Category: Places

From the very first time I read this poem, I knew I was going to blog it. I just wasn’t sure when. As time passed by, it kept changing. Drawing energy from events around me, and from me. Always draping itself with shades of sadness somehow familiar if I only dared to slip beneath the calm surface of the ocean that fills my heart.

Today, although transformed, it is just as pure and deep as the first time I read it. Today, it has many meanings, woven together, just like life’s tangled relations. And just like life itself, happy or sad, you just have to endure it:

Two planets meeting face to face,
One to the other cried ‘How sweet
If endlessly we might embrace,
And here for ever stay! how sweet
If Heaven a little might relent,
And leave our light in one light blent!’

But through that longing to dissolve
In one, the parting summons sounded.
Immutably the stars revolve,
By changeless orbits each is bounded;
Eternal union is a dream,
And severance the world’s law supreme.

Poem by Muhammad Iqbal, the “Poet of the East”, from “The Call of the Road”

Life is making choices, some easy, some hard. Sometimes knowing and sometimes unknowingly,  and then living by those choices. And always being wise after the event.

Life is a test. No, a series of tests, big and small. And you are taking them, like it or not. You’re taking them and may not even be aware. And the results? Well, by the time they are known, it will be too late for any retakes.

Life is wanting to be brave. Then realizing that happens only in movies, and the only time you  can really be brave is when life itself does not give you any alternatives. And you have a feeling that doesn’t really count, but you move on.

Life is acting. A role play to the world as time passes by. A pageant of smiles and frowns, sometimes on the outside, sometimes on the inside. The trick being never to let anyone distinguish between the real and the fake.

Life is a road, twisting and turning. Ever descending into the twilight at the far end of the valley. And you keep moving because stillness is not an option. Maneuvering unexpected turns and frightening overpasses, you hope to keep on the path as you proceed.

Life (part 2)

I am the tree.

Always rooted strongly to the ground, looking up at the sky.
Always staying still, while others pass me by.

Some times things get caught in my branches.
But that they will stay with me, there are little chances.

Because all it takes for them to fly away,
is a gust of wind on a stormy day

They leave me behind alone,
and go to places to me unknown

I stay back, right or wrong,
because this is the place to which I belong.

With time I will grow old.
All my stories untold.

Until the day of the big storm.
My roots too weak to perform.

Memories will flash me by,
as I try one last stretch towards the sky.

When we wake up, it will feel like a dream. A very real and vivid dream. All alone in blind darkness and utter chaos, the final passageway before us, we will pray for our light not to fade until we are safely on the other side.

No matter which era, mothers’ dreams for their sons are identical. During the weaving of those dreams, knots of prayers start to appear, and bits of hope materialize. But often, all dreams are washed away through the black lines of the kohl. Because perhaps history fancied one color only. The color red.

One.
These three letters have many faces.
The one we want all our lives,
the one we never want.
The one who stays with us,
the one we never get,
the one with whom we always stay upset,
and the one that has his own opinion.

Wait.
Childhood’s wait for toys.
The wait for rain after the prayers.
Wait, keeps on going and searching for a name, keeps painting pictures at the street corner, keeps being stuck in the door lock. If the wait ended, wouldn’t the eyes look away and close themselves? Waiting is inevitable, but halting of the wait is not?

The ways strung to our feet are uncountable.
Life, clutching the finger of necessity, keeps on running. No sound, no tranquility, no promise, can stop it. The roar of desires mutes the voice, while the age of necessity keeps growing. Life. No, life never stops.

One day I met a man on the street. He had in his hands two similar faces.
I asked, “What do the two faces mean?”
He said, “One is myself, the other, the world.”
I asked, “Which one are you?”
He said, “I have forgotten.”
I asked again, “What is the benefit?”
He said, “I have gotten accustomed to benefiting from misfortune.”
Far away from there, a few words written on a plaque smiled, and both of us picked up each of our faces.

Original in Urdu, “Kia Naam Doon”, by Sajjad Ali (from the audio album Chahar Balish)