HYDERABAD: Kashmir. Cashmere. Kasheer. All etymological connotations bleed the same way. Its very mention generates war in blood carrying the implosion and explosion of a postcard-perfect home which was not just a papier-mâché idea, it existed, and now exists between endless days of curfews, the draconian AFSPA, shooting on the streets, khaki boots trampling upon snow dyed with fresh blood, denuded chinar trees: symbolising prayers ripped with barbed wires, nameless graves, faceless children, moonless nights, lost addresses, and forced occupation of the land.
The screams of a bleeding-burning-writhing valley fail to fit in words. Or even if they do, they rise from the page, reach the sky and cover the reader and his surroundings like rain detaching him/her completely to where s/he belongs in a sudden-painful transition to a ravaged land of roses and tulips reduced to ash and blood that still cover those lives battling, striving, struggling to live, to break free. Huzaifa Pandit’s award-winning collection is an expression of this pain, an offspring of darkness which lilts the lullabies of fire and blood climbing stanzas to reach the moon but ends up distorting its fingerprints with liquid-hot glass.
In the book the poet, himself gasps to breathe, yet moves his fractured fingers to navigate the trails of ink; his harvest is smoke and haze on which the reader feasts and the socio-political chaos feeds. The readers, who have framed a mental map, based on Op-Eds and reportage of what’s happening in Kashmir, get to dive deep between stanzas, deeper within the Kashmiri poet’s psyche, the turmoil he has gone through, the bullets he’s taken and what such a mess does to the sense and sensitivity of a wordsmith. The analysis and summary is this book though it all appears as if seen from behind a broken prism. The result: shattered rainbows appear on the pages and your fingertips. The curvature of these colourful arcs are questions Huzaifa raises at the end of which hangs the throttled flow of life in Kashmir. A puzzling reward perhaps both for the poet and the reader. That’s when the political and the personal begins to merge: each remaining whole in its own entity.
Interestingly, the chapbook of 35 poems begins with ‘A Kashmiri Fairy Tale’. The poet opens it with the line ‘one day when...’ the narrative moves through shoes, wooden bridges to ‘warm warm May’ for puerile quarrel to continue. Robert Burns comes alive in the usage of green green grass with a hint of longing for the warmth which oozes only from wounds and guns. The child-like wish travels to be trapped in unfolding events that open bit by bit in the next pages. The fable from a wounded land breaks part by part. The poet doesn’t raise slogans instead the train of his thoughts moves with the metaphors of daily life breathing with mundane objects like kerosene lamp, damp blanket, salted tea that change roles for the portraiture of bloodshed and military occupation in the conflict zone. The Dal lake in his poems isn’t full of Bollywoodesque water lilies, but instead reeks of weeds, reflecting a sky which is too full of screams, bullets, and bombs. The shikaras move like ghosts in a burnt forest.
The poet pulls through the ashes and includes the reader to walk inside his verses though the roads are slippery with blood, the alleys dark and the sky the colour of burnt copper. The Kashmir that he presents is the strophe in the blood which opens up all at once, it’s beauty ravaged by chaos is catastrophic. The burst of green is soon shadowed by the denuded poplars and his words register the endless white of snow once in a while punctuated with ravens. But the green refuses to die. It opens its eyes in the poet’s heart which is ‘empty, quite empty.’ The poet’s mannerism comes from the ghazal tradition and that’s why we see the verses dotted with a lot of Urdu/Persian words.
This is the way the poet introduces the Kashmir of his times to the world which has seen it flaming through Nikons and newsprint. Huzaifa’s doctoral dissertation is on ‘Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali, and Mahmoud Darwish – Poetics of Resistance’. It’s not a coincidence that he is a resistance poet himself and carries the nuances of the master-poets who vehemently opposed political oppression in their poems. It’s a book which is more a mirror held in the hands of a Kashmiri-poet-scholar, and people need to hold it to feel the psyche of Kashmir itself which chants ‘Mad heart, be brave...’
Publisher: Hawakal Publishers
Price: `220