Mansoor Shikoh
Naya Shikwa · A New Complaint
Naya Shikwa is a musaddas of 64 stanzas in six movements. It takes up the complaint Iqbal voiced in his Shikwa (1909) and makes it anew, for our own time. It keeps Iqbal’s metre and his six-line stanza, but speaks in today’s language about today’s world.
Iqbal’s speaker complained for a people who had served God and lost their power. This speaker complains for those who never had any: the hungry child, the peasant, the daughter, the bombed school, the dying parent. It is not a poem of unbelief. It is an argument that goes as far as faith can bear, and then a little further.
Each stanza has one shape. Four lines build a picture or a case; the closing couplet turns it into a question addressed directly to God.
I The Paper House کاغذ کا گھر stanzas 1–8
A child draws a house and leaves its door open; a bomb falls on that very door. The house survives on paper, the artist does not. From there the speaker questions his own making: he never asked to be born, was shaped from clay with thirst and desire built in, wound up like a puppet and told he is free. Even nature runs on death.
The complaint begins with the design, not the world.
II The Moon of Bread روٹی کا چاند stanzas 9–18
Who gets what. One child inherits a crown, another rests his head on bricks. The diamond shines in the palace while the only moon in a poor kitchen rises on the mother’s black tawa. One book calls a human being priceless, another writes a price beside his name.
If the world is just, why does it work like a market?
III Ablution in Blood خون کا وضو stanzas 19–30
Faith in the wrong hands. Prayer used as a mask, a daughter given half a share of love, questions called rebellion, and hands that wash after killing as if washing were enough.
The anger is aimed at those who use God’s name, and at why it is allowed.
IV The Fruit Bag پھل کی تھیلی stanzas 31–39
War. In the rubble lies a schoolbag, and in it a drawing: a road home, a sun, an open door, flowers. The mother leaves the door open and ash comes home instead. At the centre, a father gathers his child into a fruit bag. The speaker asks for one small mercy, a cut hand made whole, and for weakness to have a guardian.
Here the complaint is at its loudest.
V Separation Within One Room ایک کمرے کی جدائی stanzas 40–49
The grief becomes the poet’s own: a sister lost at birth, a body that turns on itself, a father silent for years in one room, a mother who read every silence, and the goodbyes that could not be spoken.
The questions stop being about the world and become the cost of loving someone.
VI A Little Hope ذرا سی آس stanzas 50–64
Knocking on locked doors, a ladder that may lean on the wrong wall, the question of whether worship was love or fear. Then the speaker turns on himself: the wounded deer he walked past, the silence that helped a killer. He no longer asks for paradise, only a door cut into his prison for light, and a world where a roof never becomes a gravestone.
The one who began “I never asked to be born” ends “I never asked for paradise”: one shade, a sky, a little hope.
From a paper house to a little shade.
The six movements will be released as recitations on YouTube. A feature film is in development.