ai saaqi (1), i have always wondered: if a tree falls in the forest and the person chipkoed to it does not die in english, who, then, consoles the grieving? we are taught to cry “help,” not “ya khuda.” but saaqi, i have known devout men to mourn a lynched heretic, seen them gather at his grave with a shroud and sing, 

جہن دل  پيتا عشق دا جام

سا دل مست و مست مدام

(2) الله حق موجود، سدا موجود

(jehn dil peeta ishq da jaam
sa dil mast o mast mudaam
allah haq maujood sadaa maujood) (3)

ai saaqi, they now call this revolutionary! this, which we clung to in our kachchhi villages, refusing benevolent british boxes. this, which we knew like grains of sand know the desert, like leaves know the wind which stirs them.

saaqi, how can i weep in their tongue when ishq da jaam (4) scours it from my gums? but for all of my languages, it is only in english that i know the word “syncretism.” and yet khalil gibran said that you must first depose the tyrant living within you. 

ai saaqi, what name is there for the violence that makes us explain oppression to the oppressor in their own language? there is a reason that our poets write about mansur (5) as if he were a dear friend. it is why ibrahim zauq said,

سمجھ يہ دار و رسن تار و سوزن اے منصور

کہ چاک پردہ حقیقت کا ہیں رفو کرتے

(samajh ye daar-o-rasan taar-o-sozan ai mansur
ke chaak-e-pardaah haqeeqat ka hai(n) rafu karte) (6)

ai saaqi, our taar-o-sozan (7) is a doctor armed with beautiful british scalpel. he slices into land with careful intention, removing ishtiraak so mushrik carves ishq out of aashiq, and aashiq full of kufr beats imaan out of kaafir (8). it is what allaama iqbaal meant when he wrote,

میری میناۓ غزل میں تھی زرا سی باقی

شیخ کھتا ہے کہ ہے یہ بھی حرام اے ساقی

(mere minaa-e-ghazal mai(n) thi zara si baaqi
sheikh kehta hai(n) ki hai(n) ye bhi haraam ai saaqi) (9)

our words choke because our lips are sewn closed, saaqi, our throats parched. the invaders may have wielded the needle, but it was our own sheikhs and great khans that spun the thread. these men standing proud upon noble lineages carved from blood and emptied tongues, who now claim to pour the drink that can quench our thirst. 

but saaqi, it is our minaa-e-ghazal (10) that we thirst for, our worlds we can maintain with our breaths and hands and eyelashes. they tell us, now, that we used to be “syncretic communities” who knew how to live together. ai saaqi, the very air weeps at the cruelty as the great banyans remind us; their tangles tell stories of how colonizers taught us the distance between two bodies so we may fight.

today, outside ahmedabad, there is a fence, saaqi. we barbed it for the british. it scars the land between pir imam shah’s dargah and the temples of grievers whose souls revolt to pay their respects. 

my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother lives in my ribcage. ai saaqi, she asks what this could mean. and i say, oh naani, feel this heat that wracks my body. this rife burn of tearing skin, of radcliffe's line carved down my sternum before radcliffe himself. carved by those i was made to worship.

she says, anaum, meri jaan, we are people of ginaan and salt plains. taar-o-sozan is sharp, and yet finite. and resilience and tears are a jigri dost (11) whose tender face we cradle. they never could destroy us completely.

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1. O wine-bearer

2. Verse of a popular poem by Sindhi Sufi poet Sachal Sarmast

3. The heart that drinks the wine of love / that heart will always be intoxicated with ecstasy. / Allah is truly present, He is always present.

4. the wine of love

5. Mansur Al-Hallaj

6. Understand these gallows and noose to be a needle and thread, o mansur, / that the rip in truth’s veil may be darned.

7. needle and thread

8. ishtiraak: participation, company, partnership; root of mushrik. 
   mushrik: polytheist, can be used to mean Hindus.
   ishq: love; root of aashiq.
   aashiq: lover, another term for a Muslim, i.e. a lover of Allah.
   kufr: blasphemy, disbelief; root of kaafir.
   imaan: faith
   kaafir: nonbeliever, atheist

9. There was a little left in my poetry-wine. / The sheikh says this, too, is haram, o wine-bearer.

10. poetry-wine

11. a friend as vital as the liver