Sad Birds Still Sing

She looked for new faces to add fantasy to life, but all she was doing was asking questions, without looking for the answers, she went by the flow without knowing the flow lessens as it comes to the shore. Her innocence paved way to what was the crowd and after all crowd was not bad, crowd was lovely, bustling, happening and it adds ‘fantasies’ to life.

He remembered how he had woken up, the nights wanting to talk to her; he also remembered the cruelty she had faced in the escalated process of growing up, but less  did she remember how she chained the lips of people and then accused them of having nothing to speak, in the modern nomenclature, they call it, 'Boring'.

I do not exist,

I am not an entity in this

world or the next,

did not descend from

Adam and Eve or any

Origin story. My place is

the placeless, a trace

of the traceless.

Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved,

have seen the two

worlds as one and

that one

call to and know.

I am a part of everything

That has been created

The politics of this is complicated at best, dystopian at worst. She thought she was understood, but less had she known the fact that we are not made to be understood, but to have pleasant memories or to cherish the beauty around us, Psychologist researchers wasted years finding that ‘External Stressors are sources of stress that come from the world around you’ and never do humans respond the same way to the external stressors, for our (human) behavior and growth is a process of evolution.

The feeling of the absurd is not, for the all that, the notion of the absurd. It lays the foundations for it and that is all. It is not limited to the notion, except in the brief moment when it passes the judgment on the universe. He on the contrary had rebellion in his blood; he had fought battles in the chasms of down south, where fear fears to pursue. He had given hope to the hopeless children born in these deep dungeons of death, living under the stifling sky forces one to get away or to stay. He had battled popular narratives down there in the apple orchards where his friends holding guns and stone had battled armies and he had been preaching and breathing resistance along them, but the irrational, the human nostalgia and the absurd was born a year later after he had set an entire set of elitist politicians on fire, he was to be back from the bay, to punch in the last doze of fire, but she asked him to stop for she will miss him, and While he was strolling back to his life, to where he belonged, to where he had breathed and given hopes, been the faceless face of a summer, She repeatedly whispered into his ears, 'Don't Go'. And that very day, He left his belongingness behind because she asked, "Don't." Less did He know he had left behind his life to be left by her too.

What can a condition outside her state mean to her, words are no magical, silence, it is just silence that Rumi translated as the ‘language of God.’ She only understood in human terms, If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning or rather this problem would not arise. Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me. But all she had done was merely drawn conclusions from what was visible and she risked it for nothing that was hypothetical or may have been a possibility.

She had woken up hearing to the Adhaan from the loudspeaker of the nearby mosque. The morning sparrows chattering on the Cable wire that ran parallel to the window of her room. The evenings would be allaying with the invigorating aroma from the nearby barbecue shop. The morning vegetable vendor in her newly tiled narrow street packed with houses on both the sides with always sapping drains, the vendor would with his ‘Lakdi ki Tokri’ packed with tomatoes, bottle-gourd, onions, peas, beans, radish – screaming: “fresh vegetables, straight from the farm to your kitchen.” In the Afternoons another vendor would be searching, “Teen , Sheshter, Plastic and of course Kagaz.” In his high pitched sounds, she saw a routine and then a day, the sound vanished, he was dead, she was told.  The early morning elders holding milk pots in one hand and “Lawas” in the other and the winter evenings were soothing with the distant owl hoots on the nearby trees that cornered her house in the midst of rice fields and then the day would begin with horns and noise of rushing cars.

If I convince myself that this life has no meaning than that of this absurd, if I feel this entire equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not best living but most living.

He had woken up the entire nights in an anticipation to get a glimpse of her, to hear her cuckoo-ic voice. He had seen light in her through the dark times, because of the uncertainty that had grasped his polity, his doings and the fire that had set, all the media houses, elites, political giants, states nearby had been wanting to doze that fire off that he had set, he had comraded along with his comrades. The cursory game he enjoyed was that the states had the luxury of lying and the media houses bought the narrative, spread it wide, but the distance from the reality as Plato has marked, “an imitation of things as they are,” hence distant from the reality and the reality in any conflict zone was, “The Ground.” Less had the states that purchased the conscience of wealthy philanthropists, newly launched activists, social activism practitioners, affluent media houses, eminent journalists, wealthy separatists known that even after buying thousands of such men and women, little had they managed to grip any blossoming  tree in the apple orchards or any leaf in the monster chinars that harboured in every lane and street down there, the apricot hidden in my hand was snatched, but they threw away the apricot stone, that is where the secret lied. It is a rule, that in a broader sense means nothing, it calls for definition. The people who fed their conscience were truthful and servants to their own truth and my truth was equally conscious, just that mine was unpaid and the amount of conscience at the other end was merely an exchange value, however it is not for me to wonder if this is vulgar or revolting, elegant or deplorable.

