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mood-pieces*

here’s the fast fading light

that illumines bark

making its lifelessness as warm skin

suffused in an earthen glow

awaiting the moment before darkness

and the moon’s borrowed light

that bathes me all in silver

caught in my time warp

you’re extensions of my dreams

my other many selves that

i don’t dare to know

yet

catalysts for subterranean change

III

can this be love

which shuffles between us

effaces itself in banality

and lifts its hdad

on long winter nights?

don’t twist and turn my words

to unfit my lips and heart

don’t pile your barbs

at me so thick

they skim the surface

of my deep and brackish

lake of memory

then will morning’s

effervescent birdsong

patch my bitter heart

and bring it back?

compound my self

find me in the recesses of my eyes

the sockets of my soul

hidden behind words not said

what can i give you other

than to share with you

my patch of sun

my garden of content

my little branch of peace

that’s mine for only hours

or moments

VII

what gaps in understanding

that strain the links of love

the crow’s come calling

to keep me company

on my windswept plain

will anybody hear my voice

faint against the echoing silence

have i come so far that i’m that

? dot on the horizon of my girlhood

VIII

on silent stones i will trip

on the rubble of days that hurt

tomorrow i’ll take out my face that’s full of

yesteryear’s hurt and don it

time’s the only healer here

softening the corners of sharp regret

muting the passions that weather faces

in furrows of disappointment

soul*

fired with the spark of the

divine image

that alights to create

in me some gem

of lucid thought

am i? are we

not fallible

bound within flesh

orifices that must touch

hand to hand lip to lip

this business of loving

that takes us on an

infinite journey

these errors of judgement

that mar my thought

nail me to the humanity

i’d aspire to transcend

bind me to the flesh

that maps and charts my thoughts

*from Picture This, copyright Alhamra Publishing.

after bamiyan

scrabbling for roots and grass he found

coins and shards of pottery

strange forbidden figurines

tempting taboo thoughts

it’s the stomach

that finally dictates its terms

in this devastated landscape

infested with

landmines that scourge the soil

uncouth men who zealously erase the past

& chidren with old men’s eyes

who know the eerie magnetism

cold caress of a gun

whose eyes flicker over the desolate land

following each microscopic dot

that barely moves

they know the cold contractions of hunger

& undertake to barter faith

for what forbidden history

might yield

arizona: valley of the sun (for my parents)

not having a picture to show you the desert sunset

i will tell you how it glows soft orange

turning the sky almost tropical

like a rajasthan sari

that’s on the other side of the world

this same sky that fades the colour from plants that must burn brighter

to compete with the sun & the bone-bleached sky

makes the lime-barked palo verde blaze the roadsides yellow

with their fallen blooms

the rockpile mountains

have done away with intermediate shades

the sun sculpting the sharp folds

like a modernist painting

the outer tips burn red

while the light

turns away from the folds

casting them almost black

on the other side over camelback mountain

the clouds in a larger than earth sky

arch vastly over the great plain

making its rocky heap a muted green

then dun where moving darkness casts brown

& soft shadowy pink where spots of sunlight softly

illuminate the praying monk rock with his folded palms raised to the sky

…colours an artist knows

as cadmium red iron oxide indian red

he knows too that on a color wheel

the opposites

are cyan or thalo blue

shades of the sky

with its infinite variations

only some of which are clear to the human eye

blending fresh recipes on his palette

the artist senses the difference

excerpt from Documentary *

(*Documentary attempts to record and make sense of the South Asia quake, through the use of poetry and prose fused together)

earthquake, 7.8, islamabad & northern pakistan, 8.49-8.55 a m and 9.20 a m

we were used to earthquakes, not just in the high narrow valleys

but down towards the plains

even the flat punjab rocking like a cradle.

