Phantom Phone Calls

Those phone calls that

I never made, remain

Unanswered

Their phantom rings getting

Louder with each passing

Second, making my ears

Bleed

I can see you

Calmly ignoring my

Non-existent calls

Deleting my unsent emails

Without reading them,

Blocking me everywhere,

Even in my own imagination

You return the gifts

That I never send

Never even opening them

Shahid, Neruda, Angelou,

Lorca, Ghosts all

Haunt me as I search

For nonexistent verses of Arabic

Little bits of magic

Hidden in the Quran

To bring back dead love

You mean well, you said

In that conversation

We never had, But

I can’t do this anymore

Comments

A peace of my heart

I should have done have done this a long time ago. In the last three (or is it four) days of curfew. I have been intending to write. But I have made up some brilliant excuses to excuse my self from writing. I have been playing games on my ancient computer or else I have been reading about superheroes and comic books on the internet. And once in a while, I check out the death toll. There is something which is gnawing at my heart. Every night, I hear sounds in the distance. They sound like women and children screaming. To shut their voices I talk to my half sleepy friends on the phone till I am bored to the point of exhaustion and fall asleep. But even in my sleep the voices are not shut out. They invade my dreams and my thoughts. I am dream that I am trying to set up a date and then suddenly without a warning, the dream changes, I am being chased in a dark alley which has no end. I cannot see what is chasing me, but its closing on me. As that thing grabs me, cold sweat breaks out...

Death of a Mother

WITNESS Muhammad Tasim Zahid Srinagar, Aug 3: I have tears in my eyes as I enter Maisuma. The remnants of tear gas sting my eyes. Police is standing at a distance as protestors, mostly teenagers, shout at me to close the lights of my Bike. I comply as the group tries to burn a truck tyre on the road. As men in the roads swear vengeance, the women wailed silently and quietly in an old school building. I climb the narrow stairs of the school and enter a room which a sign declares as assembly room. The room is full of women as someone points me to an women who is hardly in her late 30's. Her cheeks are pale and drawn but she is hardly in the room. Neither the oaths of vengeance nor the silent wails of women seem to have an effect on the young widowed mother of Asif Mehraj, Shammema. She is sitting almost impassively among the women. As Women around her wail, her pale face grows darker. A teargas shell hit the heart of Shammema's 16 year old son during the protests....

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You know what I hate about writing for a paper. It seems to be a cheap form of prostitution. You prostitute your art for a few pennies. Your words instead of bodies. I mean whatever happened to art for art’s sake. But then people hardly think about art or even love these days. Unless if it is an piece of art that some bored millionaire has brought for an obnoxious amount of money or in case of love, it is laced with large doses unbridled lust. Think about it, half the praise that Dev D got was because the romance between Devdas and Paro was replaced by lust. When was the last time I wrote for myself. The strange thing is that I remember the exact time I did it. After being copped in my house for three (or was it four) days in the curfews of the summer of revolution. But I must have written hundreds even thousands of words since then, lending my pen to chicken rates, illegal buildings, bad roads, corrupt police men, nauseating politicians. But my soul is as empty as old parchment ...

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