The autumn is here,
mercilessly ripping apart the heart of summer
exuding long-brewed melancholy from it.
The air is heavy, laden with unread elegies,
smelling of the smoke of burnt tears.
What the tulips of summer conceal beneath them,
the berserk palid leaves of Chinar
in autumn manifest-
Grief is a constant companion here.
Zabarwan, shriveled and bruised by the coils
of concertina around its neck, looks resignedly
over an over-age, museless Dal
being frequently gangraped
by hyper-aroused visitor Shikaras
squirting sterile normalcy on her face.
The autumn is here!
All the city walls have been hurriedly adorned
by colorful grafittis,
diluting the native stains of organic Red
with the chemical ones.
A trafficked prosperity prostituted
into some smart city mission.
The markets are flooded with
clueless shoppers and anxious hawkers
selling, heckling, selecting,rejecting
rumours of an impending war.
Second-hand imported apparels sell fast
as people wear first hand violence.
The autumn is here!
We can mourn in metaphors only
for all prose is sedition.
We barter pickled rage for bland Survival,
can beggars be choosers!
Free expressions are mortgaged for Safety-
even whispers are exiled to anonymity.
Homes sit on explosive whims of impunity,
toxic entitlement can see them into rubble, at will.
Lullabies are replaced with night’s vigil,
every son is numbered before puting him to sleep.
Days are interspersed with set alarms,
daughters must be reminded to walk in groups.
Almond eyes kohled with gunpowder,
bosoms replete with fright,
lips ripe with the silence of graveyards.
Orchards full of skeletons,
Graves- some unmarked, unidentified
some empty, awaiting.
Shhhh , the CASO is on;
Sturdy men in the dawn,
become slack dead bodies by day
dead bodies turn into empty graves by night!
That’s how the matter changes its form here
from solid to liquid to gas
since the autumn is here.
(Do the dead protest
for being chosen to be dead;
a lot is left undone back home,
many promises lurk unfulfilled.)
Breaking news!
Enemy neutralised, eliminated, terminated.
The “collective conscience of the nation”
has stolen the show
and withheld corpses as souvenirs,
in their fetish for naked dance of jingoism.
Bodies can’t be returned, Law and Order wills.
(the dead must be protesting!)
The night was freezing cold,
the shrouds still unworn, the graves still agape
but the agony of unanswered questions,
the pain of forced separation,
the misery of stifled mourning
kept the mourners unslept, afloat.
The drunk dance wasn’t over yet.
Candles in the peaceful vigil
were doused and desecrated.
Law and order had suspected
in each wax and wick
the burning tail of Hanuman!
Pouncing on the placards and posters,
as if wanting to tear down each word
into incomprehensible, unidentifiable syllables,
Law and order chuckled in grandiosity!
“Return the dead bodies”
“Ret” , “the dea”, “d bod”
the crumbled, torn pieces of posters
now lay here and there-
a shameless Vastraharana !
The lights were switched off, purposefully.
Law and Order must not have wanted to see itself
in the eyes of old, feeble father
while trampling his emaciated face
under meaty combat boots.
Hail the Valour!
All of them were dragged into the van.
All of them gazed helplessly into the dark sky,
their hands raised up,
throats dried up,
clothes torn apart,
bodies struggling to break free,
shouting into the face of weaponised tyranny,
“Kill us all, once for all,
keep the bodies,
and the ghosts too”
Law and Order, with a full belly,
goes back home and crashes on bed.
The graves, lay awake, awaiting!
—Rumuz is a Srinagar-based poet.
(This appeared in the print edition as "AUTUMN IS HERE!")
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