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.

elegies V

the poem from my last elegies post made me think of another one, one of my favorites. it's from a genre of palestinian exile poetry. i've only found this one translation online, aside from where i originally read it a few years ago, in a book for class on the israel-palestine conflict.

"The Traveler"
-Yusuf Abdul al-Aziz
  
He visits the station,
buys a ticket, and goes away.
He dreams of the unblinking sun,
of inns by the sea,
and the woman like a lily.
He drinks her kiss
in bed
near quiet window.
Always he had gathered his days
as the sea gathers its waves at twilight.
He watched them closely, then departed
for inscrutable destinations.
-Did you find the right departure date?
-No, I found the road that has severed the river
from its source.

"elegies" is a series of no-particular-format posts i'm writing as i begin the countdown to my departure in june, after nearly two years in kathmandu... mostly musings on life and lov and transition, what's gone before and what's coming next.

elegies IV

it seems like every day now, something happens that brings home to me, with a stomach-churning pang, how much i will miss nepal.

i'm the unofficial additional roomie in the house across the road, popping over unannounced to charge my computer from their inverter, a luxury. fortunately, none of the various people who have lived here over the last year and half seem to have a problem with showing up home to find me sitting in their living room. c and i are there now, scrolling through my phone to send a mass text to gauge the social temperature for the night. probably only about a third of the numbers in my phone are people who are still here. i don't know why i haven't erased the outdated ones, and say as much to c, who has been here even longer than i.

"yeah," she says, "my phone's like a graveyard for old friends as well."
except they don't feel dead or gone to me, no matter how bad i've been about keeping in touch.

~

when my parents were here, my dad came along to our local bar to hear a friend's band play. it's one of the first places i ever went out in nepal, but a year a half later, it's like an extension of my living room, my personal nepali cheers. it is seedy, smoky, and dark, with layer upon layer of markered graffiti on the yellow walls; i am convinced i will never find any bar that i like as much, no matter where i go. a huge group of friends has gamely shown up to have a beer and chat to my dad. i, almost greedily, watch their faces and let their conversations wash around me. i am warmed by quiet pleasure. what remarkable, smart, funny people i know, and have known, here. my memory fills in the images of all of the people who aren't here now, who left a month or six months or a year ago, sitting around with us, as if they left yesterday. i wish i could introduce my parents to them, as well, but they'll have to rely on stories, unpaired with faces.

~

we've had a great afternoon, despite the rain. we grilled for my roomie's birthday, and people came in and out all afternoon and evening to eat and drink and talk. i took one last set of pictures of the birthday boy and a close friend of his, who was leaving to go back to australia, and later marveled at the open love on their faces as i scrolled through the photos. by this point, it's gotten dark, and i'm having a side conversation with another friend. he's in a long-distance, cross-cultural relationship, and it is understandably hard. i tell him, although i'm single, i think i know how he feels. i have been lucky enough to have many, many people i love, from college, from childhood, from nepal. they're scattered all over the world now, but i still feel connected to them. it is an exhausting blessing, i say. in my (rare) quiet moments, when i think about them, the connections soothe me, but i also feel as if i'm pouring love through those connections, beginning with me in kathmandu, end emptying in america, australia, spain, england, india, south africa. you sometimes wonder if the supply is unending, or if you'll get to the bottom of the well and wonder just what's left of you.

later that night, people are clearing out. one of my close friends comes over and squeezes me, hard. his cologne is familiar and overwhelming.

"if you don't keep in touch with me, i'm going to come find you," he says. "and take care of yourself. i won't be around to"

i'm surprised. he is a notoriously unsentimental person. it's one of the reasons we get along. "whatever," i say gruffly, "i'm leaving in two months, not tomorrow."

"maybe," he says, "but here, two months is tomorrow."

~

it's not just the people, i find. 

wrestling with my landlord's puppy; smelling the chicken roasting in the kebab shop on the corner; passing the rather startled looking woman's face painted on the sign for the "hair saloon" down the street; cheerfully arguing with cab drivers; making plans to get tea with the owner of the grocery store; the ease of buying veggies on my way home from work; clucking over the unseasonal rain, but seeing the mountain peaks emerge in the distance as the winter pollution is cleared from the air. 

all of these things and a million more overwhelm me with a sudden, dazzling, bewildering feeling of love on a daily basis. maybe it's that this is the first place i've lived for long enough, outside of the pre-existing structures of family or university, to feel like a home i've made for myself. it is, as much as my hometown or my college years, such a large part of who i am, partly because i'm so young. 

but this sense of love and homecoming i feel in kathmandu is inextricably tied to longing for the other homes i've had. while i sit and drink tea at the cafe, just in front of the ganesh statue, the sun hits me a certain way or some song comes on, and i'm suddenly yanked away. i'm tossing my deli-juice soaked apron off at the end of work and heading to the beach on the cape; i'm lying with friends in the courtyard of our residential college, our textbooks still closed as we stare up at the may blossoms against brown stone and iron of the gothic architecture.

the paradox of such simultaneous embededness and dislocation is dizzying.

