THIS week’s column was intended to be a diatribe against the circumstances that are choking the denizens of Delhi and Lahore, and a reflection on the absurdity of the inevitably doomed Conference of the Parties (COP29) in a country determined to thrive on its oil exports.
But then, a sorrowful memory intervened. I was still a relative novice in the newsroom of this paper 40 years ago today when Ghazi Salahuddin, Dawn’s energetic news editor, informed me that the nation’s foremost poet was on his deathbed in a Lahore hospital.
Shortly afterwards, Ghazi confirmed the inevitable — and persuaded me to write a tribute. I was out of my depth, given my perfunctory knowledge of Urdu literature. I had known him as ‘Faiz chacha’ since my childhood as a friend of my parents, although I was better acquainted with his warm-hearted partner, Aunty Alys. It wasn’t until my mid-teens that I began to appreciate Faiz as an exquisite poet.
My only one-to-one with him occurred in an antechamber at Moscow’s Metropol hotel in 1977. I was at the cusp of a fruitless journey to earn a medical degree at the People’s Friendship University, and only vaguely aware of the disaster that was unfolding in Pakistan. I can’t recall the month, but it was after the March elections and before the July coup. Faiz summoned me out of his crowded living-room salon into a dining room where he offered me one of his Kent cigarettes (and was mildly surprised when I gratefully accepted) before launching into a broad overview of what was transpiring in our homeland.
I was mildly bewildered to begin with, but the primary purpose of the poet’s narrative was to assuage any concerns I might have about the safety of my parents. Blissfully unaware at the time of their ultimately unsuccessful endeavours to effect a rapprochement between prime minister Z.A. Bhutto and the Baloch leaders he had stupidly incarcerated — amid death threats that persuaded my father to carry his World War II service revolver on train journeys to Hyderabad, where the National Awami Party stalwarts were imprisoned — I wasn’t particularly worried. Until that conversation.
Poets like Faiz illuminate our possible tomorrows.
Not long afterwards, a fellow student informed me that Pakistan, like Bangladesh, had a Zia at the helm, and reminded me of the inimitable Punjabi poet Ustad Daman’s sadly evergreen couplet: ‘Pakistan diyaan maujan ee maujan/ Jithay waikho faujan ee faujan’ (a loose translation: “There is no end to Pakistan’s joy/ Wherever you look, the military is deployed”). A distraught Daman left his own deathbed to attend Faiz’s funeral, where he reputedly wailed, “Don’t leave me behind!” Neither of them lived to witness the unexpected demise of Pakistan’s most toxic tyrant, or the hybrid horrors that followed.
The aftermath might have reinforced their despair. And both the Lahoris (sure, Faiz was a Sialkoti who also lived in Karachi and Beirut, and spent time elsewhere, while Daman never budged from his inner-city bolt-hole) would have been appalled by their hometown’s profoundly depressing contest with Delhi as the most polluted city in the world. They would have been familiar with the delightfully crisp air, crunchy frost and morning mist of the Lahore winters that enthralled me as a child, walking or cycling to school.
Faiz might also have been alarmed by the venue of COP29. I’m not sure if Baku ever figured in his verse, possibly because even during its Soviet phase Azerbaijan’s capital tended to be viewed as an oily city. Several of his 1970s poems are datelined Moscow, Tashkent, Samarkand and so on — but never, as far as I can tell, Baku. Luckily for him, Faiz passed away well before the USSR ceased to exist, a mock democracy resurfaced in his beloved Pakistan, and an India where he was widely adored — a sentiment he heartily reciprocated — lapsed into Hindutva.
Faiz would have been disappointed but perhaps not surprised by what has occurred in the past 40 years. I don’t have a copy of the tribute I speedily churned out in 1984 — just three weeks after an unexpected morning phone call from Ghazi at my YMCA lodgings, minutes away from the coalface, had alerted me to Indira Gandhi’s assassination — but I do recall focusing in part on Faiz’s consistent internationalism, and notably the drumbeat of rebellion that echoed throughout Aajao Afreeka (Come Back, Africa).
A couple of years later, his poem Hum Dekhain Geentered the stratosphere courtesy of Iqbal Bano’s brilliant rendition. It envisaged a future that remains suspended between now and a possible tomorrow. His record as a journalist, literary critic and trade unionist testifies to the fact that Faiz was always more than just a poet. Yet it is primarily his verse that will forever remain a guiding torchlight towards a brighter tomorrow in which today’s younger generations might revel across the subcontinent.
Published in Dawn, November 20th, 2024
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