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Afsar Mohammad

Afsar Mohammad has just published a collection of poems Evening with a Sufi with the Red River Press, New Delhi. He writes in his home language of Telugu and English. He also published with the Oxford University Press (USA) a book titled Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India. He teaches at the University Pennsylvania.



Afsar Mohammad (Telugu)
Translations by Nauduri Murthy

A Black Love Poem

1
Will you agree at least now
That there is no invisible love?

2
All that remained between us
Were some apprehensions
And few insults still.
And after that
Either you shoot me
Or I shoot you.

3
No.
Faces of people
Are not just colorful flora
Or green foliage;
Neither woods, nor skies
Nor clouds nor mountains.
They are colours…
And at this moment
They are either white or black!

4
Can't you declare, even now
That all our love and laughter
were mere masquerades?
only veritable hatred?

5
After so many pages of history
And after several emotional journeys together
You remain ultimately one color
And I … another.
That's all!

6
Wasn't it just mistrust
That sufficed to chase and pull the trigger?
One look, just one look
To throw out your body
The life within
And the beats of its lively heart
Like a rot-soiled quilt!

7
Will you admit
At least now,
Our love is dichromatic?



When the Vowel in Me is Lost

After a lifetime,
Dear daddy!
I get to know you… gradually
And ever slowly.
Like a warm sigh died down…
Like the dim blinking evening lamp in the niche
Refusing to blow out or snuff out.

The lesson of life...
What hundreds of dawns
And a few more hundreds of evenings
And the silent nights and friendless midnights
And the un-thawing gloomy days
Had failed to teach...
Turns a new leaf today.

After you had completely slipped down my eyes,
This house became a boat afloat
On the river of infinite silence
Following your absence.
Only after you had left,
In the shadow of the lamp lit near your head,
Perhaps, I was really noticing you.

I am a hovel
Leaning on the post of a deep sigh
Perplexed as to what to choose
Between life and death.

Death is an untaught lesson ... every time.
The same monotonous repetition,
Of a fly
And a peacock's feather,
On the same page.



The Seedless

The seed
Has become unviable.

1
You and I
Are now each  a desert
A Thar… A Sahara…

2
The path lies there like a tired breath
Our path … in that wilderness.
The course smothered under our steps
Is like a lone cob glistening through your mantle…
It is a smile dashed against the shores of my lips…

3
That land is no more,
With fields bowing under a heavy harvest
And our hands grazing over them.
There is no more that scaffolding
Nor the dreams we once dreamt lying there.

4
There's no river
Nor our feet dunked in it
Neither the ripples they created there
Nor the fish that kissed them.

5
No,
There is not a drop in the river
Nor in our eyes that anxiously follow it.

6
Is this reticence?!



One Midnight in San Francisco

“I left my heart in San Francisco…”
Tony Bennett was walking away singing crazily...

Still...
This dead of night
Over the blue firmament of San Francisco
And over the whiff of hazy black mist of cold winds.

2
Forgive me, Tony!
Madly believing your song to be true
I 'flotsam'med into this bay.
I am not able to hide under my eyelids
The cable cars you tied to stars
And your blue seas
I know you'll suspect my vision if I say
Your home looks to me
Like a walking skeleton donning lights.

3
For that matter, can any city be a home to anyone?
Who knows! As I was walking
Down the heart of downtown
It seemed the drizzle of cold and fog
Had enveloped both the skin and the soul.
Of what hue and savor is indigence? You can see.
Come here at once Tony!
And play your song in that hue and savor.
You said you floated lonely somewhere, but

4
Hiding the dark truth of homelessness
Your song glitters like a funereal wreath
In the hunger's forest-fire of mortal frames.
That amber-colored sun
Is an untouchable... even here. Forever!



On the Banks of River Kaveri

A pining...
For not having drowned like a paper boat
When you were impregnably brimming over the banks;
For having failed
To play like a pearl of water
On the sickle of your waist
When the first signs of youth blossomed over there;
For not sharing a piece of firmament
Standing at the threshold of your teary look

2
Kaveri!
You are now an abridged version of your own epic;
And I...
A worn-out boat on your attenuating banks...
A childhood running into the crimps
Of those aureate saris drying up over there on your sands

3
As for the contentment, well, there is.
There is that satisfaction that you lie here
On the hem of my cilia.

4
But,
What I came here for
Is to anchor oceans in my eyes;
What I came here for
Is to stream around your wizened ribs in ripples.

