-H. L. Mencken in “The Poet and His Art”.

- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 7:06 PM 0 comments

 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sonnets from the Portuguese, 14

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
'I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'—
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.
- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 3:14 PM 0 comments

 
Robert Browning

Meeting at Night

1

The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

2

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!


William Shakespeare

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 3:05 PM 0 comments

 
In Ghalib’s words: “Duboya mujhko honay ne,
Na hota mei to kia hota?”

It’s true. Poetry really is that which is inarticulate in us. You search for the words to describe your condition – you wonder if there even is a name for your condition – and then there is a chance meeting between yourself and an obscure book. Or a lose page that pops out with heaps of dust from behind a blue and red sofa.
A surprise encounter and you begin to speak someone else’s words through someone else’s mouth.
But the heart that feels them is yours alone.

I want to be able to write like I used to before: with that poet’s weakness for symbols, that innocently brazen imagery, that blithe whimsical air of absurdity. That wooziness; a soluble nostalgia that could be whisked into lightheadedness.

Whose place is it to say what I must feel; whose right is it to feel for me.

I have bitten my nails to blood and fish-skin thin strips of human flesh.
I have sunk my teeth into my lips and drawn blood blisters. I have drowned myself in my own bloodbath. The scene of carnage; the massacre – it is my own making, my own doing.

I die a different death with every flip of the card, with every roll of the dice. And what would have been if I had not been?

Would there have been a tiny Mehreen shaped hole in the universe?
A gaping black whirlpool that would have managed – despite the absence of life – to suck everything into it.
Would I have still administered destruction? Would I have walked around in all my blackness and felt my skin?

Perhaps someone could you have put their ear to my ribs and heard the silence of a place where a heart should have been.

What a black thought; blank - filling you up - to the little arteries in your brain with despair instead of magic. Salt instead of water.

Let me now swim to safety.

On the green leather top of my desk in a textured silver frame is the picture of a woman in a maroon skirt. She is smiling in a distant time when smiles came easy. She is smiling out into a time when no one has the time. She holds his arm with a certain air of reassurance. She needs some of her own. She entwines one arm around his, clenches her grey handbag with the other and looks up – in a flash they are twenty-something forever.

Even the bronze vase next to them – with its cheap pink and yellow plastic flowers – will never break and is forever immortal.

- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 11:31 AM 1 comments

 
Salu says that he “exists beyond the scope of existence”.

Not only is that statement as oxymoronic as someone saying that Salu is “dark and short but hot nonetheless”, it is pure bull also. I'm not going to give it any more credence than i would one of those times when two pseudo intellectuals get together and pretend to be learned by saying the kind of things that perhaps Bacon would have said. However, while he mystified, what he said was clear to those who understood it. As for Salu: he is only just a trying philosopher.

I just realised today that if one were to determine the uniformity within people’s discourses about their lives and what was wrong with it, all one had to do was log on to http://www.blogger.com/.

In the words of Carl Becker, every man is his own his historian. Forgive me for manipulating the context of this statement but I just couldn’t help extrapolating it to suit my observation.

Enough techno/psychobabble for one night.

thank you for the inspiration salu.

- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 5:12 PM 3 comments

 
to all the people who hate me:

i only wish i was capable of hatred.

- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 1:41 PM 0 comments

 
my loves!!!!! especially MINA DAHLING! this is a joke baby love!


travelling that long road to wagah

oct 22, 2004.

the reservations were there....but what lay on the 'other' side was beautiful.




Jaspinder Kaur was Paki Punctual – thirty minutes late – and I was in a bad mood. Waking up on the right side of the right bed but still feeling like a stranger is never a good way to start the day. Especially a day that entails getting hopelessly lost on a winding road in a minivan choked with claustrophobically essentialist rhetoric. But there I was, on my way to the Other Side in a scandalous orange Patiala shalwar, armed with a new faith and a Sikh name, newly minted for the occasion.

