Karachi, A Poem

Karachi, A Poem

walking past the chips wala

masala chips after maghrib prayers

oily hands, walking

a Pepsi, maybe? from seven to thirteen rupees

past abdullah bhai's bakery

maybe a burned cake rusk for free

not today, Fridays only

passed the gosht walas

under the infested trees

swooping around the congregation

of cats and crows, goat intestines fall

from trees

passing the sign, "matric boks and suplies"

towards the printing press and garage

mechanics that fix cars and bicycles

Into the thin street

dividing the arcade

where children watch their backs playing streetfighter

"Beware of Babar Bhai, he is not the right kind of man!”

and the dabbu table for men

around which young boys learn to smoke

at Abdul’s pan shop where you can buy

Marlboro lights from America

“made by Jews to make Muslims impotent

It is a war of demographics; Abdul is a spy!”

A tin paper box wala announces his presence

"four annas for a kilo"

Samosas, Jalebis, and Cake rusk

at the Master Bakery, but here the oil is a month old

Khurram buys Pakoras from here, but never samosas

He has epilepsy, it might be the oil

Condensed milk is good with ice candy

but it costs one rupee extra

"gole gande wala, you are a thief!"

"Wheat has gone up four rupees this week," he says

A rupee is not worth much these days

The streets are quiet

It is time for evening prayers

Shias have called for prayers already

At the al-Aqsa mosque, Maulana Fazal has a sore throat

A Siren is used in his place.

There is resentment: “Tonight they will have the last word"

Towards the Al-Farook ground which once had a coat of thinning grass

Now it is covered in gravel.

rabid mongrels occupy it at night

There was an encounter here

police shot a militant and killed a boy of almost-eleven

“A batsmen, like MIANDAD!,” they said.

But I suspect the dead are always remembered like that

Maybe I will be lucky enough to die

in my Graham Gooch uniform

But I fear that boys who die in English uniforms do not go to heaven

Across the street is Agha's Juice House

Clean shaven young men wait there for girls

From Sir Syed Girls College

Sohail from down the street sits there

He once sported a jamaati beard

Now he is clean shaven and in love

On the main road

a green and white bus is broken down

Emblazoned on it, a fighter jet streaming above a mosque

Under it the words "Allah will protect"

The air is thick with smoke

The horns blaze against the summer heat

A gentle breeze brushes against me

Maybe one day I will move to the ocean.

The Poetic Life of Afzal Ahmed Syed

My stepfather, poet Afzal Ahmed Syed, loved Dhaka. But his beloved city now only appears to him in nightmares.

---

Arsalan Khan December 16, 2011 

My stepfather, Afzal Ahmed Syed, is a generally quiet and inward man who occasionally breaks from his reticence with humorous insights about the world. He does this not through fanciful and elaborate explanations, but in pithy quotes or by reciting a shaer.

As many thoughtful commentators on his life and poetry have suggested, much of my father’s poetic vision has been shaped by his experience as a witness to immense political tragedies like East Pakistan’s violent rebirth as Bangladesh in 1971, the Lebanese Civil War, and the ethnic and sectarian violence that overwhelmed Karachi in the 1990s.

Musharraf Farooqi, my father’s friend and translator, has suggested that his poetry reflects a long “inner migration” commonly found amongst writers and thinkers who have witnessed the enormity of war and suffering. This is undeniable. But, there is a little more to the story than that. It is important to remember that experiencing great trauma does not necessarily generate the kind of humanitarian ethos that I believe is central to my father’s life and work. In fact, if our modern day experience demonstrates anything, it is that political tragedies are just as likely, if not more likely, to deepen the ethos of brutality and violence as they are to create an ethic of self-reflection and compassion.

