"The
Ghat Of The Only World"
I knew Shahid’s work long
before I met him. His 1997 Collection, The Country Without a Post Office, had
made a powerful impression on me. His voice was like none I had ever heard
before, at once lyrical and fiercely disciplined, engaged and yet deeply
inward. Not for him, the mock-casual almost-prose of so much contemporary
poetry: his was a voice that was not ashamed to speak in a bardic register. I
knew of no one else who would even conceive of publishing a line like: ‘Mad
heart, be brave.’
Shahid had a sorcerer’s
ability to transmute the mundane into the magical. Once I accompanied Iqbal,
his brother, and Hena, his sister, on a trip to fetch him home from hospital.
This was on May 21st: by that time he had already been through several
unsuccessful operations. Now he was back in hospital to undergo a surgical
procedure that was intended to relieve the pressure on his brain. His head was
shaved and the shape of the tumour was visible upon his bare scalp, its edges
outlined by metal sutures. When it was time to leave the ward a blue-uniformed
hospital escort arrived with a wheelchair. Shahid waved him away, declaring
that he was strong enough to walk out of the hospital on his own. But he was
groggier than he had thought and his knees buckled after no more than a few
steps. Iqbal went running off to bring back the wheelchair while the rest of us
stood in the corridor, holding him upright. At that moment, leaning against the
cheerless hospital wall, a kind of rapture descended on Shahid. When the
hospital orderly returned with the wheelchair Shahid gave him a beaming smile
and asked where he was from. Ecuador, the man said and Shahid clapped his hands
gleefully together. “Spanish!” he cried, at the top of his voice. “I always
wanted to learn Spanish. Just to read Lorca.”
At this the tired,
slack-shouldered orderly came suddenly to life. “Lorca? Did you say Lorca?” He
quoted a few lines, to Shahid’s great delight. “Ah! ‘La Cinque de la Tarde’,”
Shahid cried, rolling the syllables gleefully around his tongue. “How I love
those words. ‘La Cinque de la Tarde’!” That was how we made our way through the
hospital’s crowded lobby: with Shahid and the orderly in the vanguard, one
quoting snatches of Spanish poetry and the other breaking in from time to time
with exultant cries of, "La Cinque de la Tarde, La Cinque de la Tarde…”
Shahid’s gregariousness
had no limit: there was never an evening when there wasn’t a party in his
living room. ... against the background of the songs and voices and that were
always echoing out of his apartment, even the ringing of the doorbell had an
oddly musical sound. Suddenly, Shahid would appear, flinging open the door,
releasing a great cloud of heeng into the frosty New York air. The journey from the foyer of Shahid’s
building’s to his door was a voyage between continents: on the way up the rich
fragrance of rogan josh and haak would invade the dour, grey interior of the
elevator; against the background of the songs and voices and that were always
echoing out of his apartment, even the ringing of the doorbell had an oddly
musical sound. Suddenly, Shahid would appear, flinging open the door, releasing
a great cloud of heeng into the frosty New York air. “Oh, how nice,” he would cry, clapping his
hands, “how nice that you’ve come to see your little Moslem!”
Invariably, there’d be
some half-dozen or more people gathered inside – poets, students, writers,
relatives – and in the kitchen someone would always be cooking or making tea.
Almost to the very end, even as his life was being consumed by his disease, he was
the centre of a perpetual carnival, an endless mela of talk, laughter, food and
of course, poetry.
The epicure Shahid
No matter how many people
there were, Shahid was never so distracted as to lose track of the progress of
the evening’s meal. From time to time he would interrupt himself to shout
directions to whoever was in the kitchen: “yes, now, add the dahi now.” Even
when his eyesight was failing, he could tell, from the smell alone, exactly
which stage the rogan josh had reached. And when things went exactly as they
should, he would sniff the air and cry out loud: “Ah! Khana ka kya mehek hai!”
Shahid was legendary for
his prowess in the kitchen, frequently spending days over the planning and
preparation of a dinner party. It was through one such party, given while he
was in Arizona, that he met James Merrill, the poet who was to radically alter
the direction of his poetry.
