[Reader-list] Heartbreak as Craft

[rehan ansari]

SHAHID, Harsha and myself were there with a beautiful Karachi boy that Harsha was enamoured with. It was a boys� night out during Desh Pardesh in Toronto, a week long festival that celebrated achievement in the arts and in Left political activism among South Asians living in the west. Desh was what had brought us together. We were spending the evening, guests of Harsha, on the balcony of a luscious bed and breakfast in a wonderful tree lined neighbourhood in the Annex in Toronto. 

In the �90s Desh was the annual festival where I first saw writers like Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Shyam Selvadurai, Amitav Ghosh and Agha Shahid Ali up close. 

Shahid was up close and personal unlike any of the stars that had ever come through Desh. He was the only star writer I remember from years of attending Desh, who came from out of town and, besides giving a reading, was interested in meeting aspiring poets in a separate session. I attended that session and was struck by the passion that Shahid brought to the classroom (he used to teach creative writing at University of Massachusetts at Amherst). He argued for rhyme and metre in English poetry, as opposed to blank verse, giving examples from advertising jingles and a Duran Duran song. The most preposterous thing I heard that morning was his argument for writing ghazals in English. 

At his reading on Desh opening nite I heard a brilliant adaptation he did of Faiz�s poem Mujh Si Pehli Si Mohabbat Mere Mehboob Na Mang. In his English poem Shahid�s rhyme schemes sparkled, putting his poem far ahead of any mere translation or creative translation of Faiz I had ever heard or read. But that morning of the seminar Shahid�s encouragement to write ghazals in English seemed an outlandish assertion.

This was a year before Shahid�s book, The Country Without a Post Office came out. At that Desh in �96 the brown satchel he was carrying had the proofs of the book. His book bag carried shaeri like this:

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight

before you agonise him in farewell tonight? 

 

Pale hands that once loved me beside the Shalimar: 

Whom else from rapture�s road will you expel tonight?

 

Those Fabrics of Cashmere � �to make Me beautiful �� 

�Trinket� � to gem � �Me to adorn � How � tell�� tonight?



Over time, in encounters with Shahid, mostly through his poetry, I have realised the truth to his audaciousness. I wish that a Shahid was in the English department of all campuses in the world that have an English Department. It should be a human right, at least for young desis.

He would also say anything anytime. On the taxi-ride with all of us headed over to the b&b in the Annex when he found out Harsha taught at Berkeley, he asked after Bharati Mukherjee who is in the English Department there. Without waiting for an answer from Harsha, skipping no beats, he added: the writer without a brain. 

When we were sitting in the balcony at the height of the tree trunks, Harsha had lit candles, recited by heart a poem in Russian by Joseph Brodsky, his Karachi friend was looking marvellous and Harsha asked Shahid about Kashmir and what would become of it. 

Shahid said he hoped India and Pakistan would leave it alone. That it become a Switzerland in the future. That was my first introduction from Shahid to the vexed issue of Kashmir. I have never been to Kashmir and only know Kashmir from the rhetoric of Islamabad. Islamabad, whether it�s the politicians, the bureaucrats or the army I know is not interested in the self determination of anybody. Not East Pakistan, not Baluchistan, not Sind, not Karachi. When has anyone in Islamabad shown heartfelt concern about anybody�s rights, human or otherwise?

So to somebody with such a closed heart to a closed rhetorical question Shahid�s poems should have been a challenge.

Here is a part of a poem in which a dead young Kashmiri speaks to the poet:

�Don�t tell my father I have died,� he says,

and I follow him through blood on the road

and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners

left behind, as they ran from the funeral, victims of the firing. From windows we hear

grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall 

on us, like ash. Black on edges of flames,  it cannot extinguish the neighbourhoods, 

the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers. 

Kashmir is burning: 

 

                                 By that dazzling light we see men removing statues from temples. We beg them, �Who will protect us if you leave?� They don�t answer, they just disappear on the road to the plains, clutching the gods. 



 



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