THE FEAST

("A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism" - Georges Bataille)

Between carnality and love,

body is bruised.

Cigarette burns, torture wounds, scars

become light pecks, hickeys.

Passionate touches: that's what

The official document says.

It always begins with a kiss -

Our warm lips

on your soft bosom.

Soon we were nibbling,

chewing into you,

we, with all our beaks;

Some had pens, some guns,

some jabbed at you with official orders,

while some were doing their duty.

The feast lasting a century

on History's table.

Leaders, masses, army and police,

Poets, intellectuals and revolutionaries,

all drunk on your blood.

The vultures are passed as flamingos.

The blood as essential crop milk.

Your gorged-on body

is a carcass now.

Who could have thought

it can all start with a kiss, a body,

A law and a land.

A PRIMER OF LOVE

C for Clothes

Magar accha tou ye hota ki hum ek saath rehte

Bhari rehti tere kapdon se almaari humari

(Jawad Sheikh)

Clothes form an essential structure in the metaphysics of love because your beloved wears them. Just by that fact only they become signifiers of something transcendent  wavering between mystical and fetish. The cloth, the garment becomes a text, a language tailored by one adorned by someone else - a Barthesian language. Its texture is the texture of memory and desire - suddenly you remember, she wore that dress on that day when that thing happened. Somewhere in a closet hangs Rene Magritte's  Homage to Mack Sennett.

"I love your every dress

Because they do

What I wish to do"

F for Fingernail

Your fingernail grazes my lip and nicks my being. Last night the waxing crescent moon resembled your clipped fingernail. Was it destined to be apart from you because it was a part of you or it wasn't, like me.

"In love

I want to collect

All your clipped nails

As a souvenir of my excess longing" (Mubashir Karim)

Q for Question

Standing before God (who has all the answers), it is a matter of asking the right questions. Mythology and epics are riddled with questions, so is Love. I love you was a question when you said it. I inherited it as an answer and that has made all the difference. Here I am, everyday, standing before God searching for the right questions to ask. 

"To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)?

Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought. . .?" (Barthes)

T for Time (and Place)

I love you is always incomplete. I loved you in Kashmir: the past indicator and the place. Love can never escape the spatiotemporality. To be in one place at the same time is essential for you and me to fall in love. Had we been somewhere else, say Paris, we would have loved differently. There's a particular Kashmiri way of loving that only lovers in its space and time know.

"Tumhari aankhoun mein

Nami aatey hi

Srinagar mein

Baarish hojati hai

Mausam koi bhi ho

Meri Nazm bheeg jati hai"

ENDURANCE

(for Raymond Carver)

It's always good to

Visit your neighbour and

When you're there 

Observe your own house

From that neighbourly strangeness:

See people living,

Laughing and bickering,

Doing stuff inside rooms,

To keep this house from falling apart.

So that you

Hear the occasional music

Slipping through the bricks,

The smoke waving

Through the chimney.

What is true for houses,

Is true for people too!