At the Gates of Paradise - Ranjan Nehru

Shahid stopped

at the Gates of Paradise

and found it had no post-office.

He travelled back to New York

through New Delhi and Boston,

then, from atop the Twin-Towers

declared

the magic words of a poet.

The beloved witness saw:

The army trucks whining past the high-way,

puffing, fretting and fuming,

dodging the grenades and the IED’s

while the Valley was de-weeded 

through Kalashnikovs,

loaded with Jehad

and what they understood of the Holy Verses,

through letters

of twenty-four hour deadlines

dispatched in a country without a post-office,

through calls

from loud-speakers blaring from atop the Minarets, 

through streams of cold blood

frozen into icicles

trickling into droplets of death,

through decrees

scribbled on the inside of a cigarette box.

And, as terror mounted on stallions of fear,

the German Gestapo reincarnated

in Jehadi uniforms.

Shahid must have seen this 

(as true witnesses do):

the crackdowns,

the missing lists,

the mothers whose sons didn’t return ,

the whip of the goons

unleashed by the Occupying Forces.

Shahid must have seen it, seen it all.

in the land of his longing .

Sarvanand Premi,

the poet from Anantnag,

received the honours with bullets

for dreaming a freedom

not as good as what Shahid dreamt.

Shahid must have seen the rape of the hounded tribe

as the last of them left the Valley

fearful of those who swore by freedom.

Shahid must have seen from Earth to sky;

poets see it all.

They are no step-mothers of Truth,

they  do not seek repose in laps

which snatch the terrified from theirs.

True poets grow

on terrains of tear and torment.

Shahid must have seen it, seen it all

from atop the twin-towers:

The fate of a land

where people prayed five time a day;

Where leaders, at the slightest hint,

recalled and recited from the Holy Book 
while making houses

where bridges were meant to span

or schools were aimed to be;

Where beggars had bank accounts

and the rich died in penury;

Where land was pushed to the landless

who passed on their labours

to the labourers from Bihar;

Where young boys, donning the white caps of the faithful,

issued  receipts

to fund  the pulpits for the Muezzin’s calls,

that directed to pick Smart Bombs and Smart Guns,

to kill ingeniously

on the sly

at the call from the Land of the Pure

against the Infidels, the Mukhbirs 

and, of course, 

the Occupying Forces

raised in a land:
 

Where subversion of a vision of a Global Village and 

disdain of the dream of a Common Umbrella

flourish freely;

Where avarice, embezzlement and God

are worshipped in one voice;

Where men aspire immortality

and hate those of lowly birth;

Where free pens and voices of high reason

whet the appetite of enemies;

Where gun-toting accused

walk leisurely behind Court Rooms;

Where pot-bellied prisoners send their guards on errands

and jailors accommodate and associate;

Where truth measured by numbers

and a lie uttered by a multitude

becomes the voice of God;

After used ballots and bullets,

after the consecration of new idols of strife

the Avatars of avarice,

the Dons who don the dress of the Mahatma,

proclaim sacrifices in public

and pass parcels in private

heralding an army of leeches

who suck in public

from across every table of the State.

In this land of absolute merchants,

in the bazaar of competing religions,

people wallow in dust and decay

while chanting verses of eternity.

In this bizarre landscape of colossal neglect

beaten out of shape,

gods and goddesses

are shuffled across

over a crescendo of deafening pop-hits

in fierce processions, by night and day,

over river-banks and lake-shores drenched in slime,

across gutters chocked in plastics,

overseen by Sahibs and Babus

moving in cavalcades,

burning fuel and making mansions,

not all from their allocations,

while busy executives,

business goons and tycoons

and their wives,

after having sent  their sons to the US,   

drive across garbage piles

on roads of madness

to plush interiors, malls and multiplexes,

unmindful of the pot-holes

that kill everyday.

Shahid must have seen it, seen it all,

from atop the twin-towers

as he lifted the Valley of self-fulfilling tears

from the pits of decadence and dust

on the broad shoulders of his poetic fortitude

into the portals of a hallowed revolution

trampled under the boots of the Occupiers.

Shahid must have seen it,

as Lal Ded or Nund Resh would have seen it,

seen it all :

The Infidels of the Valley

fleeing across the tunnel

with broken trunks and forlorn homes.

Their shadows becoming as murky as the smoke

that lifted their hearths into heavens

while their well-meaning neighbours

showed them the hidden fortune of their flight.

While narrating the sordid stories of their own plight,

they helped them

sell their lands to them

at one-tenth the price.

The Infidels, like true infidels,

failed even to acknowledge

this act of faith.

The fodder sent from across mountains and seas

piled in orchards and paddy fields

to foster the revolution of the faithful

commanded from the fortress across the line

which separates the pure from the impure.

Shahid must have seen it, seen it all

as the deathly dance of Karbala

descended once again

at the Gates of Paradise

in the camps of the Infidels,

the Mukhbirs and the Occupying Forces.

And while History receded into the dustbin of time

Shahid, much before the Judgement Day,

got a glimpse of that what he didn’t see 

At the Gates of Paradise.

  

© Ranjan Nehru