Cover

The Cloud Messenger

Aamer Hussein

TELEGRAM

Dedication

My beloved puts on a garment of clouds today …

From the Sur Sarang (Rain Song)
of Shah Abdul Latif

I

A Flute Died

I heard two gulls cry at dawn today.

Why do they come to town in summer, so far from their body of water? I asked you that day when they circled over our heads as we drank coffee on the cobbled pavement by the canal. Remember? It’s a sign of coming rain, you said. They fly inland when it rains. But only a few days later somebody told me they weren’t seabirds at all: just scavengers that visited cities in search of refuse from dustbins.

The day I heard the gulls cry my friend broke her flute in the place that once was rainless. The flute had been her companion, her voice when she couldn’t speak. The flute had travelled with her across two oceans. For hours she tried to fix it, but she’d forgotten how. She wept for a day. It had rained all day and night for a week before the flute died, and often there was no light.

The cut-off flute laments and the wounded woman wails, Latif of Bhit said. That one remembers being one with the tree, this one longs for her beloved.

One day, when we loved each other, you said a falcon flew out of a book and perched on your shoulder. You couldn’t keep her. You let her fly away. The perfect falcon from a poem by Rumi.

In the rainless place, the clouds before sunset took on the shapes of birds. Remembering them now, I can see the falcons. The flight of swans. And the gulls.

When my friend mourned her flute I told her how, just a few weeks before, I’d complained to you about a recalcitrant and loving heart. It’s a wild, wild dog that feeds on us from the inside, I’d said: it won’t be tamed.

My friend said: Sometimes I feel you write my words. As if you’ve stolen them from me.

That afternoon, sitting again on that cobbled pavement by the canal, I asked a poet if he would call the heart a beast or a falcon.

The swan dives into limpid water to seek pearls. Cranes and gulls are content with dirty water. Latif says, look just once at the swans: you’ll never be friends again with the cranes.

Why did your perfect falcon fly? Why is my shoulder empty?

The rain came down hard. We took shelter under a tree.

My friend said, I want you to write a story that’s rain-coloured: rain-grey, rain-blue.

You walk away in the rain. You say someone is waiting. I won’t call out your name. Won’t see you turn, look back. They say you shouldn’t stop someone who’s leaving. And never call out to them from behind.