“I don’t like my Sikh name!” was the noisy lament of one of my thirteen self-styled Sikh companions. “Gurbinder is so outdated!” Having been christened Lajwanti just moments earlier, I could relate to Guru’s annoyance. Sure, Rajinder Singh Bedi had written a touching story about a woman called Lajwanti who was abducted during the Partition, but ‘Lajo’ was a less than euphonious alias. True, I was one of fourteen Lahori students leaving home for India, and if it were utterly necessary that I be given a Sikh name, then surely it ought to be something up to the minute: more chic, less Punjabi.

Then of course, there was also the fact that I was – or would like to pretend I was – completely opposed to the delegation’s fascination with “Otherness”. Still, I went ahead and announced that I would like to be referred to as “Sush” for the duration of the trip. My matter-of-fact declaration went unheard as thirteen voices screamed out “Lajo!” in perfect sync with the unsettling thud of the van flying over a speed breaker. If the road wasn’t bumpy enough, the driver – in his Matrix-inspired shades and Osama bin Laden headscarf – was certainly on a death wish.

“So we have the Sikh names but do we look Indian?” asked an insightful Subaltern Singh. Therein began the process of reducing “The Indian” to the signifiers of his physical differences. When a consensus was finally reached, the results were somewhat disturbing – thick lips, frizzy hair, broad face, big nose and so on. A bit of a caricature, a worryingly reminiscent of the old Little Black Sambo stereotypes. Considering I was in a busload of Lahore’s finest, it was all a bit worrying.

The little reductive squabble was finally and mercifully, brought to an end (or postponed) by the driver’s announcement that we were lost. This was the perfect cue for Burger Singh – who had been eerily silent up until now – to start mumbling curses in heavily accented English. As our literature instructor cum chaperone, it was his ‘duty’ to make sure that we reached and crossed the border safely, especially considering that the trip had already been delayed a day because of “embassy complications”. More like laziness and complete lack of organisation, I thought.

As the van zigzagged its way across narrow dirt-roads and under low bridges, all thirteen pretend Sikhs, including myself, peered out in fascination at the passing mud houses with cow shit splattered on their walls. Our thirty minute ride had already stretched to ninety, and it was unsettling how it had been ages since I last spotted a woman on the roadside. It seemed as if all there was left of this side of the world, still west of the border, were men with scratchy beards, the occasional emaciated ram, and scores of barefooted, suntanned children.

And of course, if Babban Ajeet’s “Why did the Pakistani cross Wagah?” jokes weren’t enough, Santa Singh started bawling a Beatles classic at the top of his voice. “We’re going to Punjab! At least sing a Punjabi song!” exclaimed Preeto indignantly.

I almost burst out laughing. “Hello! We are in Punjab! Lahore is as Punjab as it’ll ever get!” I snapped. I was to regret this piece of commonsensical information and so was everyone else. Thanks to me, Burger – who is forever waiting for an opportunity to show-off the postcolonial rhetoric he picked up at some Ivy League – launched into a lecture about how “we” were still “inextricably caught up in the coloniser’s chains” and thus knew “nothing better than to hum his compositions”. Heavy.

“Don’t say anything against Pakistan,” warned Kamini (pronounced Kum-ee-nee) in her baby-doll voice. “You’re forgetting that the place we are going to is famous for theft.” Not for the Golden Temple, the Jalianwala Bagh Memorial or for hosting the Dussehra festival. Amritsar is famous for theft, because Kamini thinks so, just like Lahore is the place to be if you want to make millions on stolen mobile phones. While these thoughts went bump in my head, everyone else in the van was getting a crash course on how to “protect” their valuables once across the border and into the Land of Coons and Bad Bucks – strong, violent, subhuman creatures, good for nothing more than eating “pure veggie yaar”.

