Make Humans Again:
A Portfolio of 20th Century Kashmiri Poetry
Featuring:
Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor (1885-1952)
Dina Nath Nadim (1916-1988)
Amin Kamil (1924-)
Abdul Rahman Rahi (1925- )
Moti Lal Saqi (1936- )
Rafiq Raaz (began publishing ghazals in the mid-seventies)
Bashir Athar (1954-)
Piarey Hatash
Bird, Mad About Flowers
What is it that will sift a flower –
and what flowers! – that will boldly drink
of spring from the garden’s year, and does not know?
For here is riot, and fury of sound, quite agony enough.
What if you were not told?
Yours is the horse-hair net
and florid bait, and the sprung-snares of luminous stuff made:
Here flowers conceal the flush green nets set with blades of spun-grass.
Here is downfall;
your ruin in fire,
should you nestle among boughs where there are flowers
high on the flowering tree – now it is past time
you left the garden; now that you persist, and would disavow this –
For we here bless only trees
that keep, and do not beg
their share of shade; we lay waste
to the tree bereft, even the proudest of tall pines.
– Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor
Time
It came to pass that time came to rest
On a picture: and the bold, green lines
Grew long, and there was a forest.
He who took the road through
Found home – and there was breath.
Where is the forest? What place, mind?
– Dina Nath Nadim
Pilgrimage for Our Time
What is it you wish to leave
That makes you leave
Not without leaving
Nothing behind?
Where is it you wish to be
That you take the zero road,
Thinking nothing of not leaving
Anyone, not quite anyone, behind
To sink, as one sinks
When one waits
For water,
Or is it an echo
The sound a cracked heel barely makes
On broken earth in an empty place?
You insist and take nothing
But a sometimes familiar shadow
To carry the rest of your humpbacked life
On the empty road you will not leave, past
The lookout that does not lie
Ahead, to a point at an indefinite close
Of a vanishing road
You possibly never meant to attempt
Or reach.
There is something
Of a kind in desolation’s witness –
An earthbound star,
The ruined sky.
There will be mountains.
There are always mountains.
There is always hope in the ascent
To breathe what breaths
They have forsaken before you now
On the heights – there, where you must
Begin (and there is not always time
to begin) your descent
There will be time: to think on distance,
Of the dwellings you can barely see,
Of beds, and a pleasant enough country road
To lead you past the open country fields;
And the dogs only too eager to chase you
Through yet another rabid country scene.
Count yourself mad
In the unhinged city –
That is surely how they will know you.
Have a care when you pick
Your gentle way through the barbed meadows
In bloom again; do not stop to listen
To woodnotes by the glittering banks
Or follow their turning feet: these
Un-drowned gods mislead – but you know this,
Not to leave the empty road or rest your broken feet
Till you cross the desert – only, you know
You will not cross the desert.
The desert is a waiting thing – and no road
Enters but leads into the waiting heart of it,
Where at last you must lie, emptied,
To listen to blistering wind
And the sun and empty sky, to wait
Overhearing the desert defeat you.
So they will find you, at the end, so very still –
Your breath all in you that moves as one
With sand – and so they will reckon you
One, unbroken, among the visionary company –
In the end they will brick you in gold
Build about you a temple
To which others will find a well paved road
Now they call it peace
Where you are.
– Moti Lal Saqi
Shrew
O it is a weight and no mistake that the window must bear –
open it and it will complain, waking the bleary wide worlds
shriek by shriek, like a shrewish (you know which) sister
by marriage. It lets out a yell when you close it as well
and you'll wish then you hadn't. As for me, I have mine:
for me to have to hear such music the lifelong day every day
– Dina Nath Nadim
Shadows
But to taste an indefinite moment
Past the ebb and trials of stars – past
The subsiding – time you insist eternal.
A city road is heeled through thickest trees
As doubts worm through my waning faith’s
Finest mantle.
I did. I opened my eyes –
I exposed my dreams to an evil eye.
Desolate now the green
Swell of breasts, scorched wilderness of fire.
Look about you, this carnival crackles
Tally your thought and the lone crow in the void.
I wished to make stars once upon a time.
Now it’ll be sweat again to give myself a name.
For the sake of belief – belligerent scrub to grow
Above snow, for consciousness – a seething snake.
These gods are not but the shadows I cast
All monsters mirror the self’s more obscure motion.
This gibbering crowds our corridors
I’ll comb trees to clothe the saints.
What hand will steer us now, what shore?
The spindrift boat turns alone in the dark.
You who dance, disrobe – circumscribe him.
Madman, know – I eat fire.
– Abdul Rahman Rahi
Bare Thoughts
A desert my love offers the shade of your hair
The memory of you insists, knocking at the door
(If the heart is a door). It is hard to want more
Of time – to wish to be and yet alone
We were none of us given to be
What more can a heart do – if the heart lives right
Next door a too inquisitive mind – but doubt,
fasten close the pain? The softened, open mouth
Hate can never know –
In tears is a consecration of love.
