Being Dead

[Selçuk: Sep 20, 1985-Forever]

Emily Dickinson, one of America’s most powerful poets was a recluse. She had extracted a promise from her younger sister to burn all her papers after her death. Thankfully Lavinia didn’t set a match to her famous sister’s poems. Dickinson’s poetry survived, and is considered among the finest in the world -- for her lifelong fascination with the inscrutable theme of dying. Emily met her maker in 1886, age 55, and is buried in Amherst, Massachusetts, very close to our very own Agha Shahid Ali’s final resting place. Shahid deeply loved Emily’s works.

Agha Shahid Ali’s hauntingly beautiful poetry evokes a very private pain in us. He died of a brain condition at 52. I have often wondered why God chose to put the rotten tumor in one of the most gifted minds of our times. Deep in his mind-matter. Why are the most matchless of men the first ones to get marching orders? Why do the finest fall first? Why do the young have to die? Why is parting so awfully painful? I get no answers. Only an eerie static. Like snow falling on a silent night. Oft times we have to learn to answer our own questions. And answers are such mousetraps.

I knew this wonderful Turkish guy who was pals with me. He too had a beautiful mind. I would sometimes give him some silly shaggy dog story: that when he laughs on phone I can distinctly hear Cheshire cats meow in the background. “I mean it Selçuk, I’d say for effect”. “Shut-up, Sam he retorted, there are no Cheshire cats in Istanbul”. “Only Pisîka Wanê, which is perhaps Kurdish for Van cats.” “And guess what, Sam, I have a cat in my lap right now”. “Didn’t I say I heard mewling”, I chortled. “But the cat is so quiet, Sam, he replied innocently. “You freak me out”. Ofcourse he had informed me in an earlier chat about the cat and he would simply misrecollect.

Selçuk was a regular guy with boyish dreams full of blue dolphins.
He lived by the Bosporus. With a gift for languages, he became a translator at 23. I used to get mails containing Turkish glossary from him. He quietly fed fish in the strait that connects the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Mackerels, sardines, and tunny would swim to him to nibble at small chunks of food he threw at them. Makes me feel content in a strange way, he explained. I thought he was being seraphic to the fish in a selfish world. Selçuk ceased breathing yesterday, carrying to his youthful grave, many such small secrets. The fish of Bosporus may well go hungry.

Personally I feel like a potpourri of emotions – between being awful and helpless. I hate losing people I love. But I lose people from time to time. Every time I love people, they just seem to go away forever. My unmarried aunt died of cancer on a windy autumn evening. I cried a lot, I remember, shaking like a young leaf on a maple tree. Many years later mom breathed one last time. It was a bitter wintry afternoon. I was 17 and I loved her like a teen. She didn’t open her eyes even as I kept wailing like a banshee. The dead never open their eyes. They aren’t allowed to. I don’t know why.

Rafi, the guy who helped me grow up fell off the roof from his small two-room home last year on a rainy day. I was not in Kashmir. I never am. Something happened to his head. In a week he was dead. Tears welled up in my eyes when someone rang me up. Rafi used to pray and fear God a lot, like all mortals. They say that fireflies glow by his grave now. I refuse to believe. He was 40 and shouldn’t have been in that cold grave. Fireflies make-out when they emit those lights.

Selçuk was the last person I’d like to see dead. He was too tender footed to go. But he is gone. At least he has no fear now. After the first death, there is no other, Dylan Thomas suggests. I think I agree.

I seem to have figured it out by now. There is this veil – that is what I reckon, death is. It is dark and rag-like. Stitched in many places by some glum thread. When it flutters it spews a scent that gives you heartache – the size of wild blue yonder. No one who walks into it, ever walks out. They are exaggeratedly proper about it.

We, the living, are always asked to move on, pray for the dead and forget. But how can one forget memories? Death ends a life not a relationship. I don’t think I can ever forget my aunt, my mom, my Rafi maam, my Selçuk. I can’t afford to. I intend to immortalize them.

As Dickinson wrote in her insanity:

Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen --
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and theirs -- between --

For Stranger -- Strangers do not mourn --
There be Immortal friends
Whom Death see first -- 'tis news of this
That paralyze Ourselves...

