My Best Friend

By Subhadeep Paul

Would you believe if I told you that Shahnawaz is my best friend?

I know you wouldn’t! I mean, it wouldn’t go well with you

The straight road of rationale that you regard as the familiar path

Isn’t ready to accommodate such an unrecognizable passerby

Shahnawaz knows it too but he doesn’t complain

He is wrongfully stashed inside a ghettoed world

He says there’re no barbed wires of communal caution in his world

Of friendship; for I am his secular friend – a friend he would die for.

 

But I don’t want him to die (just as he can’t live to find me gone)

Our births have landed us with alternate camps and banners

Different hearths, concurrent hearts – we have never complained

I am the shadow of his substance and so too is his opinion

I live out my days as free-flowing salt in a land that’s mine

It’s Shahnawaz’s land too but he doesn’t have the allowances

His allegiance doesn’t prove his state of belonging; they say

Business thrives when you masquerade the lie as truth.

 

They have got all the symbols wrong; their motifs twisted

Beyond recognition (even our sub-human pets would know)

A decade back, boys jostled in play till dusk, heedless about creed

Today they lead curfewed lives in their dim-lit chambers

They bartered love for fear, leading such quiet lives

That you couldn’t tell whether they were alive or dead

Then one day I had an accident and suffered much blood loss

The same blood that I had hoarded for so long, so vehemently.

 

Shahnawaz bore me to the hospital with zeal unsurpassable

His blood saved my life; my greedy veins gulping the vital flow

At that very moment, none thought about Shahnawaz

His fez, his namaz, his fasts and even his very name mattered not

Be he a jihadi, a sufi or a messiah, he was a donor above all

Years later someone asked me about that Muslim friend of mine

I corrected him: “If you’re desperate for adjectives to describe my savior,

Kindly use the word ‘best’. Shahnawaz is my best friend.

 

 

Dr. Subhadeep Paul teaches English Literature at Maulana Azad College, Kolkata, India. His first book of poems ‘Finite Sketches, Infinite Reaches’ was published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata in 2007. Subsequently, his poems have appeared in The Sunday Statesman, The Telegraph, Earthen Lamp Journal, the Four Quarters Magazine, etc. He is currently working on a quest novel.