These cups are shallow, entirely
Too constricted for thought –
Do you think they’ll found us
Forms more truly shaped, less hallowed
Before I sell, no longer sound
Love’s wants, myself grow to shadow
Some other?
These must be wraiths
These where Man, you say,
We’ve yet to raise.
This wreath of words is not your own.
Bare thought is given to grey
Unto decrease.
The dog is collared in gold –
O how your bark quickens my heart.
In the ruined city
A trembling heart is treasure.
– Amin Kamil
Where Do I Go?
You thought me pleased
To see you go; eager
To run my fingers
Through your earth,
The things you did not carry;
Eager to undo what was
Your time; eager to build
In that place the house of my dreams
Out of your quick undoing –
So it was
Your memory, slowed in ruin,
Is all you can still call your own –
So it was
And even so, I’ve made an end
Of myself – everything you left
I marked my own. You thought
I swallowed you, whole –
Where did I go?
You cannot say.
I’d forgotten the graves
So many,
So quick to grow
I’d forgotten,
There will never be enough graves.
There will be fire, you’ll see,
Fire enough, pyre
To pyre,
Anywhere – but Where
Do I go? Speak –
Speak to me of the grave
And my time to come –
It will not give me up to sleep.
– Bashir Athar (From The City of Stones)
Event
Arid, the open
Mouth of a shoe,
In a patient ruin
On an empty street
Of a fallen face
That is still,
Until done to a turn,
Eventually,
Past recall
In the welcome mouth
Of a passing dog
Eventually still –
Until it bounds
The shoe not loosed
Into a gutter:
Quiescence, possibly,
Of thirst.
– Dina Nath Nadim
The Lost *
Brothers, it comes to this: our address is lost.
And where now shall we look for our own? – now
That place is lost.
What we have regarded so long looking on with love
A sanctuary, locked – that house is lost.
Who shall we here call to account for our drowning dark?
O, that we are the stifled, our unburdening excuses lost,
That we flutter, concentred about a candle, till we burn
Until it grows obscure, and the moth is lost.
When will the heart’s tinder turn back around, return?
The intimacy of long winter nights is lost.
What we could gather to hand was but faith –
Lidless now the pots, our treasure lost.
When we at last shall steal away with nothing –
May God recall where to look for all we have lost;
For so is the one who could riddle tomorrow –
The dervish, our giddy visionary – lost.
– Piarey ‘Hatash’
* I came to learn of this poem through the exiled author’s performance of this poem over the telephone (in a conversation with the filmmaker from Jammu) as featured in the film of 2008, Jashn-e-Azadi, written and directed by Sanjay Kak. I would like to thank all those involved in the film for making poetry in its human voices, in all its fragility, so palpably present through this film. My translation has attempted to mimic not the word alone, but the first person personal voice, overheard through a remote, and crackling, tenuous vasculature of wires.
Seven Sparks
At midnight the seer’s soul caught fire; he began to dance –
In frenzy he danced, and in splendour. I was still, fearing,
When he made me a gift of paper. I trembled to see there
Sparks, there were seven, wrapped in folds of paper like silk.
I was overcome. I fell into sleep, dreaming there the dancing seer
Was stilled. I made a fold of my hands, and pressed them together
And asked after his gift: “Tell me, let me not be the one left out
of the secret tonight – what is this? In the name of God,
What would you have me do with these? How keep them? The sparks
will burn, how can they not, through these folds as fine as silk.”
“They will burn,” he said, “and the sparks go out. And seven
are the places that shall catch fire, burning for so many years.”
– Rafiq Raaz
A Coat for Rain
I walked into that room
I took the raincoat off; set it
Any which way on a nail – and
Turned-around, I spun, and stood,
Considering, with a pregnant look,
At length: for it seemed to me
I was there, hanging, awry:
A coat suspended from a nail –
These are the same
Shoulders, these my arms
Disjected. And I have known
This incoherence of buttons
The clinging – unreasonable,
Unyielding thread! – this way
And that, the all too familiar holes
– Thus, duly inspected, I,
I took to the door, I checked myself
Out, out from this rack of cloth,
This institution, this store.
Then there were two –
Strangers – yes, they were both
Strangers – the two of them something
Odd, something surpassing eager –
“Is there anything of his he left behind?
Anything to survive, something used
Something old, something he wore
To cover his head, something scribbled
Or something green, still fresh, a poem
He did not live to see published? He wore
A coat at the end,
It was for rain.”
“Yes he did,
There is a room above where it hung
On a nail.
We none of us could bring ourselves
To look.
Till the day we tried it on ourselves
until it fit.
We let it lie after that,
Left it well enough alone.
It’s been a few days since
We let the rag-picker have it
For who knows
How much. What’s it to you?”
“It is wanted, naturally,
By the museum of letters.
Can you say who has it,
Or if there is some mark
That identifies it?”
“And how will you get your hands on it?
Will you fish for it
On a mountain
Of rags? Listen,
Friend, there is something,
Stitched into the lining,
A label its very own:
SHEIKH ALLAH,
MASTER TAILOR.”
– Dina Nath Nadim
Mood
The fog –
Outside –
The silence,
And cold.
