Just you and me in that '78 Datsun wind bursts through the windows our faces flushed mercury rising along the endless pockmarked Hub River Road that spears through the Baluchistan Desert
beaten trucks adorned like a madman's canvas swish past become hypnotic color-wheel swirls in the horizon those bastard charsis drive faster their sclera webbed with red as they choke in cabins thick with homegrown smoke naswar stuffed under their paan-stained lips their eyelids flutter like butterfly wings our heads twist northward to see the smashed balls of color
we cruise slowly moving closer a gingerbread house is an abandoned stone hut atop a mountain of layered dust a parched matki at its door I turn to you and ask who lives there? a shrine for some holy man but obviously not a Baba Ghazi the dilapidated ruins fade behind the headrest as my wandering eyes turn away
this never-ending road forks south the Datsun protests as its heavy body heaves on a donkey's path
the sandy plain extends into infinity and infinity gushes skyward into the Baluchistan plateau you brake and twist the key
my small brown hand enveloped in yours we walk to heaven Janat ul Baki
you show me where your father's bones sleep run your fingers like undulating snakes through decades of dry sand on his grave expressionless as the grains loosen and dance away in the whistling wind
you tell me how your father should have had a shrine but not like Baba Ghazi he settled for even less
I was only told years and continents later after we buried you that your infant son also lay in Janat ul Baki waiting for qayamat
Lasbela Hub-Chawki Jumpir hold your name still yet the rivers have run dry and the land-grabbers refuse to leave
I leave you at Janat ul Baki in that '78 Datsun spider-web windshield sand streams through six perfect holes it is never the same without you
