Skip to main content

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 and the walls fall down on me. I wake up in cold sweat to hear the wails again.

Then suddenly in the distance, something clatters. I think it is gunfire. I known it is gunfire. Some where, some place, another person is getting shot. A cold impassive bullet is piercing his heart and puncturing out with his blood, his aspirations and hopes and dreams.

I think about his blood and suddenly I see I his father with his hands on his son’s cold body. I see his mother impassive to the world. I see his widow and I see that she sees nothing. I see his son, who has just understood that death makes people cold. I see his daughter, who cannot see.

I see his grave as they dig it. I ask the mourners, “what will they write on his tombstone?’ My question hangs in the air like a old heavy fog that forgot to away, but no one answers me. I look at the mourners face who is next to me.

It is …Indescribable. Then I realize he is the man whose funeral I am attending. I understand, all the mourners who are taking the dead man to the grave is (or should I use are) the dead man himself.

I am suddenly back in my bed. My neighbor’s TV is blaring news (ad). Hostages in city of temples, Floods in the lallooland, A new CM in the tribal state, The Land of pure will a get new president (who is either a liar or a lunatic), A Wife tells the world’s most powerful nation to elect her husband but no word on the dead man who attended his own funeral.

Suddenly the TV goes silent along with the rest of the world. The firing is still going on. I am safe. I am far from the sound.

But then suddenly the sound gets closer and closer. The bullet that will claim me will soon come. It will be an easy death because I am no were wolf and I need no silver bullet. It will be lead bullet for me.

It will find its way to my heart. Peirce it and rest in the deepest part of my dark heart. And I will be at peace.

Comments

Tauqeer said…
nice one keep up the good work
should write more frequently

Popular posts from this blog

In Barely Discernible Darkness

I will trace the Jhelum Across Your back with my fingers In barely discernible darkness It will form a paisley Drawn from the memory of An imagined Kashmir No language spoken by Man or Gods shall be Uttered that night Words will be melded, Sentences molded to form A new language of love The ink, a fine powdered Amethyst, shall dry as We write its grammar The quill tips, fashioned From old bones, shall Burn in its blaze The room will be Full of scorch marks In barely discernible darkness -- Tz

Surviving Kashmir

In Kashmir Tragedy doesn't strike you,  It seeps inside you, like a malignant disease  Slowly making its way to your brain,   Disintegrating your mental faculties,  one by one.  Taking you apart one minute at a time,  making happiness  A sepia picture that grandfather  Put up on the wall of the ancestral house,   That is now just a road,  with every passing car Raising dust over your family tree,  the room where  You once crawled,  teeming with unruly pedestrians,   Grounding your memories to mere dust,  walking by  an invisible house with blue windows and tin sheeted gate. In Kashmir,  tragedy doesn't seek you,  it survives you.

Chapter 9: Madness

I hold onto the ledge of sanity by the edges of my fingernails polishing a tune that i heard long ago on radio Kashmir, sandwiched between propaganda and farmer's show, where they taught how to sow blood in fields of saffron to reap a harvest of dead bodies mutilated with joy and skinned alive by bayonet edges and threshed by a machine made of army boots I hold onto the ledge of sanity by edge of my fingernails playing an imaginary santoor, made by the last santoor master of Srinagar, its wires made of Human tendons and its small wooden hammers, bones of young poetess its fickle frame crushed bone of orphaned children trafficked from mortared houses into army camps disguised as play grounds I hold onto the ledge of sanity by edges of my finger nails dreaming about refuge in the asylum of ugly emperors and handsome beggars hiding behind masks of iron, smelted by gunpowder made behind the mosque made of stone, where th...