a soul lies strewn aside, a rotting mangled heap, a putrid heart decays inside, a will too dehydrated to weep, a festering me, aching to hide, a mind too splintered to sleep.
a severance from the here, the now, a life of constantly needing to bow, a torn wail of pain, wailed somehow, a frigid heart with nothing to endow, a stench reeks from each guilty bow, a stream of hot tears on blinded brow.
what happens when the mind itself claws, scratches, and mercilessly lashes, what can you do when the soul itself shatters, and is slayed by the blade that slashes,
it’s all a barren pantomime of unending dread, it’s all a freak-show until everything is dead.
2.
it’s all just the ha-ha-hee-hee of cacophonous gibberish,
It’s all just the ha-ha-hee-hee of festering rubbish …
Message of condolence from President Nelson Mandela to my father on the day of my mother’s death from ALS in Johannesburg April 2008
My mother reuniting with Comrade Ahmed Kathrada, who spent 27 years in jail with Comrade Nelson Mandela and other Rivonia Trial accused. (Photograph taken by me in Stockholm, Sweden mid-1990). On the right is Comrade Winnie Mandela (who along with Nelson Mandela was friend and comrade of the family dating back to the 1950s) and in the background on the left is my father
My mother addressing an anti-apartheid meeting in New Delhi mid-1980s, alongside the wife of the Amvassador of SWAPO of Namibia and Mrs. Margaret Alva
For my mother, Zubeida Moolla, and for the countless women, names unknown, who bore the brunt of Apartheid, and who fought the racist system at great cost to themselves and their families and for women fighting for human dignity the world over
My mother meeting President Nelson Mandela upon his release from prison 27 years after they last saw each other. (Photograph taken by me in Stockholm, Sweden, in the summer of 1990)
My mother meeting President Nelson Mandela upon his release from prison 27 years after they last saw each other. (Photograph taken by me in Stockholm, Sweden, in the summer of 1990)
My mother with President Nelson Mandela’s mother, alongside South African women of all races protesting the imprisonment of their loved ones who were thrown in Apartheid South Africa’s jails as political prisoners.
(Photograph from The Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa)
My mother addressing an Anti-Apartheidmeeting in New Delhi – mid 1980s
South African Struggle Poster
✊🏾 For women everywhere ✊🏾
Pregnant, your husband on the run, your daughter just a child, a few years old,
they hauled you in, those brutish men, into the bowels of Apartheid’s racist hell.
They wanted information to sell your comrades out, you gave them nothing, these savage men, who skin just happened to be lighter,
You did not cower, you stood resolute,
you, my mother, faced them down, their power, their ‘racial superiority’, their taunts, their threats.
You stood firm, you stood tall.
You, like the countless mothers did not break, did not fall.
You told me many things, of the pains, the struggles,
the scraping for scraps,
the desolation of separation from your beloved children,
by monstrous Apartheid, by brutish men, whose skin just happened to be lighter.
You told me many things, as I grew older, of the years in exile, of the winters that grew ever colder.
You were a fighter for a just cause, like countless other South African women,
you sacrificed much, you suffered the pangs, of memories that cut into your bone, your marrow,
you resisted a system, an ideology, brutal and callous and narrow.
Yes,
you lived to see freedom arrive,
yet you suffered still,
a family torn apart, and struggling to rebuild a life,
all the while, nursing a void, that nothing could ever fill.
I salute you, mother, as I salute the nameless mothers,
the countless sisters, daughters, women of this land,
who fought,
sacrificing it all by taking a moral and principled and valiant stand.
I salute you,
my mother,
and though you have passed, your body interred in your beloved South African soil,
you shall remain, within me, an ever-present reminder,
of the cost of freedom, the struggles, the hunger, the toil.
I salute you!
Viva the undying spirit of the women Viva!
For the brave women of South Africa, of all colours, who fought against racial discrimination and Apartheid and for women fighting for human dignity the world over
South African Struggle Poster
South African Struggle Poster
South African Struggle Poster
South African Struggle Poster
My mother and my then 7-month old sister Tasneem, following the arrest of my father under the infamous “90-day Detention Law” raids against anti-apartheid activists in 1963
The letter from President Nelson Mandela to my father on the day my mother passed away.
My parents were comrades of President Nelson Mandela stretching back to the 1950s
For a Mother …
She left me, with only the thoughts of her embrace to warm me, in frigid mornings of tomorrows yet to come.
She left me, with her words of tender truths to shroud me, in the coming evenings of stabbing sleet and hail.
She left me, yet she stays forever within me,
in my waking dreams and in my restful thoughts,
she stays forever within me,
she remains an abiding part,
of the love, the pain, the tears,
and thusly, we shall never, ever be truly apart.
( for my mother, who passed away on the 4th of April 2008, after a long battle with Motor-Neurone Disease or ALS, and for every brave soul battling ALS and other illnesses across the globe )
My mother used tell me this with tears in her eyes.