Shahid placed great store
on authenticity and exactitude in cooking and would tolerate no deviation from
traditional methods and recipes: for those who took short cuts, he had only
pity. He had a special passion for the food of his region, one variant of it in
particular: ‘Kashmiri food in the Pandit style’. I asked him once why this was
so important to him and he explained that it was because of a recurrent dream,
in which all the Pandits had vanished from the valley of Kashmir and their food
had become extinct. This was a nightmare that haunted him and he returned to it
again and again, in his conversation and his poetry.
Kashmir days
[Agha's family] were Shia,
who are a minority amongst the Muslims of Kashmir. Shahid liked to tell a story
about the origins of his family: the line was founded, he used to say, by two
brothers who came to Kashmir from Central Asia. The brothers had been trained
as hakims, specializing in Yunani medicine, and they arrived in Kashmir with
nothing but their knowledge of medical lore: they were so poor that they had to
share a single cloak between them. But it so happened that the then Maharajah
of Kashmir was suffering from terrible stomach pains, ‘some kind of colic’.
Learning that all the kingdom’s doctors had failed to cure the ailing ruler,
the two brothers decided to try their hand.
They gave the Maharajah a concoction that went through the royal
intestines like a plunger through a tube, bringing sudden and explosive relief.
Delighted with his cure, the grateful potentate appointed the brothers his
court physicians: thus began the family’s prosperity.
“So you see,” Shahid would
comment, in bringing the story to its conclusion. “My family’s fortunes were
founded on a fart.”
By Shahid’s account, his
great-grandfather was the first Kashmiri Muslim to matriculate. The story went
that to sit for the examination, he had had to travel all the way from Srinagar
to Rawalpindi in a tonga. Later, he too became an official at the court of the
Maharajah of Kashmir. He had special charge of education, and took the
initiative to educate his daughter. Shahid’s grandmother was thus one of the
first educated women in Kashmir. She passed the matriculation examination, took
several other degrees, and in time
became the Inspector of Women’s School’s. She could quote poetry in four
languages: English, Urdu, Farsi and Kashmiri. Shahid’s father, Agha Ashraf Ali,
continued the family tradition of public service in education. He taught at
Jamia Millia University in New Delhi and went on to become the principal of the
Teacher’s College in Srinagar. In 1961, he enrolled at Ball State Teacher’s
College, in Muncie, Indiana, to do a PhD in Comparative Education. Shahid was
twelve when the family moved to the US and for the next three years he attended
school in Muncie. Later the family moved back to Srinagar and that was where
Shahid completed his schooling. But it was because of his early experience, I
suspect, that Shahid was able to take America so completely in his stride when
he arrived in Pennsylvania as a graduate student.
Kashmir and the political
situation
The steady deterioration
of the political situation in Kashmir – the violence and counter-violence - had
a powerful effect on him. In time it became one of the central subjects of his
work: indeed it could be said that it was in writing of Kashmir that he created
his finest work. The irony of this is that Shahid was not by inclination a
political poet. I heard him say once: “If you are from a difficult place and
that’s all you have to write about then you should stop writing. You have to
respect your art, your form – that is just as important as what you write
about.”
Another time, I was
present at Shahid’s apartment when his long-time friend, Patricia O’Neill,
showed him a couple of sonnets written by a Victorian poet. The poems were
political, trenchant in their criticism of the British Government for its
failure to prevent the massacre of the Armenians in Turkey. Shahid glanced at
them and tossed them off-handedly aside: “These are terrible poems.” Patricia
asked why, and he said: “Look, I already know where I stand on the massacre of
the Armenians. Of course I am against it. But this poem tells me nothing of the
massacre; it makes nothing of it formally. I might as well just read a news
report.”
