(EXILE AND HOPE)
Sleeplessness has claimed us.
It sits in our bones,
a quiet fire,
gnawing through the night
while we pretend to rest.
We have forgotten
what it means to sleep without fear,
to wake without remembering
all that we have lost.
Even our dreams return us
to doors we can no longer open,
to courtyards where our footsteps
have become strangers,
to windows behind which
another life has learnt to live.
Perhaps we were born
under a sky that blessed and cursed at once,
light at the edges,
dark at the core,
marked before our first cry,
chosen and abandoned in the same breath.
We left in the terror of the night,
with trembling hands,
a few clothes, a handful of photographs,
the names of our beloved dead,
and the desperate belief
that we would return.
We left our gods in their niches,
the smoke rising from familiar hearths,
the temples where morning bells
had once summoned us to prayer,
the Chinar tree that had watched us grow old,
the courtyards where generations gathered,
and the river that had carried
the sacred ashes of our dead.
Who could have told us
that a lifetime could be uprooted
in a single night,
that a home could survive in memory
long after it ceased to belong to us?
Mornings arrive like liars,
bright-palmed, honey-tongued,
wrapping our wounds in tender deceit,
a silk so soft
it almost makes us forget
the rot beneath.
The world tells us to begin again,
that time heals,
that life moves on.
But how does one begin again
when the beginning lies elsewhere?
How does one make a home
where the walls know nothing of one's childhood,
where no tree remembers one's growing,
where the soil holds no echo
of one's ancestors' footsteps?
We have lived in borrowed rooms,
measured our lives by suitcases and travels,
folded our grief into the small spaces
the world allowed us.
We have smiled when asked how we are,
because the truth is too long
for the patience of a stranger.
Our children have grown
under unfamiliar skies.
They know the names of our villages,
the rivers, the shrines,
the gardens and mountain paths.
They have heard of Chinar trees ablaze in autumn,
of snow settling upon rooftops,
of springs whispering beneath the willows.
But how can we explain to them
the fragrance of a garden
they have never entered,
the tenderness of a home
they have never known,
the ache of belonging
to a place beyond their reach?
And yet,
somewhere in that thin light,
a stubborn warmth lingers,
too small to trust,
too present to deny.
Perhaps it is a mother's voice
calling her child in from the cold,
the smell of bread rising in an old kitchen,
or a name spoken in Kashmiri,
the mother tongue
that exile could not silence.
Perhaps it is the heart,
still turning towards the mountains
even when the mountains
are beyond its reach.
But evening keeps no such mercy.
It tears the veil without warning,
spilling its hoarded grief
into the hollows of our chests.
At dusk, the dead return.
Our mothers appear in the silence
of alien rooms;
our fathers stand at the threshold,
still expecting us to follow them home.
And those who died in exile
leave us with questions
we cannot answer.
Will we ever return
to the land that gave us our names?
Will our ashes mingle
with the sacred waters
of our ancestral rivers?
Will the last wish of a dying exile
remain a burden
for the next generation to inherit?
We watched our elders depart
with their faces turned towards a valley
they would never see again.
Their last wishes travelled with us,
unfulfilled, from one address to another.
Some carried the names of their villages
to the very edge of their breath.
Their longing became an unfinished prayer,
passed from one generation
to the next.
We step into gardens
that once knew our names
and now refuse them.
Flowers turn away in bloom,
their fragrance withheld,
beauty without welcome,
colour without kindness.
The springs may still release their waters,
the mountains gather snow,
the chinars burn in autumn's glory.
But what is a landscape
when those who loved it
can no longer live their ordinary lives there?
A garden can survive its gardener.
A house can stand after its family is gone.
A temple can endure after its bells fall silent.
Yet something disappears
when memory has no living place
in which to breathe.
Autumn clings to us,
not as a passing season
but as a second skin,
a living death stitched to the flesh.
Years pass.
The hair grows white.
Photographs yellow.
The voices of our elders fade.
Our children inherit the names
of vanished lanes and ancestral homes,
custodians of a world
they have never known.
The road home,
once so familiar in our dreams,
recedes into a distance
we no longer know how to measure.
Exile is not merely the loss of a house.
It is to carry a homeland within
and find no resting place for it
in the world outside.
It is to grow old
with a childhood that has no address,
to remember a mother's window
and be unable to show it to her grandchildren,
to possess the memory of a home
that may no longer exist as we knew it.
O Lord,
how many rehearsed sympathies
must we endure?
How many solemn words,
how many promises,
how many seasons of waiting?
Why these polished lies
masquerading as hope?
We have learnt this truth in blood,
in the slow arithmetic of loss.
You may water the leaves,
keep them green for the watching world,
speak of shelter while the branches wither,
speak of peace while the roots lie exposed.
But if the roots are severed,
quietly, deliberately,
with patient cruelty,
even the tallest trees,
proud in their borrowed sky,
will tremble,
then break,
then fall, one after another,
until the forest forgets
it was ever a forest,
and the ground, level and mute,
wears the silence like peace.
And yet,
deep beneath that flattened earth,
where no eye turns
and no prayer reaches,
a single root remembers.
It remembers the first rain,
the warmth of the sun,
the tender darkness of the soil,
the hands that once nurtured
its fragile beginnings.
It remembers the children beneath its branches,
the old resting in its shade,
the birds returning each spring,
the fragrance of wet earth
after the first monsoon shower.
It remembers a time
when belonging was not a plea,
when a door opened without fear,
when the name of one's village
was simply the name of home.
The root does not know
when the rain will return.
It cannot promise
that the earth will soften
or the sun reach it again.
But it remembers.
And sometimes,
memory is the last form of courage
left to those who have lost everything.
Somewhere in that buried darkness,
a hope stirs.
Not the hope proclaimed from platforms,
nor the promises printed in speeches,
but the quiet hope of a child
who longs to see the land
his grandfather never stopped describing.
The hope of an old exile
who asks for nothing more
than to stand beneath a chinar,
breathe the air of his native valley,
and feel, for one unguarded moment,
that he has never been away.
The hope that our children
will inherit more than our sorrow,
that they will walk the paths
of their ancestors without fear,
without humiliation,
without having to explain
why they belong.
A hope to rise once more.
To feel the rain upon forgotten roots,
to lift a trembling branch towards the sun,
to send one green shoot
through the weight of a thousand sorrows.
A hope to become a tree.
And then, one day,
when the buried roots find one another,
when the scattered seeds
are no longer afraid to grow,
a forest once again.
Not because the years were kind,
nor because the wounds were healed,
nor because the world
had finally learnt to understand,
but because the roots
had refused to die.
( Avtar Mota )
.Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.
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