquisite geraniums.

Summer after summer
When I was a girl,
I used to sit on her window ledge
while she cried out the names
of herbs she grew in her kitchen garden.
“Look, child,” she’d say in her
Georgian drawl,
her buttermilk eyes
fluid behind her bifocals,
“This here is rosemary,
and that there is oregano,
and this here is pasta
from the corner store,
and here in the pot,
you put my herbs
and some bright red tomato paste,
a handful of Parmesan cheese
(as much as you like),
and you got yourself
one of them fancy Italian plates.”
Then she’d take her watering can
and sprinkle her beloved geraniums.
She’d hold each stem
and whisper God only knows what
to the petals.
“Look, child,
that there is your gran’ daddy,
snorin’ on his see-saw chair,
and these here
are my geraniums.
There never was a flower
more resilient.
There never was a thing alive
that loved this woman more,”
she’d say and point
her thumb to her chest.
And all this while
Grandpa would sleep in his chair
after eating his fancy Italian plate
(with Grandma’s rosemary
and Grandma’s oregano)
and Grandma would water her geraniums.

One summer Grandma burned dinner.
She held my hand
as I sat on the window ledge,
and looked at me
with her buttermilk eyes.
“Look here, girl-child,
plant my geraniums near my grave,
and tell the grave-digger
to bury me far from your gran’ daddy
and right by my geraniums.
There never was a thing alive
that loved this woman more,”
she said and pointed
her thumb to her chest,

while Grandpa belched and spat
and called Grandma Geraldine
good-for-nothing Georgia garbage.

Nostalgia

Asphalt smells rain-like, fingers fluid sing

Sonnets, verses – old haunts and poems new.

Stoic pen asks what Providence will brew

Amidst erupted skies, awakening

Memories – soaked, drowned. Cold winds bring

Enough words, taciturn, fertile, and true,

To write of moments – lost, forgotten, few -

As this weather silently spies to string

The old cities of youth – a mundane row,

Unfortunately captive bricks of home.

Will keepsakes held in each fiber of time

Remember fiercely this name tomorrow?

When death has colored this poem chrome

Will nostalgia govern all reason, rhyme?

I am the poison
born out of your marriage,

and you are the poison
running in my veins.

Our loves
are misunderstood -
I wish to transform
your face into a serpent’s head
and feel an aversion
to each memory of you,

and sometimes to slit open a wrist
and see your blood snaking
lazily
out of my body -
deep red and
viscous
with too much love,
with too much hate.

And all this because
we have emerged as failures
in our respective identities -
you, the fragile father,
I, the disillusioned daughter.

We step
on each other’s toes
and weaknesses;
it is a dance we do,
loving and unloving
our mingled past
our disparate pathos.

Perhaps
it is destined (and best)
to remain kin in name alone -
ceremonially,
superficially,
biologically
related -
and to appreciate
ourselves
as (each other’s) cyanide and arsenic -
poisons both of us,
different nonetheless.

Your face ripples through
the poems I have written.
And you do not have the patience
to construct yourself
word by word,
joining
each dot and line,
a (logical) progression
in a manuscript of old poems -

rejected many times over
by literary magazines,
occasionally published
in nondescript
small town
community journals -

your face contained in my syllables
on cheap, mass-produced paper.

You call yourself a narcissist
and refuse to read verses
birthed to render you in poetry.

I call myself a poet
and refuse to stop weaving
this web of you around me.

We are contradictions
of our self-proclaimed identities.

Pity,

my words fall
on trained ears,
under objective eyes,

and you are lost to the interpretations
of strangers.

Hi RIL,

I am posting nine new poems that I wrote over the course of the last few weeks to commemorate a coming of age of sorts with friends who have helped me improve my writing. I am including the “Foreword,” which was my tenth post to celebrate this coming of age in its slightly edited version. I hope you all will enjoy the poems.

