Nauroz on April 14, 2019other joys will come other springs to follow other mouths will sing their songs other eyes form their tears look for me with my friends look again and look in vain look for my shape and form look again and look in vain slowly spring will tip-toe in to fail to find me perhaps fail […]
The meeting on April 7, 2019as I sat at maghrib prayer at dusk in June in the small village mosque – darkening shadows draped around like dark sheets and the heat of the brick floor still rising like waves to my face – I saw in the corner of my eye a flash of colour yellow, green and silver a […]
Twilight days and Delhi nights on April 1, 2019leave us here in our women’s chambers leave us here so secure chewing the lotus with lotus maiden amidst the fumes of a suspended past that waft away an uncertain future space so marble-cooled illusions so fixed behind crenellated tiled and cypress walls the blood and passion of war the heat and dust of the […]
To my mother on March 31, 2019When I walk at night alone in the deep wadis of her sobs or when I know that each time I drive fast or laze the reply to her letters; when I know that at midnight she sits up praying to her God to keep me warm and whole, when I know that she will […]
Will ever be on March 26, 2019Let me rub the sleep that dusts superfluity from my eyes under my thumb-nails dies the sparrow yearning for a brave new Pakistan at last with the final squeaks of the parrot perhaps that day will never be I have not chest and shoulder enough to include all the birthing problems of this bleeding psyche […]
At the Khaibar Pass on March 20, 2019There is nothing spectacular or even dramatic in the climb or the mountains but the air is almost tense in its silence so insolently indifferent to me and my times here: all is awe and hush far beyond the Pass : Kabuls and Samarkands, all that the urban imagination conjures in nostalgia, the mainsprings of […]
Train to Pakistan on March 15, 2019My first memory shaped me, continues to inform me and I share it with an entire subcontinent. A small boy in a crowded train compartment bathed in dim yellow light motionless at night stranded in the killing fields of the Punjab My parents were escaping with me from Delhi on the slow train in that […]
Spring thoughts in Farghana on March 13, 2019The alfresco burial is done The pipe and the kettle-drum have sung the warrior to his sleep; the mourners wail their way back to the village. High above, the mountains which stretch like a young man’s ambition in springtime, an iced drizzle starts to speak of a last snowfall to come. Soon the passes will […]
Birmal and The Great Game – Part 3 on January 21, 2019We left Wana well before sunrise. No roads or paths existed west of Wana when the standard maps were made more than half a century ago and none did now. After heading due west, we turned north. Our journey through ravines and stream beds was slow and bumpy. On either side, running north to south, […]
Birmal and The Great Game – Part 2 on January 20, 2019Law and order in Waziristan were traditionally maintained by three overlapping, and in some ways mutually interdependent, though often in opposition, sources of authority. Together they constituted the three pillars of authority in tribal society: the tribal elder, or malik; the religious leader, or mullah; and the Political Agent representing the government. Each had a […]