“On the night when you cross the street
From your shop and your house,
To the cemetery;
you’ll hear me hailing you from inside
The open grave, and you’d realize
How we‘ve always been together.”
Moulana Rumi (ra)
I am not fine. My mind is blocked. I seem to collide head-on with myself. My eyes are frozen, on the dust particles in my room that do not move. No atoms in any cell of this cellar vibrate. The air is curfewed, gun-pointed by some resurrected grief; the lanes around my heart cordoned, all the doors of my friends shut. I do not breathe. My blood is coagulated, veins iced. A dirty bandage passages through the cavities of my falling teeth. Like water frozen in winter drains, all of my dreams are snow-sculptured, black and muddy. A mesh of a graveyard silence shrouds all my simmering desires. Everything is quiet. This room is a tombstone, my face chiseled out in its hardness. I am engraved half-smiling an unsure smile, a confused gesture that denotes neither unrest nor peace. The windows are open but jammed as if spilled over by bucketfuls of cement centuries ago. The air right outside its threshold in assumed position drooling dew drops to enter a step inside; waiting for the slightest indication of some guaranteed safety. A myna with open wings picture clicked in flight in the square window cut from the sky. She waits for me since half an hour with the same tilt of her neck, her beak anxious to reveal a message from the ancient times. A marsiya written in a poet’s blood, dangling from her neck, seems to be the only thing that wavers in this mass vacuum tonight.
Her eyes do not blink and neither does mine. I look and write about her but my arm is not moving as though these words manifest on the paper all by itself, as I continue being a silent witness with no amazement. A second’s needle on my table clock tries hard to reach digit 12 and start a new minute. It fails. Tied by a nylon rope around its neck and pulled back as many times as it tries, it fails to take me to a new minute. Trying hard, a scratching sound from the rusted throat escapes the glass of the clock and gets confused in the vacuum, where to go. It doesn’t go anywhere. It suspends right in front of me between the two frozen dust particles frozen right in front of my eyes. My heart doesn’t react. Time has turned to stillness tonight and I have turned into this – a cracking tombstone, abandoned in its barren soil. My neck and spine straight as epitaph, in anticipation of the sculptor that condemned my face towards this window forever, wondering about the message the myna had to give. I sit on myself with vague Urdu couplets gradually eroding away life’s beauty from my forehead. Idle birds of my ideal imaginings fly and sit on me to perch at, as if on the spire of a Sufi shrine. I have turned into both, the deceased and the deceased’s tombstone.
An old woman creaks open the door and sneaks illegally into this solitary graveyard at midnight, a wobbling broken lamp casting shadows on the remains of the room. She tunes the knob and her neck scratches to right. She tunes the knob and her neck jerks to left. The second’s needle in my table clock skips a beat and stops exerting. The air outside drops its guard and forgets its duty. A drop melts out from the end of my ureter. She approaches. I am soiled. Taking her frock up, she slides her hand in her inner waistcoat and counting grains one by one, she spills them at me, in a violent convulsion of her arm. The eleven grains lash out and directly hit the porcelain cups of my eyes. It is the first sign of life in ages within this room.“For eleven years of togetherness” she murmurs. The upper lip of myna’s beak, brittle with age, cracks and crumbles down. I do not blink. It didn’t hurt. There are no visions left to break and no dreams to be broken again. The grains rebound rebelliously and are thrown back to her face, one towards the window. She turns to leave, curving her body between the frozen dust particles, now bloated with emotions. But the birds of my wanderings are not concerned. They poop on my head in sheer boredom, liquid rosaries of failure dragging themselves down along my brows and across my face. The Myna outside has yet not given up on me and doesn’t let go. The cracks in her body deepen. The scars on the woman’s face surface. The poop hardens diagonally across my lips. The woman steps out. The dark descends. Desert cold invades the room. The woman has left, the door slicing the only ray of light diagonally entering the room. I sigh. The air outside retreats. Desert cold has invaded the room. I have turned cold as death but do not chill. It is night within a night, I am alone and I risk humming with myself in this darkness:
“Mout choru- karith khaeli kam khaane tai
hai toote raavun ad yaavun soraan tai”
(O ‘Death-burglar’; you loot many homes of its members
Only the surviving beloveds know why their ailing youth rots away)
I assure myself that she is gone and it will be the longest night in my room tonight. The hope of life and love sizzle between the dark cavities of my burning ribs and escape, light as smoke to the burnt ceiling of this room. I shall not write anymore about how the only symptoms of life evaporated from the remnants of my room that were nothing but your belongings. I shall not write about how every dust particle suspended in the air, collapsed, as if shot dead to a heap on the floor. I shall not write who you were maybe even are to me. But I shall write about what fate I shall see with tomorrow’s rising sun, cracking open this ice-tomb. I shall write about how I will transform after my death in the last remains of memories you left me with. I shall write about how I shall keep loving you until I might be granted up there a life sometime again.
