Blood

This was written in a car on the way from Gulmarg (a popular hill station in Kashmir) to our home in Srinagar. My generation of Kashmiri Pandits has seen its parents’ homeland but in snatches of summer holidays. The self-pitying anger catches up with me, sometimes (this mostly happens whilst I’m involved in the thought-provoking process of digesting a plate of white rice and rogan josh.) Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmiri_Pandit#Exodus_from_Kashmir_.281985.E2.80.931995.29. 

I’m not a fan of patriotism. But what is sad and ironic is sad and ironic, and is often the wellspring of poetry. Mine, at least.

…

The rain
Falls in lashing curtains of cold.
Washes these gulaal-tainted streets
Of the sanguine, sanguinary memories
They hold
Of my parents’ rosy childhood.

What if I
Twist this pine needle
Into your forefinger?

These streets, where the echo of
Old gunfire still fills hearts
With pregnant tension.
Pine needles dipped in the necks
Of a million innocent lambs, tame-ly
Driven away from their sheds (‘Lal
Chowk’¹ is such an ironic name),
Or prepared, halaal².

Watch the blood flow, slowly,
Your ivory hands defiled beautifully.
As the wine-brook dribbles softly down,
Your henna scorched crimson;
Drools over your fertile skin.
Down your arms, belle,
Buttons around your undulations,
Like a ruby waterfall in vales of
Velvet down.

Down,
It trails a train of blood-lust.
Down,
Barbed feathers of unbearable happiness.
Down,
To cure my roseolar heart.
Down to the lips.

Suck
Until my lips drip of you.
My love.
Is blood the bribe you
Pay, for being a woman?

Marked by vermilion for
Slaughter; You
Scrambled for freedom
From the threat of blooming
Violence. You
Left your homes and
Your identities, and
Bawled mutely from
Ink-and-paper megaphones; that
Justice was denied
To you. You spent
Your respective vernal laukchaars³
Bathing in the reflected
Summer-sunshine of the Lake.
By the banks of Jhelum, you
Dreamt and loved and lost
And wept, when its waters ran russet.

Your translucent eyes
Take on vitrulescent hues;
Soft sighs, mawkish,
As I drink of you.
(Our love is a Countess.)

But we, the rosebuds of this
Valley; we didn’t see
How it was to dream and love ‘neath
The rusty shade of the chinar tree.
And while you lost a past, we
Lost a future. But we
Won’t weep;
There are no tears
For something one never
Knew.
We wallow in vicarious
Nostalgia.

The duet begins to crescendo, slowly;
Climbs, higher
And higher.
Bathed with the perfume of
Your spice; higher
And higher.
Reaches its
Climax; scream,
As Life falls away,  for a millisecond.
We touch God in each other
For a millisecond.
Anointed by my breathless
Sweat, you are;
Fragile and friable in my arms
You are, shivering in the dewy
Night wind; paler than the virginal moon.
Now, sweet
Humid dreams shall soon
Beckon you and me, to ease
Into
A crimson slumber.

Bathed in blood, you
Shall ever be.
My love, my land.
Bathed in blood you shall ever be.

…

The aloof rain washes away
Everything.

…

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lal_Chowk
²http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halaal#Dhabihah:_method_of_slaughter
³laukchaar – childhood, in the Kashmiri language.