Ushshaaq ke kafile - is there to be a destination?

I was in Mumbai recently. I have always been fond of Bombay with the detached interest of someone who has never been tempted to live there. But I was morbidly aware of it this time as I suppose was natural. Mumbai bustled as usual. But every taxi I took was stopped for inspection. Every taxiwala I spoke to was getting on with his life, on alert. I was in the south of the city which is beautiful and old always, but seemed to my eyes as newly fragile. I felt like hanging garlic or pumpkins on every lovely building facade to ward off evil eyes.

Mumbai doesn’t represent home to me; to me it is a fascinating big city. But when I saw the everyday faces of Mumbai I felt a little of what they must feel.

This Faiz nazm that I am putting up I came across the day I left for Bombay. With Faiz almost always the mahboob is a metaphor for the beloved homeland. This poem Faiz (a fervent communist himself) wrote inspired by the letters of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. But like all good poetry it stands independent of context, moulding itself to shifting temporal atmosphere and inclinations. So here, supplant the repression of the communist ideology with the acts of hatred against capitalist Mumbai or violence in your homeland , and you still have a pretty powerful poem. It is not the best Faiz poem I have come across but in this instance its quotability is very high.

Ham jo tariik raahoN meN maare gaye

tere honToN ke phuuloN kii chaahat meN ham
daar kii Khushk tahnii pe vaare gaye
tere haathoN kii shamm’oN kii hasrat meN ham
niim taariik raahoN meN maare gaye

suulioN par hamaare laboN se pare
tere hoNToN kii laalii lapaktii rahii
terii zulfoN kii mastii barastii rahii
tere haathoN kii chaaNd sii damaktii rahii

jab khulii terii raahoN meN shaam-e-sitam
ham chale aaye, laaye jahaaN tak qadam
lab pe harf-e-Ghazal, dil meN qandill-e-Gham
apnaa Gham thaa gavaahii tere husn kii
dekh qaayam rahe us gavaahii per ham
ham jo taariik raahoN meN maare gaye

naa rasaa’ii agar apnii taqdiir thii
terii ulfat to apnii hii tadbiir thii
kis ko shikvaa hai gar shauq ke silsile
hijr kii qatl-gaahoN se sab jaa mile

qatl-gaahoN se chun kar hamaare ilm
aur nikleNge ushshaaq ke qaafile

jin kii raah-e-talab se hamaare qadam
muKhtasar kar chale dard ke faasile
kar chale jin kii Khaatir jahaaNgiir ham
jaaN gaNvaa kar terii dilbarii kaa bharam
ham jo taariik raahoN meN maare gaye

Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Montogomery Jail
15 May 1954

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The site from where I have done this cut and paste also has a translation by Agha Shahid Ali, It really is not very good but here it is. In fact I have never found that I have liked any of his translations that I have read. What is the point of making up your own stuff in a translation, I say? As it is one is losing out all the lyricism; why maul meaning? Not to mention sequences and constructs. Don’t know if I am just being fuddy-duddy but it gets my goat.

Update

I’ve tried a translation of my own. I’ve tried to stick close to the original. Here it is.

We who were slain on the darkest lanes

In longing for the roses that are your lips

Hung from the dry branch of the gallows

In seeking the lamps of your palms

Killed in twilit lanes

Distant from our lips within the noose

Colour danced in yours

Your hair rained flavour

Your moon-hands shone

When the dusk of terror rived your lanes

We came as far as feet carried

A poem’s fragment on our lips, fuel of sorrow in the heart

The sorrow that evidenced your beauty

Look ! we still yet stand witness

We who were killed in the shadowy lanes

If love’s consummation was not our fate

Remember that love was a self-fashioned ideal

Who complains then if all love’s strains

Meet in cubicles of death

We glean our knowledge from those same cells

And set forth a procession of lovers

On whose pathways of desire we will walk

Diminishing the distance of pain

For whom we conquered a world

Bartering our lives for your love

We who were slain in the darkest lanes

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I think it is interesting how the ‘we’ in this poem is interchangeable with the ‘I’. In fact I had a long time deciding whether to speak in the singular or plural. But I felt keenly that the spirit of community fairly pulses from the lines. The mass, the power and spirit of the bonded many, is very integral to Faiz’s poetry. Which is probably why I am seeking his poetry so often nowadays. I am afraid like everybody else that we may dust away the pain a little too soon. I feel the need to be connected for a little longer. We will take ourselves back to our individual lives as we must but in doing so I sincerely hope we, each of us, leave a little of ourselves boiling in the cauldron that is perhaps brewing a revolution.

Into that heaven of freedom...

I write this in a state of mild embarrassment. I thought I was past this sort of thing. I have worked in the circumference of the Indian government and certain of its do-gooding tentacles for about a decade now. I know enough to know that very little good ever gets done. I have met scores of government officials who probably don’t even realise that they are corrupt because they know of no other way to be. I know that incompetence and apathy can be so bone-deep that it can seem to structure the system. I have been at more meetings than I care to remember where everybody knows what to say and everybody knows what will finally be done, knowing that the two are never the same thing. I have passed over stages of shock, disgust, rejection, defiance, and to detachment. I can usually work in this dystopic world determinedly doing what I have to, healing disappointment with amusement, fighting revulsion with rectitude and glossing pain with philosophy.

