Elephants in Manhattan

In the summer of 2011, I went to meet a friend in New York. Sameer quickly came down to the lobby after the guard at the counter called him. He had not been home for years. His face lit up, the way it always does for friends from home. As he greeted me, his accent faltered. He abandoned English and switched to Kashur."How was Kashmir?" he asked, smiling."Not as terrible as the last year," I said, "but you know how things are.".In the elevator, he held my luggage. He was no longer smiling. We climbed to the third floor in silence. The apartment building was in Roosevelt Island with a view of the East River, across from which he worked in a laboratory at Weill Cornell Medical College..The following day, a Sunday, I woke up to the hiss of the sprinklers. I sat up on the couch in the living room and looked through the window. The lawns, drizzled over, were neat and shining. Over Manhattan, the sky was a receding rag of clouds..Sameer snored in his bedroom, hoarding sleep to last him the rest of the week. I went out and walked toward the East River, under the shade of maple trees in full leaf. Unlike most other things in the US, maple trees are puny. Their leaves are a little larger than, and in the shape of, a duck's webbed feet. In comparison, Kashmir's boen is grand. The leaves are like open human hands, and have such poetic patterns of venations that Srinagar's silversmiths fashion earrings after them..The morning turned out to be blustery, and the waves of the East River slapped against the shore. I ambled on, keeping close to the water. I watched countless bubbles forming and bursting on the surface, and wondered who was being choked to death beneath. I heard someone wailing in the distance, but I kept walking. Soon, I reached the Roosevelt Island tram station. In its early morning desertion, I boarded an F train. It sped through the tunnel beneath the East River, and felt like being in a long rattling coffin. I got out at 77th Street, near Lenox Hill Hospital, which for many years I had longed to see..At the gate with sliding glass doors, the guard asked me why I wanted to go inside.."I am researching the genesis of a poem," I said.."What! What poem, man?" he asked.."Lenox Hill," I said.."It is a hospital. There are no poems here, man." He frowned, asking me to leave..'Lenox Hill' is the first poem in Agha Shahid Ali's collection Rooms Are Never Finished. In the 65-line canzone, Ali broke the silence which descended on him after his mother, Sufia, died of brain cancer in 1997. The collection, the most accomplished of Ali's works, contains a cycle of poems in the first section, titled 'From Amherst to Kashmir', which deals with this loss. While these poems have a searing poignancy and exceptional technical intelligence, 'Lenox Hill' is my favourite..…Kashmir,she's dying! How her breathing drowns out the universeas she sleeps in Amherst. Windows open on Kashmir:There, the fragile wood-shrines – so far away – of Kashmir!O Destroyer, let her return there, if just to die..The poem conceives of a string of wailing voices condensed into a juxtaposition of a historical legend with an impossible personal grief. Mihiragula, a king of the Hun dynasty, while passing over the hills of Pir Panjal into Kashmir, hears the cry of an elephant which by chance slips and falls off a cliff. He asks his men to throw the other elephants in his caravan, because he takes instant pleasure in the dying elephants' cries..The Hun so loved the cry, one falling elephant's,he wished to hear it again. At dawn, my motherheard, in her hospital-dream of elephants,sirens wail through Manhattan….I was disappointed with my inability to explain to the guard what I was looking for. But even more with what he guarded – a bland building incommensurate with what, in my readings of the poem in Srinagar and Delhi, Ali had led me to believe. I had not expected silent cement blocks and windows of mute, unreflecting glass. What I had pictured was a place where the screams of Sufia leapt from infinite walls and lofty, choked domes with such swaying force that could reduce the entire city to rubble. Each cry, I had imagined, reached god himself, tearing through his red robes and knocking him down from his saddle of eternal comfort….***.After a brisk rain-shower in the evening, the sky cleared up. Sameer and I cooked white rice and collard greens, the closest thing to the leafy hakh at home. As we ate by the window, our voices grew louder, speaking in Kashur. We listened to a Bashir Dada song on YouTube. We drank several cups of nun chai..Sameer is from a village in Sopore, a small town in the northern district of Baramulla, known for its dirt roads, orchards laden with apples and warm people fond of cussing in their singsong accents. He was 36, of medium height and built, a fellow both humble and handsome. I had met him six or seven years ago when he was a graduate student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, and he told me a story that stayed with me..In the beginning of 1993 – when Sameer was 18 – on the morning of 6 January, his younger brother and sister were travelling in a bus headed to Bundpor from their village. As Mudasir and Saima reached Main Chowk in Sopore, troopers of the 94 Battalion of the Border Security Force (BSF) stopped the bus. Then, they came nearer and began firing at the passengers. At least 20 people died instantly. The rest were shot at as they came out of the door, trying to escape. Only four people survived including Saima and Mudasir..Later when Sameer asked them what had happened, they told him how they had hidden beneath the seats for more than two hours. They witnessed the soldiers entering the bus and firing at their fellow passengers. So determined were the troopers to avenge the death of a BSF soldier killed earlier that day, they spilled gunpowder over the lines of the shops and houses on either side of Main Chowk and set them afire..According to the report "Structures of Violence: The Indian State in Jammu and Kashmir", published in September 2015 by the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, that day troopers killed 46 people and destroyed much of the market.