Late last night as sleep knocked so sweetly on the door, I allowed myself the luxury of a rendezvous with Jagjit- the ghazalist. It was the famous 'Hoontun se choolo tum', but that was not all about it which made me so weak in my knees. While playing his instrument, he was touching the chords of my heart. His stress on the word 'soonapan' was so subtle that I had to remind myself I was not in the concert but listening to him far away in time and space. Then, as few among you might be aware, he does a focalisation of a mother's love for her child. The legend he tells us goes like this; A mother having lost her child makes a sculpture out of clay that she may, when it is dry, hug it and quench her thirst of the lost love. The irony is that it will hardly do the needful but this mother, being so much in love, can't escape the task, even if she wants to. The faculties of her brain do tell her that what she is doing is a time-gone-waste act, but the ones in her heart press her to go for the recourse.
The important thing in life, as Pamukians know, is to be happy, thus her heart rules her brain and she does succeed to some extent, but happiness, in the real sense of the word, eludes her. A little while later in ghazal the words 'Aakash ka soonapan mere tanha mann mein' reflect the state of mind of this symbolic mother. Her world seems blank to her from everywhere but despite that she believes that her lost love would somehow return to her. Her heart believes in sheer faith that a respite would come out of this hugging the sculpture to add some semblance to the ravaged corners of her heart. One can't escape subjectivity here because I remember my mother very much as the ghazal goes on. I feel weaker with each beat. And then I remember Wamiq's mother whom I heard on BBC. I remember Tufail's mother who rejected the compensation for her lost love. I remember my neighborhood. A little girl hardly 10  who lost her father. This jurist father of her had fled his village, for the fear of being eliminated. And one day as he came home to see his little daughter and the other six daughters, he met his fate. He had hardly seen his family of seven daughters. Picked and shot mercilessly in my village, the gunshots roar within me still. I go back to the ghazal, tapping my toe in tandem with the santoor and dholak and the accordion and the guitar. I remember. A woman of my neighboring village whose young son left his home in the morning for the day's work and never came back to his mother despite the promise he had made to her that he would be home early that day and also bring her a plastic shoe, for she had developed cracks in her heels. I imagine her cracked heels. I remember the cracked heals of this mother. I remember his son who could have caressed his mother's heels. I am almost crying but I remember again. I remember a family of the same neighboring village whose seven members were burnt alive in the dark of the night. I remember no one ever having spoken about it, not even us! I remember a boy of not more than twenty five years old and only heir to his family who left for a nearby village to bring home some mutton for they had guests visiting them. The guests did visit but unfortunately they could not taste the mutton because the boy did not come back. Till date nothing remains known of him except the fact of his disappearing in the thin air leaving no track of him. I remember seeing his father while we used to be on the way to school who used to travel everyday between the two villages and if anyone would ask him where he was going, his reply would be. ''Farooq tshaantan ‘I am looking for my son Farooq". I remember so many mothers who paid a heavy price in this part of the world. But I fall asleep and the morning comes with yet another day of same reminiscences and pains. What a pity to see the upholders of human values and democratic norms do the inhuman things by denying the victims their right to see the victimisers punished! And as I start for the day ahead, I see myself walking into the slumber again with a verse from Iqbal reminding me of my dilemma.
Khwaab se beidaar hota hai zara mehkoom agar
Phir suladeti hai usko hukumraan ki saahiri 
(Tanveer Habib is a Research Scholar (Ph.D) from the Department of Linguistics, Kashmir University, Srinagar)

Lastupdate on : Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:30:00 Makkah time
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