"Khudi ko kar buland itna ke har taqdeer se pehle khuda bande se khud poochhe bata teri raza kya hai"
- Allama Iqbal"Khuda bhi tujh se jo poochhe teri razaa kya hai, qalandari ka taqaza hai arz-e-haal na kar. Tera maqam maqam-e-raza se aage hai, khudi na bay'ch, tufaili na ban, sawaal na kar."
- Mir Ghulam Rasool Nazki
Mir Ghulam Rasool Nazki..
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Teri razaa kya hai....
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Dear Dada,
Salaam,
How are you dearest Dada? Do I really need to ask that question? Maybe not, but just for the sake of the niceties of letter writing let us go along with the ritual just this once. Even though I know what a smirk such inanity would bring to your face. You see it helps break the ice. And I sure need that if I am going to be talking to you like this.
You know once I wrote a letter to you and you wrote back saying it was more a ‘note’ than a letter. What a calamity that seemed to me. And the rest of my day was spent in a frenzy of chiseling words, chipping phrases and polishing thoughts so I could obliterate even the memory of such a description of my expression. In the process of course I was introduced to the generosity of expression and the ease of familiarity that writing a letter affords. This is what I want to bring to our conversation today. As for the letters you wrote to me, 2 or maybe 3 at the most, they are the parchments enshrined in the corridors of my consciousness. I go to their altar ever so often – to seek an uprightness of thought and a brilliance of action when desolation threatens to enmesh me. Your words will always have the power to blunt the jagged edges of despair and thaw the frozen expanses of faith. Your words are so much like you, unrelenting and merciless to an outsider and yet life-giving and luminous to the believer. Or as Rumi said, “In his wrath there are a hundred kindnesses, in his meanness a hundred generosities.
This only in hindsight, for when you are small and your grandfather’s eyes have the shimmer of a lions’ you feel very, very scared. It doesn’t help much if your parents, your aunts, your uncles and whoever, have you are also very, very scared. Do you even know that you could freeze a person right in his skin by simply looking at him? I must say, while I can, that you were a little impatient with us. Chasing us into the dark corners of hell, as it were, if we so much as touched something you didn’t want disturbed. At times like these you were to us fury personified - eyes blazing, beard flying and walking cane raised to strike. As we looked up at this picture of merciless ferocity our little lives dissolved there and then into little heaps of oblivion. We either simply fell unconscious or pretended to.
But you know we did plan and plot our little rebellions against you. Revenge was on our minds. But woe was our only recourse finally for you had our parents’ minds hostage too. For even in the privacy of our rooms we were not allowed to play out our little rebellions. You know by simply calling you harmless names, so that the terror in our little hearts could ease a little. Instead, I remember me, my sister and my brother tip toeing for the most part of our childhood across our room for the simple reason that you might be disturbed in your room below. I don’t know by what twist of fate, we had come to occupy that room, because we were also told you could even hear our words in your room below. So even in the oblivion of the night our words stayed mere whispers and silently traveled merely the short distances between our huddled bodies, on tiptoes, lest they disturb you in your sleep. Dear Dada I always wanted to ask you. Why did you like vanquishing your little foes so?
And so the whole idea of having a conversation with you, an informal one seems a little unreal to me even now. The very expression seems surrealistic. As if I were saying the sun had come down into my backyard to share a cup of tea. And so all the more reason for me to go right ahead and have one!
And then of course we grew up. And you became like the morning sun, flooding our minds with the light of your intellect and illuminating our hearts with the power of your wisdom. You were a special man, you know. The respect you gave to each ones growing up and the space you afforded for each one’s individuality is no easy feat. More so considering that you had so many of us to contend with - your children, there children and then there children too! And yet you were present in each of our lives. Present and vitally relevant till the day you passed away and ever after. You related to each one of us. You were as relevant to the youngest one among us as you were to the eldest. Your mind so fresh and your exuberance so invigorating that to associate the word old with you jarred. This to my mind was the most remarkable quality about you.
