ABSTRACT
Agha Shahid ‘Ali explains in a brief note, at the end of the collection of his poems, The Country Without a Post Offi ce, that this particular poem, Farewell, “at one-but only one-level is a plaintive love letter from a Kashmiri Muslim to a Kashmiri Pandit.”2 Perhaps it is the special boon of poetry, and especially that crafted by Ali, that the meanings unfold and interweave like a set of Russian Babushka dolls, each doll hiding a multitude of dolls nestled within its womb. The powerful ambiguity of a love/hate relationship; the unrequited love reinventing itself into hate; the erstwhile lover and friend transmogrifying into the “perfect enemy”—the “Enemy” par excellence; the all too familiar entanglement of memories and histories; the overwhelming nostalgia of a recurring “what if;” the sense of irretrievable loss necessitating a need to acknowledge, understand and thus forgive, and yet an inability to do so-an attachment to that self-same pain, the Nietzschean ressentiment; the silencing of ineffable pain fragmented into defensive amnesia or obligatory muteness and yet spilling all over; all signify images that resonate hauntingly in the context of post-Partition South Asia.
