Dear KLF, You Brought Papa Back to Life!

Of all the sensations and experiences I might have had in the four decades of my life, the most disturbing was the touch of my palm against the soles of Papa's lifeless, cold feet. In a blurred moment I saw some people bent upon him perhaps trying to revive him or figure out if there was just a tiny ray left; but I knew! I knew with my hands pressed against his feet that he was no more. My larger than life father, with his outspoken demeanor and intimidating gaze would never rise again. 

I'm a writer; it's in my genes. I find solace in the beautiful leaves of a journal scribbling away with a pencil, its scraping sound against the pages as soothing for my nerves as the cooing of the pigeons on my windowsill. I write to pour my heart out, I write to survive, I write to be able to live fully, to fight, to find courage, to shed my tears where no one will judge me. I write because for the first three decades of my life that's all I knew. But I could not write about him. I could not share even within the silent pages of my journal the grief, the void. So I withdrew, and put up so many facades that I lost track of Papa's little princess. She once was, but not anymore. The veil of indifference with occasional emotional outbursts of emotions expressed everything except a single word about that fateful night when he became one with the earth.

I went to the 8th Karachi Literature Festival last evening, the first time since it started many years ago. Over the years many asked me why despite such strong literary roots do I never attend it, why am I never part of it. I found many excuses to hide behind - large crowds, prejudice, indifference, lack of time; every single time finding a new, rather untrue reason for resistance. I went there yesterday because I knew I needed to; a voice inside drawing me to it, telling me to go find myself in a crowd of hundreds. I went there to salvage the ties to my family, revisit my roots, hear a friend speak, and to admire a woman who against all odds had built OUP and KLF to what they are. I went because I could not resist anymore yet did not expect what I found there. I found my father! I heard him in the speeches, in the humour by Mustansir Hussain Tarrar, and in the silky smooth Urdu by Arfa Sayeda Zehra; I saw him sway in delight at the couplets being recited occasionally, and smiling proudly at the statement by Arfa Sayeda that "those who are living under the notion that Urdu is a diminishing language could not be more wrong". I saw crowds around him greeting him with respect, and his old friends and acquaintances amused at his one liners. I saw him pleased, and proud, and just so happy, and I realized this was home to him; and he was there, all around me. I had been mourning a death for 16 years that never happened...

Demons in Words

I feel like I'm playing a role in a horror movie, or rather, I'm stuck in one. Wherever I look there are words everywhere - hollow, stark, staring at me with a demonic glare. Everywhere I look, they are always there! My laptop, the phone, the book I was reading, documents strewn across my desk, every notebook I open, they seem to be all over. How did I produce so many? How do we all produce so many of them? All the messages we write, and countless emails, to-do lists, and contracts. I can feel them crawling towards me in eerie silence, with their creepy antennae feeling for my existence, to take over my being. I take a few steps back but they are surrounding me; I have nowhere to go. I'm their slave, begging for mercy, looking for a thin flimsy ray of light to hold onto. But there is none...

I look around desperately trying to find a fresh, blank canvas, to start over, start afresh, but I see words and letters, more of them, so many of them. If I don't speak much and crawl back into my shell like a hermit, will they let go? Will they step back or are they going to haunt me forever? Words I said and wrote, all the poems swaying like old trees on a windy night, all the pieces of writing calling out for me, to grapple me, trying to submerge in my mind once again. I don't have the capacity anymore! I'm maxed out! No more words for me. No more words of insanity or joy, peace or reality, logic or reason, love or hardships. Not one more word!

I embrace the suppressed desire to be surrounded by light, to be part of that blank canvas I so wish to see. Nothing but white, deathly, yet eternally peaceful....

Evanescence

I place my elbows on the table and prop my forehead in the palms of my hands; the warmth emanating from my skin merges with that of my palms. I close my eyes and wait for the moments to slow down gradually till they come to a standstill, and I heave a sigh.

Once again I find myself transported to the land where dark silhouettes wait with open arms, ready to possess me. Once again, I fall prey to their promise to take me in, to grant me a life that swirls around in the ghoulish corridors of a place unbeknown to many. I let myself drift with them, moving towards the dreariness that marks their land, now my own. I float in the air, almost weightless, feeling further and further away from where my feet could touch the ground. The atmosphere is thick with mystery waiting to unfold but only when I am ready to submerge myself in its dark, dismal clouds. 

But I am! I AM! 

Take me in, for I have left behind the facades that I held in place for what now seems like hundreds of years. I'm ready to let go. I'm ready to let your still unfamiliar to me deathliness, to engulf me like a mother would take her newborn in her arms, with love and care unmatched. Seep in through every pore of my skin till you and I become one, never to be apart again. 

I'm closer now; I can feel a bristly caress on my skin; I can hear the hoarse whispers, inviting me to your world. Is it you? Come forth, show me the ghastly murks that mark your land. I have braced myself to be far apart from the world that witnessed my birth, and the world that tore me apart.  

Hold me tight, never to let go, for I want nothing more than to be a faded shadow of yesterday. 

This world of mortals would never understand; to evanesce, is to live!!!

Walk with me, just walk with me...

Rip apart the dreams that once traced the contours of my soul,
Rip apart the chords that held together the lies and truth yet untold.
Walk with me in the still of the night, laced with cries of death,
Don't turn back! The shrieks you hear are nothing but the demon's breath.
Just walk with me, oh walk with me, on a path that leads nowhere,
Merge your soul with the enchanting song that forms my cloud of despair.