Tomorrow forth, I shall no longer be an ordinary man frozen in the stillness of his worldly room. All the objects of my room will be granted a higher understanding of all the sufferings my heart endured. I shall begin to be enlightened, soaking all the poison of this world in my poor chest. I shall understand all souls because in your love, I traversed the entire world meeting all its inhabitants within myself. I shall meet all the people I never knew I was. I shall become all as I had once become, when I first saw you. I loved you and that was enough and that love shall suffice all the world-stricken people tomorrow forth. No matter what happened, I won’t stop being a devotee of it.
A halo of divinity that only suffering bestows shall surround my tomb and all the people coming out from their therapeutic religious centers will soon observe it. I shall be granted a higher status.
Shy girls will start coming to me with their ailing youth from tomorrow. Cutting the corners of their dupattas, they shall tie the sacred knots round these walls, and worship my all-compassionate silence. Blue and orange and yellow and green. Little teenagers will come on their loaned scooties to write secretly A+R and Z+B. Gujjar beauties will come and write ‘Pir, Zahid aur Parveena ko milana”. Mothers will come with a set of pens and circumambulate around me biting their own words in repressed pain “peer, kamyaab kar. Matric imtihaan mein Imran ko first division dede.” I will still not smile but keep burning in your repressed pain. The noor others will witness shall be the fire only I would keep burning in. I would burn, burn for having helplessly loved and lost.
The walls will one day get tired of burning between my grief and their prayers. Exhausted and old. They will lose their strength and start crumbling down. The air will trespass inside through the gaps. Bricks of my patience will one day start falling out. The myna with her song, half-dead, will rush inside and try to awaken me to deliver her message. I will still not consider listening. Having listened to your voice, what voice could mesmerize me anymore?
The people will see my annoyance and interpret it as a desecration and stone the bird to death. I feel bad and whine a little. As with other folklores, the world will understand a story that I never said. They would see my relationship with the bird and see it mysteriously Holy. They consider the sacrifice of the Holy bird and bury her beside me. I lift the green cloth from my knees and cover her grave protecting her from cold. The miracle spreads like wildfire. With great fervor, they’d erect iron grills all around me breaking down all the ancient walls. Colourful lamps will be lit along all the edges of my new- tombstone. Charsis will find peace with me during the nights with their unreciprocating lovers. Some would bathe in each other’s sweat and I shall be like a night a blanket to cover them together, humming but only the songs we once sang together.
A word of mouth will spread that someone hums at the shrine during the night. The news will conquer all like a plague and night long religious dances and music will invade into my tombstone through a hundred openings of the grilled walls. A trust of locally revered old men will take my ownership. I become a renowned tourist destination for liberals. Soon all the patients will throng my tombstone- people from cities and villages. I appear in newspapers and fundamentalist magazines.
Having gained popularity, the old woman comes back with her grains. She is not allowed to come directly near me. I fritter in my cage to see her once more through two porcelain cups of my eyes. She wails outside, unable to trespass the fortified wall of devotion all around me. She tries to explain that she has known me very personally. I shout my songs even louder. But no miracle happens this time. None of them hears me in the pandemonium of all spiritual seekers. They invoke me. I invoke God. Lifting her frock, she slides her hands in her inner waistcoat and opening her palm, shows them the grains she had still preserved.
I shout in agreement, clasping the rods of my cage by my teeth and shuddering them hard. I shout, “Yes. It is she. It is she. I am no peer. This is her eleventh grain. Please let her come back.” She is dragged away by her two arms as I keep looking at the eleventh grain drowned in the sweat of my fate line, within the tomb. She spills the grains on my cage for birds to peck at. The dead myna doesn’t pick the hint nor responds from her grave. All the grains fall on the heads of my bird-devotees to peck at. The old woman screeches aloud like an untrimmed nail on a broken glass.
The grains rain from the skies at the revered Sufi saint. I wail aloud like a wounded beast. People hear my groans and see the woman as impious. They kick her down the stairs onto the main road. I break across my neck and spine. She falls in two unequal halves. I am defeated and silent again against the bars, in the Urs that would be observed year after year. ‘Death is indeed a wedding night’. Peace prevails at the saint’s tombstone.
PS: This is inspired by a true story
The writer, interested in Arts and Literature, is a practicing architect at INTACH (Kashmir) and can be reached at ar.tahamughal@yahoo.com