My mother left South Africa in the 1960’s to join my father who was in political exile at the time in Zambia and Tanzania.
My father was a close comrade and friend of Nelson Mandela and shared the cell next to Mandela during one of their periods of being jailed by the Apartheid security services.
My father later escaped from Marshall Square jail along with his comrades, Abdulhay Jassat, Harold Wolpe, and Arthur Goldreich.
The four escapees were then were spirited out of South Africa as there was a then £2000 reward for them to be captured – dead or alive.
In 1970 my father was deployed by the African National Congress of South Africa (ANC) to India to be its Chief-Representative there.
I was born in New Delhi a couple of years later in 1972.
My mother and father spent two years in Mumbai (then Bombay).
One afternoon my father fell and broke his leg.
My mother knocked on their neighbour’s door of the apartment complex where they lived.
The neighbour was an elderly Punjabi lady.
My mother asked the elderly lady for assistance in calling a doctor to see to my injured father.
A Zoroastrian (Parsi) ‘bone-setter’ was promptly summoned.
My mother and the elderly neighbour got to talking and the lady asked my mother where they were from, as their accents were clearly not local.
My mother told the elderly Punjabi lady that my father worked for the African National Congress of South Africa and had been forced into exile to continue to struggle to raise awareness internationally about the appalling situation in Apartheid South Africa.
My mother also mentioned that they had to leave their two young children (my siblings, whom I met only later in life) behind in South Africa, in the care of grandparents, and that they were now essentially political refugees.
The elderly lady broke down and wept uncontrollably.
She told my mother that she too had to leave their home in Lahore in 1947 and flee to India with only the clothes on their back when the partition of the subcontinent took place and when Pakistan was torn from India and formed, due to narrow religious and sectarian reasons, whose repercussions are felt to this day.
This was also a time when religious violence wreaked havoc, and untold suffering and death for millions of human beings.
The elderly lady then asked my mother what her name was.
‘Zubeida’, but you can call me ‘Zubie’.
The Punjabi woman hugged Zubeida some more, and the two women, seperated by age and geography, by religion and all the things that seek to divide humanity, wept, for they could understand the pain and trauma of a shared experience.
The elderly Punjabi lady told my mother that she was her ‘sister’ from that day on, and that she too felt the pain of exile after being forced to become refugees, and what being a refugee felt like.
Zubie and her husband Mosie (my father) and the family next door became the closest of friends.
Then came the time for Mosie and Zubie to leave for Delhi where the African National Congress (ANC) office was to be officially opened.
The elderly Punjabi lady and Mosie and Zubie said their goodbyes.
A year or two later, the elderly lady’s daughter Lata married Ravi Sethi and the couple moved to Delhi.
The elderly lady telephoned Zubie and told her that her daughter was coming to Delhi to live there, and that she had told Lata, her daughter that she had a ‘sister’ in Delhi, and that she should not feel alone.
Lata and Ravi Sethi then moved to Delhi in the mid-1970’s.
Lata and Zubie became the closest of friends and that bond stayed true, till the both my mother passed away in 2008.
My father and I still feel a close bond with Lata and Ravi Sethi, and vice versa.
A bond that was forged between Hindu and Muslim and between two countries of South Africa and of India, shattering the barriers of creed and of time.
A bond strong and resilient, forged by the pain and trauma of a shared experience.
That is why I shall never stop believing that hope shines still, for with so much religious bigotry almost consuming our world today, there will always be a woman, somewhere, anywhere, who would take the ‘other’ in as a sister, and as a fellow human being.
And that is why, I believe, that there will always be hope.
Hope in the midst of unbearable pain and hope in the midst of loss and of unspeakable suffering.
Hope.
For we can never give up hope for a better world.
(For aunty Lata’s late-mother, my mother’s ‘sister’ and who took us all into her heart, and for Lata and Ravi Sethi of Defence Colony, New Delhi, India)
my ceaseless deceit, my puffed-up conceit, reeking of what i am, of what i do, of my pathetic charade, my sacharine parade - coiled in an infinite loop:
a conscienceless repeatedly repeating repeat ...
... juggling halves, my polar mind skids, with no traction on this seesawing slide,
as it scurries off to hide,
behind effortless lies, spewing forth with a phantom innocence in my eyes,
throttling the urge to feel honest emotions, soiling all meaningful ties,
strangling the surge of a feeling so fleeting, so devoid of all meaning,
while by the by, my desecrated soul rips and shreds,
fleeing like rotten cowardice, up and away into the grieving skies,
with nothing but putrid detritus left behind,
stinking up the paths i always seem to find,
and always, always,
always concocting spurious excuses, blaming it all on the chemicals misfiring between the crevasses of my unkind mind,
while getting away with it all for the briefest time,
shivering with stunned fear,
knowing, always knowing, i shall be exposed,
no matter how craftily i regurgitate each and every scribbled rhyme,
as i desert the purest ones who truly care, the truest ones who have never hesitated to share,
as i tread with crocodile smiles, upon the hearts and souls they have with love laid bare,
while by the by, i feel nothing as i abandon them with scarcely a goodbye ...
