سرائیکی ڈیجیٹل لائبریری

ساکوں نہ مِیت بݨا وے سانولا)
(ساکوں نہ مِیت بݨا

A poet’s inspiration begins with a single flash, a single line. Sudden, electric and complete in itself. That line is not merely a feeling or a thought; it is an experience distilled. The rest of the poem is built around it. It is as if the poet spends the entire composition trying to justify that one haunting line. In essence, the poem becomes a meditation on that flash.

Along with Ashu’s flash also place these lines of Munir and Faiz in the same frame and reflect. Are not all these poems meditations on their own single flash?

ساکوں نہ مِیت بݨا وے سانولا ، ساکوں نہ مِیت بݨا

مجھ سے پہلی سی محبت میرے محبوب نہ مانگ

محبت اب نہیں ہوگی یہ کچھ دن بعد میں ہوگی

ہمیشہ دیر کردیتا ہوں میں ہر کام کرنے میں

Such flashes do come again and again, but they rarely take shape within the mould of a beautiful poem. The reason is that, in that moment, the creative receptors are not fully awakened. Or perhaps the flash fails to penetrate the aesthetic zone. Sometimes, both the flash and receptors are caught in the turbulence of the external world. I think the analogy of صدف and قطرۂ نیساں will make the point clear. Even if there is an oyster, even if there is a raindrop, without the season of spring, no pearl comes into being.

Remember, it is essential for the oyster to be alive. If a dead oyster’s mouth remains open for some reason and a raindrop falls into it during the spring season, a pearl is not formed. What comes out of such a dead oyster? “Intellectual-emotional waste” which an uncultured reader accepts as poetry.

After this somewhat necessary, somewhat unnecessary overture, let us now turn to Ashu’s beautiful flash and reflect on it.

ساکوں نہ مِیت بݨا وے سانولا ، ساکوں نہ مِیت بݨا

Hesitation is the choreography of an existential consciousness.It is the interval where freedom and absurdity stare each other down. Delay is the space where meaning is neither denied nor accepted but suspended. It is a dance with the void.

This song’s flash and its four unfolding stanzas emerge from the womb of hesitation, delay, and deferral. And let us not forget that deferral is no denial, only a pause in time.

The title refrain “Do not make me your beloved, O Beauty” is not a direct address to any immediate object. This lament is not meant for any specific listener. It is but an expression of pain scattered in the existential space. Who is Ashu addressing? A single person? The entire world? God? Himself? A beautiful woman? It doesn’t matter to him who it is. He just captured the flash. The ferment (lawa) had matured within him, which he gave a beautiful form in the moment of creative grace.

Confrontation with the reality of one’s being is the essence of the existential stance. That is why Ashu’s metaphors are not ornamental. They are the very grammar of existentialism. “Do not make me your beloved O’ Beauty “, is not a simple evasion; it is Ashu’s firewall. It is a declaration of existential autonomy. He worries about the loss of freedom that comes with being idealised. He fears being reduced to a role, a symbol, a fixed image or a possession. To be a beloved is to be trapped in a definition. It is like being placed inside a frame.

You are admired, but you can not move.

You are remembered but not understood. You are seen but not known.

You are loved, but not as yourself, only the idea of you.

This is what I meant by” trapped in a definition”.This very awareness prevents him from saying yes to the call of love, though he does not say no at all.

Existential consciousness whispers,” do not bind me in names, do not confine me in frames, do not put me in the cages of language, let me breathe like a presence not a definition”. Ashu wants to be in flux, in ambiguity, in possibility. Not in a role that others have written for him. He even does not want to be in beauty’s gaze because that gaze freezes rather fossilizes identity.

If you revisit the four poems by Ashu, Munir and Faiz mentioned earlier, there is one beautiful common element in all of them. And that is none other than the aesthetics of delay and deferral. They weave different patters of delay and deferral in the unfolding stanzas of their beautiful poems not to obscure the flash but to justify it with poetic grace. Here, let me say one thing: it is the aesthetic labour which conceals the bluntness of the titular refrain in Faiz, rendering it not merely acceptable but even worthy of emulation.

The poems of Munir – The Bohemian, The Narcissist, cannot be discussed here, for that would be a digression altogether. For reference, I can say this much: both of his poems are woven from delay and deferral. Despite the regret, he cannot free himself from his habit of procrastinating.

