South Side Blues

Ghalib

~ Aseem Kaul

Tonight, you recite Ghalib from memory;

because poetry, like blood, must come from the heart.

Taking a sip from your glass after every couplet,

the scotch rhyming perfectly the melancholy on your tongue.

You cling to nostalgia like an empty mirror,

to the scent of this language that withers like flowers.

You gather pain the way the sky gathers,

pinprick by slow pinprick, the stars.

Somewhere between question and answer

the feeling dissolves. The need to sing becomes

the struggle not to fall. And you arrange

your ruins into one last gesture,

knowing the Beloved will not heed your call,

knowing she will prove false, like God, or the Moon.

***

You write to me from Delhi,

speak of summer blackouts,

of how, disconnected from the machines,

you thought of Ghalib –

the bomb blast of his grief

leaving the city in ruins –

and how the history of loss

could be written on a feather.

When the power returned

you turned the lights off,

lit a candle to see

the darkness a little better,

and still the shadows

were not the same.

***

“Madness”, Ghalib writes, “is never without its reasons;

surely there is something that the veil is meant to protect”

And I think of all the years we have spent

listening to these ghazals, the verses

falling from our lips like pieces of exquisite glass

from broken window frames;

shaping our mouths to his sadness,

unbuttoning our collars to let his words stain

the rubbed language of our songs.

What have we been hiding from,

my friend? What longing is this inside us

that we disguise in a dead man’s clothes