The Half-Inch Himalayas / Edition 1

by Agha Shahid Ali

Overview

A stellar collection of early work from a renowned poet.

The Half-Inch Himalayas is a stellar collection of early work by the poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001). His most recent volumes of poetry are Rooms Are Never Finished and The Country Without a Post Office. He is also the editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819511324
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	06/24/1987
Series:	Wesleyan New Poets Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.23(d)

About the Author

AGHA SHAHID ALI was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He earned a Ph. D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. His other volumes of poetry include Rooms are never finished (2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture (1972). He is also the author of T.S. Eliot as Editor (1986), translator of The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992), and editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan, 2000). Ali Received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A Lost Memory of Delhi

I am not born it is 1948 and the bus turns onto a road without name

There on his bicycle my father He is younger than I

At Okhla where I get off I pass my parents strolling by the Jamuna River

My mother is a recent bride her sari a blaze of brocade Silverdust parts her hair

She doesn't see me The bells of her anklets are distant like the sound of china from

teashops being lit up with lanterns and the stars are coming out ringing with tongues of glass

They go into the house always faded in photographs in the family album

but lit up now with the oil lamp I saw broken in the attic

I want to tell them I am their son older much older than they are I knock keep knocking

but for them the night is quiet this the night of my being They don't they won't

hear me they won't hear my knocking drowning out the tongues of stars


A Dream of Glass Bangles

Those autumns my parents slept warm in a quilt studded with pieces of mirrors

On my mother's arms were bangles like waves of frozen rivers and at night

after the prayers as she went down to her room I heard the faint sound of ice

breaking on the staircase breaking years later into winter

our house surrounded by men pulling icicles for torches off the roofs

rubbing them on the walls till the cement's darkening red set the tips of water on fire

the air a quicksand of snow as my father stepped out and my mother

inside the burning house a widow smashing the rivers on her arms


Snowmen

My ancestor, a man of Himalayan snow,
came to Kashmir from Samarkand,
carrying a bag of whale bones:
heirlooms from sea funerals.
His skeleton carved from glaciers, his breath arctic,
he froze women in his embrace.
His wife thawed into stony water,
her old age a clear evaporation.

This heirloom,
his skeleton under my skin, passed from son to grandson,
generations of snowmen on my back.
They tap every year on my window,
their voices hushed to ice.
No, they won't let me out of winter,
and I've promised myself,
even if I'm the last snowman,
that I'll ride into spring on their melting shoulders.


Cracked Portraits

My grandfather's painted grandfather,
son of Ali, a strange physician in embroidered robes, a white turban,
the Koran lying open on a table beside him.

I look for prayers in his eyes, for inscriptions in Arabic.
I find his will:
He's left us plots in the family graveyard.

* * *

Great-grandfather? A sahib in breeches.
He simply disappoints me,
his hands missing in the drawing-room photo but firm as he whipped the horses or the servants.

He wound the gramophone to a fury,
the needles grazing Malika Pukhraj's songs as he, drunk, tore his shirts and wept at the refrain,
"I still am young."

* * *

Grandfather, a handsome boy,
sauntered toward madness into Srinagar's interior.
In a dim-lit shop he smoked hashish,
reciting verses of Sufi mystics.
My father went to bring him home.

As he grew older, he moved toward Plato,
mumbling "philosopher-king,"

Napoleon on his lips.
Sitting in the bedroom corner,
smoking his hookah, he told me the Siberian snows froze the French bones.

In his cup,
Socrates swirled.

* * *

I turn the pages,
see my father holding a tennis racquet,
ready to score with women,
brilliance clinging to his shirt.

He brings me closer to myself as he quotes Lenin's love of Beethoven,
but loses me as he turns to Gandhi.

Silverfish have eaten his boyhood face.

* * *

Cobwebs cling to the soundless words of my ancestors.

No one now comes from Kandahar,
dear Ali, to pitch tents by the Jhelum,
under autumn maples,
and claim descent from the holy prophet.

Your portrait is desolate in a creaking corridor.

(for Agha Zafar Ali)


Story of a Silence

While her husband thumbed through Plato, spending the dialogues

like a pension,
in whispers, his inheritance lost,
his house

taken away,
my grandmother worked hard, harder than a man

to earn her salary from the government and deserve

her heirloom of prayer from God. When he slept,
she leafed

through his dreams: she wasn't in any of them

and he was just lying on the river's warm glass, thousands

of him moving under him. He was nothing when he woke,

only his own duplicates in her arms. Years later she went

into the night,
in one hand the Koran, in the other a minaret

of fire. She found him sleeping, his torn Plato, his pillow, the fire's

light a cold quilt on him. She held him as only a shadow must

be held. But then the darkness cracked, and he was gone.


Prayer Rug

Those intervals between the day's five calls to prayer

the women of the house pulling thick threads through vegetables

rosaries of ginger of rustling peppers in autumn drying for winter

in those intervals this rug part of Grandma's dowry folded

so the Devil's shadow would not desecrate Mecca scarlet-woven

with minarets of gold but then the sunset call to prayer

the servants their straw mats unrolled praying or in the garden

in summer on grass the children wanting the prayers to end

the women's foreheads touching Abraham's silk stone of sacrifice

black stone descended from Heaven the pilgrims in white circling it

this year my grandmother also a pilgrim in Mecca she weeps

as the stone is unveiled she weeps holding on to the pillars

(for Begum Zafar Ali)


The Dacca Gauzes

... for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes.