You gave no solutions and provided no answers. You enabled or should I say forced each one to find there own answers and live the reality of their own solutions. You constantly sought the upright in men and ruthlessly rejected the weakness of spirit. You mercilessly pulled people up from the morass of their own mediocrity and in so doing set them on the path to integrity. Your truth had the edge of the sword and your word the power to create or obliterate. Sometimes I feel you were like truth itself. With its austere beauty, with its frugality you were truth in all its dazzling and uncompromising glory. You gave one the most valuable gift of all, the choice to respect the highest in oneself. You never set out to win hearts. You tended souls and therein made slaves of hearts and minds. Your followers were followers by their choice. You never sought them. You seemed to seek fellow seekers. Personal glory and fame seemed not to concern you. I still remember how you cherished a genuine compliment with unbridled joy and rebuked a false one with the vehemence of a zealot as if warding off something deeply polluting.
You were what you were. It mattered very little who you were with or where you were. You were the same in both the personal and the private sphere. You were the same man at home, in a gathering of men as learned as you or smoking the hookah on the shop with one of your friends in the market. People did not seem to be big or small for you. They were either intelligent or stupid. And they fell or rose on that yardstick. Your wife of course was above all yardsticks. I can never forget how you looked the day you brought her lifeless body back from the hospital - a shattered man in the most poignant moment of his life. And the farewell you gave her when she left the house for her final resting place. No woman I think could ask for more love, more dignity and more beauty from her man. I also remember you in your final years here. Impatient to see her again, she was such a big reason for you wanting to go. What better compliment to pay to a woman. I also remember her adoration of you bordered on worship. Vow a man who was great even to his wife! Well most of the time at least.
It’s been an eternity since I last spoke to you. And I have missed you as I have moved through life. I have missed you a lot in my despair but I have missed you more in my happiness. I miss the conversations I had with you as I grew up. Or the conversations you had with others and I was witness to. Conversations that had a knack of pouring meaning into my life, and coloring in unabashedly brilliant hues the ordinariness of the little incidents of my life, transforming them into brilliant milestones that now haunt me for none can match their brilliance.
It was a wonderful world we saw as we grew up around you. A world full of poetry, books, discussions, and of course the endless stream of your friends from the literary world. As the youngest in the family it was our duty to ensure that you all had endless supplies of tea, biscuits, water etc. And we reveled in this activity. We sensed that something very worthwhile was going on while you all talked and talked. We sure didn’t understand then the subtle intricacies of your intellectual debates. But we were sure that we were part of something wonderful and historic. Which is so true for some of the best minds in the literary scene of that time where sharing ideas and sorting out existential matters sipping hot cups of tea and drawing on the hookah for inspiration. As I look back at that time what strikes me if the informality and joy that characterized all these gatherings. The camaraderie and the bonhomie as you tossed words, ideas or thoughts to each other in a ping pong or delivered powerful arguments to each other in a sparring game. It seemed to us at the time that life is some great adventure for you people. And this adventure seemed to coexist remarkably with the mundane everyday elements of life of the other. As if there was no conflict in the two. There seemed no separateness between the two, only a blending in and enrichment. Sometimes we kids would really panic. Because we thought you were having a fight. Well your flushed faces and raised voices seemed to indicate that. And then suddenly you would order another round of tea and the hookah would be feverishly passed around from one to the other and then the world would resound with laughter. With a ring of ecstasy to it as if to quote Rumi, “…both worlds were dancing.”
You know, once I was read somewhere that Ghalib used to tie knots in his shawl while composing his verses and that another poet maybe Firakh Gorakhpuri would sit in a room covered with spotless white sheets to compose his poems. And so I would stealthily await an esoteric ritual. I remember I never actually saw you compose any of your poems. The only thing that struck me was that you looked the same when you were at work and when you were praying. Both moments seemed to hold the same sacredness for you. Your room at these times was as if of the other world. Light took on a different sheen as it filtered through the windows of your room.
