Perhaps life is an old shrine hidden somewhere beyond the reach of maps.
Inside it, there is a small locked chamber.
Its door has no handle on the outside…
Nisar Banbhan
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.
The Door Within
Perhaps life is an old shrine hidden somewhere beyond the reach of maps.
Inside it, there is a small locked chamber.
Its door has no handle on the outside.
All our lives, we walk around it.
We touch its weathered walls.
We leave our names upon them.
We wait through summers and winters.
We watch the moon disappear and return,
Again and again,
As if the sky were teaching us the secret of coming back.
Yet the door does not open.
Then, one night, when the city has spent its last light and even time seems to have forgotten the sound of its own footsteps, something knocks.
Not from the corridor.
Not from the world.
From within.
And perhaps, at that moment, we understand:
There was never a door.
There was only ourselves,
Standing between the seeker and what was being sought.
The strange mercy of life is that whatever we spend our years searching for beyond ourselves has been sitting quietly inside us from the beginning.
We give it different names.
Love.
God.
Loneliness.
Longing.
The memory of someone who left before we were ready to let them go.
Perhaps the names change because the human heart needs many languages for the same wound.
But the wound is one.
And perhaps that is why the memory of the beloved is more sacred than presence.
Presence gives us a face.
Memory takes the face away
And leaves us alone with the soul.
When we love someone truly, something begins to dissolve.
First, the boundaries.
Then the certainties.
Then the small kingdom we call I.
Until one day the beloved and the lover stand so close to one another that neither can tell where one ends and the other begins.
Perhaps the one I have been seeking
Has been seeking me all along.
Perhaps longing is simply the echo of a call
We have not yet learned how to hear.
You came into the sky of my heart like the pale moon of spring.
You did not bring light with you.
You brought back the memory of light.
And that was enough.
Since then, even my darkest nights have carried a faint remembrance of dawn.
I tried to forget you.
I tried the usual roads
Silence, distance, reason, time.
But every road I took toward forgetting
Ended at your door.
That was when I learned that some people do not leave us.
They leave the world.
They leave the room.
They leave our hands.
But they enter the invisible country within us
And become part of its landscape.
After that, there is no farewell.
Only distance.
And even distance becomes a form of nearness.
To meet them again, we no longer need to travel outward.
We must descend.
Into that quiet place
Where the soul remembers what the mind has forgotten.
Sometimes I imagine Rumi dancing in the evening light of Konya.
Perhaps his turning was never around a beloved standing before him.
Perhaps he was turning around the emptiness at the center of his own being.
Round and round’s
Until the dancer disappeared.
Until the dance remained.
Until even the word self-became too heavy to carry.
Perhaps that is what annihilation means:
Not death,
But the gentle disappearance of everything that insists on being separate.
Sachal knew another language for the same secret.
When the self becomes transparent,
The One begins to appear everywhere.
In the trembling leaf.
In the dust beneath our feet.
In the breath moving through the night.
In the silence between two heartbeats.
And, sometimes,
In the face of the one we love.
My beloved,
Sometimes I wonder whether I love you at all
Or whether I love, through you,
That nameless presence
That has been restless inside me since I first learned how to desire.
There is something within me that refuses to sleep.
At the edge of every night,
When consciousness becomes thin
And dreams begin to loosen the knots of the day,
It comes quietly and places its hand upon my shoulder.
It says:
The journey is not over.
I ask,
“Where are we going?”
Silence.
“Whom are we looking for?”
Silence again.
Then, from somewhere deeper than thought,
A voice rises:
If you want to find the One you seek,
First step out of His way.
Perhaps this is where the mystical journey begins.
Not with finding.
With surrender.
Not with becoming more of who we think we are,
But with becoming less.
Less name.
Less pride.
Less certainty.
Less possession.
Until even love itself must be surrendered
To the river that has no shore.
Only then does the secret reveal itself:
Love was never a person.
A person may awaken it.
A face may become its doorway.
A voice may carry its fragrance.
A memory may keep its lamp burning.
But love itself is a fire without a name.
It enters us quietly
And begins to burn away everything that is not eternal.
Name.
Form.
Pride.
Possession.
The little story we have written about ourselves
And mistaken for the truth.
Perhaps this is why the deepest wounds
Are sometimes the most beautiful doors.
At night, when the wind moves its fingers across the tablet of my heart, it does not write poetry.
It opens old wounds.
And inside every wound
Another door.
Behind every door
Another silence.
And at the farthest edge of that silence,
Where even longing has forgotten its own name,
There is you.
Or perhaps
There is the One
Who has been calling me
By your name.
I no longer know whether I remember you
Or remember Him.
Perhaps there is no difference.
Perhaps every true remembrance eventually leads beyond the remembered.
Perhaps the beloved is only a lamp placed beside the road,
So that the traveller may discover
The light was never outside him.
I only know that when the night becomes deep enough,
Something begins to glow within me.
Not your face.
Not mine.
Not even a face at all.
Only light.
A light without a source.
A light that asks for nothing.
A light that does not illuminate the world
But dissolves the darkness within the one who sees it.
And I sit there for a long time,
Without asking where it came from,
Without asking where it will lead,
Without asking who I am.
For perhaps this is the final grace of life:
To walk so far into oneself
That the seeker disappears,
The journey disappears,
The question disappears
And there,
In the innermost room of the heart,
You discover the One
You spent your whole life searching for outside.
Not standing before you.
Not waiting for you.
But quietly,
Eternally,
Bowed in prostration
Within you.
___________________
Read: Babies Who Never Saw the World