Who, vital only to Our Thought --
Such Presence bear away
In dying -- 'tis as if Our Souls
Absconded -- suddenly –
If they don’t allow cats, I hope they let Selçuk translate laughter in paradise.

Sameer

To my amigo: Come back

The darkness is here
And I am afraid to enter
~from a poem by Selcuk

There is a certain understated elegance about Selcuk – pronounced Sel-Juk -- that makes him very impressionable. He is satiny, like a Pasha who never got to go to a war. Selcuk wrote amazingly sensitive poetry in Turkish but could never hold a conversation for too long. He understood the happiness of winter and walked along the Bosporus on cold evenings – all alone – with nothing but a merry tinkle in his eye.

I bumped into him many years back in a virtual alley. He sounded like an upriver boy with no pretensions. That enamored me. Like so many young souls in Turkey he wished to break free and float to freer lands. Eventually he came to the United States and took up a small job in Cincinnati, Ohio. He fell in love with America. Selcuk went back to Istanbul to complete his studies. He said he would return but never really did.

A trademark tuff of flowing hair easily camouflaged Selcuk as a rock star. His lone weapon was a disarming smile which he used to devastating effect. Originally a Kurd, his folks came from a beautiful place called Siirt in Southeast Turkey. According to a legend a local lord had a beautiful daughter whom he decided to give in marriage to someone important from another clan. The girl was in love with a shepherd named Ali.

The big-nosed father paid no heed to the girl’s objections and she was obliged to give in to his wishes. The wedding day came and the wedding procession, with the bride riding on a horse, set out for the bridegroom's village. On the way back mournful strains of a flute were heard in the mountains. The girl knew it was Ali playing and called out to him, 'Run Ali! Take me away.'

The shepherd galloped up beside her on his horse, pulled her onto the saddle behind him, and the couple was soon out of sight. Some time later a village was built on the spot where the elopement had taken place, and it was called Seyirt, meaning 'run', after the girl's cry to her beau. In time Seyirt became Siirt. Selcuk was born in the same romantic village, though I am not too sure if he ever visited the exact spot.

In one of my last conversations with Secuk he told me that I’d love Taşbaşı, a place near his home. It is a deep gorge with intriguing rock formations through which the river Uluçay races along its winding course. The Billoris spa is located next to it. The spa has a large pool with hot sulphurous water. Selcuk invited me to come and take a dip. One feels strangely revived and rejuvenated, he chuckled.

It was tales like these and many more that made me like Selcuk.
He had a sudden offhand charm that innervated you. I haven’t met too many people who are so truthful, transparent and kind at the same time. Yet there was an inferno in him which I found hard to fathom. It came to me as a cross betwixt a burst of poetry and a wordless note of zest. May be I could never completely understand him.

Early today I was told of his pain. He lies comatose in an Istanbul hospital. Quite unknown to me, it appears he was nursing a brain tumor for which he underwent an operation. Soon after he slipped into a deep coma, out of which he is yet to emerge. I suddenly hear words on the night breeze. I feel heartsick. It is sorrow, the size of sky.

I wish life had an undo-function. It is such an uphill battle. Such an unjust trek.

I just hope Selcuk – my friend -- makes it. I’m yet to take the dip.

Sameer

Kashmir diary: One year after Ragda

My mind had been imperceptibly wandering. I’ve been travelling recently, tanking up on a lot of innocent countryside gossip and also reading up quite a bit. If these are not alibis’ enough for my not been able to update my blog, I’ve another fish story. From time to time, I have this somewhat nonchalant urge to not write, as if attempting to rebel with this constant creative pow in me. Thankfully I am back in my element now.

I took a lot of mental notes which have now begun to mishmash in my head. Before it is too late to recollect [being a terribly forgetful chap], I shall jog my memory. Let us start on chipper notes. Cynicism can wait.

On a pleasant August noon, as the maroon sun shone in its relentless form, I along with a band of buddies set off for the hills of South Kashmir. Past caring, past peacock color fields prancing with the rice crop and past scent laden apple orchards, we trundled onto a secluded spot where fronds of shining mist greet you in a perpetual slow motion. We were met with an insane amount of traffic on our way [the cars have more than quadrupled in the last decade] as honks blared with mad abandon. Some geese scurried for cover. Apparently it was a holiday weekend, and I figured out, everyone wanted to holiday.