I knew in the ordinariness of my existence, then as now, that you were no ordinary man. And by that I don’t refer merely to your worldly accomplishments as a poet, a thinker and an intellectual. You were so much more than these mere words. I refer here to the effulgence of your spiritual might. That dimmed many a sun around you and sometimes left silence as the only way of speaking with you. You were such a strong presence that left one with only two options. To either be resurrected in its encompassing magnificence or be obliterated by its sheer power. There was no other way. Except, of course if you chose to smile and shatter a million suns to reveal the gloriousness of joy and the essence of magnanimity. This is what you did with us your grandchildren most of the time.
So dear Dada for me you will always be a measure - a measure for success, a measure for humanness, a measure for creativity and above all a measure for a life well lived. And every too often I fall short. Every time a moment I live is not complete enough. Every time a laugh I laugh is not true enough. Every time a tear I shed is not full enough. Every time the love I give is not pure enough. Every time a line I write is not beautiful enough. Every time a thought I think is not generous enough. Every time a life I live is not straight enough. I fall short. But then you are also my measure for faith! So I have missed you not just as the grandfather I so loved. I have missed you as an example of all that can be great in a human being. More than anything else I have missed you as my spiritual anchor. The man I had put between god and myself, the man who always negotiated a good deal for me. Without you I am shorn of my spiritual refuge, alone in a wilderness that is stark and unveiled.
You were to me someone who had witnessed ‘the essence of the essence’ in yourself. I have never seen someone enjoy a simple cup of tea sitting in the garden on a sun filled afternoon with as much abandon as you. I have never seen anyone relish a plate of rice, saag and mutton in a way that any of us waiting on you would want to eat nothing else for the rest of our lives. I have never seen anyone as reluctant to have new clothes but wear them with such pleasure that the clothes fell in love with themselves. I have never seen someone who found the extraordinary in the ordinary with such passion. I have never seen anyone so in love with life for the simple fact that this life and all else is created by the one almighty. I have never seen someone love God the way you did. And I will probably not know it till I stop loving you like god himself.
Dada it was a sheer blessing and a pleasure to have been part of your life.
How are you dearest Dada? Do I really need to ask that question? Maybe not, but just for the sake of the niceties of letter writing let us go along with the ritual just this once. Even though I know what a smirk such inanity would bring to your face. You see it helps break the ice. And I sure need that if I am going to be talking to you like this.
You know once I wrote a letter to you and you wrote back saying it was more a ‘note’ than a letter. What a calamity that seemed to me. And the rest of my day was spent in a frenzy of chiseling words, chipping phrases and polishing thoughts so I could obliterate even the memory of such a description of my expression. In the process of course I was introduced to the generosity of expression and the ease of familiarity that writing a letter affords. This is what I want to bring to our conversation today. As for the letters you wrote to me, 2 or maybe 3 at the most, they are the parchments enshrined in the corridors of my consciousness. I go to their altar ever so often – to seek an uprightness of thought and a brilliance of action when desolation threatens to enmesh me. Your words will always have the power to blunt the jagged edges of despair and thaw the frozen expanses of faith. Your words are so much like you, unrelenting and merciless to an outsider and yet life-giving and luminous to the believer. Or as Rumi said, “In his wrath there are a hundred kindnesses, in his meanness a hundred generosities.
This only in hindsight, for when you are small and your grandfather’s eyes have the shimmer of a lions’ you feel very, very scared. It doesn’t help much if your parents, your aunts, your uncles and whoever, have you are also very, very scared. Do you even know that you could freeze a person right in his skin by simply looking at him? I must say, while I can, that you were a little impatient with us. Chasing us into the dark corners of hell, as it were, if we so much as touched something you didn’t want disturbed. At times like these you were to us fury personified - eyes blazing, beard flying and walking cane raised to strike. As we looked up at this picture of merciless ferocity our little lives dissolved there and then into little heaps of oblivion. We either simply fell unconscious or pretended to.