ہمیشہ دیر کر دیتا ہوں میں ہر کام کرنے میں

Procrastination is an instinctive refusal to be boxed in by societal expectations of time and timeliness. Moreover, it is his shield against the anxiety of unexpected results and responses. If he gives it up, his Bohemian rhythms would be disrupted.

Even in the first poem, there is no sign of any immediate love.Or perhaps love has already bloomed, yet he restrains himself from moving toward it. This delay is not passive; it is existential. Munir says love will not erupt in the heat of the moment. It will arrive later, as memory, as reflection, as aftermath. That is a profound defamiliarisation of love, not as presence, but as trace. And let me say that our subjective world is essentially haunted.We are shaped by absences, silences, and deferred truths.

ملاقاتیں جو ہوتی ہیں جمال ِ ابر و باراں میں

Is it really a rendezvous? Isn’t it the collision of two absences?

Faiz, however, is a different case. His approach is dialectical, clear and calculated. He seeks to subject love to the demands of historical necessity. For him, romance requires austerity. Until the revolution comes, until the sorrows of the world are lifted, he wishes the beloved to accept some curtailment in the romantic regimen. Faiz has loved with all his heart. He has loved in the past, he still does and he will continue to. Only for a while, he asks for an adjustment in the romantic regimen.

مجھ سے پہلی سی محبت میرے محبوب نہ مانگ

That is to say, Faiz has in view the deferral of love’s prior, full regimen. But it is not just that. If we read the entire poem, it becomes clear that Faiz has chosen to stand by the truth of the present moment. In the given situation, he aligns himself with the truth. His words do not escape into illusions; rather, they remain rooted in reality. This fidelity to the moment gives his poem both strength and timelessness.

لوٹ جاتی ہے ادھر کو بھی نظر کیا کیجیے

اب بھی دلکش ہے تیرا حسن مگر کیا کیجیے

And in that, I hear echoes of Bulleh Shah.

بلھا رب کہو نہ کہو

آئی صورتوں سچا رہو

Bullah, whether you invoke God or not, stay truthful in each lived moment. Whatever situation comes upon you, live through it with truth.

Whether it is Ashu, Munir or Faiz, none of them truly rejects love. What they all do is delay, defer. Ashu, too, never creates an atmosphere of outright refusal. It is not a “yes,” but neither is it a “no.” His tone is so gentle that it almost gives the impression of being a “yes.”A person does not always remain fixed on one emotional or intellectual platform. He keeps experimenting.

محبت ساڈی وَیرݨ ھے

محبت ول وی کر ڈیکھوں

اشو

This sounds much like Camus’ Sisyphus, finding meaning in the struggle itself even if the outcome is predetermined.Though he has endured this trial before, the shadow of its outcome still looms.

بھریاں دی ول بھرݨی اوکھی

پل پل چاکری کرݨی اوکھی

اوکھیاں وس نہ پا وے سانولا

What can one do, really, when life, like a Sisyphean boulder, insists on circling back, rehearsing its agonies? This is the human condition. This is a theatre of recurrence. So we keep repeating Camus’ haunting refrain, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Not because he is, but because we must.

اوکھیاں وس نہ پا وے سانولا

Here is a poet, in the depths of existential fatigue, rejecting his futile struggle. And there was a philosopher, I quoted him arguing that the only way to be free is to embrace that same struggle. We should not forget that there is a vast difference between a sensitive poet caught in the absurd condition of life and the absurd hero.

“To roll the same boulder up the hill, to rehearse the same agonies, to weigh the same bonds twice is a burden too heavy, to serve every moment is too harsh a servitude. (Servitude, here, is not just social. It is existential repetition rather than existential recycling.)Do not cast us in such trials again”.

This could be Ashu’s lived experience, not a vicarious one.Anyway, both have value.One gives us scars, Other gives us stories.In short, we can say that Ashu hesitates to re-enter old narratives that offer no transcendence.

