Of Poets and Healing…….

I found the poem in my last entry a couple of years ago. The Gujarat riots of 2002 shook the very foundations of my faith in our democracy, secularism and all the other isms and made it collapse with the earthquake within, that measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. The riots of 1984 which shook the country prior to this was the first instance of my core turning to rubble…….all that I heard and saw on television or read in the papers made me question my oh so “Kendriya Vidyalayan” beliefs.

The riots of 2002 received greater coverage owing to the influx of cable television and the increasing number of news channels. In the melee that followed, the newspapers and magazines were not to be left behind. I had seen photographs of the massacres and in particular the picture of a foetus on a ‘trishul’ (trident) was devastating for me but I had to stay strong for the foetus inside me. She (I did not know it was she then) gave me the will to go on and take a breath and then another and live on, not reel under the images that I was seeing.

I realize though that I was not healed. But this poem, this poem was written for me. For closure. For healing. For peace. For hope. There have been many instances when I have read something that either seemed as though I had written it or that the author was me, only in a different body, space and time. It was the same with “Kauser Bano ki ajanmi bitiya ki ore se” – the poet knew something was amiss and wrote this piece to heal me or was it to heal himself and in turn offer me some kind of closure?

Found this poem in the compilation titled – Dark Leaves of the Present, Edited by Angana P.Chatterji & Shabnam Hashmi, Published by ANHAD

Thank you, Anshu Malviya for writing this poem. If I had the same felicity and verve with Urdu, I would have written this posting in the very tongue which was the first language I ever spoke.