... Bulleh Shah speaketh...

... Memory Stains...

Once upon a time, there was a poetess.


I am glad she is dead now because she was too ... abstruse. People couldn't understand what she was saying and she was becoming too eccentric. I had to kill her and I don't really miss her, she was an added weight ... with all the other people I host in my consciousness.


However, this is one poem... she wrote this in 2002 ... and although it suffers from the same element of being too superfluous … I think it’s forgivable… almost.

Memory Stains

Strings of ik-tara speak, the flute
Hums a rueful tune of enchanting history.
Musk of the wet Arabian sands,
Stain the silk of memory trace.

The medieval hourglass,
Flows down in deathless narration,
Of legends beneath the parched soils:
The tales told and forgotten…

Seeker of the Truth, soliciting in worship.
Calling out to the wine bearer,
To fill his chalice to the brim.
Overcome with rapture,
Loosing his sense, in the Sense.

Ay! Mansur El-Hallaj of Baghdad,
The seeker of light within Light
Paving that way through waylessness,
Other mortals cannot fathom.

The veils unveiled,
Light pervaded darkness.
The “I” annihilated, the self naughted,
Where Love became the enemy of the self,
And God’s Existence accentuated in the self’s nonexistence.

But, words betrayed invocation:
“I am the Truth!”
Cried the words of the mystic.
And thence, the gallows at his feet.

The devout folks, dismembered him
Limb from limb,
To silence, to entomb, to blend
His flesh within Iraqi sands…


“Kill me, my faithful friends!
For in my slaughter is my life -
And my life in my death.”
Cried the lover, intoxicated.


Hush the ik-tara, shun the chronicle!
Kneeling heads of Mohammed’s progeny,
Have rolled within the bowels of this earth-
It is but the nature of these wasteland sands.

But, who can label dust from dust,
The tyrant from the martyr-
The innocent from the oppressor-
And, the lover from the denier?

Tune down your laments, weeping flute,
The speaking tongue belies the feeling heart.
For him who tries to render passion into words,
Sees with Hallaj’s spirit to the gallows.

No alchemy, no elixir of life,
Memory stains, history tarnished.
Hallaj lives in the silent spirit,
Dies in words.

... What was God thinking...?

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There is so much blood laid to waste…

… So many screams, explicit and implicit…

Every corner you turn, every time you switch the television on, someone is being murdered, or murdering, or on the verge...

Was man created for violence?

Is aggression SO innate that we see nothing else?

… What was God thinking when He created us?



This:

“It is He Who hath created for you all things that are on earth; Moreover His design comprehended the heavens, for He gave order and perfection to the seven firmaments; and of all things He hath perfect knowledge.

Behold, thy Lord said to the angels: "I will create a vicegerent on earth." They said: "Wilt Thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood?- whilst we do celebrate Thy praises and glorify Thy holy (name)?" He said: "I know what ye know not."

And He taught Adam the names of all things; then He placed them before the angels, and said: "Tell me the names of these if ye are right."

They said: "Glory to Thee, of knowledge, We have none, save what Thou Hast taught us: In truth it is Thou Who art perfect in knowledge and wisdom."

He said: "O Adam! Tell them their names." When he had told them, Allah said: "Did I not tell you that I know the secrets of heaven and earth, and I know what ye reveal and what ye conceal?"


II: XXIX – XXXIII
Quran

... God wanted to teach... and for us to learn...

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To learn and to teach those who don't know...

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And for them to learn ... and teach those who don't know...

Quite simple.

... Kafoor...

This had to be the first time I heard the word, but the speaker spoke of it as if it were table salt. I was told it looks like table salt or glassy, ground limestone. But the speaker is eighty-seven years old and her chemistry is rather basic.

The context is not very interesting but relevant for this scrap of writing.

“Munjhli apa said when you bury me, bury me with one hundred kilograms of kafoor,” Daddi was telling Mama. “Now think about it, she died so suddenly, it took hours to get hold of that amount of kafoor. What’s the point of such a will?”

I don’t know who Munjhli Apa was but may her soul rest now. She died a few generations, raised to the power of a few more generations before I was born. Her will consisted of nothing but of a burial with one hundred kilograms of Kafoor – a white, powdery substance sold near graveyards, added to the grave during burial. Daddi claims it is supposed to keep the body “fresh” for sometime.

I am not sure how this indigenous method of body preservation differs from the knowledge of ancient, advanced Egyptian chemistry. But the concept is worth a wonder - - - the concept of wanting to make the body live, even when you are medically dead.


Death is either poetic, apparently too distant to be real, or just heavy.

And then, the science of chemistry, for the art of body preservation.


Why would one want to keep their body alive, when dead?
Well, why wouldn’t one… after all the things this body demands, it should sound only just to ask it to reciprocate.


Immortality is a yearning we cannot deny.


Even at the weakest moments, when we wish we had never existed, we still want that suffering to become permanent somewhere, in a depersonalized fashion. Earlier men scratched caves with pictures of mammoths… “we were here”… we smile when we discover two letters scrapped by ambitious lovers on tree trunks… “X and Y were here” And those few letters and images tell stories of synapses and civilizations – ‘please know this, we were here’. Journals, art-work, music… they are not just sublimated derivatives of libidinal energy … they are an attempt to be remembered.

One string pulled resonates forever, sound energy converted into other forms of energy… it doesn’t die.



Kafoor is not just a white powder.
It’s a metaphor for that promise to live on, in any desperate form… God, they come in such beautiful forms, sometimes.


Like signed books, with long-drawn-out signatures…
Marked pages, ear-marked pages…


Is there anyone who wants to disappear, unnoticed… without a mark, without a grain of kafoor? Even the likes of Kafka, who wanted their works burnt after death? Did he really want to do that…? Leave without a trace…? Silent, unspoken martyrdom sounds so virtuous, it almost hurts – but does someone really aspire for that? According to sociobiologists, many species are pre-programmed like that: they will sacrifice themselves to warn their race against danger. But even that suicide is a form of preservation… the preservation of your specie.


…Kafoor…


Children… why is it discomforting to think of them as parasites – something they are, basically? By-products of a biological motive? No… that’s not all...what they are. They will carry you inside them, in their genes, in the color of their eyes, the voice, and perhaps even (God forbid, in my case, at least) your ambition …

You will live … somehow… through them.



What is Heaven…? It is not just a lure of vibrant goblets, silk and wide-eyed maidens; it’s a Promise of infinity. Sufistic annihilation of the self… to merge the self with the Self… not annihilation, then, is it? It’s all about becoming the part of the Origin, a forever-al Origin… a forever-al, non-created, non-ending Being…

… Kafoor…


Rhodes Scholarship…
Ganga Ram Hospital…
Taj Mehal…
Pyramids…


Don’t worry, Munjhli Apa, you’re not the only one.
Others have been less discrete...

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