Muneeza Shamsie

In a family’s history, a nation’s

At the Time of Partition by Moniza Alvi, Bloodaxe Books (Tarset) 2013 pp64 ISBN: 978 1 85224 984 7 The Lahore born, Moniza Alvi, one of Britain’s foremost contemporary poets today, has a new collection At the Time of Partition shortlisted for the 2013 TS Eliot Poetry Prize. The volume consists of twenty poems which flow into each other to create a single haunting and lyrical narrative, welding the personal and the public. The result is a stunning, skilled and controlled work of immense grandeur. Alvi, daughter of a Pakistani father and an English mother, wrote the poems shortly after her startling discovery that her father’s younger brother, brain damaged by a childhood accident, had disappeared at Partition. In 1947, while crossing from Ludhiana to Lahore, Alvi’s widowed grandmother had entrusted him to friends. She never saw him again. Alvi researched Partition compulsively to write about this family episode, drawing on her imagination to recreate incidents and characters, including the grandmother she had never met. Her poems she states are “a version of what might have taken place.” The book begins with newly divided India and leads into newly created Pakistan. In the process it encapsulates many great migrations throughout history: a story of conflict, trauma and loss, followed by adaptation, mutation and change, alongside intangible dreamlike images of memory.

The first and last poems “The Line” and “Going Back” respectively, revolve around that invisible, surreal boundary line drawn so arbitrarily between India and Pakistan a line so narrow a sparrow might have / picked it up in its beak. Framed within the first poem, “The Line” is the story of her uncle Athar’s childhood accident: a bright young boy, Athar, playing outside in the dust and the gay painted lorry / that struck him. This fateful moment and its denouement, the brain-damaged child, that the best of physicians, including his father, could not cure, resonates with the tragedies that follow the sub-continent’s defining “midnight’s hour”. The land itself at its most calmest and most dignified / yielded to the line, lay still—/ it didn’t know what was coming. References to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, Nehru’s independence day speech celebrating India’s freedom, are interwoven with the dilemma of the poet’s grandmother, widowed now, in Ludhiana, / a son in England,/ five of her children / with their mother / on the wrong side of the line. In “Must we go?” the poet imagines herself in her grandmother’s place: the decision she has to make, while her children complain and protest, and the neighbourhood empties out, as rumours of rape, murder and suicide spread. “Better by Far” describes her resolve to leave, in an overcrowed bus in the scorching summer, with five children – Ahmed, Athar, Rahila, Jamila and Shehana – a foil to fairytale imaginings of a flying magic carpet with Nehru to wave them on/and Jinnah to welcome them. “Ever After” dwells on that critical moment when friends offer to take care of the young Athar “We’ll take him, Shakira ./ He can travel with us ./ You’ve enough on your hands / with the other four./ There are places still / on the second bus, inshallah!” The poem dwells on the grandmother’s turmoil, and desperation with the benefit of hindsight, to reverse time, to undo those words: Take him. The poem describe her farewell to her known familiar world: her house And Ludhiana itself, the Old City and the New-/Civil lines with its flowering trees. These peaceful images belie a harsher reality: Bleeding internally, the city / tried to appear whole/ for a final goodbye – / as they would gather and wait, / appear whole/under Muslim rain and Hindu sun, / Hindu rain and Muslim sun. The next poem contemplates illusion, friendship and trust in an unreal climate of fear and hope while “They Took the Bus” details that arduous journey, the smells and sounds of the congested bus, children clamouring “how much further?” And the danger: the stories

of terrible atrocities and trains filled with the dead and no young women. Those tales which had no beginnings / or had swallowed their endings/tales which recoiled from / or feasted on themselves. No one dares leave the bus, not even a woman giving birth. The approaching dark brings more fears; morning reveals deserted villages, dusty anonymous landscapes. Alvi’s interplay on the words “tales” and “nights” in “Not A Thousand and One Nights”, heightens the terror. The tenth poem “No” tells of arrival - in that nameless, waterless, “no-man’s land” a strip flanked with walls of barbed wire separating India and Pakistan. The second half of the collection begins with “The Camp”, a vast parody of a city, a teeming cluster of tents and shelters constructed from rags, bamboo, sheet metal. There is rejoicing at loved ones re-united, lamentation over the missing and dead; incidents of cholera, theft and murder. Alvi’s use of repetition and rapid rhythm heightens the desolation and unreality. Holes in shelters. / Holes in families / the losses/ trickled out ,/ poured out ,/ in the queues, in huddles / around the fire. There the poet’s grandmother tends to her four children, queues for rations – and sends a messengers for news of Athar. Then comes the revelation: We’re sorry they said, / the friends of friends. / So very sorry – /He isn’t with us –/ he disappeared at –/ He vanished –- between –-/ The last time we saw him. / We did what we could –- Alvi moves between the specific to the collective, to tell of thousands who suffered likewise, as she describes her grandmother’s agony, her quest for Athar. Sometimes she thinks that she has glimpsed him nearby. She cross-examines, desperately, people who claim that they, or someone they knew, “had seen Athar / or someone just like him.” Sometimes she thinks that she has glimpsed of him nearby And she prays, and prays and prays. “On the Brink” begins with the words The camp was on the brink of the city / the city was on the brink of the camp. The poem considers the changing face of Lahore, the influx of refugees, the exodus of Sikhs and Hindus, the solid edifices of the High Court and Assembly buildings, schools and colleges and the abandoned and gutted houses, havelis and hovels worlds within worlds /, microcosms of the beleaguered,/ expectant city./ Lahore, still-beating heart of the Punjab. This contemplation of violence and resilience weld in with “And