There is not a rag to wrap naked trees.
The mud walls beg, surround me.
I have seen grey ash in the oven
And I have stood by a window
Without a kangri*, shadow-spurred
To ask the lengthening road –
Hey, where are you going? Won’t you take me with you?
– There was fog and silence and cold.
I sat back down again by a corner in the granary.
– Abdul Rahman Rahi
* kangri. At present, a fairly idiosyncratic means of keeping oneself warm in winter and beloved of Kashmiris. The design is simple: wicker encases an earthen bowl shaped pot that can be filled with charcoal (preferably charcoal made from the leaves of the chinar) and live embers.
Sonnet
Such days I see the moon rise over hill – it seems to be
Fried bread, except for such scars I see unseam
A neck so collared in every dissolute colour – let me believe,
Instead, the moon is cut from threadbare Pampur tweed.
The moon is bread, but if, through a spent halo in decline
She still shines, a thing too finely used, or unseemly old,
Something a man might slip in with money owed
The peasant girls – this moon is counterfeit coin.
The moon is fried bread: and mountains hunger;
Clouds again put out kitchen fires. But in woods I see
By glimmer-lights; glean kindling and far fairies
From the glow of their cooking stoves – and farther,
On distant peaks, I know a little rice is beginning to rise.
I’ll let my hunger know; I’ll heave my eyes to heaven.
– Dina Nath Nadim
took flight –
patience, a cup, spills over.
They hid
in a cave
one hundred years under
sleep: dream fathomed.
The light sleepers?
The dog,
unblinking
time,
overtook Decius
and the cave: waste
of dreams
of dark
cobwebbed – the cave is dragon hoard.
– Abdul Rahman Rahi
Our Big House
Our house
Is a big old house
Now the rats upstairs and down
Make a home of it
In the many hollows they know
Make this house the big old house
It is – and it is not in the least unusual
As we would no doubt know
If only we’d care to look into it
As something less familiar
Than structure, something I’d be inclined to weather
If only I thought I could survive the collapse
Below this dimension of just thirty centimetres
Necessary to squeeze safely inside the eggshell walls
And not have to sit and listen to the skin
Of this house peel, or these, our thoughts
Pulsing with the ceiling starting to collect
Under our bare, blackened feet
On the bare, blackened floor.
Is it any wonder
They stop and lick their lips and stare
(Past the hollows and broken doors)
At gutted stairs and gutted beams, or take
What they can and think, “It’s a wonder
It still stands, a wonder that they’re here”?
But there’s so much that lives with us still
In the big house in the middle of the street
Like the mongooses
That quicker than you or I can blink
Or cancer spread
Put out the eyes,
Put out the eyes
Quicker than blood
Sinking into the floor, a little warm
At first, then a little cold,
Blackening the wood
Under our bare, blackened feet.
This house is big enough for us still.
Those who could afford to leave
Have left the house to those of us
Who can neither afford to leave
Nor die in a distant place, in shadows
Mountains breed from unfamiliar bone,
Or survive the crossing
Of the salt roads
Where the water cuts like glass
Only to forget
The way we came
Or where
We’ve come
And why –
Dry dust
Of roots
A little earth
And skin
In all that’s left
Of our flayed hands –
This house is big enough for us still
Confine your ears if you hear them say
“This house is just big enough
To be our grave” – it is not the dead
We need to fear. Hide your eyes –
All will be well, all will be well
If we can just set right
The unscarred bones of this house
That they may grow into nothing
You need fear, whatever you think you hear
In the room with the eggshell walls
That shift, and shifting
Suggest some ungentle thing.
But if after these walls you cannot bear to think
Of something growing, then be glad
For we do not hear and will not see
The light of our pyres put out our little fires,
Put out our little fires.
– Moti Lal Saqi
* This adaptation has more of the translator in it than any other piece offered in this selection. Readers familiar with the original will know where the translator has lingered on an image. More importantly, this adaptation is one of three I have prepared of Saqi’s remarkable ‘Big House’ , or ‘Mansion’, a series intended as a sequence to capture the voices present in Saqi’s ‘Big House’ and the ‘house’ of the poem.
Sonam Kachru is a student of concepts in history, whether such concepts are brought into view through arguments offered in dry-as-dust philosophical analysis, or arguments metrically made with all the resources of narrative. He is particularly interested in the history of philosophy and literature available in Sanskrit which he pursues awake to the trials of thought elsewhere but without an interest in comparison alone. He is currently a PhD student in the Philosophy of Religions Program at the University of Chicago; his dissertation essays a reconstruction of the arguments for an elegant, if sinuous criterion for the nature of mind put forward by the fifth century philosopher from Peshawar, Vasubandhu. This being a work in the history of metaphysics and philosophy of mind narrowly construed, Kachru also hopes to complete a slightly unrulier work, Pleasure in a Time of Leaves, an essay on Aśvaghoṣa's poetics, soon. When he is not beating such bushes as thrive in Sanskrit or its neighboring languages from pre-modern history, Kachru translates from Kashmiri poetry of the twentieth century. Some poems form the ongoing book-length project may be seen here.