My village
And in my village, the moon
The people dear to me
Like the moon
A river
That flows by my village
The shade
Of peepal trees
My mother, brothers and sisters
Friends and lovers
Idiots and intellectuals
Sounds and shouts
Old men who remember Ghadar
Temples and mosques
Azaans and bhagats
Hindu Muslim Sikh Christian
They all live here
But
Nehru
Villabh
Tara Singh
and Quaid-e-Azam
Don’t live here
People live here
Partition hasn’t
Happened here
Yet
Hasan Mujtaba is a poet who writes in three languages: Urdu, Punjabi, and his native Sindhi. He has published two collections of Urdu and Punjabi poetry: Koel Shehar ki Katha (2015) and the recently published, Tum Dhanak Orrh Lena (2020). He is also an award-winning journalist and human rights defender. He has worked for BBC Urdu as their New York correspondent. He lives in New York.
Haider Shahbaz is a writer and translator. He studied history at Yale University, and he is currently doing a PhD in comparative literature at UCLA. He is the translator of Mirza Athar Baig’s Hassan’s State of Affairs (HarperCollins).