But you know we did plan and plot our little rebellions against you. Revenge was on our minds. But woe was our only recourse finally for you had our parents’ minds hostage too. For even in the privacy of our rooms we were not allowed to play out our little rebellions. You know by simply calling you harmless names, so that the terror in our little hearts could ease a little. Instead, I remember me, my sister and my brother tip toeing for the most part of our childhood across our room for the simple reason that you might be disturbed in your room below. I don’t know by what twist of fate, we had come to occupy that room, because we were also told you could even hear our words in your room below. So even in the oblivion of the night our words stayed mere whispers and silently traveled merely the short distances between our huddled bodies, on tiptoes, lest they disturb you in your sleep. Dear Dada I always wanted to ask you. Why did you like vanquishing your little foes so?
And so the whole idea of having a conversation with you, an informal one seems a little unreal to me even now. The very expression seems surrealistic. As if I were saying the sun had come down into my backyard to share a cup of tea. And so all the more reason for me to go right ahead and have one!
And then of course we grew up. And you became like the morning sun, flooding our minds with the light of your intellect and illuminating our hearts with the power of your wisdom. You were a special man, you know. The respect you gave to each ones growing up and the space you afforded for each one’s individuality is no easy feat. More so considering that you had so many of us to contend with - your children, there children and then there children too! And yet you were present in each of our lives. Present and vitally relevant till the day you passed away and ever after. You related to each one of us. You were as relevant to the youngest one among us as you were to the eldest. Your mind so fresh and your exuberance so invigorating that to associate the word old with you jarred. This to my mind was the most remarkable quality about you.
You gave no solutions and provided no answers. You enabled or should I say forced each one to find there own answers and live the reality of their own solutions. You constantly sought the upright in men and ruthlessly rejected the weakness of spirit. You mercilessly pulled people up from the morass of their own mediocrity and in so doing set them on the path to integrity. Your truth had the edge of the sword and your word the power to create or obliterate. Sometimes I feel you were like truth itself. With its austere beauty, with its frugality you were truth in all its dazzling and uncompromising glory. You gave one the most valuable gift of all, the choice to respect the highest in oneself. You never set out to win hearts. You tended souls and therein made slaves of hearts and minds. Your followers were followers by their choice. You never sought them. You seemed to seek fellow seekers. Personal glory and fame seemed not to concern you. I still remember how you cherished a genuine compliment with unbridled joy and rebuked a false one with the vehemence of a zealot as if warding off something deeply polluting.
You were what you were. It mattered very little who you were with or where you were. You were the same in both the personal and the private sphere. You were the same man at home, in a gathering of men as learned as you or smoking the hookah on the shop with one of your friends in the market. People did not seem to be big or small for you. They were either intelligent or stupid. And they fell or rose on that yardstick. Your wife of course was above all yardsticks. I can never forget how you looked the day you brought her lifeless body back from the hospital - a shattered man in the most poignant moment of his life. And the farewell you gave her when she left the house for her final resting place. No woman I think could ask for more love, more dignity and more beauty from her man. I also remember you in your final years here. Impatient to see her again, she was such a big reason for you wanting to go. What better compliment to pay to a woman. I also remember her adoration of you bordered on worship. Vow a man who was great even to his wife! Well most of the time at least.
It’s been an eternity since I last spoke to you. And I have missed you as I have moved through life. I have missed you a lot in my despair but I have missed you more in my happiness. I miss the conversations I had with you as I grew up. Or the conversations you had with others and I was witness to. Conversations that had a knack of pouring meaning into my life, and coloring in unabashedly brilliant hues the ordinariness of the little incidents of my life, transforming them into brilliant milestones that now haunt me for none can match their brilliance.
