School Days
ek dil ko hazar dagh laga
andarune mein jaise bagh laga
—Mir Taqi Mir
I hurry back home for my notebook.
Barbed wire. Iron Gate. A few steps
of garden. Inside, Abu’s chain
smoking. His smell. I enter
the room aching
with an afternoon
raag. In its amber
dark, smoke streaks,
whorls above his head
like the ghost
of a sunset. The light
is a canary that flits
on his hand, which
—veined and mottled
like an autumn leaf—clings
to a cane.
He sees me, rustles. Looks up
at the clock.
His grip tightens.
Later, in the sapphire
dark, I enter
the garden. A security guard
is singing a ghazal:
na gul e nagma hun
na parda e saz… In the whisper
of leaves, an overripe plum.
No: it’s the eye
of a CCTV camera.
Under it, the gate looks
like a dirty mirror.
Like the heart of a bandit.
In its reflection,
I lift my shirt:
purple blue green
bruises. Like a hundred open eyes.
Like a peacock’s wing.
Notes
1. The epigraph is a couplet by Mir Taqi Mir. It means ‘On one heart a thousand scars / as if,
inside, a garden’ (my translation).
2. ‘na gul e nagma hun na parda e saz’ is the first line of a couplet by Mirza Ghalib. Below is the
whole couplet with a translation.
na gul e naghma hun na parda e saz
main hun apni shikast ki aawaz
I am neither the rose of sound/melody nor the tone/frets of an instrument/harmony
I am the sound of my own breaking.
3. ‘Abu’ means father.
Zain Baweja is a poet from Karachi, Pakistan. They graduated with a bachelor’s in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and are pursuing their Creative Writing MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Their poems have appeared in The Oxford Review of Books, The Aleph Review, and AGNI magazine.