اساں تاں جانی کٹھور دلیں دے

اجڑ گئے بھنبھور دلیں دے

نہ کوئی سِک نہ ساہ وے سانولا

I have been petrified from within. Bhanbore is ruined, no breath, no longing left. Here, identity is deferred through emotional fossilisation. No longing, no movement, no self to offer. Identity is not denied. It is hollowed out, emptied and left as a shell. This is not just a personal trauma; Ashu is historically and culturally emptied. He has woven the ruin of Bhanbore and the desolation of heart in a single thread of thought. This style not only revives historical and cultural memory but also reveals human anguish on an inner and existential level.

نہ کوئی سِک نہ ساہ وے سانولا

We know that the presence of breath and longing is in fact a sign of possibility. But if both are absent, then desolation is no longer temporary; it becomes total and irreparable. At this poin,t Bhanbore ceases to be merely a destroyed city of the past and transforms into a metaphor for the broken State of the human heart. The inner emptiness is so vast that no new settlement, no new bond and no new dream can flourish within it, no matter how radiant the call of love may be.

اساں تاں وا دے جھولیاں وانگوں

آندیاں ویندیاں چھولیاں وانگوں

نہ جپھڑی نہ جاہ وے سانولا

Ashu loves defamiliarisation, the art of making the familiar strange. He takes a gust of wind and reveals it as the terrifying essence of freedom with no destination.

He takes a wave and makes it a metaphor for the entire transient nature of being.

He uses rhythm and metaphor to break the hypnosis of ordinary language and forces us to see the object anew, in all its alien glory. He becomes elemental, wind and wave, things that move but never settle. No home, no belonging, no rootedness. Here again, he is not refusing identity; he is refusing fixity. He would not be pinned to a place, a role or a relationship. He is saying, I exist but I do not stay.I appear but I do not remain .This stanza itself unfolds as an extended metaphor of ephemerality, echoing the universal sense of impermanence.

مِیت ملݨ دی تانگھ اچ وسݨاں

اپݨی لَس وچ آپیں لَسݨاں

ہے اوکھی درگاہ وے سانولا

Ashu does not domesticate the strangeness, he rather estranges what once felt known.In these captivating lines, he introduces a unique phenomena of flickering or self flickering and intertwines it with longing for”‘Mit”. Let us explore what kind of flickering is this?

جیسے مندر میں لو دیے کی؟

No, it is not the soft and steady light of temple lamp. It is intermittent like that of the clouds.

But this flickering is not the burst of lightning. It is a soft glimmer in the sky, a quiet testament to the cloud’s presence with the possibility of rain or to longing itself. In Saraiki language wasna also means to rain. Therefore, using wasna and lasna in the same couplet indicates that here flickering refers to lightning, as soft, distant glimmer. In the light of this correlation, flickering is the state of self-burning without any purposeful light for external spheres. So, it is the agony of self-awareness that never coheres into a solid identity. It neither allures ‘Mit’ nor the meaning. It serves as a catalyst for longing. In this painful experience, self becomes both subject and object. Self burns itself to define itself.  This recursive loop can be both enlightening and tormenting. In short flickering is an embodiment of hyper awareness that leads to paralysis of action which again is a cause of delay and deferral. Such flickerings nest in pauses, the hanging moments in time. And are often located in the pause between longing and union, void and meaning, anguish and art, etc.

The gravity with which the agony of self-flickering is portrayed is truly unparalleled and exceptional. It is the silent scream of a soul, caught in the storm of becoming and unbecoming, where every flicker is a heartbeat away from both creation and oblivion. The same agony is contained in this single sigh,

ہے اوکھی درگاہ وے سانولا

This is the wonder of Ashu’s creative art that he takes such delicate existential threads and transforms them, with mastery and grace, into the fabric of a folk song. In a culture seemingly locked in default energy-saving mode, I fear Ashu’s art of defamiliarisation still goes unnoticed. Much of his poetry, including the piece under discussion, is a deliberate turn toward a poetics of reawakening. Beyond weaving existential threads, he defamiliarises love and the beloved, rendering them strange and alive once more.

To defamiliarise love is to rescue it from cliche, habit or habitual perception and automatization. It is to restore its capacity to astonish, to wound and to transform. When Ashu defamiliarises love, he does not merely describe it, he reinvents it. In doing so, he invites the reader to re-enter the world of feeling with fresh eyes, to stumble over it as if sighting for the first time. In a culture that risks forgetting how to feel, defamiliarisation is not just a literary technique; it is an ethical stance. It is Ashu’s refusal to let love and life become ordinary.