Now?” the story of the poet’s grandmother and Athar the family / began / to reconfigure/ around an absence ,/ this ripeness/ of his loss. / Ripe as if some/fruit/must fall / but hour by hour/month by month/no fruit fell. There is the offer to share a house, a constricted space, compared to their Ludhiana home. They move in and feel they are trespassing: it is filled with someone else’s furniture, clothes, food, Everything as it was / when a family mirroring/their own had grasped the / future –- and fled. In “Settling” Alvi’s descriptions of the family settling into Lahore, are intertwined with Pakistan growing older, a country divided between East and West And always there was India its immense shadow / forever fixed to its heels. Alvi tells of her grandmother’s applications to the authorities in search of Athar; the certainty and uncertainties of a new life in a new country/ “And Where?” conjures up photos of the Founder of the Nation, his vision of freedom, followed by his death. Mohammed Ali Jinnah. And her lost son / At rest in the afternoon or waking / she might picture them both, / one superimposed on the other. “Continuing” describes the poet’s grandmother re-assuming the rhythms of daily life: the children join school, there is cricket and social gatherings, and her son in England marries an Englishwoman. What was there to cling to / but hope? / The fine escarpment of hope. / Hope in her children/ her sons –- her daughters. / Hope in the future, of some vestige / of the-past-in-the-future. The book culminates with “Crossing Back” a meditation of time, imagination, memory, the process of writing and the blurred edges of divisions and dividing lines, life and death. This is a truly extraordinary collection, a work which succeeds in being spare, compelling and timeless. Furthermore, for the sub-continental reader, it captures a moment of time, a memory, so visceral that it has an extraordinary power. This book should not be missed.

(Lead Story version published in Dawn: Books & Author’s Supplement)

Muneeza Shamsie is author of 'Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English', Bibliographer (Pakistan) of Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Co-editor (South Asia) of the online Literary Encyclopaedia.

Milan Richter

A girl at the poet's grave in Dhaka

What were you doing there, with a saturated bindi between thick eyebrows, alone, with eyes like black cherries on a smiling table, with raspberry lips like wings of a morning Muse, with a translucent red scarf over a summer dress, with a brown shopping bag on the right shoulder? Did you come to read your verses to Kazim Nazrul Islam, verses of hidden passion for all human and beautiful? Did he listen to you, the Poet buried only a few steps from the great mosque? Or were you to meet here someone who would seat you on the throne of his heart? I am asking, asking but I don't want to hear any answer. The glitter of your black cherries stuck in my retina, it was with me all days in Dhaka, in the chaos of the streets, in the halls where proud verses swirled the dust of vanity, in the solitude of a sad hotel room, yes, the glitter of your eyes everywhere. "May we take a photo of you?" I asked, standing already next to you, with my massive chest pressed to your tender shoulder. "Are you a poet?" you didn't ask, knowing at that moment more than all the poets of the world that the Muse will remain a mystery forever. We went to pay homage to the Poet of poverty, despair, of love and sorrow: Bengt, Benaissa, Lee, Aminur... After some minutes when I looked toward the gate, there was no saturated bindi between thick eyebrows, no black cherries nor raspberry lips, not even a translucent red scarf – only a dried-out old woman selling dead pictures of a living poet. Informative translation by the author

The shadow of light – a little feather from an angel?

Ever since Mother hung a picture above the nursery door showing a Guardian Angel, you asked yourself what did he look like and whether he would really protect you when you walked that narrow plank above the abyss… Could it be you never saw him in the dark moments of your life, because his feathers are black?

You used to sense only his breath. Light snow from the cherry orchards. And though you were falling as if into a chimney, you knew it wouldn’t end so black. He held you by your collar and dragged you out from there. There, where you staggered, where you stuttered, he would push you ahead, putting words in your mouth, although it might not have been the will of God. Again and again you looked over a poem’s shoulder. The shadow of light… occasionally flitted in the dark. A pair of eyes, like those of your mother when she hung over the nursery door her own portrait… Translated by Peter Petro

Milan Richter is a Slovak poet, dramatist, and translator. He published 24 poetry books in Slovak and in translation into several languages, as well as 4 theatre plays.

Annabel Villar

Black & blue

Blue, blue, blue… blue silk, blue satin, blue velvet, tiny white milk drops, red tiles, green branches, golden sands, gray pebbles, black seagulls, multicolored and disgusting jellyfish. Black, black, black… an open spirit at the jail of the beach.