Noor

When you glanced at my former poems, you, like most of the seasoned critics that I have encountered in my entire writing career, must have seen a very guarded poet. I weigh my words very carefully, and I like having that kind of command over my thoughts. I am generally afraid of letting loose an unnamed cat-like creature that often paces restlessly in my head. I like to keep it on a tight leash, disciplined, submissive, attentive. You will see that in my poetry. My inner poet (with magnificent tiger-like attributes) savors control.

As I progressed with the poems written particularly for this auspicious event, my poetry became very candid, and at times, even audacious. At certain points over the course of the last few weeks, it became more than poetry. It evolved into a dialogue among the many divided aspects of my personality. I was able to quiet down a lot of griefs, put an end to long-standing arguments, accept defeat for inner battles that had continued way past their prime. In short, I healed myself. Slowly but surely, with my own words, with my own thoughts, and with a definite direction in my poetry targeted to make a difference for me and for my readers, I was able to salve a lot of old hurts.
This journey was not altogether sad. It was not all about laying demons to rest. There were some exceptionally happy moments. When love matures, it often sort of fizzles out. It is good to realize that sometimes love retains its metaphorically clich??d pizzazz even after its expiration date is long past. You will see this in ???The Constant One.??? It is a poem quite out of character for me, and it happened unexpectedly. I do not write about two people that are terribly, hopelessly, insatiably in love with each other, and I don???t plan on doing so in the near future. In fact, I don???t really believe in that kind of love. For me, love comes packaged with a little hate in the wrappings. Hate surfaces sooner or later, and in the best case scenario, you can get over it and channel it only during fights and arguments. ???The Constant One??? happens to be a love poem, as best as I can write those (and I believe I don???t write them well), but it does come with its counterpart, the aforementioned hate. You will see a little bit of hate bubbling up in ???The Limits of Love.??? I think a healthy relationship should incorporate a good sized side order of hate with the love entr??e. Hopefully, most of you cynics out there will agree with me.

Most of the poems, however, were about my personal journey, my literal travels and losses in ???Me, The Cartographer??? and the importance of safe-guarding my mental well-being in ???Self-Preservation.??? ???Providence??? was about my flaws as a human being, about the shortcomings of others and about being able to accept them, digest them, survive them for the love of God and all that???s holy, because I do not and will not believe in a vengeful God. ???Medicine and Poetry,??? as the title very aptly lists them, is about my two great passions ??? I believe in the very core of my personality, I decided to write in order to heal myself, and I very consciously chose to go into medicine to heal others. These two go hand-in-hand for me. I cannot differentiate my love for one from the other. ???Bricks and Stones and Walls??? was like excising a recurring neuroma. I am sure there is residual grief in the lives of so many of us. This poem for me was one more surgery to get rid of my imagined equivalent of neuropathic pain at the site of an amputated limb. No doubt, a jumbled mass of nerves will once again grow and make me hypersensitive, but for now, this poem has given me a temporary reprieve, and for that I am grateful.

Moving on, I was truly inspired by modern literature in the summer of 2008. I was particularly moved by the way the modernists wrote about time. Time was in itself an entity, a character in modern literature, and I was completely engulfed, intrigued, downright besotted with the way time passage was used by the likes of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. And so, my last two poems were about how time has played a role in my life. You know, we often disregard what time does for us. It hurts us and heals us and it does this over and over again, and I simply wanted to acknowledge this in my work. So, ???Time??? and ???Year Number Twenty Four??? are both my acknowledgments. While ???Time??? employs a more somber brand of poetry, more typical for me, ???Year Number Twenty Four,??? written tonight, on the eve of my twenty fourth birthday, is a gift to myself, something that made me laugh while I wrote it and has made me laugh every time that I have reread it. It is good to laugh this way at yourself. It makes you appreciate the small things in life that frequently matter more than any major happenings. It is often the insignificant events over the course of a year that make it memorable, a new joke, a bad movie, a genuine belly-laugh, a friend???s advice, you get the idea.
I hope you will enjoy reading these poems as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Noor

For Year Number Twenty Four

Do something for me,
Mr. Twenty Four,
be nicer than Twenty Three.
He was a nut job, that one.
Do you realize what he did to me?
He made me a Mrs. from a Ms.
Oh, the horror, the atrocity,
the absolute injustice of being
(literally) signed off the singles market.
Yes, my dear Mr. Twenty Four,
that little rat, Twenty Three, your brother
or distant cousin, oh for the love of God,
extended family member, whatever,
that little weasel practically fired me
from being single.

