Shaleen Rakesh Website and Blog

Long before there were villages, or temples, or paths worn into the mountains by human feet — there was only snow. A rich white carpet for miles. Winter came, and then winter came again, falling upon the young Himalayas in a silence that was so complete that it seemed to ask nothing of the world. At the highest elevations, where the sun’s warmth could never quite climb high enough to reach it, the snow stayed. It survived. Each storm lay down upon the last, patient, unhurried, until the weight of uncountable winters pressed the snow into something else entirely — blue, glacial, vast. And although it looked frozen, like stillness itself, it was, in truth, always moving, ever so slowly. The glaciers flowed downhill so gently that a single human life was too short to notice the journey. Beneath all that snow, the mountains too were still becoming. Far below the ice, the Indian continent went on pressing itself against Asia, lifting the Himalayas by the width of a few millimetres each ye...

The last house before the forest begins is rarely remarkable. Its walls are weathered by decades of rain and winter sun. A stack of firewood leans against one side. Prayer flags may flutter from the roof, or perhaps only old clothes left to dry. A dog sleeps in the doorway, opening one eye whenever footsteps pass. Beyond the courtyard human intention gives way to the patient designs of the forest. Every village in the Himalayas seems to possess such a house. It is a magical threshold. Here, cultivated fields end. Footpaths narrow. The smell of cooking fires begins to mingle with damp earth and pine needles. The sounds of conversation become intermittent, replaced by the murmur of unseen streams, the tapping of a woodpecker, or the wind moving through deodar branches. Those who live in the last house know the forest differently from visitors. They know which herbs appear after the first monsoon rain and where porcupines cross the path at dusk. They recognise the call of a barking deer...

There are birds that seem to have been carved from the oldest chapters of the earth, and there are birds that appear to have been invented by the wind. In the forests surrounding Dehradun, the Great Hornbill and the Indian Paradise Flycatcher live beneath the same canopy, yet they could hardly embody more different imaginations of life. The Great Hornbill is a monument disguised as a bird. Its immense yellow casque sits atop its bill like the weathered dome of an ancient temple, and every beat of its wings announces its arrival long before it comes into view. It does not seem to fly so much as proceed with authority. Even the forest appears to acknowledge its passage. There is something deliberate in its movements, something stately and almost ceremonial, as though it has inherited responsibilities from an age before human memory. The Indian Paradise Flycatcher belongs to another order altogether. It is lyrical. The white male, with his impossibly long streamers of a tail, seems less...

The rain begins the way all important things begin — without announcement, present where a moment ago it was not, touching the river's surface, in a cadence she did not choose to hear and cannot now unhear. She is sitting on a wall. This is the whole fact. She is sitting on a wall, above a river in a city that has been arguing with itself for a thousand years, and has not resolved anything and is still here, still beautiful, still turning in the afternoon light, like a thing that has forgotten it was supposed to arrive somewhere. The boats pass. A leaf trembles. Her breathing is doing what breathing does and she notices this — notices the noticing — and something in the noticing, quietly steps aside. Shankara told the story of ten travelers who crossed the roaring river and wept, because they could count only nine. Each one counted the others. Each one forgot to count himself. They mourned what was not missing. They stood in their own light and called...

Among the great poets who entered Hindi cinema, Sahir Ludhianvi occupies a unique place. Majrooh Sultanpuri brought the refinement of the ghazal into popular culture. Kaifi Azmi carried progressive idealism into film lyrics. Sahir did something more unsettling. He brought doubt. His poetry is filled with love, but rarely with romantic illusion. It speaks of hope, yet remains suspicious of easy optimism. It dreams of justice, while remaining painfully aware of human hypocrisy. Again and again, Sahir returned to a single question: What remains when we strip away comforting illusions? That question made him one of the most important Urdu poets of the twentieth century and one of the greatest lyricists in the history of Indian cinema. Born Abdul Hayee in Ludhiana in 1921, Sahir’s early life was marked by conflict and insecurity. His parents separated, and he remained deeply attached to his mother, who raised him under difficult circumstances. The emotional wounds of childhood never e...

  She believes she is choosing— the specific confidence of the hand that reaches towards a spine as though the hand decided, as though the self that wanted, preceded the wanting, as though she arrived here by intention rather than by the long, patient work of everything that has been, arranging her for this moment, since before she knew there was a moment being arranged. One foot inside. One still on the pavement. The threshold does not rush her. It has held this position, for years — it knows how long these things take, the moment before life divides into before and after, the last breath of the person you were before you became the person who picked up that book. Meursault stood in the sun and felt nothing he was supposed to feel — or felt it, and could not find the word that would make the feeling legible to a world that required legibility as proof of humanity. Camus gave him the sun and the heat, and the gun, and the absurd silence of the uni...