~

before i left for nepal, i read a poem about kathmandu that a childhood friend's mother had given me. that's nice, i thought. the book stayed on my shelf when i moved here. 

she recently ran into my parents, a small town inevitability, and, learning that my time here was drawing to a close, sent me the poem again via email. this time i read it twice. once to myself, and once to my then roommate, who was leaving the next day for the states. after, we sat together on the porch, quietly, listening to the dogs bark, and, i imagine, feeling the levels in the well fall, and rise, and fall again.

~

SESTINA: HERE IN KATMANDU
Donald Justice (1925-2004)

We have climbed the mountain.
There's nothing more to do.
It is terrible to come down
To the valley
Where, amidst many flowers,
One thinks of snow,

As formerly, amidst snow,
Climbing the mountain,
One thought of flowers,
Tremulous, ruddy with dew,
In the valley.
One caught their scent coming down.

It is difficult to adjust, once down,
To the absense of snow.
Clear days, from the valley,
One looks up at the mountain.
What else is there to do?
Prayer wheels, flowers!

Let the flowers
Fade, the prayer wheels run down.
What have they to do
With us who have stood atop the snow
Atop the mountain,
Flags seen from the valley?

It might be possible to live in the valley,
To bury oneself among flowers,
If one could forget the mountain,
How, never once looking down,
Stiff, blinded with snow,
One knew what to do.

Meanwhile it is not easy here in Katmandu,
Especially when to the valley
That wind which means snow
Elsewhere, but here means flowers,
Comes down,
As soon it must, from the mountain.

"elegies" is a series of no-particular-format posts i'm writing as i begin the countdown to my departure in june, after nearly two years in kathmandu... mostly musings on life and love and transition, what's gone before and what's coming next.

i don't think it's possible to forget the mountain.
 
 

elegies III

i don't know whether it's coming from a house or a store, but there is one place on my walk home from work, just as i come up this little slope, past the intersection, where i am always engulfed in the smell of fresh ground cumin.

 

"elegies" is a series of no-particular-format posts i'm writing as i begin the countdown to my departure in june, after nearly two years in kathmandu... mostly musings on life and love and transition, what's gone before and what's coming next. i will never use pre-ground spices ever again.

elegies II

i hadn't planned on, well, planning my next move, but a few things cropped up on my RSS feeds, and so i applied. now i have nightmares about interviews. it's overwhelming to consider the sheer number of possibilities (not to mention constraints), and to play out the the domino-effect that my choices now may have on my whole life path. i do find that this paralysis in the face of options is mitigated by my youth, relative to many of my other friends and fellow itinerants in kathmandu. one of these recently said:

"The other evening, I found myself once again wondering what it was that I was being called to do with my life and I decided that it was to walk in the light.

This afternoon I started this blog because I wanted to know what, exactly, we meant by that"

check it out.


"elegies" is a series of no-particular-format posts i'm writing as i begin the countdown to my departure in june, after nearly two years in kathmandu... mostly musings on life and love and transition, what's gone before and what's coming next. 

elegies I

i'm having a beer with my roommate and another friend on the front porch of my house. my parents are arriving in kathmandu the next day. i'm excited, if slightly anxious about justifying my last year and a half of life decisions to them. i describe to my friends (s. is nepali and j. is an aussie who's been here long enough to know the ropes) some of the ways i've tried to describe life in kathmandu to my parents.

"i tell them, it's like... in the states, if you were to, say,  accidentally step on a dead animal or get run off the sidewalk by a motorcycle bearing down on you from behind...that would be an extraordinarily bad day, like a need-to-go-debrief-with-a-friend-over-multiple-beers level of disruptive. here, it just...is. unpleasant perhaps, but nothing out of the question"

s. laughs and j. says, "well, i'm ok with all of it, except not having electricity when the [cricket] world cup is on." he holds his computer up, squinting at the screen as he tries to register a better wifi connection.

the power cuts out. without the light pollution, the stars are brighter than you would see in any urban area in the states. i hug my knees closer to my chest.  from late february through mid-april, kathmandu has dry and warm and bright, playing-hooky to lie in the sun kind of weather, but it is still gets a little chilly at night.

"mm yes. we do lead a charmed life," i say, taking a sip. i am very much serious.

"elegies" is a series of no-particular-format posts i'm writing as i begin the countdown to my departure in june, after nearly two years in kathmandu... mostly musings on life and love and transition, what's gone before and what's coming next.