– Oscar Wilde/The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew:

a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one now knows," my grandmother says,

"what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from

her mother's dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all six yards, through a ring.

Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered with gold-thread paisleys

were distributed among the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.

In history we learned: the hands of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,

and the cotton shipped raw by the British to England.
History of little use to her,

my grandmother just says how the muslins of today seem so coarse and that only

in autumn, should one wake up at dawn to pray, can one feel that same texture again.

One morning, she says, the air was dew-starched: she pulled it absently through her ring.


The Season of the Plains

In Kashmir, where the year has four, clear seasons, my mother spoke of her childhood

in the plains of Lucknow, and of that season in itself,
the monsoon, when Krishna's

flute is heard on the shores of the Jamuna. She played old records of the Banaras thumri-singers,

Siddheshwari and Rasoolan, their voices longing, when the clouds gather, for that invisible

blue god. Separation can't be borne when the rains come: this every lyric says.

While children run out into the alleys, soaking their utter summer,

messages pass between lovers.
Heer and Ranjha and others of legends, their love forbidden,

burned incense all night,
waiting for answers. My mother hummed Heer's lament

but never told me if she also burned sticks of jasmine that, dying,

kept raising soft necks of ash. I imagined each neck leaning

on the humid air. She only said: The monsoons never cross the mountains into Kashmir.

CHAPTER 2

A Monsoon Note on Old Age

This is fifty years later: I sit across myself, folded in monsoon sweat, my skin

shriveled, a tired eunuch, aware only of an absence;
the window bars

sketch a prison on me;
I shuffle the stars,
a pack of old cards;

the night regains its textures of rain. I overexpose your photograph, dusting

death's far-off country.


A Butcher

In this lane near Jama Masjid,

where he wraps kilos of meat in sheets of paper,

the ink of the news stains his knuckles,

the script is wet in his palms: Urdu,

bloody at his fingertips,
is still fine on his lips,

the language polished smooth by knives

on knives. He hacks the festival goats, throws

their skins to dogs.
I smile and quote

a Ghalib line; he completes the couplet, smiles,

quotes a Mir line. I complete the couplet.

He wraps my kilo of ribs.
I give him the money. The change

clutters our moment of courtesy,
our phrases snapping in mid-syllable,

Ghalib's ghazals left unrhymed.

Note: Jama Masjid is the great mosque of Delhi. Ghalib and Mir, two of the greatest Urdu poets, are especially known for their ghazals.

The Fate of the Astrologer Sitting on the Pavement Outside the Delhi Railway Station

"Pay, pay attention to the sky,"
he shouts to passers-by.

The planets gather dust from passing trucks.


After Seeing Kozintsev's
King Lear in Delhi

Lear cries out "You are men of stones"
as Cordelia hangs from a broken wall.

I step out into Chandni Chowk, a street once strewn with jasmine flowers for the Empress and the royal women who bought perfumes from Isfahan,
fabrics from Dacca, essence from Kabul,
glass bangles from Agra.

Beggars now live here in tombs of unknown nobles and forgotten saints while hawkers sell combs and mirrors outside a Sikh temple. Across the street,
a theater is showing a Bombay spectacular.

I think of Zafar, poet and Emperor,
being led through this street by British soldiers, his feet in chains,
to watch his sons hanged.

In exile he wrote:
"Unfortunate Zafar spent half his life in hope,
the other half waiting.
He begs for two yards of Delhi for burial."

He was exiled to Burma, buried in Rangoon.


Chandni Chowk, Delhi

Swallow this summer street,
then wait for the monsoon.
Needles of rain

melt on the tongue. Will you go farther? A memory of drought holds you: you remember

the taste of hungry words and you chew syllables of salt.

Can you rinse away this city that lasts like blood on the bitten tongue?


Cremation

Your bones refused to burn when we set fire to the flesh.

Who would have guessed you'd be stubborn in death?


In Memory of Begum Akhtar
(a. 30 October 1974)

1

Your death in every paper,
boxed in the black and white of photographs, obituaries,

the sky warm, blue, ordinary,
no hint of calamity,

no room for sobs,
even between the lines.

I wish to talk of the end of the world.

2

Do your fingers still scale the hungry Bhairavi, or simply the muddy shroud?

Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow,
sobs in dingy archives, hooked to you.
She wears her grief, a moon-soaked white,
corners the sky into disbelief.

You've finally polished catastrophe,
the note you seasoned with decades of Ghalib, Mir, Faiz:

I innovate on a noteless raga.

3

Exiling you to cold mud,
your coffin, stupid and white,
astounds by its ignorance.

It wears its blank pride,
defleshing the nomad's echo.
I follow you to the earth's claw,

shouldering time's shadow.
This is history's bitter arrogance,
this moment of the bone's freedom.