He had moved miles away from all that, but as foretold, he had set an entire house on fire, he did not like business, he had seen his family suffering, friends dying, he surely was not a beneficiary of the conflict, neither did he use the same as a launch pad for his career, rather he answered, “All I can be a slave to, is their blood or my own conscience, not to money or transactions.”  He had forgotten the nonexistent minions who once existed to him, now he on a higher pitch and scale though facelessly was bringing the business bosses down. What must be remembered in any case is the secret complicity that joins the joins the logical and the tragic.

He being around her became useless in sometime and became attached to the void and that nameless pain, as if suffering had consumed him, in her case, it was a privileged aspect, he felt and what had consumed him was sorrow and the colour of everything had become sorrow, the colour of moon to him was sorrow, the colour of streets and memories was sorrow, the colours of his own heart had become sorrow, the colour of his breath was sorrow and the colour of his sorrow had become sorrow.

During this time there was an admission of ignorance, rejection and fanaticism, the limits of her opinions, Once more the philosophy of ray of light that he saw in her had splintered, broken away and faded over a dazzling sea of love, new people, new people, asked questions without looking for her answers.

She had not seen how this comrade had transited, her happiness, he made his own. He had spent rainy nights under open sky, but never had he uttered a word about it, nor the pain that had been inflicted upon, injected into him. She was right when she said, “I do not know you.”  But her life was no less tragic; she had her own struggles, distant from the struggles that she had faced in the primitive stages of her existence, the tragic flow of her generic survival never ceased to exist or escalate, the sturdiest of them all being the mental conflicts, though she partially was a manufacturer of these tragedies, but tragedies had befallen her and he could not stay isolated from her, when he was needed the most, I thought what could anguish her in the world, my company would possibly rival the anguish that these fantasies of her had drowned her into. Her Face had brought back the permanence of springtime in his world away from where spring would mean something with chinars reproducing and snow melting, rivers gushing and almonds blossoming. As Faiz noted, “What is there in the world except for the beauty of your eyes.”

She had been facing it alone and now she had compelled herself to isolation, people around her only expected and forgot that she also could possibly be traumatized. They said, never heard. She gave them what they asked for. She suffered the suffering without even playing the suffered. She was a victim, being victimized. Nobody saw the pain, the suffering that she was living with, but all that was expected of her was to be empathic to the feeling of one and all, which was grounded in the fact that she was inexpressive, it is not words every time, it is the silence is pain that speaks more than the spoken words. An Accumulation of bad taste among the black fencing allows a dreadful melancholy to rise from this spot where death shows her true likeness. Everything fades, except the memory, all she intended to do was create memories which provided her an impressive pair of wings.

But she wanted time and space from him, not for his faults, there was none deciding them, we were flowing by the tide, looking for the shore and then one day the trunk strong bond shook and then he thought She had lost her house, away from her parents and everything went down the drain for her. But she had bounced back, every single time, her story was to be told, she not me is the protagonist of this tale. She had narrated every single detail to him from her nastiest tragedies to the fragrant memoirs, he was emphatic Stopped reading the poems he wrote for her, the lines filled with love and deep respect for all that she possessed, but that empathy transited into something undefined, not love. She had swayed him away, distanced and isolated him when her company was something he craved the most.

My eyes googled her in the ballads of nitcze, the odes of Shelly, the quatrains of Shakespeare, “error searching the item” declared the journalistic jargons, the intensity of the search around grew, from my whatsapp to Facebook. But even Google needs key words, I had none, but “pretty” and that appropriately was less, minute, it shriveled her, there was no solitary word to illustrate her.

Then Faiz once wrote in his poem,

Mujh se pehli si muhabbat

Mere mehboob na maang

He further reasons it and says he has a lot to do other than worshiping her,

The dark and savage enchantment of countless centuries

The dark and savage enchantment of countless centuries

Woven into silk and satin and brocade

Bodies everywhere being sold in lanes and marketplaces

Caked with dirt and bathed in blood

What anguish in the world could possibly rival the anguish of being without you.