For A Friend Who Is About Not To Marry Poem by feroz rather

When one of my friends,
Who always allowed me to watch him
From the fringes into his soul,
Through sweet motherly innuendoes
Came to know his young beautiful cousin
As his future wife, he turned to a feeling, perhaps, unlike thought……

Questions and giggles in anticipation……

‘How would it alter the idea of my self’?

Would he forget the idea
Of the idea in the intelligence of God,
And Plato kept in pocket
Be gradually rubbed off from the bedroom
To the backyard, buried under the bunches of flowers
Which grow so naturally in the summer, in Kashmir.

In her soft mellow arms
Would he cease to be
Freud’s pupil, a naive nihilistic, may be,
And without reverence for Reason,
Peek softly through the maroon curtains
Which she got him in dowry,
At apple-orchids of desire
And cease to look beyond;
The oppressed hills of Pir-Panchal.…

What will happen to him
To the freedom of restlessness, cynicism
The natural gifts from ‘the pathology of power’,
And to be on its margins with cold revolutionary thought.


Cursing Aristotle to set it on,
What about the timeless hours
When we sipped cheap tea
The will of our common friend, of self-annihilation,
Would he no more think of killing death,
Would Rumi no more enter his private rooms,
Would she who like all of us
Was born a Muslim in Occupation
And Un-Islamic ignorance, intrusion and Patriarchy,
Wobble at ‘Weh-Datul Wajood’,
You’re the then liking of absolute anarchy

Would he be able to tell him
How he had suddenly grown scared of dogs
After reading Rousseau in college
And yet thought somehow
That dogs are more rational than men…..



‘She watches MTV and dresses up nicely,
Is so lovingly innocent, ignorant,
In the first year of a Humanities course, in College’.

‘Her ill-cut nose and deep black eyes
With much blacker and profuse eyelashes,
Lend a Gothic grace to her lady-like face’.

‘Would sex liberate me
From the freedom and tyranny
Of this ceaseless thought’?

‘Would it rob me
Off my poverty to be
The complacence of the comprador’?

‘Would Occupation seem no more oppressive,
Ignorance no more non-existence,
And freedom of thought and self no more a dream,
While I lie within her warmth on our soft-curtained bed’?