War-weary Kashmir was emptying out on Pakistan’s Independence day eve. To Pahalgam perhaps. Sixty two years is a long time to keep your fingers dipped in old wounds. While in Delhi that baritone intellectual Jaswant Singh was turning the Hindu rightwing cock and bull story on its head by declaring that Jinnah was a great bloke [which he sure was], and while Pakistanis sang their ‘qomi-tarana’ [national anthem] without having to fear Baitullah Mehsud for the first time in years, we drove on to the lush green woods of South Kashmir to camp, an act unthinkable of, only a decade ago.


My Kashmiri friends are very meticulous. They amaze me with their knowledge of camping tents and allied outdoor gear like gazebos, sun shelters and sleeping bags. Raj and Salus got down to pitch the NorthPole tents and in no time five all-weather tents were up, doors facing one another, high up in the hills of South Kashmir. A brook danced on cobbles nearby. Soon barbequing began in all earnestness and the fragrance of small mutton chunks, marinated overnight, spread. A local, in charge of the nearby fisheries farm, came over to inform us that the smell of meat in the wild may attract animals, especially bears. I knew this was the closest to real nature – virgin, dangerous and best that I could get to. And if ever I attempted to do a mini Bear Grylls [Conservative British politician Sir Michael Grylls and Lady Sarah Ford's son, famous for his Man vs. Wild TV series] this was my moment.

At dot eleven the sole lamp in the camping site [habituated by our five tents] went out. The darkness was the blackest I have ever seen. There was nary a bark except for the sound of clean water. The crackle of palsy laughter and the perpetual stream of gags, perhaps the only reassuring evidence that humankind still existed. In feeble candlelight [we had conveniently forgotten torches or battery operated lamps], more than 7,400 feet above the sea-level, many altitudes away from our loved ones, in the middle of an eerie pine forest, my band was digging up happiness.

I loved the chill that perforated me in a million places, notwithstanding my Puma light jacket. I smelled rain and before long a mizzle began, prompting us to scramble to our waterproof tents. Soon heavens opened up and it began to rain old women with knobkerries [clubs] as they say in Afrikaans. The patter of cold rain on my cozy tent was enlivening and something to die for. [I so love rains] Outside, the wind rustled in the woods, as though trying to speak someone’s name. Staccato lightening lit up the mountain silhouettes. No one really slept that night. We kept hollering at each other from inside our tents, completely transfixed by nature’s awe inspiring nocturnal display. Sleep came at daybreak.

We were awakened by the sweet tweedle of country birds. Like a childhood fairy tale. I ran, with others, to the adjacent stream, loud with the sound of cold water. Usually used to controlled showers in the confines of marbled wash-rooms, it was fun doing a balancing act in the glacial brook. We threw water at one another, we screamed at the top of our voices, as if trying to sing human hymns to the rainbow trout fish that kept plonking from time to time. I was entirely unaware of the sun tan I was getting. [Days later the first reaction from a pretty female journalist colleague at work was thus: Good to have to back, Samy. You look bronze. Were you holidaying in Greece?]

The outback was outstanding. We fetched groceries from a nearby tiny village. Since they didn’t expect a horde of mad boys to descend upon their languid three shop market and hence stocked no poultry, we were guided to a place they called Vayel City [City, in the hills, in a forest range, the guy must be bonkers I reckoned]. Well Vayel City proved to be no NYC. It was another piddly little village with seven shops. Luckily they had chicken. And the foul from Vayel City became our forest feast.

When you go red in the face and your eyes turn mild jade with glee, you know you are high. An olio of untrammelled nature, night long rain and beautiful pals is one such recipe. High up in the green hummocks of South Kashmir, I was spaced out because I’d all the three – a dale so beautiful that you’d think you are dead and this must be the phantasmagorical heaven, they speak of in the scriptures. A million globs of rain, like angel tears, coming tap-tap-tap, quenching our earthy lusts. And friends – you can never have enough of ‘em.

Sameer