Rooms are never finished
Although Shahid’s parents
lived in Srinagar, they usually spent the winter months in their flat in New
Delhi. It was there that his mother had her first seizure in December 1995. The
attack was initially misdiagnosed and it was not till the family brought her to
New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital, in January 1996, that it was confirmed that she
had a malignant brain tumour. Her condition was so serious that she was
operated on two days after her arrival. The operation did not have the desired
effect and resulted instead in a partial paralysis. At the time Shahid and his
younger brother Iqbal were both teaching at the University of Massachusetts in
Amherst. His sister, Hena, was working on a PhD at the same institution. The
siblings decided to move their mother to Amherst and it was there that she died
on April 24, 1997. In keeping with her wishes, the family took her body back to
Kashmir for burial. This long and traumatic journey forms the subject of a
cycle of poems, ‘From Amherst to Kashmir’, that was later included in Shahid’s
2001 collection, Rooms Are Never Finished.
During the last phase of
his mother’s illness and for several months afterwards, Shahid was unable to
write. The dry spell was broken in 1998, with ‘Lenox Hill’, possibly his
greatest poem. The poem was a canzone, a
form of unusual rigour and difficulty (the poet Anthony Hecht once remarked that
Shahid deserved to be in Guiness Book of records for having written three
canzones – more than any other poet). In ‘Lenox Hill’, the architectonics of
the form creates a soaring superstructure, an immense domed enclosure, like
that of the great mosque of Isfahan or the mausoleum of Sayyida Zainab in
Cairo: a space that seems all the more vast because of the austerity of its
proportions. The rhymes and half-rhymes are the honeycombed arches that thrust
the dome towards the heavens, and the metre is the mosaic that holds the whole
in place. Within the immensity of this bounded space, every line throws open a
window that beams a shaft of light across continents, from Amherst to Kashmir,
from the hospital of Lenox Hill to the Pir Panjal Pass. Entombed at the centre
of this soaring edifice lies his mother:
…Mother,
they asked me, So how’s the writing ? I answered My
mother
is my poem . What did they expect? For no verse
sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir
and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of
Kashmir
(across fifteen centuries) in the hospital. Kashmir,
she’s dying ! How her breathing drowns out the
universe
as she sleeps in Amherst.
The poem is packed with
the devices that he had perfected over a lifetime: rhetorical questions,
imperative commands, lines broken or punctuated to create resonant and
unresolvable ambiguities. It ends, characteristically, with a turn that is at
once disingenous and wrenchingly direct.
For compared to my grief for you, what are those of
Kashmir,
and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the
universe
when I remember you – beyond all accounting – O my
mother?
For Shahid, the passage of
time produced no cushioning from the shock of the loss of his mother: he re-lived
it over and over again until the end. Often he would interrupt himself in
mid-conversation: “I can’t believe she’s gone; I still can’t believe it.” The
week before his death, on waking one morning, he asked his family where his
mother was and whether it was true that she was dead. On being told that she
was, he wept as though he were living afresh through the event.
In the penultimate stanza
of ‘Lenox Hill,’ in a breathtaking, heart-stopping inversion, Shahid figures
himself as his mother’s mother:
“As you sit here by me, you’re just like my mother,”
she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir,
she’s watching at the Regal, her first film with
Father.
If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother,
I'd save you – now my daughter – from God. The universe
opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God’s
mother!
I remember clearly the
evening when Shahid read this poem in the living room of my house. I remember
it because I could not keep myself from wondering whether it was possible that
Shahid’s identification with his mother was so powerful as to spill beyond the
spirit and into the body. Brain cancer is not, so far as I know, a hereditary
disease, yet his body had, as it were, elected to reproduce the conditions of
his mother’s death. But how could this be possible? Even the thought appears
preposterous in the bleak light of the Aristotelian distinction between mind
and body, and the notions of cause and effect that flow from it. He had said to
me once, “I love to think that I'll meet my mother in the after-life, if there
is an after-life.” I had the sense that as the end neared, this was his supreme
consolation. He died peacefully, in his sleep, at 2 a.m. on December 8.
Amitav Ghosh, Brooklyn
December 15, 2001
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