Ghazal of Nationhood
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Less than a month ago, the Indian Air Force conducted airstrikes inside Pakistan. The last attack of this kind took place in 1971, before I was born, and though tensions between the two countries have never ceased, even the family’s fragmented recollections of blackouts, travel restrictions and patriotic songs on the…
In the Agora of Socrates
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi No one knows if it was really in the state prison, the ruins of which are visible today outside the ancient Agora of Athens, that Socrates was kept during the final days before his execution, so many times has the area been destroyed and reconstructed— walking past it sends a chill…
The Locked Doors of Delhi
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi “I’m on a roadside perch,” writes Ghalib in a letter, “lounging on a takht, enjoying the sunshine, writing this letter. The weather is cold…,” he continues, as he does in most letters, with a ticklish observation or a humble admission ending on a philosophical note, a comment tinged with great sadness…
“Once upon a time, Europe really did not matter.” The Silk Roads: An Illustrated New History of the World
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi “You start with a scarf…each 90-by-90-centimeter silk carré, printed in Lyon on twill made from thread created by the label’s own silkworms, holds a story. Since 1937, almost 2,500 original artworks have been produced, such as a 19th-century street scene from Ruedu Faubourg St.-Honore, the company’s home since 1880. The flora…
Song of the Silk Road: A Photo Essay
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi In Tian Shan mountains of the legendary snow leopard, errant wisps of mist float with the speed of scurrying ghosts, there is a climbers’ cemetery, Himalayan Griffin vultures and golden eagles are often sighted, though my attention is completely arrested by a Blue whistling thrush alighting on a rock— its plumage,…
My Swat Valley Story
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The most stunning memory of Swat valley that remains with me since my first visit as a child is the euphoria of the headstrong Darya e Swat, the luxuriously frothy river, like fresh milk churning and churning joyfully. That, and the first time I heard the pristine and full silence of…
“We Too Shall See”: The Case of the Missing Verse
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The danger in being the people’s poet is that the poet may end up being reduced to the limited capacity of his people’s reading, his message shrunken to reflect their superficial grasp of his poetry, his work bent out of shape, and the complexity, depth and subtlety critical to understanding it,…
Countries Dreamed Up by Poets
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi My earliest encounter with English poetry drew a subliminal connection with the Irish poets, a connection I could not easily pinpoint as a student of literature in Lahore, Pakistan, but one that re-emerged with striking clarity on my first visit to Ireland. Seeing fragments of poetry adorning hotel walls, ceilings of…
The Superlative form of Love
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi And there was evening– you were born (raging like a lioness). A monsoon evening– the window wide and the world awash. With this, the window in the story of my first hours on earth, my mother conjures a desire for perspective and possibility. I will grow up seeing the veins of…
From the Khyber Pass to the Great Black Swamp: a conversation with Dr. Amjad Hussain
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi On particularly tough days of my first Ramadan in college, I had vivid dreams of Peshawar, my hometown. Eager to succeed as an international student, I would never have confessed to being homesick but for my Psychology course “Sleep and Dreaming” which required a dream journal. “It’s mid-day,” I noted in…
The Female Anatomy of Letters: A Five-part Essay
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Writing lives in the gut, like the good bacteria and the bad; it carries on an endless flirtation, an infuriating, nagging conversation with the gut’s long-married partner, the psyche. From time to time, it may traverse its underground-cityscape of anxiety, nostalgia, compulsion, its contradictory pull between instinct and fact-checking, its love-hate…
Muslim America in Poetry: A Conversation with Deema Shehabi and Kazim Ali
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Deema Shehabi & Kazim Ali As a Pakistani writer who grew up during the Soviet war in bordering Afghanistan, and one who has never known a time when Muslim-populated cities across the globe were not under attack, I insist on defining my “Muslim-ness” outside the gallery of war, turning away from…
Escaping the Margins: Poetry of Protest, Poetry of Power
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The author as a student at Kinnaird College I began writing poetry on a campus of red-brick corridors, ancient oaks, belligerent crows, and sharp-witted, lively women who thrived on critical thinking— Kinnaird college, in Lahore, Pakistan. In my earliest writing, I seem to have tested truths, grappled with the abstract, as…
Qasida of Water: al-Andalus in the Poetry of Darwish and Iqbal
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The ancient bricks of the mosque’s roof slowly loosen and slide apart, letting in a sudden, high torrent of water that nearly drowns me before becoming a mist of green, garden-filtered light: a recurring dream after my first visit to Cordoba, Spain, years ago. I would remain haunted afterwards by the…
Breath in a Box
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi On the M2 bus to the East side, a man heaves as he steps in with his walker. I have yet to open the box that has the Sufi nai you brought me. When the man attempts to sit down, he has trouble balancing. I have yet to open that box…
The Concussion Year
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The ghost that lurks around the old Bombay Company bookshelf is the ghost of an elliptical future, trailing the past like a spectacular, burning, comet-tail. It is the wispy energy of my own half-dreamed, half-written book that hovers over the rows of books I use for research, mostly works of history…
Baker of Tarifa: A Photo Essay
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Trying to name the peculiar sweetness of Spanish sunlight in winter (lemon soufflé? saffron ice cream? malai qulfi?) before touchdown in Granada, I feel the small plane shake, then gently glide into descent. I’m reminded of a poem of mine in which a character has a dream of flying over the…
Studying the Liberal Arts while Muslim
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi As the election season seemed more and more like being trapped in a carnival where the uncanny is orchestrated to play up primal fears, we witnessed language itself veering off into the realm of the irrational— not only because statements did not reflect facts or reflected only partial facts, or arguments…