Ghazalnama

The ghazal for Maaz Bin Bilal becomes a way to love as well as to remember, to dialogue as well as to critique, to mourn as well as to memorialize. It aspires to the condition of statement and song, seeking to combine a love of rhetorical flourish with tender lyricism, political assertion with whimsy, even as it acknowledges its debt to forbears who range from Gandhi to Ghalib, Adrienne Rich to Agha Shahid Ali. Seguing between the elegiac, the reflective and the playful, these poems lurch restlessly across Delhi and Belfast, Aleppo and Srinagar, in quest of the ‘inflammable’ word, driven by the ancient aspiration of poets down the ages to write ‘in fire’. — Arundhathi Subramaniam