Umar Nizar
The night listens, with its soft palette of shadows. Daylight colours gradually lose their glistening sheen. Life begins where death abates. Images lurk in the embers of memory. Shadows emerge. Gazes soften, seeking that solace, beloved of the weary. In the smithy of the heart, intensities cool down, settling into primordial life rhythms. Now put on that mask, so the real you can be seen.
Time is not getting you anywhere; only space does, space that corners you into gentrified pizza triangles. That life which was elsewhere, now comes and sits down before you; the night abides. It’s half the time we have, between death and life, limning the love.
Sunshine was a time without stars, and the children played in the streets till they were chased out, into the woebegone edges of the cityscape. The candlelit vigils came first. They drove out the spectral, the inchoate, the subterranean longings of the night. We ebbed into the gutters, into the belly of the beast. The earth salted its buffer zones. The darkness sang lullabies to the rich. The day was a terrain of sweat, flowing red in the fields. The massacres overseen by blue skies, life traced its own past and sought refuge after hours. Finding a snug comfort, it settled there, seeding the night with disgruntlement, agony and fire. The bellows in the smithy heaved, and life flourished in the margins. That was till the vigils.
The vigils and the vigilantes took over the night. Tears interred in wax as fossils, slept through nightmares. The night melted at the tips of their candles, sepia turned into Leica sepia, and then into sepia Hasselblad. We flowed downriver, the effluvium of light. Life went on nevertheless, leaving in and out of the shimmering light that heralded an end to suffering, with an obtuse sense of dark humour. Light, incandescent in our memories, awakened the pulses. We came back in the garb of daylight spectres, carnivalesque of the species solar. Life sprouted from between the concrete mortuaries. The night, dies. The moon follows the sun, as saffron chases the green, and death beckons to life. Bracing for the light, the vampires give up their lives. Blood oozes from the pores of the living; it drains the land of colour. Nightlife made us its nightdead.
In a folk legend, a princess from the netherworld marries overland and, as her dowry, brings the night into the world. The solace of the night envelopes her as a shroud. It sings lullabies to her loneliness. The shadow becomes her mother, and the life to come mimics the life that never was. The chromatic blindness at night brought justice alive, and the gender became one in a platonic tumble. Man becomes woman and woman becomes man, and animal turns human and the human, animal. It never accepts boundaries between species and kinds and quality. In the primordial void, everything flows into everything. If I could channelize a fraction of that vehemence into my writing, I would be winning the lit Nobel every other year. The liberal geeks at the universities and their geekdom have taken over the night. The spectral has turned lethal. Burdened with hopelessness, the indigent once had packed up their bags and migrated into the night. And the nights became cheap. And then the rich kids came, seeking fun and sex and cheap drugs and inebriation. Soon they would display a chromatic splendour that we were innocent of. The new kids on the block opened their dine-out cafes, and malls and discotheques and night-folk became spectres. Everything, even the money, followed the other money. The night, truly becomes darkness visible.
The night had once clothed us, it was our vestment, now in tatters. Its tears are wounds of our souls. We beg in the open, beached in the daylight. The nakedness, the sheer revealedness of the day, its sun and shine and beaches in Ibiza and Vitamin D and rich people tan, make us feel, well, unwanted. Where do we go to shrivel our skins whose faces have the texture of parchment paper? Time etches its artwork on our faces. It is a Biennale in motion. The dayfolk have become the nightlifers. Then they become the lifetermers, and we are their prisoners forever. They swim, amphibiously from the day into the night and from the night into sun and sin, and we are left to lament -the ululation of the speechless. Or tongues are gone. The night, licks up the pain, as a flame would, and the molten pain was here 4.6 billion years ago. The night suffers the day, and sheds its skin, its biography.
Generations live and die on the wayside, their fates written on the obverse of coins – Roman Dinari, Dutch, Portuguese, Groschens and English. Time passes, but the day doesn’t. We yearn for the night, for its softness to wreath us. The day wraps us up in shrouds. We become raisins in the sun, shrivelled, unhoused. Night is the house of our being, not the darkness of the soulless tunes, but the invisible light of the hope to come. We run into the night to escape and sleep off the days as someone fasting would. Overwhelmed as we are, time passes us by, and the night when it arrives, offers no solace; it is a time of murder and looting. This night, is not our night, the night of many-hued darknesses. The lusts of the day segue into the night and push us out. We bleed in the sun as vampires would. The night weeps for us. But we never forgive the day, its stolen light and life. Nor do we forget that the night is our night, its cuddling chasms of proprioception. Our brains bleed out into the wilderness. We are legion, our names are, the night remembers its denizens. The mountain has lions, they visit us often, the night protects, it listens, and the glistening rains nourish dreams. Spectres emerge from ashes and emerge into the dead dawn that bewails its loss. Deliver us from the day.
‘The darkness of the night is a bag that opens with the gold of dawn’-Tagore
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Umar Nizarudeen was at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has a PhD in Bhakti Studies from the Centre for English Studies in JNU, New Delhi. His poems and articles have been published in Round Table India, Vayavya, Muse India, Culture Cafe Journal of the British Library, The Hindu, The New Indian Express, The Bombay Review, The Madras Courier, FemAsia, Sabrang India, India Gazette London, Ibex Press Year’s Best Selection, etc.
