and You

My nocturnal fortunes were never fair:

I couldn't ever see

Srinagar skies with you,

gifting you shapes in the stars

sliced like cakes,

whichever shape you wished.

Stars, skies and shapes 

I lost everything;

I lost the shape that emerged

out of your womanly body

into motherhood.

Your gustatory shift from tea to coffee,

I lost too,

your sartorial mutations.

I lost your acquisition 

of driving licence

or the coordination you acquired 

between your hands, feet and eyes

that was absent

in your life.

The alignment of your lips and tongue

is not the same as I left them quivering then,

I have lost the sound

of words

that you pronounce differently now.

I lost in a lifetime

what others gain in one

And you

And you

And you

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"