…. and we left our acquaintance in every
gathering, every festival, and left on your doors
a little saffron, a few blood red apples, but
forgot to greet the shadows of your silences
around us. We took off our shadows as
a last resort, as instructed in the poems, but
we were destined to be
lonely. memoir
A beautiful day at the Dal Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir
…the yellow butterfly of siege
carried our madness on its knifed wings.
and in the prisons of our half-prisons
we too cried mirrors of
Dal water, under orders to keep
eyes dry, lest the alphabet of dreams of
your prisoners be inked in calumny. memoir
…. write that your story inherits
our songs of the siege, where we were, where
we will be. Dip our name in your songs
that we may empty our eyes
of the desert snow. We promised
we will forget you
under the tall shade of autumn maize,
but you crept back
in the ripples of Jhelum’s song. memoir
Also Read: We Dreamt of Traveling to the City of my Childhood
……from our words was born
the map to the forbidden eid, when we
forgot to offer our yusuf at the far away
courts of the emperors of famines. Our lovers kissed
the sparse grass and flew off
in wind and dust over
the mountains of our tomorrow…. memoir
…we ask
them: will you meet us
as rain on the roof of strangers
on a reckless day?
Will we meet
on the auctioned banks of
our boats in mid river of unspoken news?
Will we be cured
of the dream of crushed mawal, and the taste
of jaded jaffar posh? memoir
…they reply:
Is it possible
now to take two steps
beyond the dark, and
kiss our ripe moon? memoir
Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Common
Memoir
Huzaifa Pandit teaches English Literature at an Undergraduate college in Kashmir. For his PhD he worked on establishing a comparison between Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish under the rubric of 'Poetics of Resistance’ at University of Kashmir. He has contributed papers on a wide range of themes centered around Kashmir like Translation and Dissent, Masculinity and Student Activism in journals and edited volumes like Himalya, Postcolonial Literature, Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies, and Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures. He also writes poetry in English and translates poetry from Urdu and Kashmiri into English. Some of his works have found home in magazines like PaperCuts, Jaggery Lit, Outlook and Poetry at Sangam. His book of poems – Green is the Colour of Memory appeared in 2018 from Hawakal Prosthana, Kolkata.
