elegies VI

maybe this one isn't so much an elegy, but it's self-indulgent, so let's roll with it.

i've been packing up all of my stuff recently, sorting out my own possessions from borrowed ones, practicing non-attachment as i wrench myself away from that old pair of torn black leggings that are practically indecent to wear. i came across a book that a friend loaned me a while back, a translation of mirza ghalib. among other things, ghalib was a master of the ghazal, a highly prescribed poetic form originating in the arab world and traveling to south asia in the 12th century.

for the first time in my life, i started going all insomniac this year. it's anti-fun. on the bright side, i got through an awful lot of books on tape. one night, after i finished reading some ghalib, i also got to toying with one phrase in my head, and decided to try writing a ghazal. it's, um, not easy.  from wikipedia:

Details of the form

• A ghazal is composed of five or more couplets.
• The second line of each couplet (or sher) in a ghazal usually ends with the repetition of a refrain of one or a few words, known as a radif, preceded by a rhyme known as the qaafiyaa. In Arabic, Persian and Turkic the couplet is termed a bayt and the line within the bayt is called a misra. In the first couplet, both lines end in the rhyme and refrain so that the ghazal's rhyme scheme is AA BA CA etc.
• Enjambment across lines or between couplets is not permitted in a strict ghazal; each couplet must be a complete sentence (or several sentences) in itself.
• All the couplets, and each line of each couplet, must share the same meter.
• Ghazal is simply the name of a form, and is not language-specific. Ghazals exist, for example, in Arabic, Bengali, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Malayalam, Punjabi, Kurdish and Pashtu and many other languages.
• In languages of Indian sub-continent ghazals occasionally contain no radif. Such ghazals are termed "ġair-muraddaf" ghazal. The pre-Islamic Arabian qasida was in monorhyme; like the rest of the qasida, the ghazal itself did not have a radif.
• Although every sher may be an independent poem in itself, the shers may share the same theme or even display continuity of thought. This is called a musalsal ghazal, or "continuous ghazal". The ghazal "chupke chupke raat din aasUU bahaanaa yaad hai" is a famous example of a musalsal ghazal.
• In modern Urdu poetry, there are a few ghazals which do not follow the restriction that the same beher must be used in both the lines of a sher. But even in these ghazals, qaafiyaa and, usually, radif are present.
• By placing his or her takhallus (pen name) in the maqta or final sher, the poet traditionally attempted to secure credit for his or her work. Poets often made elegant use of their takhallus in the maqta.

anyway, i just found it stuck in the ghalib book when i went to put it aside to return it. it's a work in progress (not that i'll ever finish it), but insofar as it's my blog and i'm doing the transitional emotional rollercoaster, i figure i can indulge myself and post a poem i wrote about nepal, on the theme of beginnings and ending. it's after the jump.

मेरो पहिलो आफै पाकेको खाना: my first self-cooked daal bhat

oh daal bhat...you, i'll miss the most.
but, fortunately, i can now cook you all on my very own.

daal bhat is about 50% of what you need to know about nepal. for all of the ethnic, linguistic, and culinary diversity in nepal, daal bhat is the common denominator, the staple meal for the vast majority of the population. it consists, at its most basic, of a MASSIVE mound of rice (bhat), and a watery legume soup (daal). standard additions are some kind of curried vegetable (tarkaari), sauteed greens (saag), one or two of an enormous variety of pickle or spicy sauce (achhar), and possibly meat and/or a little yogurt (dahi). it's eaten twice a day, mid-morning and early evening, served on a big metal plate, all in heaps and/or small metal bowls around the mound of rice. you eat it by pouring the dal on the rice bit by bit, and then MUSHING EVERYTHING TOGETHER AND EATING WITH YOUR HANDS, which is flippin' awesome. you're fully expected to have multiple portions of everything.

anyway, shockingly, i never cooked it for myself at any point in the last two years. firstly, i live in fear of pressure cookers. there's a reason they get used as improvised bombs. furthermore, it's pretty labor intensive (plan on two hours prep and cooking) and so ubiquitous that it really just makes more sense to pop down the street to literally any restaurant. i also have yet to find a good recipe online, so learning how to cook it would have required a lesson that i never seemed to get around to. but i recently bought my own copy of a taste of nepal, a cookbook i've gotten for several people as a present. the other night, both my roomie and i were CRAVING dal bhat, so we just went for it. we think it turned out pretty well for a first attempt, but by that point it was about 9pm, and we may have lost perspective in our starving state.

in any case, full recipes after the jump (hopefully i won't get a cease and desist letter from ms. patak).