Musa

Irreverent as the local drunk

he sways across borders

no thought for sunsets

or war—a sharp eye

on his own shadow.

Forty days of hunger

lope after him

eager to devour anything he drops,

eye his leather sandals

as they wither on his feet

like a pair of dry mackerel.

The Pamirs are thresholds he

stumbles across,

skips over the rivers of Sindh

yet lifts each foot high

to step over beetles’ wings.

Alleys as narrow as a spectacle case

snap open on vistas;

ocean, esplanade,

he skids past pyramids of melons

in some mad bazaar

sprints after a horse-drawn carriage

notes nothing for miles

but a buzzard

clipped to the air.

He recalls no desert

no salt-paved land

no camel no gecko no wild ass;

‘nothing saw I,’ he insists

and that too

is accurate.

As if turning a page

and coming into an illustration

what does he find inscribed

but this being—

shoulders aflame

thighs green

arms charred black—

an ink drawing,

a tree—a mere bush

contrapposto on a grassland—

flames arranged in its palms

as if it sold fistfuls of fire

to an indifferent sky.

The vision leaps,

falls to its feet

sings to itself

taints his white beard

like a bride’s hennaed hands,

flames ascend,

flames full of birds

flames, spirit

flames, claws,

ants crawl

bear the flare away—

Where he stoops to arrest a flicker

his fingers find crescents,

warm pelt;

he holds the embers in both hands.

As for the staff he’d carried once

why, it fell—it slithered away—who cares!

dumbstruck he writes

on anything he can find,

on leaves as large as a camel’s footprint,

on stone.

And crawls out of a dream

as from the gentle trap

of a mosquito net,

heads home

impatient to immortalise

the miracle, this travelogue.