Perpetrators of violence often believe themselves to be victims of some kind. They always imagine that they are merely defending themselves against the machinations of others. It is no surprise then that the arc of history takes the shape of a recurring tragedy as one generation of victims becomes the next generation of perpetrators. Not surprisingly, violence and suffering are recurring themes in his poetry:

We need a whole lot of flowers

for one half of them will succumb to their wounds

We need a forest of nocturnal flowers

for those who could not sleep for the report of gunfire

we need a whole lot of flowers

for a whole lot of rueful people

we need anonymous flowers

to cloak the stripped girl

(from "We Need a Whole Lot of Flowers")

My father’s humanistic ethic is built around a realisation that the lines between victims and perpetrators of violence are often quite blurry. This too comes from experience, especially his experience in Dhaka, Bangladesh during the Bangladesh war of Independence. My father frequently says, and with no small measure of pride, that the first and only vote that he has ever cast in his life was for the Awami League Party in the 1971 elections.

For those of you who are not familiar with Pakistani-Bangladeshi history, this election was won convincingly by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bangladeshi leader and champion of Bengali political autonomy and civil rights, but was later abrogated by the West-Pakistani establishment backed by the powerful Pakistani military. This event thrust the country into a cataclysmic Civil War that led to the deaths of millions and culminated in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation-state. Although himself an Urdu-speaking West Pakistani, he was a firm supporter of the Bengali movement. This commitment was informed by his unbounded love for Dhaka, a city that he had made his own. He says that every night, around dusk, he would renew his love for the city by taking a stroll through its narrow streets and newly erected parks.

He was a staunch supporter the Bengali movement because he understood that a people, especially a people with such monumental intellectual and literary achievements, could only be subjugated so long before they revolted. Yet, despite his support of the Bengali movement, my father became a victim of the war. On December 14, 1971, Bengali soldiers forcefully removed him from his home in Purbali, a suburb on the outskirts of Dhaka, and interned him in Mirpur, a quarter of Dhaka where other Urdu-speaking minorities lived. He could no longer walk through his city and as a result his love, naturally, dissipated. In 1972, he was arrested as a Pakistani sympathizer and a collaborator with the Pakistani military. This was during a time when many such “internal enemies” were being executed. He was later deemed a “peaceful citizen” and released, possibly at the request of an influential member in the Bangladeshi militia forces. A year later, he along with his mother and six younger siblings managed to escape Dhaka, never to return, making their way through India and Nepal to Karachi where he now lives.

If my voice is not reaching you,

add to it the echo —

echo of ancient epics

And to that —

a princess

And to the princess—your beauty

And to your beauty —

a lover’s heart

And in the lover’s heart

a dagger

(from "If My Voice is Not Reaching You")

My father rarely speaks of Dhaka, but when he does it is with a tremendous sense of betrayal and sadness. His beloved city, he says, now only appears to him in nightmares. It was in Dhaka that he first began to think about the destructive potential of language, its capacity to strip people of their humanity and open them up to violent retribution. The War my father experienced was very much fought in language well before it was fought on the streets of Dhaka. West Pakistanis had long dehumanised their fellow citizens in East Pakistan, attacking them for being backwards and unsophisticated.

This was also very much a war about language because West Pakistanis had imagined their Bengali counterparts to have a degraded and inferior tongue. Later, when everyone had abandoned speech for war, the Bengalis turned on their Urdu speaking minority with the same vitriol to which they had themselves been subjected. Now, it was Urdu-speakers who were imagined to be conspiring, by virtue of their language, against Bangladeshi liberation. Much of my father’s interest in poetry emerged in a context where everyday language had become deeply compromised on all sides. His poetic vision springs from the knowledge that our modern day political tragedies are rooted in everyday speech and language. Maybe this is why he remains to this day a conspicuously “quiet” and “inward” man and maybe this is why when he does speak, he prefers to speak in the language of poetry.

Maybe poetry in his world carries a unique potential to transcend the violence of our modern world, a violence woven deeply into the tapestry of our everyday lives.

Poetry translations have been done by Musharraf Ali Farooqi.

This post was originally published here.