The winter is not done yet, this year cold breeze keeps coming back from the mountains and high passes closer to you. I keep thinking of you how are you? Last night my hand was in your pheran pocket I found a cold walnut from last winter the kangri was missing though.
There is fresh snow up there I am told. Is it true that lake froze again did you get milk – you must drink tea did you get some vegetables did Farookh come, with his loaded shikara What did you eat last night, or drink I hope you have some salt. I tried but couldn’t cry.
Open the window carefully, and just a little, only to peep lots of snow rests on western slope guards with guns have a barrack there, they shoot if anything moves – remember Zooni our love, our pet remember? poor bitch had stepped out to pee. did you go out? I remember our door faces east one can see the Zabarwan – a white sheet in this season, like Ammi’s grave stone in Habba Kadal qabristan.
Here in the city I don’t step out it is cold here too, in barren Arawalis I can’t walk barefoot on cold terrace stone it reminds me of young boys without shoes outside Hazartbal, of women wailing at the banks of Jhelum.
तकसीम से पहले जिस घर में वो रहते थे उसे ढूंढने हम अपने वाल्दैन के साथ लाहौर गए। अब्बा मरहूम की फेरिस्त में दूसरे नंबर पे हीरा मंडी जाना लिखा था, और वो गए । वो शेखुपुरा में पैदा हुए थे पर बचपन ग्वाल मंडी इलाके में बीता। उनकी और मेरी ज़िन्दगी के वो यादगार दिन थे।
“Please tell him that his labour of love will light up many of the dark nights and heavy hearts that the enchaining of our Firdaus has resulted in. What was a alley of joy had become a vale of tears. But its beauty, both of its landscape and of its people, lives on in these lovely writings. Bless him for preserving them for those of us who have no access to them. Bless him.” – Nilima Singh on #ishtihaarWall Calendar 2022 (A long winter in paradise) @ishtihaardesign
You have all your fingers on the pulse of your reader, and through your characters, also on the significance of individual and collective human behaviour and actions. For a lay reader some of these actions (of your characters) may be meaningless or could be inferred as trivial – a humorous interlude – and these could be seen as actions directed at no person, but, deeper meanings of these are significant to our understanding of who and why we are, what we are as a society.
As a writer you trap your readers, hold her in a spell, like a magician does to its audience. A ten-year old protagonist/narrator navigates the minefield of suburban or small town India, and, through his loveable gang of friends, blows up every decent notion of parenthood and childhood a society could/should have. A slightly older character, that too a vagrant, a child abused and violated pushed to the street, manages to steer and guide the reader where he wants. That is his power. As a reader you are at his will and command, you start missing this ‘misfit’ if he doesn’t appear for two pages. This character forces the readers to start mimicking his traits and accept them publicly, as a matter of pride. Look at what Laffatu has done! He has brought your fan following to start conversing in his demeanor. The character lisps and stutters yet no one feels sheepish or embarrassed at openly siding with him, joining his street-gang-like style and even speaking the way Laffatu does.
Wow! It is simply a wow thing for an author that his characters are being ‘adopted’ by his readers as ‘their children’. It is only the parents of a growing up adorable toddler who start babbling like the child. On social media, your reader starts conversing in the words and style of the character, succumbs to it consciously and deliberately, knowing fully well that there is a certain shame associated with this disability in our society.
The story or that one dynamic character doesn’t stop hammering us. One character is not enough for the plot. The other ‘gang members’ and tertiary characters too hit us–relentlessly, mercilessly. Not one of them stays static even for a paragraph, even Lal Singh, the roadside Bum-pakora seller who watches the town pass by him every day. He is a banker to ‘his sweet-gang’ not just of the tainted money but ideas too – he is a saviour – a friend, philosopher and guide to the emotionally tormented bunch of youngsters – a second kitchen, a second mother away from their own household. The parents, family, classmates, shopkeepers, teachers, neighbours, girls & women (supposedly the emotional anchors), workers, even the locations – each one – in their shortest of remarks – rip open the ugly seams of our society. Devoid of love, care and grooming the youth oscillate between hope and frustration. If one wants to teach a subject called ‘the state of the nation’ this one book should be on the curriculum.
There is a certain rousing rhythm, a kind of music of the Spaghetti era of Westerns that runs through the book without it being there explicitly. A John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman or a Strother Martin lurking somewhere. One can almost hear muted shrieks and muffled vocals, stretched strings of sobbing guitars, tower bells sounding fear, a steam rail engine trundling over desert tracks, sound of hoofs trotting on rocky west bearing bad omen, a bullet hitting and ricocheting off a metal drum and the precious water draining out of it, a pistol fired somewhere and a hyena crying in the dark. These sounds may not be audible to all but their echoes resonate. Reading Lapujhanna took me back to the time when I first read Raag Darbari. Ashok Pande’s writing reminds me so much of the noted satirist Shrilal Shukla ji. May you continue to illuminate our world with such insightful writing as Lapujhanna.
Ankahi. Unsaid. 
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