Prose

Monsoons

for Papa — the paterfamilias

one by one

the old guard

passes on

and

oceans away

we grow old, too.

LONG before my grandfather was my grandfather, he was a boy who went to a large, colonial boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas. At dawn, they would all wake, bleary-eyed, and run a couple of miles before showering and heading to the mess for breakfast. There were three kinds of meals prepared each morning — English, halal, and vegetarian — for the three kinds of students. When summer arrived, he would often go to stay at one friend’s or another’s, following a patchwork of brotherhood that stretched across India, linked by the efficient trains of the Raj and schoolyard camaraderie. But, sometimes, he would come home, and then he would spend his days bicycling through the streets of Bombay; through sheets of monsoon rain; through Partition itself; until time caught up to him.

Now he walks in the neighbourhood park in the late Karachi afternoons with the other old men until the sun sets.

But, sometimes, in his dreams, he is a boy again and it is warm and bright again and his mother is still in the kitchen, humming as she cooks, and he hears a shout from outside and he grabs his bike and runs out to meet the other kids and together they cycle through their beloved Bombay once more, a city that, finally, lives on in them, lives on until the very last one remembers it for the very last time.

***

This morning on the news they said the monsoons will begin soon.

Photograph by Shanzeh Najam.

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Prose

Melancholy Tastes the Same in Italy and Other Stories

“A sad story, don’t you think?”
Haruki Murakami, On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning

1.

I thought all the kids did it. Whenever it got too much, you’d just take it all, unspooled as it was, and pick a song. (Any song.) You’d listen to that song again and again and again, until the feeling was the song and the song the feeling. And… then you didn’t have to worry about it ever again. It worked really well — it still does. The only problem is that now I’m old enough to forget things. And sometimes I’ll play a song that’s vaguely familiar and, before I know it, all those threads that I’ve carefully stashed into it will come flying out. And high up on Mount Olympus, Ariadne can’t stop giggling. 

2.

I remember the softness of her naked feet on the cold, clean tiles. 

3.

At dusk, bright billboards of you across Lahore pursue me home.

4.

Even the smallest Dairy Milk is purple. Once, purple was worth its weight in gold. The Phoenicians would crack open hundreds of thousands of Mediterranean sea snails to make an ounce of Tyrian purple. Imagine that. Imagine the audacity of trying to overwhelm her with quantity, to stretch my hands out “thiiiiiiis much”, “to the moon and back”, “infinity times infinity”, but I can’t say all that, of course, so I do the best I can and save up for weeks and weeks and buy as many of the small, purple bars of Dairy Milk that I can. And when I turn the large backpack upside down before her, I can see the concern for my sanity in her eyes. Believe me, this is the best that I can do to show you how much. Forgive the quality of the chocolate. Once, purple was worth its weight in gold. I stand before you, hoping that the quantity is enough for you to extrapolate the quality. You were always good at math. 

5.

The indolent Sunday afternoons of my childhood are estranged from me. Lost in time. They seemed so endless back then. Will I ever get them back? Or, if I do, will it simply lead to a relocation of those longings to another horizon, still further back. I dream of horizons of yearning, each gazing at the other, a succession of infinite funhouse mirrors in a Barnum and Bailey multiverse. “But it wouldn’t be make-believe / if you believed / in me.” 

6.

A final memory. Another birthday party. She is not coming. So I talk to an old friend. An animated conversation about politics — the usual. When, suddenly. Small, soft palms cover my eyes. The heart-note of a perfume I can always pick out, no matter how crowded the school’s corridor. A voice breathes in my ear. Guess who? And I can not breathe. For I know that this moment will forever be a barometer for my happiness, a high-water mark left on the levees of my heart.

7.

And now here I am, on the last train home. And I do not know what to make of that.

we were running through the autumn leaves /
a couple kids just wearing out our jeans…

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Poetry

Arcadia

Just for this evening, let’s not mock them.

At least they had ideas about love.

Mary Szybist, The Troubadours Etc.

heavy New England sunlight floods your apartment.

in the mornings after, your bed is too small for us both.

the only music — faint — from your old phone in the shower.

it’s always Sunday, somewhere.

contrails fade into clear, blue sky.

the porches of the nation creak beneath

bluejeans and familiar conversation.

faded pastel flags above the strip

mall flutter in the breeze.

and somehow I am in a scratchy grey sweater

a schoolboy in a long forgotten —

now urgently familiar — corridor.

it is winter yet I am not cold.

something burns within me:

it is the thought of meeting you.

but every step is time, time, time.

