SHINE Humanity is a registered NGO dedicated to providing high-quality healthcare and clean drinking water to underserved populations.
As President of SHINE Humanity’s Youth Board, I gave a presentation on SHINE’s charitable activities to the students and faculty of Karachi Grammar School.
This post was also published here, on the Ziauddin University Atlas Blog.
Man’s heart a river be
deeper in depth than the unfathomable oceans,
Ah! Who knows the wailing of the heart
in search of its Lord?
Sultan Bahu, d. 1691, (translated from the Punjabi by Sayed Akhlaque Husain Tauhidi)
THERE is a stubborn Sohni in my soul who longs to cross the Chenab of two worlds to reach her beloved, Mahiwal. I refuse. She persists. I patiently explain how fragile my ghaṛiya; how vast—how turbulent—the waters. It is but a simple thing fashioned of simple, unbaked clay: how dare it aspire—ad astra—to the stars? She smiles at me and slowly shakes her lovely head.
A marvellous thing: as we watch the shoreline recede behind us—and the waters swirl higher, ever higher—my turbid heart settles for the first time since I was a boy of twelve and found that battered old copy of the Conference of the Birds and learnt of love and Love.
And together, my Sohni and I watch as our Mahiwal appears on the distant bank and dives into the waves and strikes out for our simple, fragile, star-seeking, little ghaṛiya.
(Still from the music video of Coke Studio’s “Paar Chanaan De” (Across the Chenab) by Noori ft. Shilpa Rao.)
Dear Baba,
A million years ago — as they sat by their little campfire — a father pointed out the constellations to his son. And the infinite night sky didn’t seem as intimidating anymore.
It’s the stories we grow up with that whisper the loudest within our hearts; they are the framework for our dreams; they pulse with the rhythm of our short, bright lives.
Thank you for giving me the stories that have made me who I am today. (Here is one of them.) Stories of social justice and dignity and equality. Stories of a divine love that is greater than the stars. And stories of who I was, who I am, and who I will be.
They are stories that will last a lifetime and I shall never tire of telling them.
Love you, forever and always.
Your son,
Shahzéb
Sometimes, I think of god as a lover of music
listening to the poetry of our lives
listening to the minor falls
and the major lifts
and to those who loved too much.
My god;
my god!
What a symphony
we shall be.
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.
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.
Gharo, Sindh, Pakistan. PHOTO CREDITS: HASHAM MASOOD, M.B.B.S., BATCH XVIII
BY: SHAHZEB NAJAM, M.B.B.S., BATCH XVIII
If you sail far enough into the blue waters of Keenjhar Lake, you’ll see a small, stone structure rising up out of the waves. You disembark onto weather-beaten steps and climb up to a white, circular platform and in the centre, in eternal solitude, lie the graves of an ancient king and an ancient queen. You say a small prayer for the royal lovers — for all lovers, in all epochs, and for those who loved too much. Before you leave, your gaze lingers a moment longer on the setting sun and the wind-ruffled waters and you wonder why it feels like you’ve left something of yourself behind there with Noori and with Jam Tamachi and their thousand sunsets. Soon, the stars will rise. And I shall think of you.
About the author: Shahzeb…
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