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Where do old birds go to die? Do they fall on us like stones from the sky? Do we stumble on their bodies in the streets? Do you not think that the All-Seeing, Almighty One who put us on this Earth has made proper arrangements to take us away?”
No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it.
la ilaha illallah, Mohammed-ur rasul Allah—There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Messenger.
Then came Partition. God’s carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred.
He spoke of the past with dignity but never nostalgia.
What escaped them was that the couplet was a sly snack, a perfidious samosa, a warning wrapped in mourning, being offered with faux humility by an erudite man who had absolute faith in his listeners’ ignorance of Urdu, a language which, like most of those who spoke it, was gradually being ghettoized.
This habit of his made life around him seem more profound and at the same time less distinctive than it really was. It infused everything with a subtle sense of stagnancy, a sense that everything that happened had happened before. That it had already been written, sung, commented upon and entered into history’s inventory. That nothing new was possible. This could be why young people around him often fled, giggling, when they sensed that a couplet was on its way.
confusion of cars, buses, rickshaws and tangas driven by people who somehow managed to be reckless even at an excruciatingly slow speed.
“So we are remembered as the forgotten ones?” Ustad Kulsoom Bi said. “Wah! Wah!”
Mussalman ka ek hi sthan! Qabristan ya Pakistan!
THE NATIVITY
Good stuff.
