Source: Dawn.Com
“O Lord, my girlfriend does not wear a burqa, she tells me, the faithful never look at a woman’s body with evil eyes … only the lechers and unfaithful shout for burqa, let Allah put a black blindfold on their impure sight.”
A Bangladeshi poet, Farhad Mazhar, not known in Pakistan as he became famous after 1971, wrote this poem, “Burqa.” I heard this poem from an old man I met in Springfield, Virginia, last week.
“What is your judgment, O Lord? … Think it over, not bad – this idea of mine … the imbecile walks with a black blindfold in the streets, not a burqa in sight, but people easily see, who is the lecher and who is the faithful.”
“An interesting idea,” I thought as I listened to the poem. Equally interesting was my meeting with this old man. As I was coming out of my car near the Tavern, he approached me and said in Bengali:
“Tumi kar shuntan re (whose child are you)?”
Surprised by this sudden breeze from a distant past, I looked at the old man and asked: “Ami (me)?
Categories: Asia