4

You cannot cross-examine the dead.
I've taken the circumstantial evidence,
your records, pictures, tapes, and offered a careless testimony.

I wish to summon you in defense,
but the grave's damp and cold, now when Malhar longs to stitch the rain,

wrap you in its notes: you elude completely. The rain doesn't speak,
and life, once again, closes in,

reasserting this earth where the air meets in a season of grief.

(for Saleem Kidwai)


Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz
(a. 20 November 1984)

"You are welcome to make your adaptations of my poems."

1

You wrote this from Beirut, two years before the Sabra-Shatila massacres. That city's refugee air was open, torn by jets and the voices of reporters.
As always, you were witness to "rains of stones,"

though you were away from Pakistan, from the laws of home which said: the hands of thieves will be surgically amputated. But the subcontinent always spoke to you: in Ghalib's Urdu, and sometimes through

the old masters who sang of twilight but didn't live, like Ghalib, to see the wind rip the collars of the dawn: the summer of 1857, the trees of Delhi became scaffolds: 30,000 men

were hanged. Wherever you were, Faiz, that language spoke to you; and when you heard it,
you were alone — in Tunis, Beirut,
London, or Moscow. Those poets' laments concealed, as yours revealed, the sorrows

of a broken time. You knew Ghalib was right:
blood must not merely follow routine, must not just flow as the veins' uninterrupted river. Sometimes it must flood the eyes,
surprise them by being clear as water.

2

I didn't listen when my father recited your poems to us by heart. What could it mean to a boy

that you had redefined the cruel beloved, that figure who already was Friend, Woman, God? In your hands

she was Revolution. You gave her silver hands, her lips were red.
Impoverished lovers waited all night every night, but she remained only a glimpse behind light. When I learned of her,

I was no longer a boy, and Urdu a silhouette traced by the voices of singers,

by Begum Akhtar, who wove your couplets into ragas: both language and music were sharpened. I listened:

and you became, like memory,
necessary. Dast-e-Saba,
I said to myself. And quietly

the wind opened its palms: I read there of the night: the secrets of lovers, the secrets of prisons.

3

When you permitted my hands to turn to stone,
as must happen to a translator's hands,

I thought of you writing Zindan-Nama
on prison walls, on cigarette packages,

on torn envelopes. Your lines were measured so carefully to become in our veins

the blood of prisoners. In the free verse of another language I imprisoned

each line — but I touched my own exile.
This hush, while your ghazals lay in my palms,

was accurate, as is this hush that falls at news of your death over Pakistan

and India and over all of us no longer there to whom you spoke in Urdu.

Twenty days before your death you finally wrote, this time from Lahore, that after the sack

of Beirut you had no address ... I had gone from poem to poem, and found

you once, terribly alone, speaking to yourself: "Bolt your doors, Sad heart! Put out

the candles, break all cups of wine. No one,
now no one will ever return." But you

still waited, Faiz, for that God, that Woman,
that Friend, that Revolution, to come

at last. And because you waited,
I listen as you pass with some song,

a memory of musk, the rebel face of hope.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Half-Inch Himalayas"
by .
Copyright © 1987 Agha Shahid Ali.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Postcard from Kashmir,
I,
A Lost Memory of Delhi,
A Dream of Glass Bangles,
Snowmen,
Cracked Portraits,
Story of a Silence,
Prayer Rug,
The Dacca Gauzes,
The Season of the Plains,
II,
A Monsoon Note on Old Age,
A Butcher,
The Fate of the Astrologer Sitting on the Pavement Outside the Delhi,
Railway Station,
After Seeing Kozintsev's King Lear in Delhi,
Chandni Chowk, Delhi,
Cremation,
In Memory of Begum Akhtar,
Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz,
III,
A Wrong Turn,
Vacating an Apartment,
The Previous Occupant,
Leaving Your City,
Philadelphia, 2:00 A.M.,
The Jogger on Riverside Drive, 5:00 A.M.,
Flight from Houston in January,
Stationery,
IV,
Survivor,
I Dream It Is Afternoon When I Return to Delhi,
A Call,
The Tiger at 4:00 A.M.,
In the Mountains,
Houses,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Wondrous Poems . . . [B]y an original, passionate mind."—David Ignatow

David Ignatow

"Wondrous Poems.... [B]y an original, passionate mind."

Editorial Reviews

"Wondrous Poems . . . [B]y an original, passionate mind."—David Ignatow

From the Publisher

With these two books, Wesleyan continues to present some of the more interesting new poets emerging today. Agha's well-organized collection traces his physical and spiritual journey from New Delhi to America. While the poet's craft is considerable, readers will be drawn in primarily by his subject. The few poems focusing on present-day America become contrived, making use of too easily surreal images, but the final poemssix short piecesare haunting, strikingly honest dreams of home and concern for the safety of friends and relatives show Agha at his finest. Stringer's poems are more surreal, less directly personal. They use images of waterseas, lakes, floodsto convey pure desperation. The speaker seems to change places with an unidentified ``you,'' trying on masks to find a trapped, abandoned self. These poems keep the reader's attention, as we join the poet in his frantic search to solve his own mystery. Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, ``Soho Weekly News,'' New York

Library Journal