Doze

At the fuzzy hours of matins, at five o´clock every day, I awake with my Heart in a fist. While I tighten hard the eyes I beg that doze does not come Fear pervades the shadows and vice versa they share the darkness. So then, I implore pray the sleep -as an uterus and an accomplice to return and rescue and show me the essence that denies the vigil.

Annabel Villar (Montevideo, Uruguay) Director of Liceo Poético de Benidorm, International Poetry Festival “Benidorm & Costa Blanca” and “Azul” Poetry Collection. Author of “Viaje al Sur del Sur” (2015), Meditation (2017) and Claustrophobia & Vértigo (2018)

Kamal Chowdhury

Fairy tales

In the trees of the dead I’ve hung a white dove You can call for Peace now!

Because I’ll tie on the body of fallen leaves a mystic om Magic realism beckons this day. Lonelier than this land are manuscripts of innocence. Cleansed, they ascend on clouds riding on unfamiliar rugs There dreams of the dead hang on boughs where doves perch My peace that dangles so, oh peace that I crave, Fairy tales I write as I traverse tumultuous realms! Translated by: Fakrul Alam

The invisible city

A three-day walk to the east will get you to the city- domes, columns and copper sculptures all around. A golden rooster crows in a mysterious way in the mornings. Many years after Marco Polo, Italo Calvino narrates a fairytale-like description of this city in the court of Kublai Khan. The cunning and skeptical king does not believe in one word. But the courtiers- even the poet laureate sitting in one corner- consider undertaking a voyage to the East. Within a few evenings, the sights of the town change, especially those belonging to the rainy season. The sun sets fast. The diners are lit with red, blue and green lights. Once the mysterious veil between the visible and the invisible is removed, a lament in a female voice is heard.

Crying is the real beauty of this city. Translated by Shaikha Shuhada Panzeree

War-child looking for mother. Mother remains a face in the mist Cannot erase that accursed birth-mark, so many children in the world come in search of mothers. After each war, the sun rises as usual and rain falls, too. The bloodstains eventually dry. But countless truths remain hidden, they must. Some of those who survive the maternity ward even after two or three decades return with countless questions want to wipe away mothers’ shame. Mother is perhaps a disconsolate star in the distant sky. Or somewhere else a face hidden behind leaves. The war-mother is still fleeing that fear, that hatred, that violence. In the face of a child’s questions, the fleeing feet bleed invisibly. Only identity is stripped. Even after two or three decades, waves are crashing against the Bay of Bengal. There are many mothers on that coast, many children. But war-children are the offspring of none. Translated by: Pushpita Alam

Before hunting for birds

Before hunting for birds, don't forget I also need wings. At your gun-powder scent, the warmth slides from feathers. On strange days, searching for leaves lost by the trees, I too lament. On these fractured days, our village draws its shutters and sits. From time to time, across the silent market, like an inconsolable child, dust flies.

Still, the husbands, sniffing for moonshine raise a great ruckus and send the women to bring wood from the forest. Fallen leaves return with the lyrics of dead birds. They return with the eyes of scared Robins. Each time I read the language of those eyes I scream. Every time, I feel the urge to throttle, oh hunter, your gun. Translated by Pushpita Alam

Dr. Kamal Chowdhury is one of the most prominent poets of Bangladesh. Chowdhury’s journey into poetry began in the mid-seventies and by 1981 he had published his first collection, Michhiler Shoman Boyoshi (As Old as the Procession). He awarded Bangla Academy literature Award in 2011. Presently he is the Chief Coordinator of the National Implementation Committee for the Celebration of Birth Centenary of the Father of the Nation of Bangladesh Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Abhay K.

Moon rising

Moon rising over the horizon, a longing rising in my heart to see the moon and you through the night without blinking, to follow the moon and your body until it sets and you rise.

To the ocean

i Ocean, I have returned to you to breathe with your breath to sing with your waves to merge my every cell with your every shell while your currents carry me to your depths and toss me back again my species story started here, who knows in which age, and I have returned to you for pilgrimage. ii I write poems on sand letter by letter, word by word, only sand knows my poems

iii Roaring sea waves back and forth hit your bare body, you float up and down with waves hungry eyes wait on the shore as you emerge from the sea like the Venus of Botticelli iv Golden gates of dawn open with sounds of the sea waves beating at the shore the ocean is restless as ever restrained by its shores as day by night and life by death v I ask—what's a beach? I can’t think of it for a long time, then, it all becomes clear— beach is any place where earth meets water, water meets air air meets sky, sky meets the Sun. Beach is life! vi I become sand and sand becomes me I become sea and sea becomes me I become sky and sky becomes me I become wind

and wind becomes me I become clouds and clouds become me I become sun and the sun becomes me lying on the beach.

The rickshaw puller

Storm or sun I pedal sweat, blood abuse, scorn I pedal day or night summer, winter or rains I pedal my shrieks my pleadings unheard my knees crumbling I pedal my family in shacks on the footpath my children picking rags of hope my ailing wife scrambling for water I pedal I pedal in dreams I pedal through miseries I pedal I pedal.

Abhay K. is author of nine poetry collections and the editor of The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems. He received the SAARC Literary Award in 2013. www.abhayk.com