when the quake struck, we thought it would only be seconds before it was over

did it begin with the strange freak spring

with the early hot breeze & the rosebuds on the creeper that withered on their stems before the evening

the flowers that spiced the air curling to paper before the end of march

were there small signals beneath the earth

something in the soil in the air

such a sunny saturday morning

sky clear & the sun diamond bright in the sky

sometimes you do not notice the silence of everyday things

the still quiet of birds and animals…

driving to the hospital in a burst of jubilation with the windows down

aretha franklin blaring

then suddenly the liquid lurching walls

the unceasing swinging

the rocking & creaking of walls and light shafts

through the eerie rumbling in the courtyard among staff and patients

one of them with dials and wires still taped to his chest

an overcome sweeperess raising her broom to the sky praying for forgiveness

the silence of the crowd

i could see people standing strangely still

looking down at us from the maternity ward on the second floor

through full length windows

it is as if time ceases in these moments

when earth is thrown off balance

Eleven a m. We sit outside in the verandah on the pew benches, our backs tense against the ripples of electric air. We have come in from the lawn, verdant in the last days of summer, everything at its zenith of green, almost tropical, the heat still palpable.

The earth shivers with a pulse of its own, as the minute staccato writing of seismic equipment on its graph.

Still, we discuss the evening’s plans, made several days ago.

Should my daughter have the barbecue planned for her friends, and should I go to the Iftar party for sixty guests planned by Zainab in her house beyond the city, near the stream, ten kilometres away? She has not yet cancelled it.

We know that an expensive apartment block has collapsed a few kilometers away: we knew this minutes after the earthquake. The television shows repeated images of the collapse, the camera shakes violently, there is a vast cloud of dust. There are no reports of deaths, and there are repeated images of young women from the apartment block next to the collapsed one, who have come out to sit at the edge of the road, and are adjusting their dupattas for the camera. People are milling around the building, back and forth along the road, waiting for something to happen. There is no sound.

The minister for the Interior has made an announcement that everything is alright, that cars are running on the roads, and people are back at work. Everyone should be calm, everything is under control.

It is as if cotton has been wrapped around us, although the seismic air unnerves us.

The television re-telecasts a talk show on the national channel, shown live when the quake struck. The studio vibrates, with a violent up and down movement, and the participants grab the table, shocked, ashen, and repeat the kalima*. When it is over, and they realise they are still on air, they look around themselves, gather their wits and raise their hands in a prayer of thanks.

The carpenter who makes furniture for me telephones to tell me that he is bringing a double bed for my clients, and that I can inform them that it will be delivered in the evening. I am horrified, and let him know that I don’t want to think about work until Monday. While I say this I wonder how I can do so with such confidence, for what Monday might bring, not in the way of another earthquake, but in the way of a normalizing of routine? It doesn’t seem possible that things will be as they were by Monday.

Messages and telephone calls of assurance swing back and forth between the inhabitants of this small garden-like city, between families in the same city and others: the entire region has been rocked from the north to the south of Punjab, into the northern part of Sindh.

A friend says that while she watched her house lurching and rocking, heard the pictures and books falling off the shelves along the liquid walls, she thought, somewhere, thousands of people are dying.

A friend who jumped out of her bedroom window in the morning, and who owns a school for which she needs to buy equipment, rallies herself by early afternoon, before the aftershock of four o’clock, takes a shower, collects her headmistress and goes about her work. The shops are open, but the atmosphere is still, waiting. It appears she is the only shopper to have ventured out.

By late afternoon, after television interviews in which the capital’s residents complain that nothing is being done to rescue the survivors of the collapsed apartment building, in which the chairman of the city development authority suggests that civilian earth moving equipment be moved in, as the government has none and the army equipment is in the field, news transpires that a large housing development company, whose owner works in collaboration with the army, will send in earth moving equipment to begin rescue work.

Army personnel arrive in fatigues and with guns, and cordon off the area, shooing away both residents and onlookers, who are trying to dig through the twenty storey rubble for their family members, using spades and whatever else they can find, often their bare hands. They stand with their guns shouldered, waiting for orders from their superiors to begin work.

