Tag Archives: 8-bit

Poetry

Searching for it

Ye masāil-e-tasavvuf

These matters of mysticism

Ye tirā bayān ‘ġhālib’

These discourses of yours, Ghalib

Tujhe ham valī samajhte

We’d judge you a saint

Jo na bāda-ḳhvār hotā 

If you weren’t an alcoholic

Ghalib, Ye na thi hamari qismat ki visal-e-yar hota (It just wasn’t my kismet to meet my lover)

searching for it at night

searching for it in brothels

searching for it in bottles of Murree’s finest on cold winter evenings

searching for it on walks through the city

walking.

walking through the humid streets of your childhood

by the park where you first kissed her

behind the queen-of-the-nights;

you will ask for them on your deathbed

to your tired, ravaged mind they will only be

a memory 

of something you knew, once,

so well

almost 

got it

almost there

almost.

 

walking.

walking through the graveyard

where your grandfather lies

and his father

and his father before him

and you, too, someday

(if you like)

under the big banyan tree

that your grandmother told you was haunted

by a family of djinn

and you’d search for them during the hot afternoons

for three whole summers;

they say every love story is a ghost story

and if that’s true

then

who will you love?

who will you haunt?

 

walking,

forever walking.

to the mosque by the sea

where you found God one day

found him on the sea breeze

that came in through the broken windowpane

of that poor fishermen’s mosque

and kissed you on the forehead as you knelt 

and you kneel again

please, you say,

please, please.

but there is no breeze tonight

so you sit there

cross-legged on the dusty woven mat

and look through another broken windowpane

at the rising sun

and the fishermen as they row in

from nights spent

searching, searching

on the dark waters

and you see the morning star

and you see the Ursids flash by

and something flutters in your heart, then

and you are alright, then;

what a strange thing you are,

Man’s heart

what a strange, strange thing you are.

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Prose

Amor / Addiction

a photograph is all that lasts long

with glory years and quiet fears gone

when summer days are far away

you can dream of skies and lover’s eyes

blue

Shoecraft, Eyes, Blue 

OF all the addictions that may plague a man, an addiction to love is the trickiest addiction to have. This is due to the singular fact that one can not buy love in the marketplace. If one could, that would be another matter entirely and we would not be having this conversation for I would be in the marketplace but we are, and I’m not, for it is — truly, insufferably — priceless.

Its effects are astounding. It can take a boy of fifteen — a promising young lad with a first-rate mind and sound disposition — and render him anaesthetised to worldly pursuits. The worlds of commerce and politics and sport are forever more left grey and drab to him. The gold stars of society no longer mean anything to him. He has glimpsed a world drenched in colour and he can not thrive without it. Over the years, he secretly feeds his addiction with scraps of poetry and ancient Persian treatises on Sufism. He devours literature with an unslakable thirst, searching, ever searching. He sees something he can not articulate in the way the sun sets behind lonely apartment complexes. Something beckons to him on the sea breeze as it blows through banyans in the hot afternoons. And something tightens in his chest every night as he watches the rising of the stars from the roof of his ancestral home. Everything he writes ends the same way: smeared with the half-remembered colours of forgotten love. Like waking from a dream and scrambling to put it all down before it’s lost to the aether; knowing it’s going, knowing it’s gone, knowing even as you begin to write that it’s useless and yet still grasping for another fix, you addict, happy in your addiction, wouldn’t trade it for the world because you’d rather your half-remembered colour than the grey, grey, grey of everyone and everything else…

There is a boy or a girl a thousand years hence on another planet who is reading all this, feeling all this. Here, Earth is merely a byword for an unspeakable nostalgia. I write to you — future-boy, future-girl — from your ancestral home. The colours are real. They exist. There is only one way to find them and there always has been. Good luck. Godspeed.

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Prose

8-bit Philosophy 

Yousuf: “Kya fascination hai 8-bit sé?” (What’s your fascination with 8-bit?)

Shahzéb: “I like 8-bit because 8-bit is to us what we are to God. It’s the closest we can get to touching the mind of the divine. You plug in a game into a beat-up old Nintendo and the little screen lights up with a brand new world of life and light and adventure. And you see a little hero and you watch his little life play out and he evolves over time and, before you know it, you care about the little sprite more than you want to admit. You love him and you root for him and you guide him and you watch him do all the things you can not because you have responsibilities… 8-bit is a distilled essence of our world. It’s forced by the limitations of bits and bytes to build a universe out of a few, small pixels. Like our world — of quantum pixels — built with care and with love and programmed with destiny. But the best part is the feeling you get when you realise how small the 8-bit world is. It has walls. It’s a sandbox that’s too small for all you’ll ever want. And you realise that you feel that here, too. And the 8-bit world is too small because it’s been made by us; us, who’ve seen bigger things. That lingers on in the subconscious of the little sprite-heroes. And it’s the same with us. That’s why we feel a twinge in our hearts every time we look up at the stars. This is why I love 8-bit. Because it reminds me that there is more than… this.”

Yousuf: “Consider teaching philosophy. At least once in your life. And fill it with this stuff. Then write a book. Title it The film of my life.”

Shahzéb: If I do, I’ll call it One Last Sunset.

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