Nur’aishah Shafiq, In Memoriam

In Memoriam

Inspired by Amar Kanwar’s The Sovereign Forest Nur’aishah Shafiq

i. To be whole again

The judge refused to accept the evidence of his murder. So, he is neither dead nor alive. She dreams of purgatory. The half-life of her love, straddling the nebulous border of ghost and breath.

Incompleteness haunts her. She always sees him coming, until one day she doesn’t anymore.

I dream she is me. Every day I wake alone in this new world old world, quarantine; fearing the invisible sickle carving lungs— fluid gathers, death by drowning.

I wept for you my almost-heart, at the crossroads between our homes. You, my every unlived love, premature goodbye.

Beyond that half-world, we were happy

Before that half-world, they were happy.

ii. Leaving Odisha

The ship escapes exosphere, finding space, fleeing desolation—a migration to the stars. What must it feel to face oblivion, infinite cosmos, a people without home. Abandoning glassy hollowed corpse of Odisha, last of human failings.

Once, Odisha was called Earth. But progress and profit, modernity’s monsters, rechristened planet, after a people exploited, a history razed. Fields colonized by totalitarian seeds; a neo-conquering.

The ship faces endless dark, to outrun passengers’ past, carrying meagre traces of crucial knowledge, some grains of wheat and rice and maize.

The sun draws ever closer, his warmth a lethal embrace to burn away the wounds that mar Odisha’s surface, darkening her seas. A final cremation. But what will grow from scattered ash? Another Odisha? finding root in faraway solar systems, galactical parasite contaminating new cluster of stars. Endless broken cycle, dust begets dust begets dust—how to break the strangle of ghosts, army of memories— how to begin again.