MY NAME IS RED

Ai ada aur sunaein bhi kya haal apna,
Umr ka lamba safar tay kiya tanha humnay.

Arabs used to call inferior non-Arabs as "Red."

In your presence and absence, I carry a pang of guilt for not being there with you. But I miss my own self when you disappeared, blabbering at midnight with a lisp in language and blood in my reed. Your unsatisfactory zeal and indiscriminate connecting of the dots resulted in the creation of an image in a broken mirror, a thousand splendid pieces reflecting the glare of yours. My name is Red. I am half-living and half-dead. My emotions are half-frozen and half-boiled. The breeze that touches my face is half warm and half cold. I am half-crying and half-smiling. At midnight, when the moon hangs like a lamp and stars stud poetry, only then does my existence get stripped off. My soul tears the clothes it wears during the day. It is half-naked and half-wrought with tattered clothes, and tears trickle down, like a noose hanging the memories.

Then there was no hope and choice of returning to a place you belong to because of the destiny of birth. Off late, when things return to silence, a lot of buzz is off from the roads, and the sun hides behind the mountain shoulders, a thought of being in a mess prevails. Was this life all about hunting for food and gathering mass? Is it more than what it offers, or maybe, but it is unfathomable? I carry all the opinions and settle with none. It begins with why we are here on earth, followed by why at a particular place. Why not of our own choice? Why are we with different people? Where have our friends gone, of whom we still dream and smell the scent?

Well, this is perfectly destiny; it offers exclusive amazement while unfolding events, places, and people, and all of them together cast memories. Some memories lose significance; even after retracting, they create no ripples, boil no emotion, and crimson no leaves. Few people write on your tabula rasa (blank slate) the experience of life at a moment when you don’t understand the world around you. They give meaning to your emotion of love, which I believe is the sentiment that transcends the narrow nationalism of our day. But when we grow, their image on retina blurs. I don’t know where they go, knowing that they are among us. This is the first tragedy with the emotion of love. They are not actually replaced but are converted into the experiences and systems within our souls. As one of my friends used to say, “Every day I gather your bits and pieces to create your image, but it doesn’t fit in the canvas.”

Few among the people who live by our side share smiles as a family. We never see their presence deep. But once they are gone, their image becomes vivid, absence sharpens love, and for many years their disappearance from the canvas of life sprinkles guilt and seeps their images from the soul. They create a hole in the heart, and when their reminiscences strike – tears block, words go up the sleeve, knees hold the breasts, eyes stare at the glaring fire, arms and feet become nervous, and life disheveled. Suddenly, we begin to realize the importance of their presence. Every person leaves with a pain that strikes like lightning. The greatest good in life is the momentary nature of everything; pain goes off. But the teacher said that they transform you into something else; however, it teaches you that their role in your life was only this much.

But what about those who still lurk around, stalk at you, and live with you, but their presence makes no sense? You just want to exile yourself from their memories. But they remain with you. They are your fate. What on earth has conspired to make them meet you? It is all random, or maybe the best you deserve? But we never stop visualizing life with ideals, delusions, and hallucinations. We travel through the audacious destinies on the edges of our blades to see ourselves with the shepherds migrating to different pasture lands. We imagine through mountain passes, cliffs, and ravines, make ideas flow through streams and brooks, and, like an exhausted shepherd, we start having olfactory hallucinations. A day delusion in which I sit in the middle of the jungle and smell the scent of pine, horses, sheep, and jasmine together, while coal burns, and the smoke oozing out from the terrace of abandoned huts rises up.

The fact of life is that we are all doing this only in our beds on Sunday. We are not shepherds. We can’t be one. We are on laptops. We are in the stock market. We can only fantasize. We live in a bipolar world with half-winter and half-summer, along with half-friends. Life is like May, half cold and half hot. It is like my age, half lived and half left. It is like this night, half awake and half slept. Like a dusk, half-light and half-night. Maybe like my hair, half black and half white…

Justuju jiski thi, usko na paya humany,
Is bahany say magar, dekhli duniya humnay.