Vacating an Apartment

Vacating an Apartment by Agha Shahid Ali

                                                   -Aysha Sherin

Agha Shahid Ali is a Kashmiri-American poet. He was born in New Delhi in 1949 and grew up in Kashmir. He left for United States in 1976. Shahid Ali held teaching positions at nine universities and colleges in India and United States. He wrote nine poetry collections and a book of literary criticism as well as translated a collection of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry. He also compiled the volume ‘Ravishing Disunities : Real Ghazals in English’. He died of brain cancer on December 8, 2001 in Massachusetts.

                     The poem ‘Vacating an Apartment’ is taken from his collection ‘The half-Inch Himalayas’. The collection follows his changes of home from Kashmir to Delhi to the United States. It consists of a prologue and four sections. Part one consists largely of fantasies about the history of his family before he was born or during his childhood days. The poems in section two are concerned with the culture and history of Delhi and the plains. The third section, which includes the poem ‘Vacating an apartment’ is set in America. The last section includes poems of nostalgia for India written in the United States.

  The poem ‘Vacating an Apartment’, as the name suggests, talks about the author’s departure from his apartment and the subsequent arrival of another tenant. Leaving an apartment or home gives one mixed feelings. On the one hand, you are planning on starting a new life elsewere and on the other hand, you are leaving a part of yourself behind. The poem begins with the poet speaking of the cleaners coming in to clean the room to make it ready for the new tenants. He describes them to be ‘as efficient as fate’. One cannot escape fate, it carries out its plans efficiently. Similarly, the cleaners with their ‘comet fingers’ efficiently wipe out his existence in that place. He also refers to them as ‘storm troopers’ from the film ‘Star Wars’ who are conducting a ‘genocide’ of his memories.

They learn everything

from the walls’ eloquent tongues

The walls of the house hear and know everything and now the cleaners have learned all about the poet’s secrets from the walls. Walls which contain his ‘voice stains’ are whitewashed. They successfully clear everything and make it clean as death. They wipe him completely, leaving no traces of his existence. They also burn the posters- India and heaven. Heaven, here, refers to his homeland, Kashmir. Kashmir is a land prone to political conflict .Heaven and India in flames shows the political turbulence.

In the second part of the poem, the poet describes the arrival of new tenants.

The women, her womb…..

…to clutch insurance policies...

The woman or the new tenant is described to have ‘her womb solid with the future’. This might suggest that she is pregnant. On the one hand, we have the poet whose time in the apartment has come to end whereas on the other hand, we have the new tenants who are full of life and have plans for the future. The new agreement signed by the tenants is equivalent to poet’s death warrant. The apartment is now beating with the the lives of the new family and the poet has stopped beating as the place which was once dear to him is no longer his. The poet had a particular affinity with the furniture and he has emotions connected with every nook and corner of the house. He says that the corner table knew about everything he wrote and every mistake he made. But the new family has no consideration for such emotions of the poet. The poem ends with the poet leaving the apartment with ‘tombstones’ or remnants of his past life.

References :

1. Shankar,Ravi. “The Veiled Sweets: Agha Shahid Ali’s Surprising Use of Humor.” Kashmir Lit- An Online Journal For Kashmiri and Diasporic Writing (2013).

2. Poetry Foundation <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/agha-shahid-ali>