Now the news shows a helicopter flying low over the mountains. Blurred footage of miles of villages, their flat roofs collapsed in solid concrete slabs. Earth seems to have exploded into the air: the sky is almost ochre. Rivers run brown with mud. The aircraft continues to fly, showing more villages. A mountainside has disintegrated, sending half of it, mud and boulder, tumbling towards the river, strewing collapsed household rubble across it.

Days later the pilots recount flying over Muzaffarabad* through a dark sky. Nothing visible but a pall of white dust. Landing through it to discover the city cased in a silence as that of the dead. Legions of cars standing, useless for rescue work because their drivers are buried beneath the rubble of buildings folded into the earth.

While I watch this, the windows and door frames rattle forcefully once more, sending me back outside. This is the third violent aftershock, one of more than nine hundred aftershocks to come, ranging from 4 to 6.2, from five seconds to thirty. The gentle tremors are like a constant swinging, making everyone feel off balance for the next few weeks. The stronger ones are sudden, after comparative lulls, and send people running from their houses.

Night brings with it hail and thunder, rain like a deluge whipped this way and that. Lightning strikes the collapsed apartment block, sizzling round and through it, flashing sudden daylight on the rescue workers, sending them scurrying from the rubble.

In this storm, people spend the night driving in circles around the city. A newscaster drenched under his umbrella flags down a few cars, and their occupants slide their windows down against the rain, all talking at once, distractedly telling him that it’s safer to brave the storm in the car than to stay in a cracked building with the fear of another earthquake.

wind sweeps down the mountains

icy over survivors under the angered sky

earth quivers with momentary tremors

thunder matching its vibrations

as it shifts & settles into place

.... In the afternoon two young air force pilots make a sally north over the Kashmir mountains, flying over miles of wreckage before reaching the airport of Muzaffarabad, which they see from the air as a pile of rubble with only the control tower standing out at the edge of the cracked runway, from which the controller frantically calls, come down, come down, help us, help us. As they circle to come in over the runway, they can see people hobbling, running across the tarmac towards them, limping, disheveled, bloodstained, some carrying the severed limbs of their loved ones in the hope that they can be stitched back on.

It is difficult to choose whom to take down to the capital, in an aircraft that can accommodate little more than five passengers. At the end, a little girl wrapped in a shawl puts out a hand and says, take me with you, please, take me. The pilots brush her off: she isn’t the only one, and she is not even wounded, even if she has nobody with her, because they have either perished or are lost. Suddenly she lifts her shawl. Her left arm beneath it is a bloody stump severed from the shoulder.

Returning supply trucks bring their stories.

They have been looted. People come out of nowhere, in the dark, climbing over the slow moving trucks, dragging away bundles of anything they can lay their hands on, jumping off with their loot before the trucks can stop, if they are not already stationary, waiting for army engineers who work like ants to put the road in some order, against mountains that periodically send volleys of rocks and pebbles flying down their slopes.

People are sitting by the roadside, still, mute, with the stench of death around them, refusing to eat, to make shelter for themselves, refusing to bury their dead until they find white winding sheets.

The supply trucks have been trying, without tools, like the villagers, to help move rubble and dig out survivors. One group comes upon a man standing by the edge of a steep ravine that drops to the river. He points to the river, saying that his house, carrying his whole family, collapsed into it. While they stand speechlessly wondering how to commiserate, the man leaps into the water.

Schools of children have died. Women at their daily household tasks, crouching over kerosene or wood stoves, or sweeping, have been buried in the rubble of their houses.

The men say, we saw the sky darken, we felt the first shudder, and when we looked back, our houses were no longer standing.

...News floats in, in uncertain bursts of fact and rumour. But the city has not yet been flooded by survivors.

on the television the shampoo girls & the tea & wedding ads

switch back & forth between

shots of children limp & blood stained

pulled lifeless from the rubble with their satchels their badges

an old man rocking back & forth in grief

a young girl’s neck tight with loss

while the conscientious scramble to shop for their fellow men

thieves loot the shelter of the suffering &

walk away with beautiful children salvaged

from mothers silent & still with grief