... and so it always goes, as it has always gone, and as it will always go,
my heart frigid, my soul inured,
hardly sparing a passing glance,
as i leave in my toxic wake, the shattered trust,
an epic of reeking untruths, spun in my web of feigned love, of all goodness pummelled into dust,
blow by excruciating blow,
yes, it is i,
who leaves nothing but a snaking pyroclastic flow ...
A summer breeze, drifts down lonesome pathways and byways and alleyways, touching worlds, torn apart. The breeze engulfs, a pristine sky of blue, while, scattering the murmuring clouds, that blanket the blazing African heavens, in swirls and immaculate shrouds.
2.
A passing shower, of gentle misty rain, settles, on freshly scented-earth. It soothes, it caresses, the exhausted thoughts, of, a weary traveller, who sits, alone, all alone, under a Baobab tree.
3.
The traveller walks alone, at peace with the fragrant soil, collecting memories of smiles embraced along the way.
4.
Finally, the wandering soul, seeks rest, finding peace at last, yet, knowing its price, is to let go – each memory, and every smile, that once burned true, but now, awaits release, from the ache of the lingering past.
“Rhino at Sunset with Baobab Tree” by Errol Norbury
The flying machine, a harbinger of death, flew across oceans, a beast in the morning calm.
The Enola Gay*, and Little Boy** silently sliced the skies, roaring ever closer to ground zero.
Hiroshima bustled, the sound of birds, of children, of mothers preparing breakfast, of fathers shaving their one day old stubbles.
Dogs barked, cats tucked themselves in corners, children skipped, vegetable stands ploughed the streets.
The Enola Gay flew nearer.
Hiroshima's people oblivious of the hell that awaited them, the fires of apocalypse that would soon consume them, laughed and quarrelled and worked and haggled the price of the fresh morning fruit.
It was at 8:15 AM, the metallic beast prowling above released Little Boy.
Little Boy fell, down towards the city, to fracture its people, in the hubbub of early morning.
The Atomic Bomb exploded, its light blotting out the morning sun, its deafening roar bursting eardrums.
The payload was delivered.
The Generals at Command Centre were triumphant.
The Enola Gay flew away, leaving a mushroom cloud rising higher and higher as it rained down unspeakable horrors, indescribable destruction.
It has been said that in Hiroshima that day, and in the weeks and months that followed, the living envied the dead, their skin peeling off as they roamed their city, their home, consumed by the sickening howls of pain from every quarter.
Little Boy exploded as it fell, releasing a heat that burnt people, searing their shadows into walls, preserved till today, a ghastly reminder of that savagery that befell all.
Radiation from the Bomb creeped into flesh, scorching innumerable innocents, as nuclear ash fell all around.
Man had created a weapon of such savagery, such indifferent brutality, a bringer of horrors, grotesque and merciless.
Man had used the weapon, not once, but twice, for three days later Fat Man*** was unleashed on Nagasaki.
I could write on, attempting to describe the indescribable horrors that rained down on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I could write on, about the deformed babies being born, decades after those two days in early August of 1945.
I could write on, about the inhumanity man visited upon fellow human beings.
I could write on, about the stockpiles of nuclear weapons - tens of thousands of bombs - far, far more powerful than those that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to radioactive ash.
I could write on, about the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons housed in the silos of those who preach peace, of those who crow on about democracy, of those who let their people starve while testing the means to carry these weapons of hell across oceans.
I could write on, about the hypocrisy, the money spent on machines of destruction, as most humans of this world go hungry each night and day.
I could write on, and on, and on.
But what more can anyone say, as the wailing, the shrieking screams of the victims echo across time,
till today.
_________
* Enola Gay - the plane that carried the Atomic Bomb.
** Little Boy - the code name for the Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
*** Fat Man - the code name for the Atomic Bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945.
a path leads, to where wild grasses grow, sashaying in the summer breeze.
2.
along the path, solace settles within, feeling the grass swooning, tickling ankles, swaying to lilting bird-song, in a dance of intimate abandon, brushing remnants of pain away.
3.
melodies float across fields of green, delicately caressing my heart, teasing emptiness to flee, and comforting the mind, to silently be.
4.
walking on, savouring the peace, a momentary respite, casting off burdens of the now, for all is quiet, in a stillness cradling fractured emotions, as the grass in the fields sway, and dusk descends, while shadows lengthen,
nudging the dimming light to take leave of the day …
Scribbled Verse 
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