With burning colours is how we welcome the winters. The word "burning" does identify with the current scenario which has been so since a long time now, ever since I can remember.
Burning on the outside of course
And burning on the inside too
Winters seem to be dreary, removing all signs of life, sucking the spirit out of the air. Still the beauty of autumn is enough to entrance one and dismiss from his mind the advancing end of life.
A little fire
A little more
A little red
A little more
Leaves you dead, just like before
I have always characterized the season by red and brown chinar leaves, a sight which used to be very common in Autumns at my school. I remember how I used to love playing with the dead, fallen leaves, knowing little what it meant, knowing little of the lifelessness that lurked.
It all begins with a little change. The air is different, the end of something and the beginning of the other thing is sensed.
A little change in colour
A little more
A little stranger air
A little more
A little sleep
A little more
Little by little is how silence appears - the soul departs
It amazes me how I am writing about something and how it relates to a greater something else. A pleasure for those who can put the pieces together and a little dissatisfaction for those who fail to do so.
The entire scene of burning and dying is an exhibition of how life ceases to exist here. Be
it the Chinars in my school or the Kashmir on the streets.
Its remarkable to notice, when one starts to write about Kashmir, no matter what aspect he decides to choose he unintentionally ends up pointing out the most distressing one and the one most obvious to him. The one I have learned to never disunite from the very image I hold of the place. Its the pain deep inside which keeps reminding you that you are alive, still alive.
As this season goes by, the count of the leaves shed rising, the number of Kashmiri lives lost at the hands of those who we despise grows at a faster rate, much faster. This makes it seem that it is much of an uncomplicated and facile task for those who effortlessly bring an end, an end to lives not considered of any value and an end to the pain they have faced all these years, leaving Kashmir again in immeasurable but familiar anguish.
Agha Shahid Ali wrote,
"A Brigadier says, the boys of Kashmir break so easily, we make their bodies sing, on the rack, till no song is left to sing"
" I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir,
and the shadowed routine of each vein
will almost be news, the blood censored,
for the Saffron Sun and the Times of Rain. "
-Agha Shahid Ali
