Whose voices meld into the wind
When the city pretends to sleep?
You pass by the crushed houses
And hear them speak:
Some girls laugh,
Their ankle chains clank
Behind the remains
Of a demolished jharoka;
Some men speak at a distance,
Beneath the rubble
Of a wall
Whose yellow bricks
Sway
In the dried rivers
Of the past.
She must have lived
In one of these houses –
Mira Sen, the Bengalun,
Who made him a poet:
The man with untamed hair,
Whose curls had been washed
With the secret scents of dust.
The man who was the lover
And the beloved;
His poems were glowing with lust.
The woman remained unaware
Of his existence
For he eternally stayed away
And watched from a distance:
The balconies
Which wore a cosmic light.
His hollow eyes
Longed for the woman’s warmth;
Her body, bathed in a fulgent ocean,
Was dressed in a vesture
Knitted with shells and pearls.
The man was blessed
With a curse
That made him whirl
Around the sun setting from her breasts,
Igniting the barren lands
Of his being.
And before he disappeared,
There was poison
In his poise, music
In his noise.
But what about her,
The Bengali woman?
Who graced Lahore
With her presence
And is blamed
For turning that Urdu poet
Into an insect
Who died a lonely death.
And who was named after her,
Wandering in despair, in desire,
How Mirabai must have roamed,
Seeking Krishna,
In the deserts
Of snow and fire.
Was she his lover?
Was she his mother
Who gave birth to him
After some sacred affair with God?
No one knows much about the woman.
When your state demolished her abode,
You passed by that road
Which was now too wide.
The ruins did not remind you
Of any genocide.
* Mira Sen was a Bengali woman who used to live in Lahore. She was the love interest and muse of the modern Urdu poet Meeraji, named after her. He was just 37 when he died in 1949, in Mumbai.
Ammar Aziz is a poet and filmmaker from Lahore, Pakistan. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Wild Court, Muse India, Femasia Magazine, and elsewhere.
