1.
Why Do We Write About Kashmir?
I have never been to Kashmir
In my life.
They say when you first see
The way the snow catches the Sun
In Gulmarg,
You draw your breath in so that
It may not escape with some of the
Feeling that you can never now forget and
Impotently you repeat the words to yourself
That an Emperor was famed to have once said
Of this Paradise,
“It is this, it is this, it is this.”
But Paradise has never known
Anything but trouble within its borders.
Kashmir has known nothing
But borders.
Lines that cut across from its shoulder
Right down to its little toe,
Lines that bind it, strap it, cut it into pieces
To be distributed amongst fighting nations
Like so much meat.
Kashmir knows no history but
A history of not-having.
Not having employment, or industry,
No safe childhood, or the certainty
Of a marked grave.
Kashmir has never known what it is like
To drink the water of a free river,
Boundless and liberated
In its entire course.
Why do we write about Kashmir?
We who have never known what it is like
To step through pools of blood
And past the fearless children with grim faces
Bouncing stones in their pockets?
We who have never known what it is like
To sleep through a curfew
Not knowing if the next sunrise is the last
That we will ever see?
We who have not been blinded by pellets
For walking the streets in our anger,
The price of our slogans
The sight of Paradise lost forever?
We write because there is nothing else
That we can do.
We write because we cannot live
With that blood on our hands.
Blood smeared like giant graffiti on
Shelled-out homes,
And pumping hot on the insides
Of a people who smart daily
With fresh betrayal
And who have long forgotten
The meaning of fear.
No, not in our names,
Or in any other.
We write because if we do not
The unquiet wail of millions of Kashmiris
Will follow us to our comfortable afterlives,
And never let us rest there.
We write about Kashmir,
Because we have been shut out from
Paradise entirely.
Pictures of the daily Hell
To which it has been transformed,
Emerge from the gaps in the walls
Of suddenly-abandoned homes,
And through our television sets,
To keep us awake at night.
We cannot sleep for as long as Kashmir burns;
So with our furious scribbling pens
And frantically typing keyboards,
We turn ourselves into the
Foggy windows of its suffering.
2.
A Bullet for Each of Us
There is a bullet with my name on it
And it is loaded in a gun,
Somewhere in a hate-filled room
With lists of people hung up
On rusting cupboards and peeling walls.
Perhaps that bullet will
One day shatter my skull
And leave a map of my body
Done in blood on the floor.
Then again, the man carrying the gun
May never make it as far as me.
Surrounded by a sea
Of people risen up to twist
The arm that moves to pull the trigger
My nameless gunman may give up in fear
Or raise his arms above his head in surrender.
We need to keep our lives to fight
And build the world of love we crave;
But in search of that, if someday soon,
I am compelled to face this
Bullet with my name on it,
Tell them I will look it in the eye;
I know in my heart I am prepared to die.
3. Mutiny of the Crows
Mutiny happened in the skies,
The day the first murder of crows
Called a meeting to declare to the world
That they would no longer
Eat its shit.
The roads filled up with filth and waste
Cluttered up the gutters
Overflowing with dirty green water,
Till at last the pent-up sludge of
Human civilisation rose up and swallowed
Its monuments whole.
In the belly of the garbage whale
Middle-class gentlemen
Sat around on soggy
Stunk-up armchairs,
And complained about how the sweepers
Never came around anymore
To clean up the place.
(The nerve of those bastards)
The murder of crows flew away
And left the filth behind forever.
They left a trail which showed the way
They went, to others who might follow.
The red promise of their rebellion
Glowed like hope upon the grey air.