‘Again I’ve returned to this country’- (The Country
Without a Post Office)
Both, Nafas and Agha Shahid Ali are migrants who
have been placed out of their own home voluntarily putting them in a somewhat
of a quasi-exilic state but it is their returning to Kandahar and Srinagar
respectively that changes their lives and views about the turmoil their nation
faces. However, with this blog I aim to do something different- to show the universality
of both these people’s narratives in a quirky way.
If a ‘minaret has been entombed’, a child was
expelled from a madrassah in Kandahar.
If ‘his fingerprints cancel blank stamps’, the
pseudo family in Kandahar are looted.
If people are ‘empty’, women and men move in a circular
motion where emotions are lost and completely drowned.
If ‘flames burn our world to sudden papier-mache’,
Nafas’s world is being burned by the thought of her sisters suicide.
If ‘the muezzin died’, the religious instructor in
Kandahar lost his spiritual anchor by asking the children: ‘What is a
Kalashnikov?’
As ‘we look for the dark as it caves in’, men look
for replacement legs.
If ‘we’re inside the fire, looking for the dark’,
Nafas is inside violent territory to look for her sister.
If ‘they haunt a country when it’s ash’, Iran is
haunted when people need legs for a living.
If Agha Shahid Ali asks us to ‘pray he’s alive’, Nafas’s
asks people around her to pray that her sister is alive.
If ‘I have returned in the rain to find him’, Nafas’s
has returned to the desert to find her sister.
If there is ‘no nation named on them’, these people
have no nation or safety. They find home in United Nations camps.
If ‘I must force silence to be the mirror’, Nafas’s
forces the black box to be the recorder of her memories.
‘Should I cross that river?’- Nafas asks whether she
should cross borders
If ‘There’s almost a paisley against the light’,
there’s colorful burqa’s against the sun.
Nafas wants to find her sister to ‘come before (she’s)
killed (her) voice cancelled’.
‘And I reach the minaret. I’m inside the fire. I
have found the dark’- Nafas reaches Kandahar. I’m staring at the land before
me. I have found the sun.
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