The river shall be freed from its thirst,
Love shall reclaim its right to speak,
And in the eyes of a beloved,
There shall be no dream of separation,
Only the dream of freedom.
For, my beloved,
The final name of our love is Revolution,
And the first dream of our Revolution is Humanity!
Hailing from Village Mir Muhammad Banbhan, Taluka Mirwah, District Khapurpur and based in Karachi, the capital of Sindh, Nisar Banbhan is a seasoned professional with nearly 25 years of multifaceted experience, encompassing 3 years in journalism and over two decades of service in a public sector organization. His extensive expertise spans content creation, scriptwriting, screenwriting, lyrics, poetry, and storytelling across multiple languages, including Sindhi, Urdu, and English. Nisar has honed his skills in writing articles, columns, and short stories, contributing to various national and regional media outlets. Additionally, he brings a deep understanding of program development, educational advocacy, and strategic planning, having led initiatives that promote quality education and foster community empowerment. His passion for literature and education merges seamlessly, enabling him to craft impactful narratives that resonate with diverse audiences while driving meaningful change in society.
FROM THE DUST OF PAIN, REBELLION SHALL RISE
It is a journey through pain,
and we are the shrouds of history.
On the throats of voices,
we sit like mourners of silence,
searching for the meaning of life,
while somewhere, deep within the centuries,
we press our ears against the wounded earth
and still hear the cries of the oppressed.
War does not always take place on battlefields.
Sometimes, it is fought in the courtyards of poverty,
where hunger murders a child’s dreams,
where a mother buries her sleepless nights,
and where fear, like the deepest root of slavery,
grows inside the human soul
until a man begins to mistake his chains
for his destiny.
Humanity is becoming the victim of its own wars;
the twenty-first century is turning into
a corpse of its own making,
its funeral cloth spread across every eye,
its mourners too afraid
to raise their voices at the grave.
It is a journey through pain.
Still, I search for where it ends.
I wander through the lost consciousness
of the human soil,
trying to recover what humanity
has forgotten within itself.
Sorrow flows through the human heart
like a mighty river,
and like Suhni,
it struggles upon the restless waters,
carrying its grief from one shore to another.
What a terrible age this is!
Every passing moment tastes of poison.
Life has become so strange
that even its name
seems to conceal a bitter draught.
In this century of emotional loneliness,
the battle for life seems already lost.
Yet the blood of the Dravidians
has never surrendered to history.
And still, in the marketplace of time,
human beings wrap themselves in cheap shrouds
and surrender their own graves.
But listen, my beloved!
This is my battle.
This is our struggle.
Do not mistake it
for the mourning of a single wounded heart.
History stands naked before us,
while our eyes remain fixed upon the earth,
searching for the footprints of our identity.
I have left the arms of lonely evenings behind.
I carry modesty like a fragile thread
wound around the grace of your eyes.
I have withdrawn from laughter,
for somewhere inside me
there is a city of unending sorrow,
where every street mourns your memory
and every turning holds
the unanswered question of the oppressed.
When you discover desert evenings
hidden inside my words,
remember:
the breeze that brushes against your body
has travelled through the barren seasons of my soul.
The language of your eyes was untouched,
like a secret never spoken aloud,
and even now
I have not become fluent
in the language of your silence.
Let my feet be stained with the dust of the earth.
My heart, however, has grown old;
my soul has grown weary.
My footsteps have disappeared into distant roads,
searching for the first light of an unknown dawn.
My wandering heart
has even forgotten its own address.
I never used to lose my sleep,
but my eyes remain wet
with a dream whose meaning
was stolen by time.
The cigarettes of burning desires
smoulder through the darkness of night.
Their smoke rises into arguments
that sometimes become the sun,
but rebellious winds
return each morning carrying black shrouds.
Upon the saw of division,
my beloved,
the moonlight has been cut into pieces.
Even the sky has been partitioned,
and the moon of love
has been trapped behind barbed-wire borders.