It was a wonderful world we saw as we grew up around you. A world full of poetry, books, discussions, and of course the endless stream of your friends from the literary world. As the youngest in the family it was our duty to ensure that you all had endless supplies of tea, biscuits, water etc. And we reveled in this activity. We sensed that something very worthwhile was going on while you all talked and talked. We sure didn’t understand then the subtle intricacies of your intellectual debates. But we were sure that we were part of something wonderful and historic. Which is so true for some of the best minds in the literary scene of that time where sharing ideas and sorting out existential matters sipping hot cups of tea and drawing on the hookah for inspiration. As I look back at that time what strikes me if the informality and joy that characterized all these gatherings. The camaraderie and the bonhomie as you tossed words, ideas or thoughts to each other in a ping pong or delivered powerful arguments to each other in a sparring game. It seemed to us at the time that life is some great adventure for you people. And this adventure seemed to coexist remarkably with the mundane everyday elements of life of the other. As if there was no conflict in the two. There seemed no separateness between the two, only a blending in and enrichment. Sometimes we kids would really panic. Because we thought you were having a fight. Well your flushed faces and raised voices seemed to indicate that. And then suddenly you would order another round of tea and the hookah would be feverishly passed around from one to the other and then the world would resound with laughter. With a ring of ecstasy to it as if to quote Rumi, “…both worlds were dancing.”
You know, once I was read somewhere that Ghalib used to tie knots in his shawl while composing his verses and that another poet maybe Firakh Gorakhpuri would sit in a room covered with spotless white sheets to compose his poems. And so I would stealthily await an esoteric ritual. I remember I never actually saw you compose any of your poems. The only thing that struck me was that you looked the same when you were at work and when you were praying. Both moments seemed to hold the same sacredness for you. Your room at these times was as if of the other world. Light took on a different sheen as it filtered through the windows of your room.
I knew in the ordinariness of my existence, then as now, that you were no ordinary man. And by that I don’t refer merely to your worldly accomplishments as a poet, a thinker and an intellectual. You were so much more than these mere words. I refer here to the effulgence of your spiritual might. That dimmed many a sun around you and sometimes left silence as the only way of speaking with you. You were such a strong presence that left one with only two options. To either be resurrected in its encompassing magnificence or be obliterated by its sheer power. There was no other way. Except, of course if you chose to smile and shatter a million suns to reveal the gloriousness of joy and the essence of magnanimity. This is what you did with us your grandchildren most of the time.
So dear Dada for me you will always be a measure - a measure for success, a measure for humanness, a measure for creativity and above all a measure for a life well lived. And every too often I fall short. Every time a moment I live is not complete enough. Every time a laugh I laugh is not true enough. Every time a tear I shed is not full enough. Every time the love I give is not pure enough. Every time a line I write is not beautiful enough. Every time a thought I think is not generous enough. Every time a life I live is not straight enough. I fall short. But then you are also my measure for faith! So I have missed you not just as the grandfather I so loved. I have missed you as an example of all that can be great in a human being. More than anything else I have missed you as my spiritual anchor. The man I had put between god and myself, the man who always negotiated a good deal for me. Without you I am shorn of my spiritual refuge, alone in a wilderness that is stark and unveiled.
You were to me someone who had witnessed ‘the essence of the essence’ in yourself. I have never seen someone enjoy a simple cup of tea sitting in the garden on a sun filled afternoon with as much abandon as you. I have never seen anyone relish a plate of rice, saag and mutton in a way that any of us waiting on you would want to eat nothing else for the rest of our lives. I have never seen anyone as reluctant to have new clothes but wear them with such pleasure that the clothes fell in love with themselves. I have never seen someone who found the extraordinary in the ordinary with such passion. I have never seen anyone so in love with life for the simple fact that this life and all else is created by the one almighty. I have never seen someone love God the way you did. And I will probably not know it till I stop loving you like god himself.
Dada it was a sheer blessing and a pleasure to have been part of your life.
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