Ruinous Time — A Poem by Saadia Peerzada
Saadia Peerzada presents a poem that trails behind the slow passage of the years that are shaped by absence, memory, and quiet and subtle endurance. These verses could as easily be about the unmaking of time that rests upon “a microhistory that tries to put into language an experience that is fragme
[et_pb_heading title="Ruinous Time" _builder_version="4.27.6" _module_preset="default" max_width="700px" module_alignment="center" custom_margin="||24px|||" global_colors_info="{}" theme_builder_area="post_content"][/et_pb_heading]
The year Nothing was inaugurated, things seemed pretty normal,
young boys still played cricket in Eidgah that summer
and older college kids hazed us, citing incompatibility.
Next year, the quiet was undisturbed by a post-it saying “I was here 25/4/2020”
Signs that said STD ISD PCO brightened under the dark sky,
my mother’s voice on the other side somehow more impenetrable than the silence.
In the third year, Nothing was punctuated by wrongful belief in internships,
I, lessened, became my only feasible project, sheer effort
shored up strange happiness but couldn’t place real birds in the sky.
In the fourth year, we wanted to live intensely, to make up for the Nothing,
things we saw every day were set to disappear, but we had no words for the premonition,
forgetting had settled in, and the Mughal gardens were overrun and gross.
In the fifth year, we walked in circles in the baāğ, a cat mewed all the way
to the front door and lucked out on half a korbaan maaz phol,
all of us seemed to live like that, the great boot had turned out fires everywhere.
In the sixth year, I wrote this poem, offering the archive as the only possible act of care,
Nothing had leased out the whole sky over our home,
what remained beautiful in it were its truths, the rest was grayscale.
Note
The title ‘Ruinous Time’ is a term that appears in Africanist scholar Farah Bakaari’s paper “Qabyo: Anticolonial Temporality and the Poetics of Ruination.”