Ubair Fayaz Fazili, a debutante in the field of poetry hails from a remote village of Kashmir, that naturally calls for peace and serenity in his words. Yet he is too busy fighting his battles with the idea of death, of pain and suffering. Fazili, is not only a poet but a painter who carries art into the field of poetry with his camouflaged metaphors. Words, like color splashes in abstract painting ignite the pyre of ones dreams and make the reader mourn along the speaker.
The poems are immersed in the idea of death and cast an image of a leaf that has been discolored because of all the grief and has the urge to fall off the tree of life. Death in these poems have been awarded a more realistic picture where the speaker pines for death in all the seasons. Even in spring when the rest of the world is welcoming new life, the speaker seems more obsessed with death than life and is seen waiting for death in utmost civility. The speaker gives some daunting images of detaching of umbilical chord and choking of throat which runs a shiver down the spine of the reader. The poet embellishes and glamorize death and one has the urge to dive into the chariot of death.
Pain forms another underlying theme of this collection and the speaker seems to beautify pain in a way that one forgets it is the pain he is talking about. Pain can be physical, mental, emotional or spiritual and he seems to be touching all of these in his collection. He talks about the pain of suffering, pain of hopelessness and pain of unrequited dreams. He reflects the condition of a modern man who allows everything to seep into him and effect him. It seems like an amphitheater of agony with each word dripping out the blood of soreness and desolation.
The under-arching dreams of an over-aspiring dreamer is reflected in the poems. It reflects the story of a person who who lies on a dwindling path and is caught between ambition and lack of opportunities. It stands for every Kashmiri boy caught up in concertina wires of conflict and bloodshed. It stands for every young boy aspiring to attain greatness and to every debutante trying to carve a niche in the field of poetry. But in all this a sense of hopelessness dominates the desires to accomplish.
Hopelessness is reflected by the way the speaker shuts down all the rays of hope, or watches his dreams burn while asking the readers to pray silently. Hopelessness pervades the poems and one yearns for a single ray of light on a gloomy journey of this book. A tinge of hope arises in the form of poem titled ” Dawn calls for hope” by saying, “what shall hold us together if not hope?”
Love forms another beautiful part of the collection and acts as a relief to the otherwise funereal atmosphere of the book. Love acts as estrogen to the fissures caused by the poet with his gloom. There is always some madness in love and he reflects it by being in love with winds that swings the heart to the beloved. But the poet does not give much space to the idea of love and takes us back to the graveyard of despair.
Being from a conflict zone himself the words come straight from the horses mouth and it is quite evident how he has been affected by conflict. His words are allusive to the bloodshed and horrors of conflict. The use of words like concertina wires, war bankers, air strikes, emergency panic and unrest are testimony to the fact.
Ubair Fayaz Fazili’s Pain(t) is replete with the same ideas of death and pain and all sixty five poems seem to be pronouncing the same idea. The entire book seems like an epigraph to his last poem in titled pain(t) itself. The speaker talks of his father who is a permanent resident of pain and whom the speaker has seen in pain all his life. He sees hopelessness in him. Hopelessness to stay alive. “Better death then constants suffering” is what the father replies and it is this hopelessness, this urge to meet death that is seen reiterating in the entire book.