A Necessary Obituary | A Poem

Through the debris of your unspoken words

Or the fiery silences which you cultivated

Into the burial of those dense labyrinths

Which you sieved through reason and emotion

I remember you

And the wedge between the idea of you

Imbued in a seeming normative

Yet diverging through a million prisms

I can still hear your aggressive conversations

Rupturing their stereotypical structures 

As you drifted between nihilism and idealism

It's your memory that effaces my presence today

Or an absence shattered into its own being

Claiming crevices of a distant space

Your dense coloured eyes

With imprints of burying so much in a pyre

As you explained to me the metaphor it was

A smoke that rose into indistinct patterns of you 

Rendering scathed sighs to their origins

Of judgements as they surpassed 

Your courageous shreds

tearing the voices who said shame

Or a defiance of that morality 

Which canvasses languages into an imprisonment

Or the gaze

When they decimated you to a constructed beautiful femininity

Or the identity of your name, which never testified

With the storm you were 

Or the last conversations you shun

Between your prayers

and the timeless worship of contradictions

A drudge delirium engulfs your last memories

When I heard you break down into the refuge of nights

The unbearable burden of being

And the continuum of becoming a farce

That's what I remember of you.

Your dense coloured eyes

And the patterns of dust and smoke from your remains

which absorbed absences in its incriminating patters

And bled with you

In its whiteness of ashes.

II. Abandoned Absences

I am layered into the winters of your memories

When your fingertips bled into ice

As you inherited the muezinns call in your silence

I hear your ancient silence welling inside me today into a cold breath

As you abandoned yourself, I remember you

Like autumnal colours flooding Jhelum

Blazing Chinar leaves which said you were there

A silent epiphany that the mountains of my hometown sang to me 

Or a melancholy which Deodars from Sheeri burnt

You are like that clandestine visitation 

Where I exhausted a childhood

Hiding beneath huge boulders

Or running on thread like wooden bridges

That had the audacity to run over a Jhelum in fierce rage

You are like that echo

Which splintered into Wular

Or the lost story

Which adorns Baba Shakrudin's gateway

Or those retreating footsteps 

That effaced the stairways of my grandfather’s ancestral house

I heard you in unlighted candles

In abandoned shrines 

I was collecting the veins of sky

Of a forlorn winter's

Painting snow into the patterns of your echoes

Like a memory of approaching spring

Every season named in your shape

All hues and colours emerging in your name 

Then in the disdain of broken dreams

We sat on the edges of sepulchres

Which read familiar and unfamiliar names

Distinct in meanings and fugitive in being

We are refugees of a self-inflicted exile

Which burnt us through and through

III. The Ordinariness of Rage

How does this rage get parked

As the night descends on our thoughts 

And line by line, each moment of the day

Recreates itself through a hyper awareness

Of performative gendered roles

Or the drudgery of domestic labour, or even the brunt of kindness

And the facade of culture

Through the farce of constructing happiness everyday

How does this anger simmer even in the calmest moments

To know the dearth of control

One finally has over one’s life

To open rusted suitcases and bury dreams

And imprint the cultural, but seemingly senseless codifications

Of men are from Mars and women are from Venus

Or whatever could have been the decolonial articulation of such binaries

Either way, at the end of the day,

When you lean over the gendered duties, 

Of disproportionate burden

A heavy thesis embedded in your mind and by now, your character

Your theories on your fingertips, as they get washed away with cheap utensil soap

And extremely hot water for stubborn oil stains 

Even your imagined identity, the liberated one

Is submerged in that water

You become and are that same woman, that is culturally written 

So why does this rage simmer so brightly in the night

Just before you want to retire to a dark alley of nothingness 

And as it sleeps with you

Why does it wake up, fresher and stronger than you