I tread carefully on the path that turns into a narrow strip further down till my eyes can see it; tiptoeing, holding my breath. I feel the eeriness of the night around me swaying wildly to the tune emerging from nowhere. One step, two steps... I move forward slowly. The air heavy with a sinister dullness seems to be almost still all but for the occasional croaking of an old toad left behind, separated from his friends. I look up towards the sky and pause for a moment at the ghostly face of the silent moon, melancholic and lost in its own shadow.
The temptation to turn back is strong; strong enough to make me wonder why I ever changed the path. But the sound of the soulful music from a land far away continues to tug at the strings of my heart. What am I to do? Turn back and trade my soul for momentary delights? Or continue to move towards the grieving cloud far away that stands steadily and still to take me in its warm embrace?
The sound of laughter makes one last effort to lure me into turning back; my feet are glued to the ground; I can neither move forward nor turn back...
But when I do, whichever path I may take, walk with me, just walk with me...

Embrace Me O Lord of Shadows!

The willful dance of death, its shadows moving rhythmically to the beat of my almost silent heart, continues towards the urging dark of the tunnel. The ferocious tentacles of silence closing in to grasp me with a force unbeknown to me. I heave a sigh and let my body go limp, giving up the hope of ever being able to gather the shattered pieces of my soul; hundreds of them, fragmented, scattered all around what is left of me.

The sky is turning a strange colour, dark, with a tinge of orange; the trees swaying, dancing in perfect harmony with the dark cloud approaching me. The hollow sound of laughter dies within at the warmth of the demon's breath on the nape of my neck, moving slowly down my spine, leaving behind a trail of tingling sensations.

I turn around one last time, my eyes woefully trying to absorb the last ray of light forming a thin streak. I try to reach out in hope of being pulled out and engulfed in gentle, warm embrace; but the demons surrounding me laugh and hasten their pace towards me.

I stand alone, arms by my side, head bent, tearing up at the sight of the diminishing light. And I wait... I wait quietly for the shadows to tire from their wild dance and lace their skeletal fingers encircling me till they come suffocatingly close; and I finally embrace the shadows! We are one, the shadows and I...

I Fail, The Mirror Fails!

The rare moment when it dawns upon you that, which never was, and that which will never be. The thought and faith that held you together all this while never existed. There seems to be no room for denial now; the only thing left is amazement at your own blindness. 

I float from room to room looking for a mirror that would show me my own reflection, that had the courage to show me the truth. I fail, the mirror fails. 

I go out in the dark, the silence of the night engulfing my tired soul, my own hollow laugh lashing back at me like shrieks of widows mourning, wailing. And I stand there numb, allowing the breeze to encircle me yet not feeling its coolness against my skin. There seems to be nothing worth standing for outside anymore, not the wind nor the fragrance of the frangipani blooms. Once inside, I stand quietly once again not knowing where to go, what to do. Like a wax doll devoid of life, my motionless silhouette stays within the shadows for a long time, until I muster the courage to walk towards a large mirror again. And then I see it! 

The pale face, dilated, watery eyes staring back at me with no more questions left in them. And in that haze I see so much yet nothing at all. I see the smoke rise, I hear the pigeons cooing away a rhythmic tune, I see the pages of a book fluttering by the wind, and I hear a poem. The poem!

It was there, all of it, yet so far from my reach. I tried placing my hand on the vision that appeared, the tattered yellow pages of that book; was that poem in one one of those pages? I wanted to run after each one of those flying yellow leaves of that book, looking for verses that might have my name, chasing after dreams, trying to capture the memories and place them safely deep within my heart; but they were scattered all over now. I see music notes escaping, words turning dull like they would if you place them in murky waters; I see shrouds of memories whirling away in dust of time; and I see the mirror then right in front of me hoping my reflection would be there. There was nothing; the shadow nor the faint remembrance of an image that was once me...

Chasing Light...

It seemed like the end of the tunnel, the streak of light that she had been chasing all this while, running sometimes stumbling towards it with threadbare shoes and bleeding feet, seemed to have merged with the dark. The music that touched the strings of her heart once was now barely audible; the hope, the mystery, the undeniable pleasure that she found in both were long gone. There seemed to be a strange emptiness lingering in the air, and eeriness like hundreds of widows in black, mourning, wailing out aloud. The mustiness was making it difficult to breathe now, but she continued to move on now crawling through the murky waters.

It was not very long ago that her heart sang with the exuberance of a young girl, making her forget all that marred her past. She had a gift; she was able to block the unpleasant, banish the dark moments of her life, those that were nothing but blood and gore. It had to take a lot of effort on anyone's part to push her to relive those moments one night. It was a night of terror, tears and a heart that refused to beat on. It was a teary night when there was no desire for another morning; but she continued to crawl on, now barely able to get past her own shadow.

Facades! All facades! The laughter, not laughter but just the screeching sound of black shadowy witches circling around the old Banyan tree, celebrating the end!

It had been a while now; she had not been able to stroke the pages with ink forming words that were whirling around in her head all this time. It had been a while....

The woman struggling to find words, and the one with a treasure of words that she was unable to share with the world, the woman crawling through whatever was left of the land in front of her breathing her last few breaths; they were one! they had always been one - chasing light.....