The Beloved Who Never Lived, Except in Verse : Mushtaque B Barq

The Beloved Who Never Lived, Except in Verse

Mushtaque B Barq

Doru Shahbad is a lover’s abode. What verve diverted my occupied soles to the place where a dear lover resides under the thick blanket of merciless soil? Ah, Rasul Mir—about whom Mahmood Gami, in downright fancy, professed, “his youthful death is confirmed.” Rasul moved on, yet genuinely moved every noble heart. His private mausoleum is not the only graveyard of his remains; with him, a thousand verses reverberate, reaching the deepest recesses of Kong, his beloved. Love is a fire that burns the edifice of ego. It is the hidden agony of a pulsating heart that draws its pulse from the beloved’s presence. It is a fallen leaf that rests on the shoulder of the beloved, who unknowingly dusts it off or brushes it away, leaving it for jackboots to crush. Rasul Mir’s Persian verses are a prototype of annihilation on one hand, and yet an everlasting expression of the excruciating pain of separation on the other. Kong, a typical rustic girl, got herself registered in the verse bank of Rasul’s heart. His verses stand witness to how an ardent lover of Rasul’s texture referred to Kong as Sondermaal, Kastour, Padmaan, Shama, and whatnot.

What wine shall I pour into the glasses?

What intoxication shall I celebrate?

Oh, drunkard, you suppress the atrocities,

And in disguise go through—

you never taste the tart of pain.

Come under the cherry tree of my village

And see how Kong’s lightest steps deck up my glass.

And from my senses, sense the vintage of love,

Brimming my dried ponds, my deserts, and my dreams.

See the Sondermaal of my notions

Stretching on the meadows of mirth.

Like Kastour, Kong is pulsating and singing my sighs,

That she, on my breast, when in love, would perch.

And like Padmaan of my playful world,

Her muslin headgear blocks the flickers.

Ah! Those verses even Hafiz would have failed to address,

And under the half-chewed moon,

The Shama of her grace would enlighten Rasul’s imaginations,

And up to the dawn, a ghazal would hit the stands.

In his heart, yanking verses Rasul’s heartfelt sighs and groans swing like a door chain that beats exotic wood when a gust surpasses. The moral insanity in genuine love is nowhere, in the ideal world, a shame for a wandering lover. Rasul would travel to Pogal Paristan and, like an ancient bard beneath his own Helicon, rip open his perky breast and observe his first love like a nightingale singing on the boughs of yearning. In that intoxicated state of conscious mind, he would utter:

O Kongi, thy grace in my fancies is like a ripple

That sends a wave across the bay,

But in serving the pulse, fades on the way.

O Kongi, do you recall the tussle of our eyes,

When behind the thatched wall

Your half-hidden, moon-like face

Would melt the Himalayan glaciers,

Where the pulse of this forlorn heart

Oft, in seclusion, wanders for solace?

Then her blushy cheeks would respond by rubbing the tulips from her introverted garden of submission, casting a glance mesmerizing enough to imprint a verse upon the skin in her praise. Her locks would often graze Rasul’s eager goblets like razor edges on young muscular wrists, yielding poetic ink for crafting a nazam for Kong’s bleakness of senses.

Oh, Kongi, queen of my ruined kingdom

Thy soldiers are but models of wax,

No more their razors up to hunt,

But in my hearth of love, like my veins,

Ready to be dusted.

Oh, Kongi, thy tiptoed run-off I would deliberately ignore,

For every rose has but fixed days.

My gaze, you know, would walk along with thy anklets

And would bring me newer forms and frames for thy headgear

To me, never was one like the blunt verses on my quivering lips.

Kong, the first love of Rasul, never lived save in his lyrical verses, never described by local historians. For the last time, when Rasul was fighting against the untimely verdict, he efficiently managed to drag himself to the window side to inspect the landscape that had already dried up for Kong had stuck somewhere, leaving the bard to narrate:

The dew of the last morning

Is artfully arranging my bath,

But alas! I shall soon be exposed

For triumphantly carrying

The visible marks of thy shyness

On the arms of my fallen fort.

This world may not remember you, O Kong,

But my verses—stitched in velvet for you—

The favorable wind affectionately knows

Its incredible job.

The poet departed, and Kong was never seen. Her presence in chronicles is missing. She was known only to Rasul who dedicates his verses to her grace, glamour and gloom. It is believed that Kong was a village girl, light-footed, dusk-eyed, carrying the humility of fields and the mystery of moonlit walls. When she walked, anklets whispered what lips could not. When she lowered her gaze, entire metaphors were born.She might have moved Rasul for so many reasons but Rasul burried her in the verses to make her presence melodiously painful. 

Ishq ne ‘Ghalib’ nikamma kar diya,

warna hum bhi aadmi the kaam ke.”

(Love rendered me useless, Ghalib—

else I too was fit for the world.)

A sigh in the air may seem thin and insignificant, yet the chest that releases it knows its pain. Rasul Mir, for many, is a romantic poet; yet his verses serve in whatever way a loving heart chooses to decipher them. Dense with metaphors, a challenging amalgamation of Kashmiri and Persian idioms, breathtaking symbols, and dazzling diction, his poetry rises beyond mere expression to become an art of living. His verses may at times challenge logic, but the reality these highly polished lines carry has, for decades, ruled hearts. He lives in the depths of lovers like a scent within a rose—one that, when pressed to its extreme, yields a single drop of perfume that blooms through every corner, every realm, and above all, lures one and all.