‘Memory is not always an active remembrance’: Two poems by Mehaq Khurshied
Photo: Karan Madhok
‘Her nostalgia was only bitter. There was no sweetness to balance it. / Of course, she loved him like our women are taught to love / Love, entrapped in obligation and duty.’
//UNLEARNING//
When will I learn,
That nothing can be achieved
From the incessant racking of your emotions
That no miracles will drop down from the sky
To wrap your heart in love
The wind will keep swaying
Even when the shelter you created
is long gone
And you sit like a hermit on top
of a desolate mountain
Trying to take lessons from the loneliness.
It is not a perfect teacher
but it will make you learn
That most of the ideas will become obsolete
till the time I write them down
When will I learn,
That this life wasn’t supposed to be a fight
designed for one to lose
I carry my hopes in one hand
And my aches in the other
And most days
I sit down with my hands
clasped together
So, my hopes give birth to new aches
And well, my aches
Have learned to trail behind
like a broken limb
sore to the eye, motionless
The flower that blooms outside my home
is the heart throbbing in a dead field.
Other days, it is but just a red
pumping flesh
misplaced in a dead field.
I tread in a world that relies on ambiguity
And uncertainty
And I, for one,
walk through it like another deer
on a concrete road
With the dreams of a lonely dense green land,
I watch the indifference of the cars passing by,
The curious eyes of the bicyclers
I go ahead and step on a fog line
And realize I wish to learn nothing
of this concrete world.
*
//In Defense of Remembrance//
I am looking at a picture of my childhood
sitting in the lap of my startled eyed: long-nosed grandmother
and her fairly masculine hands wrapped around my little torso.
A faint, formal smile on her face.
You see, I don't know much about the preservation of memory, except through pictures. I never served to maintain the idea of someone who once was. All I know is that most moments in our lives are only bittersweet. I try to delve into the possibility of remembrance by looking closely into the picture—and even closer into her eyes.
I see nothing except the memory of someone else
the ache of absence;
of her dead husband peripheralizing her.
I do remember that she disliked getting her pictures clicked
even more, looking at the old pictures of her
because it reminded her of her husband.
Her nostalgia was only bitter. There was no sweetness to balance it.
Of course, she loved him like our women are taught to love
Love, entrapped in obligation and duty.
But I have started to believe that she only remembered him
because it was easier than forgetting
and because forgetting would mean accepting that she had survived without him.
And when she died, I already knew that I would survive
I tell stories about her now and then,
I cried some tears and moved on
Only to realize a commonplace phenomenon
That memory is not always an active remembrance
Because as I define her in an opulent vocabulary
thick words outlining her deceased body
That one day snares my memory when she signed an official paper
A woman who only knew how to write her name
In a space belonging to men
in a language where I try to find her now
a language, that had served her nothing
I had peeked over and looked at it
uneven words spelling- S a f i y a
No one else had paid much attention
she hadn’t looked at me either
but in that brief moment,
she didn’t need to remember anybody else
to be someone
At that moment,
she was what she was: an independent entity
floating in her sour air
S a f i y a, with no begum at the end of her name.
***
Mehaq Khurshied is an English graduate from Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir. She did her MA in English Literature from Ambedkar University Delhi. She writes often when a poem comes to her as naturally as leaves to a tree. She muses about the nostalgic memories of her home, to turn her perpetual home-sickness into a creative endeavour. She carries verses of Forough Farrokhzad, Mary Oliver and Plath on tip of her tongue, and a desire to write half as good as them in her heart. You can find her on Instagram: @blurryface03.