Just then, Subaltern started jumping up and down on the torn van seat, screaming for everyone to “look!” to their right where a platoon of sombre, wily, mammoth-sized cows were walking sluggishly in a line. It took him a few minutes to get over the excitement of seeing what might have been “Indian Cows”. After all, the mere fact that we were “quite near” the border was enough to convince Subaltern that these cows could be nothing but “Hindu”. After a ten minute discussion about the differences between “Paki and Indi” cows, it all balled down to one essential distinction: “Indian cows definitely looked more worshipped,” announced Subaltern, shaking his head in mock sadness. “They will never have to see the butcher’s knife; they will all die of old age.”

Everyone burst out laughing. Subaltern’s astute elucidations were definitely proving to be a distraction from the fact that though God and the army knew where Wagah lies, our driver certainly didn’t. The few passer-bys we had asked for directions had all – not surprisingly – pointed us towards different roads. We were citizens of God’s country and it was only natural that we would be led – over troubled waters - to the unholy side.

Thirty minutes and thirteen almost-dead-with-impatience Sikhs later, we reached Wagah only to find out that we’d been running in a wide semicircle about it the whole time! I flapped open my video camera lens right as our van pulled up at the gate to India. After getting my passport and luggage checked, I went in search for a four leafed clover. Walking gingerly across grass that did not belong to me, I realised that it was as green – if not greener – as the grass back home.

- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 10:41 AM 2 comments

 
This is nothing more than early-morning riff-raff about last night.

Late last evening to be exact, when the only boundary in between
was the exaggerated shadow of candlelight in the darkness.

My face was lit with borrowed colours; his eyelids were batting impish delight.

Our hands were to ourselves.


And for a while to our food: his hot creamy mushroom soup and my steak topped with the most magnificently magical mushroom sauce.

He was coffee, and I, in contrast, coffee with milk: the differences were more than skin deep.

He seems to have figured love out: “Love rhymes only with the heavens above. Still, we have quite a few martyrs in its name and, like King Duncan, more men have been slain in its castle than died of any other single cause. Duncan himself was no fool, as his words testify when the execution of Cawdor is reported to him. He knew that appearances could be deceptive and yet he chose to put his trust in Macbeth.”

While men – I admit - are intelligent, women are cunning: even the most intelligent of men can fall prey. The wisest…the most experienced: the most seemingly in control.

He obviously agrees. “Men are fools as a general rule and twice so when they are dealing with women,” he writes. “Indeed, in the latter case, the majority even tends to act foolish gladly.”

Yes the conversation is all high-flying and philosophical. but it is – for the most part - enlighteningly light, never soporific.

But the undertones are all but clear.
I think. I hope.

The buzzing in my head is dizzy-coloured. Golden sparks and bubble-pebbles flying around confusedly. How lop-sided is his smile: hinged precariously – almost – in that stubbly area between the lips and the chin or titled upwards in rascally glee? What colour are the lips: a cigarette-dyed concoction of purple and blood or a maddeningly seductive cross between flesh and black?

I want to know why he is staring at something behind me: is it the basketball game that interests him or the few, loose wisps of my curls?


I am on the edge, about to slide through. This rabble-rousing is too much.


- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 11:13 AM 0 comments

 
the only thing


i n b e t w e e n


was

candlelight

- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 11:05 AM 0 comments

 
azy hirra and me...in the TONGA! (god where have these pictures been all these years!)

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- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 12:08 PM 0 comments

 
sam and mat - the making of coven volume 2

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- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 12:05 PM 0 comments

 
tonga heaven

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- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 12:04 PM 0 comments

 
farewell morning....right before we made our entrance in a TONGA!

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- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 12:04 PM 1 comments

 
farewell morning...back to the uniforms! (standing (L to R): abeera, ash, me, noora, maryam khan, zany). (sitting on counch (L to R): niazi, hirra, zara). AZY BABY ON THE FLOOR! luv my girls...miss you all...

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- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 12:03 PM 0 comments

 
me n hirra doin the bhangra after our "entrance" - the morning of the farewell 2003

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- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 11:59 AM 0 comments