Lullabies in Dust and Light
A lyrical meditation on memory, longing, and the echoes of the past, inspired by the timeless verses of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Jamaal Ahsani. Set in a forgotten town draped in twilight, this poetic prose evokes nostalgia as a living presence, tracing the quiet ache of remembrance through dreamlike imagery, lullabies, and emotional resonance.
“Kar raha tha gham -e- jahan ka hisaab / Aj tum yaad be-hisaab aaye.”
(I was tracing the weight of the world’s sorrow
When your memories crept in stealth as a shadow.)
The sun slowly dipped into the purple veils of vesper and memories oozed out of the cracks of time. In a town that the world had almost forgotten, where the streets curled like old film reels and the air hummed with the echo of unsaid goodbyes, nostalgia wandered like a gypsy woman. The jingle of her anklets sending sweet shivers through the dust that caressed her fugitive heels.
She was draped in a dress sewn from faded lullabies and scattered the moist scent of rain that arose from the earth on a sultry summer night. Her hair held the wind of attic windows thrown open to forgotten songs. She walked softly, as if stepping might wake the past from its languid dreams.
At the rusted hinge of twilight, she arrived at the edge of a lake that hadn’t mirrored a sky in decades. It was an unwrinkled place silvered with dust, rimmed with the torn tapestries of seasons gone. There, seated on a bench carved from memory, was another figure. He was draped in an overcoat made from photographs that had blurred at the edges… a patchwork of smiles and shadows.
He looked up and smiled. “You came.”
“I always do,” she said, taking the space beside him like a poem melting into its last stanza.
They sat in utter quietude. Not awkward, but reverent, in the way two echoes might embrace if they met in the middle of a canyon. Around them, the air thickened with symbols: paper planes drifted through the sky like fallen thoughts; music boxes played lullabies on their own accord; and trees whispered the names of children who’d outgrown their names.
“I remember you,” he said finally, voice lined with sepia. “From the scent of bread in a grandmother’s kitchen. From the way the light hit the floor on lazy Sunday afternoons.”
She nodded. “And I remember you in the way a song remembers the first heart that hummed it. The way an old coat remembers the body that once danced in the snow.”
They weren’t lovers, nor strangers. They were reflections. They were the two sides of the same sigh: one rising from the past, the other falling into it.
As night pulled its velvet coat across the sky, the stars blinked like fireflies trapped in glass jars. The lake finally stirred, reflecting not their faces, but every face that had ever remembered… eyes wide, hearts aching sweetly.
And so, nostalgia embraced the past…not for the first time, not for the last. Just as they always had, in every dusty photograph… in every story told and re-told for endless times… in every silence that spoke louder than time.
Somewhere the wind whispered wistfully….
“Jamaal, Har shehar se hai pyaara woh shehar mujh ko
Jahaan se dekha tha pehli baar aasmaan main ne.”
Jamaal Ahsani
(Of all the cities, dearest is the one to me,
Where I first looked up… and found the sky watching me…)
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