No, no, it’s not a complete loss.
I get good benefits.
The health insurance that comes
with being a Mrs. has satisfactory coverage.
There is a driver and a car, small perks
that come with small sacrifices – you know, the usual,
sharing a bathroom, which can get taxing let me tell you,
cooking for two, definitely not my forte,
being patient, the hardest one by far.
Oh well, I will learn to live
with this little present Twenty Three left me.

But you, Mister Twenty Four, are full
of possibilities.
I will spray each day of you
with infinite love,
unwavering attention,
insurmountable praise,
if only you promise to be
just the perfect gentleman I need -
oh please, I was so not making a pass at you,
Mister Twenty Four,
we are having a perfectly decent
and polite conversation.
Good heavens, aren’t you a ladies man.

As I was saying, Good Sir, I have called
to ask a favor.
I am hoping that you,
unlike your predecessor,
that Twenty Three, ghastly man, I tell you,
will be much better for me.
Perhaps you could lose the necktie?
I could use a little informality,
a little winding down,
a moment to catch my breath, if you will,
right about now.

No, I am certainly not asking you
to get undressed.
How very inappropriate of you, Mister Twenty Four.
I must tell you that I am
utterly appalled at even the suggestion
of something so outrageous such as this.
Please, be decent, now.
Dear God,
I can see you have an interesting
sense of humor,
much like Twenty Three.

I fear I will have to let you
show yourself (your events, Mister Twenty Three,
get your mind out of the proverbial gutter)
in good time. All in good time, then.
I must take my leave now, and I have learned
not to approach one of your men prematurely.

I do still hope you will be kinder to me, Sir,
or at least more fun -

oh no, not your idea of fun -

good day to you, Mister Twenty Four, and
welcome.

For Time

I feel age in my knees.
Each unfamiliar crack,
each resistance of bone
against eroding bone,
is measured in years.

Was it yesterday
that I sat in the sun
with Mother
and ate tangerines,
each cold, juicy sliver
flowing down my throat
like liquid velvet?

Was it yesterday?
Was it another century?
A different era?
A dream even -
yet another trick time
plays on me these days,
the trickster that it is.

When was it that
I realized my father was
human after all,
not the god that I had worshipped
him to be. Human, flawed,
and perhaps in my rage,
even dispensable.

How is it that time
has nullified the cold shock,
the hot fury of departed moments?

(Can time travel with my words?
Can it say
that sometimes love is consumed,
supple that it is,
by the acid toxicity of lies.)

Last night
(when I first felt age in my knees),
I sat near open windows
and smelled rich aromas
of curry and coriander
emanating from every kitchen
in the building.
The smell was foreign to me,
too strong,
uninvited.

Was it only six years ago
that I embraced my mother
and smelled these spices
in her clothes,
in her hair,
and felt as though I was home?

Six years. A lifetime. An irreversible
change
of preferences.
Time has taken hold of me
and flown,
and I have lost my bearings.
Time has stabbed my flesh
and slid the knife inside to its hilt.
If it weren’t for the scar tissue,
I would not remember that this
tricksy beast injured me -
and to this, Time quietly
responds -
And I saved you, too.

It gives me no answers,
Just ever more rhetorical questions -
was it years ago…
was it yesterday…
Time, Time, Time,

you cruel bastard,
you patient friend,

you have made me a stranger.