December 6th, 1992.
It would have been a different life and a different story had that morning never happened. It was ten in the morning, and I was just about to hit the road. As I stepped onto my verandah, I saw the entire street filled with people. A few steps forward, I saw a large crowd gathered at the nearby mosque. They had just heard about the news of the demolition of the Babri mosque in the city of Ayodhya in north India that morning. A 16th-century structure, centuries of history, brought down in hours. Quite far from that demolished mosque in Ayodhya, my small town in South India was facing a serious threat of those incidents might spread here too. A sense of fear had filled the peoples’ hearts of similar imminent attack on their own mosque, and they were standing shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, forming a circle as if resolved to protect the entire structure. Silent and still: perhaps saying prayers to themselves or simply lost for words to describe their anguish. The grief that had settled over our street that morning was not only for a building, it was for something far more fragile that had cracked along with it.
Later, I realized that this morning would replay in my mind whenever I gathered my words to write, or even to think. I still have a hard time processing the entirety of the event after all these years. I am not sure how much of this remains personal and how much of it amounts to politics. Is it an everlasting metaphor for the things I have failed to capture until now? How did we arrive at this ironic moment of destruction, at both personal and material levels? Many such experiences culminated in the poem “Evening with a Sufi” from the collection of my poems with the same title.
These dark hours in broad daylight drew me back to my evenings at the Sufi shrines scattered across the landscape of the places I have lived and loved. I began to oscillate between two opposing worldviews—construction and destruction. All around such shrines, I heard people narrating stories about building a community and standing for each other. Where has that threshold gone, where we would huddle over a refreshing steel glass of chai? Was it merely an innocent memory of childhood now?
Amidst such soul-searching questions came another event — once again shattering the desire for togetherness. The poem “Evening with a Sufi,” in fact, was a portrait of another event in 2002. It was an immediate outburst following the demolition of the grave of Vali Deccani (1667–1707), the pioneer of Urdu Ghazal poetry. For me, it is a shrine of love, compassion, and most importantly, poetry. Vali Deccani represents a key moment in the rise of vernacular poetry in South Asia. His grave had been a shrine visited by both Muslims and Hindus alike. Measuring my own steps between 1992 and 2002, I see myself walking through a broken path of hurting stones and thorns.
It is not uncommon for my poems to take me back to childhood. If they don’t, I find an excuse to return and bring back at least a few fragments of memory. This act, however, is rarely to recover some nostalgic past, it is to connect it with the present. It is my way of finding a fine balance amid diverse experiences, underlying tensions, and contemporary struggles. For me, language is the only available option that holds them together. In fact, several poems in Evening with a Sufi blend past and present, and perhaps, faintly, a future as well. Speaking less about the destruction of Vali Deccani’s shrine, the poem carried me through many memorable evenings at several Sufi shrines. Any such evening would bring back the memories of my grandmother and her endless stories about Sufi saints and their shrine histories.
After every prayer at a local mosque in my village in South India, I would visit a Muslim graveyard where I was asked to place a few flowers on a grave. I did this dutifully, with the unquestioning ease of a child following ritual, assuming it was the grave of some family member. It was only later, when my grandmother sat with me and began to speak, that the grave became something more. Her story was the first thread in a larger weaving I didn’t yet know I was learning. She narrated the life of a Sufi saint—not some distant, abstract holy man, but one whose every chapter was woven into the place-legend of my village, into the soil and the stories that made the land feel inhabited by more than the living. She used the Persian term shahid pir—meaning martyr saint—to describe him. At that point, I had no knowledge of Sufism or sainthood practices, but the story stayed with me.
Most of my knowledge of Sufism and its shrine culture comes from such stories, anecdotes, and oral poetry performed by villagers encountered wherever I traveled from my village to other parts of South India. I tried to find similarities, but I always wanted to learn more from the diverse speech genres, images, and Sufi ideas that gave these oral poems and narratives their staying power. Through long years of writing and reflecting on life events in India and the United States, I return to those moments and weave them into new expression. I remain forever curious about how my present dilemmas and conflicts seep into this Sufi past and bring something new back to the surface. This poem, for instance, ends on the image of a sparrow writing something on the grave with its “bleeding beak,” continually trying to “translate its pain.”
I see myself and my reader in that same reflexive mood—translating each other’s pains, reaching for each other’s hands and shoulders. Since then, most of my writing and thinking has been aimed at ensuring that the human chain never loses its innermost thread of togetherness or breaks apart for any reason.
