i continue to live; he continues to find out if he is really alive.

I am about seventy-five percent sure my father is having an existential crisis.

I can't blame him, of course. It must stem from guilt, from memory
Of the 90s, of Gaw Kadal, of his friends
Who left him one by one to cross the border
Into Pakistan

And he might find their bodies
Lying on the street
Some years later.

He blames himself.
He wants to go back
And join the militia
He thinks himself a coward.

I have seen heartbreak.
It is everywhere, in Kashmir.
There are a thousand quiet ones, amid the loud ones.
My father's heartbreak is different.
His carries on silently, over a lifetime.

My father's perfume smells like spring.
Like hope.
It is strong and announces his presence before he walks
Past.

But he does not smell spring on his clothes.
To himself, he smells of
Dead people,
Soap,
Hunger,
Silence,
Bad dreams,
Lost friends,
Lost hopes,
Gunpowder, and
Tea?

My father's body is uneven.
His right ear is fake.
When you look at him, you can tell
One ear hears what I tell him
The other is still stuck in the past,
Listening to his friends sing Bollywood songs
While playing cricket on Dal Lake.

A Glock 19 weighs about .7 kgs.
My father remembers the weight in his hands.
He remembers standing in line:
On one side, life.
On another, death.

He remembers the Kashmiri sun.
The dusk there does not arrive on the shoulders of golden sunsets anymore,
But on the heels of long, encroaching shadows of untraceable trees 
In the distance, gloomy parallel patterns that cascade over the 
Undulating landscape of unevenly dispersed corpses and other things.

He remembers kneeling under the sunset,
Whispering into the Earth in supplication,
And God responded with the future
But his eyes were shut so tight in prayer
That he could not see.