Daily Times

Walking the streets with the Dahta

Lahore’s phosphorescent guts are blurred

at night in November

but in this night

Jomay raat

the Dahta walked in green neon

and around his marble epitaph

a thousand beggars begged

in a unity

insured by a complete

selfishness

only Hujwiri walked among them

in wide-fingered benevolence;

sight was half-played

on the retina as of

a half-blind man.

Incessant petal-drops

spectruming

an opulent rain that

drapes in

Shalimar

translucent muslins

wafting

around a lung-seducing

musk-incense:

the heat-scent of the devout

as he gapes

in cup-palmed awe and a little

love.

Some beggars swayed

gnarled dying tree-trunks meanly clothed in

winter leaves through which dim-glowed

the night-lights of bazaar nocturnality;

some beggars dressed in tiers

of foreign suiting and fat of Lahori

ghee

rolled one eye to Arabic calligraphy

one to Swiss watch;

some eyes shone in kahjal darker than

the effacing black burkha

but the lights danced in their

brief pupils.

One crawled on fours—up my hairy calf

in grotesque impossible

contortions of the human mind

that still blinked the misplaced

sanguine smile—so beautifully irrelevant.

The flies had gone for the season

the dogs perennially unimpressed

and didn’t care anyway

soft-nosed they prodded

warm smoky dung;

they had seen it all before:

the dazzling lights

then

then the dazzling dark

all the professional beggars re-acting

their roles

with first year RADA earnestness

the much-moneyed, heavy-vehicled beggars

sure of their goodness

in this visit to the Dahta

who walked among them all

palm-humoured and light

equating all, elevating all.

He wasn’t frown-minding

that some were deadly serious

it was all in the game

of love.

Not for him—he know

for when he walked in

his many-varied neons he

also mixed in the minds

of his pilgrims

and amongst them

there were also some

like the whore of the red tit

of the next door mandi

hanging from low garish-painted doorways

crepuscular lives

so like his own locale

but he was contended this evening

A happy child urinated with abandon;

a lal-bearded villager

almost in orgasm

of his onanistic

religious frenzy;

a group-man grown holy

was serious

as serious as Alamgir at Friday asr

in a Ramzan in the Deccan.

“Na koi banda raha na koi banda nawaz.”

Iqbal should have known better

as the cane-waving policeman

smiles at me

and takes care to reply in his English

but the Dahta is unequivocal in his care

and perhaps the false beggar

returns from him richer.

Fires that explode

like festive crackers

at the pit of my stomach

up through me

to a Christmas ringing

in my ears

I sense but do not smell

onion and sweat

on the tongues of the masses

pressing each other through the bazaar’s

intestines

that creak with indigestion

The Badshahi now rose

dated splendour

in black lumpy papier-mache.

Blind tangah horses chilled and

blackly farting into the mists;

idle men with fierce moustaches

idling with one hand

into the idleness of their shalwars

and static between rising

pyramids

of salt-white batashas

sit active pharaohs

in ready expectation of

another Moses—who never comes.

They were all there:

love remains love

however crudely exhibited

faith turns to love

however clumsily expressed

love creates faith

from whatever quarter coming.

I came back that evening

levitated on the horns that tossed me

acute-feeling the goodness and

friendship

of the Dahta

flowing in the streets of his Nagri

and in me

where it mattered.