COLUMN: FATIMA IJAZ: Neo-Pakistani-Negritude Manifesto

Black Tea-Coffee Jaisa, The Imagined Other

The certain tea of his voice seeped into his skin and through my soul into my hands. I have seen the sunrise kiss the morn till its red and the glow reaches the inner sanctum of houses, houses lighting fires. The fire spreads into the enigma of my cat's eyes and silently strolls onto the railing of my balcony. The finest moment is the kajal line of his eyes, deepening as a black vein on an iris. Only that it is on my eyes. Our souls become entwined as the branches of the tree outside a ramadan smoked apartment. I lift a hand and touch the smoke of his solitude. It simmers like the symphony of syllables of birds that alight and depart, rather like butterflies. Come and go, sweetheart, the space creates longing and absence of words wears a nobility too sacred to be uttered. I remember the significant turn of events like the eclipse that cuts through the night. The cloth of night is fluid and formlessly falls on me and I am swirling into the air, rising. Flying in the night sky I dissolve into the night you are wearing, and your chocolate-skin is tea-reaching on my fingers. I suddenly remember the notes of the sonata's soul-sister, the one that fell on the stairs like water. Water trickling down avenues, pathways, door-knobs, window-sills.....our flooded apartment where have come to rest birds from the magical kingdom. These are the birds of the star-dust of things you said to me, on nights when everything else was still, wonder-struck. Your words grew wings and vanished into the blackholes of my being. Drowning your thoughts reached those timeless, pointless starry stills. I become enigma and sound and structure and solace and synchronicity and splendour and sudden song. You are what I know, as one knows the arteries of a map of the city of one's life. The city where it all happened. The one place that can't be forgotten, can't be replaced. Kinder than baptism by the saint, is your hand placed on my heart. The beating of bat's wings in these dark interiors keeps the flurry in the black swan's mystery afloat. Exteriority of a phrase is spectacular in such a place. To enunciate the very thing that is turning the earth, axis-prone, I lilt toward you. Seven times the dragon-fly flew, seven times it returned to sew into your skin the tattoo of my heart. Hundred encounters fathom the sun on you. The moon is mild on such nights, the mystery is within, shining in the translucence of waves. Washing over the city sands is a desire, that is unquenchable. It persists onto the lonely landscape of crabbish homes. And thus it always will, this is the spell you cast just by being. Tea, coffee, sensation of all things choc, I trace the sand-dunes of your silhouette.