Heraclitus’ curse.

decades pass.

I grow estranged from my self.

the music grows louder.

the bathroom door opens.

what’s wrong?

you ask

why on earth are you shivering?

The Cloisters, Fort Tryon

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Poetry

Celestial Mechanics

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears?

Shakespeare, Sonnet CXIX

Two thousand years ago, Ptolemy

traced the vagaries of the stars

and was left immortal for that

and I, too, yearn for the taste

of ambrosia. So here I lie, on

moonless nights, writing my

own Almagest, as I trace the

constellations formed by the

stardust of your nevi.

Howard Pyle, “The Mermaid” (1910)

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Poetry

Giants

do you remember the tiny

balcony with the single,

swaying bulb? of

course, she said.

the cheap wine,

the red paper

cups.

how every Fourth of July

I leant there against the

gunwales of your heart,

watching the fireworks

flash in your

eyes.

yes, we lived like

giants, she

said.

P.S. If you look out the window, you might see a train travelling to tomorrow. 

P.P.S. time, she says, / “there’s no turning back, / keep your eyes on the tracks” / through the fields, somewhere there’s blue / oh, time will tell, she’ll see us through

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Poetry

Summer Begins in Whitestone, New York

(a haiku)

summer rains, stars rise —
taking the long way home I
am mugged by fireflies

Image result for primitive radio gods

and if I die before I learn to speak / can money pay for all the days I lived awake / but half asleep?

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Poetry

Camelot

Every love story is a ghost story.

David Foster Wallace

in a flyover state where

the trains do not stop

but chug on toward the

hills, a quiet chord drifts

out over the darkling

plains and is lost for ever

to the wind and rain and

perhaps we are only

this: ghosts before our

time burning through

books burning through

women burning through

ourselves hoping to find

Camelot.

oceans away — a place

where nobody speaks the

language of the heartland

— you wait for the Q44 to

take you home. lights

alight. church bells toll

the hour. tonight the

street is empty and the

night is empty and the

moon will not rise and

there will be no stars to

guide you home. only the

dumpster fires rage on,

filled with the debris of

yesterday.

I got this window that looks out to Orion / I paid extra for

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Poetry

Icarus

It’s only ghosts here in the winter.

BoJack Horseman

When you’re in love all this

“life” stuff feels like a play —

a game; a dream. And when

you’re not, it’s not. That’s just

how it works. Nights like these

I feel like I’ve forgotten how to

dream. I used to dream of flying.

I miss the wind in my hair, the

sun on my face. But most of

all, I miss your sighs; how the

longing in them would rise up —

up through the zephyrs and comets —

dissolving into stardust that just

might, with a bit of luck, power

the universe for an-

other heart-

beat.

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Prose

On the sweet sounds of static on old radios

Time was a string of knots, a spiked wheel,

a seam that you could split and heal—

As a boy, reclining on horsehair

one morning on a train,

you watched the countryside,

a single light-filled frame

in which lives flickered, drawn forward

like a train along a track; you saw yourself,

suspended in a fractured, endless motion,

going, never going back.

Lauren Wilcox, The Moving-Picture Principle,The Paris Review, Summer 2004

AND then there was that band that had that song called the Loving Sounds of Static. Before then, I’d never thought of static as something that could be loving; beautiful, even.

And then I learnt the only thing I remember from high-school physics: that 2% of the static you hear on old radios as you turn the dial from station to station at sunset is primordial waves — remnants of the Big Bang destined to course forever more through the lonely spaces between the stars and I feel a bit strange knowing that, don’t you?

And the band was called Möbius Band and a Möbius strip is a band, too — not the musical kind — but kinda like the one you wear around your wrist except it has a twist in it so you can visit both sides — inside, outside — without lifting your finger.

And Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, famously, about the bittersweet songs of distant earth but he also wrote about a wall of darkness at the edge of an alien universe and I remember reading it twice in one go and wondering at the magic of it all, and wanting to be a writer, and that was about a Möbius strip, too.

And since then, that’s what I think of whenever I hear static on old radios: sci-fi and interstellar origins and whatever it is that lies just beyond the border of everything. But more and more, now, I think of those quiet evenings spent endlessly tracing a finger along the continuous surface of a band worn, once upon a time, by you.

 

 

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