Postcard from Kashmir
Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.
I always loved neatness.
Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.
This is home.
And this the closest
I'll ever be to home.
When I return,
the colors won't be so brilliant,
the Jhelum's waters so clean,
so ultramarine.
My love
so overexposed.
And my memory will be a little
out of focus,
it in
a giant negative,
black
and white, still undeveloped.
A Dream of Glass Bangles
Those autumns
my parents slept
warm
in a quilt studded
with pieces of mirrors
On my mother's arms were bangles
like waves of frozen rivers
and at night
after the prayers
as she went down to her room
I heard the faint sound of ice
breaking
on the staircase
breaking years
later
into winter
our house surrounded
by men
pulling icicles for torches
off the roofs
rubbing them on the walls
till the cement's darkening
red
set the tips of water on fire
the air
a quicksand of snow
as my father
stepped out
and my mother
inside the burning house
a widow
smashing the rivers
on her arms
The Season of the Plains
In Kashmir where the year
has four clear seasons,
my mother
spoke of her childhood
in the plains of Lucknow,
and
of that season in itself,
the monsoon,
when Krishna’s
flute is heard
on the shores
of the Jamuna.
She played old records
of the Banaras thumri-singers,
Siddheshwari and Rasoolan,
their
voices longing,
when the clouds
gather,
for that invisible
blue god.
Separation
can’t be borne
when the rains
come:
this every lyric says.
While children run out
into the alleys,
soaking
their utter summer,
messages pass between lovers.
Heer and Ranjha and others
of legends,
their love forbidden,
burned incense all night,
waiting for answers.
My mother
hummed Heer’s lament
but never told me
if she
also burned sticks
of jasmine that,
dying,
kept raising soft necks
of ash.
I imagined
each neck
leaning
on the humid air.
She only
said:
The monsoons never cross
the mountains into Kashmir.
A Butcher
In this lane
near Jama Masjid,
where he wraps
kilos of meat
in sheets of paper.
the ink of the news
stains his knuckles.
The script is wet
in his palms:
Urdu.
bloody at his fingertips,
is still fine on his lips,
my well-fed skin
the language
polished smooth
by knives
on knives.
He hacks
the festival goats,
throws their skin to dogs.
I smile and quote
a Ghalib line;
he completes
the couplet,
smiles,
quotes a Mir line.
I complete
the couplet.
He wraps my kilo of ribs
I give him the money.
The change
clutters
on our moment of courtesy
our phrases snapping
in mid-syllable
Ghalib's ghazal's
left unrhymed.
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