Lo, A Tint Cashmere!/Lo, A Rose

Shahid is struggling with brain cancer in Brooklyn, New York. This is Agha Shahid Ali, whom Amitav Ghosh calls the most important poet of his generation.

Shahid's memory is uncertain. It is elusive but can become unexpectedly available as well. He may forget his sister's name, and he will ask to be reminded of the titles of his books. It is a triumph when he can remember that he has a book coming out in August called "Rooms Are Never Finished."

He is in danger of losing his life to brain cancer, everyday he goes for chemotherapy. His family-- two sisters and a brother-- and friends and colleagues gather around him and it is lively. They are turning his fight into a jashn. It is especially festive around him in the evenings.

So I met him after 5 years. He wanted to know everything about the time I met him and I had met him for several days in Toronto during a festival called Desh Pardesh.

I have never been asked, unconditionally, to remember something. I had to remember and I had to tell him. I told him that we went to a party where a young man took his clothes off.

As I told this story Shahid seemed to be remembering and forgetting. I would tell the story and he would interject.

Who took his clothes off?

Did I take my clothes off?

I would correct him and tell the story again of that anonymous person at the party who took his clothes off.

Clothes Off? Really? Did you take your clothes off?

It was funny as well, I know this is how his wit works, but I solemnly told my story again.

As we were leaving that night Amitav Ghosh, Shahid's neighbour in Brooklyn, came in to pay a visit. A couple of days later a few Indian and Pakistani writers were gathered at Amitav's house and he showed me a poem that Shahid wrote. Shahid wrote it on the occasion of his mother's stuggle last year with brain cancer.

It is called Lenox Hill, it addresses Krishna, Shiv, Allah the Merciful, Jesus and Mary, but all mothers and sons must read it and so must President Musharrif and Prime Minister Vajpayee when they decide to talk and not talk about Kashmir.

Shahid wrote this poem in a poetic form he says was probably invented by Dante. Canzone. Dante said about it that writing in it was loading himself with chains. Dante wrote one canzone. Shahid has written three, he says without humility.

Lenox Hill

(In Lenox Hill Hospital, after surgery, my mother-- not fully conscious-- said the sirens sounded like the elephant's of Mihiragula when his men drove them off cliffs in the Pir Panjal Range)

The Hun so loved the cry, one falling elephant's,

he wished to hear it again. At dawn, my mother

heard, in her hospital-dream of elephants,

sirens wail through Manhattan like elephants

forced off Pir Panjal's rock cliffs in Kashmir:

the soldiers, so ruled, had rushed the elephants.

The greatest of all footprints is the elephant's,

said the Buddha. But not lifted from the universe,

those prints vanished forever into the universe,

though nomads still break news of those elephants

as if were just yesterday the air spread the dye

("War's annals will fade into night/ Ere their story die"),

the punishing khaki whereby the world sees us die

out, mourning you, O massacred elephants!

Months later, in Amherst, she dreamt: she was, with dia-

monds, being stoned to death. I prayed:

If she must die, let it only be some dream. But there were times, Mother, while you slept, that I prayed, "Saints let her die."

Not, I swear by you, that I wished you to die

but to save you as you were, young, in song in Kashmir

and I, one festival, crowned Krishna by you, Kashmir

listening to my flute. You never let gods die.

Thus I swear, here and now, not to forgive the universe

that would let me get used to a universe

without you. She, she alone, was the universe

as she earned, like a galaxy, her right not to die,

defying the Merciful of the Universe,

Master of Disease, "in the circle of her traverse"

of drug-bound time. And where was the god of elephants,

plump with Fate, when tusk to tusk, the universe,

dyed green, became ivory? Then let the universe,

like Paradise, be considered a tomb. Mother,

they ask me, So how's the writing? I answered My mother

is my poem. What did they expect? For no verse

sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir

and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of Kashmir

(across fifteen centuries) in the hospital. Kashmir,

she's dying! How her breathing drowns out the universe as she sleeps in Amherst. Windows open on Kashmir:

There, the fragile wood-shrines-- so far away-- of Kashmir!

O Destroyer, let her return there, if just to die.

Save the right she gave its earth to cover her, Kashmir

has no rights. When the windows close on Kashmir,

I see the blizzard-fall of ghost-elephants.

I hold back-- she couldn't bear it-- one elephant's

story: his return (in a country far from Kashmir)

to the jungle where each year, on the day his mother

died, he touches with his trunk the bones of his mother.

"As you sit here by me, you're just like my mother,"

she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir,

she's watching, at the Regal, her first film with Father.

If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother,

I'd save you-- now my daughter-- from God. The universe

opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God's mother!

Each page is turned to enter grief's account. Mother,

I see a hand. Tell me its not God's. Let it die.

Are you somewhere alive, weeping for me, Mother?

Do you hear what I once held back: in one elephant's

cry, by his mother's bones, the cries of those elephants

that stunned the abyss? Ivory blots out the elephants.

I enter this: The beloved leaves one behind to die.

For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir,

and what (I close the ledger) the griefs of the universe

when I remember you-- beyond all accounting-- O my mother?