TaufiqRafat (1927-1998) was an English language Pakistani poet born in Sialkot, India in 1927. Educated in Dehra Dun, Aligarh and Lahore, Rafat and his family returned to Sialkot (now in Pakistan) following Partition in 1947. After graduating from the Hailey College of Commerce, Lahore, Rafat became a company executive and married his wife Rehana, who was a social worker and women's rights activist from the local Kashmiri community.
Hailed as one the finest poets writing in English in Pakistan Rafat wrote some of his finest poems in the 1970s including "The Boy with the Bashed in Skull" and "Gangrene" from Wordfall, both of which provide vivid images of poverty and social division. Rafat's major work Arrival of the Monsoon: Collected Poems 1947-1978, which contains 150 poems, was published in Lahore in 1985.
Rafat died on 2 August 1998.
Circumcision
Having hauled down my pyjamas
they dragged me, all legs and teeth,
that fateful afternoon, to a stool
before which the barber hunkered
with an open cut-throat. He stropped it
on his palm with obvious relish.
I did not like his musthachios, nor
his conciliatory smile. Somehow
they made me sit, and two cousins
held a leg apiece. The barber
looked at me; I stared right back,
defying him to start something.
He just turned aside to whisper
to my cousin who suddenly cried
'Oh look at that golden bird,'
and being only six I looked up;
which was all the time he needed
to separate me from my prepuce.
'Bastard, sonofapig,' I roared,
'sister-ravisher, you pimp
andcatalmite,' while he applied
salve and bandaged the organ.
Beside myself with indignation
and pain, I forgot the presence
of elders, and cursed and cursed
in the graphic vocabulary
of the lanes, acquired at leap-frog,
marbles, and blindman's buff.
Still frothing at the mouth they fetched
me to bed, where an anxious mother
kissed and consoled me. It was not
till I was alone that I dared
to look down at my naked middle.
When I saw it so foreshortened,
raw, and swathed in lint, I burst
into fresh tears. Dismally
I wondered if I would ever
be able to pee again.
This
was many many years ago.
I have since learnt it was more
than a ritual, for by the act
of a pull and downward slash,
they prepare us for the disappointments
at the absence of golden birds
life will ask us to look at
between our circumcision and death.
--TaufiqRafat