5
Isn't it Kaveri?



My Heart Coos

1
Yours is
A rattling voice that flows with a tremble...
An agitated river...
Collecting itself ...much like a feverish child under a blanket.
Lowering a pregnant hovering cloudlet to earth,
You flash like lightning bowing on its splitting vein.
Shrinking into silence like her ... a disquiet Godavari.
For the last time before snapping,
In the wellspring of your voice,
There's a feverish yearning, stumbling for life
In the grating of your words.

2
There's a song storming within,
Consummating a rumbling cloud and a parched heart
Raining on the bouldered city,
Befriending light in the night,
And in the day, concealing darkness within.

3
There's nothing to write, till the humming of the heart ceases
Not sure if it was fear,
Like when an uncharted train passes through a tunnel.

4
O, My Deliverer!
Don't I hold my breath and grip my body in my fist?
Don't stop, don't stop your song,
Till my blind run comes to an end.



I Have No Nat

I am some limb
Lingering under a hollow head
You never told me
Where I came from
Who brought me up or
Why I was partitioned exactly in the year 1947
Cutting off, or appropriating each limb of God
Else, looting them for yourself,
You did not leave anything for me.

I am an ethereal shadow,
A soul disposed of secretly over the wall,
I am wandering about countries.
Thought each of them my own and
Each station and every door mine
But, no bumblebee gives out my address.
Some vermilion hands
Ploughed away the land under my feet
The dust from those temple towers knocked down
Piles up on my fluttering body entombing it.
Palling my eyes with eyelids

Everybody rends my cool body
Snatching his pound of flesh.
My body is now an Al Kabir!
I am dropping down dead on the gory Bombay streets
Unable to identify my own cadaver.
I am an enigmatic junction, where
Nobody knows which way he is heading.

I am an inhabitant of this vacuous world, for truth
But, always an exile wherever I might live.
Sinking one half of me in darkness,
I imagine the other half is all brightness
Diving into my inner vortices
I kill the soul of Time each second
I ask for no kingships and no kin-shares
I have no language
To ask for my veins to deracinate.

I am satisfied with some semblance of shelter on earth
No matter there's no room to bury me beneath.
The land I inhabit is sanctimonious to me,
Pray! Don't cast me off somewhere, like a desecrated cloth.

Not with  the year 1947,
I ask you to divide me by myself
My rejoicings, my wails, my insults and my suspicions
These molestations and this murdering of me
Are not mine, and mine alone...  but yours too.
Please don't abominate my mother’s amniotic fluid.

You foes who divide and rule!
You can't sever me into two.
Nor can you blow my pupils off.



Death Indeed

Death is not
Starvation
Neither Tsunami
Nor cessation of heartbeat...

When a promise made hides behind equivocation
When a profile coldly vanishes into the back, or
When a man is banished into eternal silence...
That is... a veritable death.

Murders
Suicides
Abortions
Are not death.

When the cherished faith you so covetously held
Mercilessly bites and hurts you deeply
When an unfamiliar hand
Turns into a murderous knife
By pinning a wound to the heart like a rose 
That… that is death indeed.



An Erasion

The shore
Is a nest built by the sea
Diligently collecting each grain of sand.

And the day inevitably dawns sometime
When
You have to erase
Not only your shore...
But even your sea
You can't help it.



After Bidding Adieu

She walks silently across the bridge
As if she has caressed a flower with her delicate hands;
Or feathered a branch along her rosy cheeks.

The bridge, like man, whelms in spring
Becoming a flower
And a greenish sprig.

After she crosses the bridge
She looks back briefly
then swiftly marches ahead... her own way.

Enveloping that look around him like a rainbow
And gathering colorful skies around
Wishing it were the end of his life
The bridge stands alone... resolutely.

Translated by: Nauduri Murthy

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