Not today it seems. Maybe I went in less cynical than usual. Maybe it was the five-feet tall tattered portrait of MK Gandhi I started at throughout the meeting. Maybe it was because they did not even get why I was refusing. Maybe it was because the auto back home had a faulty meter.

But I came home and bawled like a baby.

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That was yesterday. One good thing seems to have come out of it though. The matla of this ghazal which has been evading me for a month finally eased into me. So here-

Tabiat-e-imaan-o-taa’at fizool ho chala jaise

Muazzin -e- deen-e-bazaar ab rasool ho chala jaise

Koi na guzraa zakhm taazaa kiye bagair

Tohfaa-e-khaar ka kuch usool ho chala jaise

Duaa na sahi salaam qubool kar jao

Keemat-e-taaluq vasool ho chala jaise

Koi larzaa tho chale koi lahar aud le mujhko

Koi nishaan duaa qubool ho chala jaise

Hairaan hun aaj zharf kaise lafz-e-bayaan

Khamaa bhi dil ka tool ho chala jaise

Usko kyaa dhoonde jo chup ke baitha Zoya

Apne khaaliqi mein kuch bhool ho chala jaise

What is this life? Without a care…

I am not sure but this might be a crisis.

One thing doesn’t seem to matter anymore than another these days.

I grasp for gradations and emerge with nothing.

I wish for something that means more than another just so that I may want it more, or feel more.

Instead I am stuck with a vanilla detachment.

I miss the hierarchies that held me together.

A lucid sense of the things of value; that completely evades me these days.

So much opinion… all gone.

Now I am certain that a thing could be this or that or naught and it would be the same.

I don’t think it is melancholic – this loss of judgment, but it is a bit strange.

I try to analyze ­­– and I don’t think this is cynicism; it would be very embarrassing if it is existential angst, and quite lowering if it is just age.

This lack of clarity about self is also a newish thing. And I must say it ceases to be amusing after a point. As always with the inexpressible, Mirza Saab comes to the rescue:

Hum wahaan hain jahaan se hamko bhee
kuchch hamaaree khabar naheen aatee

Aage aatee thee haal-e-dil pe hansee
ab kisee baat par naheen aatee

Now that I have been actively thinking about it, with a cursor to my head, I think I may be able to give you the crux of the matter.

I have lost subject matter for my prayers.

I cannot think of what to ask for, no unambiguous desire, no stubborn ambitions, and no righteous demands.

Increasingly I feel as if everything is perhaps exactly as it should be… as it ever will be.

But you see that leaves me with very little do, and very little scope to be.

I talk about this probably because I feel a conflict. My generation has made an ideal of ambition. To know what you want and to achieve it – that beyond all things is desirable. Sure, there is a wide choice of ambitions: there is professional success, personal happiness, a great love life, money, fame, altruistic ambitions, a desire to be of service, or a need to fulfill a potential.

To have an ambition you need foremost something worthy of want. In this matter all ideas seem to have deserted me. Somehow without my contriving it, I seem to have turned out into the kind of person who is perfectly happy to watch the play, act after act till it unfolds its climax, or not.

And so I stand in the glaring spotlight of someone nobody is actually watching and ask myself, ‘Is this alright?’

I not sure how I’ll answer but I have a feeling I am going to say, ‘See how it goes’.

Reconciliation

Dui hai
Dui hai
Dui hai
Dui hai
Dui hai
Dui hai
Dui hai
Dui hai
Dui hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Teek hai
Ek hai

Owning a thing

I played a tape today that I have had for seven years and never played once. I’ve come across it several times in my search-for-music missions, appealing its appropriateness, but never satisfying me of its rightness. You see this tape doesn’t actually belong to me. It was my friend’s…. who gave it to me a month before he died. It is strange and a little cold that it was the first thing that occurred to me when they told me he was dead; guilt for not returning his belongings on time. It was a thought that preoccupied the entire dry, dazed day that followed. I contemplated the propriety of returning his tapes to his family. I did not think they would know what to do with them, they had hardly known what to do with him. I also knew that if he had willed it he would have wanted me to have them, but still I would have liked to be sure. Like all things in his life Pappu’s death was strange and dramatic. He was found run down on a railway track. All the usual speculations made the rounds and all the inevitable conclusions were drawn. Someone said he seemed very happy when they met him that morning. I like to believe that was true.

So I was left with those tapes in my shelf, and no tears in my eyes. I was left with a vague cloud of guilt for being an ill-mannered borrower, for wilfully understanding less than I did, and giving less than I could and absolutely no more than I should. I thought I had been wise and kind, his death made me feel rude and miserly.

I was clearing my cupboard today when I played his tape on an exasperated impulse. Mehdi Hassan’s ‘Shahad. The tears did flow now. Less easily than they would for say an episode of Oprah Winfrey, but nevertheless they were there. They felt viscous and heavy and strained out my eyes. To be expected I suppose. They were old tears these… seven years old.

I hope I have let you rest at last, Vikram, by owning what you gave me.