In the footsteps of refusal,
in the narrow streets of expression,
civilisation must find its way home again.
But tell me, my beloved,
where shall we gather these scattered solitudes?
Your playful, tender body
remains in my eyes like a window,
through which, every morning,
I watch the sun of your existence rise.
Bhittai!
The strings of your tanbura
seem to have gathered rust.
The tents of our colourless calls
are stained with the darkest shades of grief.
The sleepless roads still ask
for the direction of anklets.
Those dreams stolen from our eyes
are still standing
at the doors of midnight.
Someone once saw the moon
beside a naked body at midnight;
someone else passed a verdict
upon the falling leaves of autumn.
Perhaps the greatest crime of love
is simply to live by one’s own desire.
Here, everyone delivers judgement
except those who dare to love,
and the rights of the living
are measured by decrees
written upon the walls.
But now,
we must breathe life into silences.
We must raise our voices.
O people!
History is watching us through its windows.
Cracks have begun to appear
in the walls of these wretched, naked nights.
Wrapped in the red Ajrak,
when we stand upon our native soil,
questions will rise in every eye:
What is our crime?
To love our land?
To dream in our mother tongue?
To refuse to surrender our existence
to the chains of slavery?
The world does not stand beside nations
that bow their heads,
but beside those
who carry their dignity with raised heads.
We are trampling through the darkness
as though we could raise the sun
with our own hands.
Our hands carry more than weapons.
They carry words,
and within those words
live the voices of centuries
of silenced history.
Your promise,
like the empty shell of a bullet,
still lies somewhere in my memory.
The shroud of your sleep
has been torn into countless pieces,
and sorrow wanders through the battlefields.
A wounded body wears its scars,
while a smile conceals its suffering.
But when the music of your bangles falls silent,
every season within me dies.
The river has been murdered by thirst.
Upon the hands of yellowing seasons
lie the dreams of an untouched bride.
On weary shoulders
rest naked villages of abandoned dreams.
If you do not stop the autumn,
what crime have the flowers committed?
If you do not touch the winds,
how will the seasons ever know
that spring still lives
inside somebody’s body?
Let your laughter loose,
I swear by the uniqueness of your being,
and this wounded earth
shall blossom once again.
The shores have laid their sorrows
upon their own breasts.
Where is the embrace of your hand?
Who will witness hope falling away
if you are not here?
The eyes of memories
are still waiting
for someone to return.
My beloved,
who will rebel against the slaughterhouse
if those who love fall silent?
If poets bury their words,
if lovers abandon their dreams,
who will speak in the name of life
in this dying world?
There is a fragrance in rebellion
that no prison can contain.
There is a longing in creation
that rises from the depths of resistance.
Love, too, carries the blood of defiance,
and in the eyes of revolution
there is the tenderness
of a beloved’s dream.
My love begins in your eyes
but travels towards every thirsty eye on earth.
It rises from the breeze
that touches your body
and reaches the courtyard
of every homeless soul.
It escapes the silence of your lips
and becomes the cry
of every silenced voice.
I am not merely a prisoner of your love.
I stand beside the human being
whose right to live has been taken away.
I am the guardian of that child’s dream
whose hands were given the shroud of poverty
instead of a book.
And whenever you look into my eyes,
you will not find only the sorrow of separation.
You will find the blood of history,
the fragrance of our native soil,
and the waiting
for a dawn
in which no human being
will ever have to prove
that they deserve to be human.
It is a journey through pain,
but this journey is not meant for tears alone.
It is a journey
to awaken the forgotten consciousness of the earth,
to breathe life into silence,
to break the walls
that have kept human beings
apart from one another for centuries.
One day,
the shroud of history shall fall away.
The Dravidian blood
shall rise again,
carrying the dignity of its land.
The river shall be freed from its thirst.
Love shall reclaim its right to speak.
And in the eyes of a beloved,
there shall be no dream of separation,
only the dream of freedom.
For, my beloved,
The final name of our love is Revolution,
and the first dream of our Revolution is Humanity!
__________________
