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| Wafa |
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''Arre, this has a flavour of Josh saheb!'' challenged a man sitting
right in front of me. Down on the stage the poet paused. Cocking his
head in our direction he said: ``And, of course, it is for you to tell
me whose flavour it has.'' The audience burst into laughter. The
putative poetry critic smiled sheepishly. He knew he had been bested.
The hall - named for the poet whose birthday this mushaira was
celebrating - was packed. There were men in white pyjama-kurta wearing
white skullcaps leading women in black burkhas and children in
multi-coloured nondenominational clothing. There were safari-suited
men, hairy arms folded across bulky chests, sitting in groups. An old
sikh with a flowing beard and a startled expression sat by himself
near the front. A small knot of elegantly clad fair young women sat
near the centre of the hall, acutely aware that everyone else was
favouring them with occasional lingering looks. But the bulk of the
audience was the synthetic fabric wearing me that play cards on lawns
at lunchtime in the Delhi winter.
The walls of the auditorium were decorated with purple banners
proclaiming the name of the television channel that was covering this
event. Earlier in the evening there had been a commotion when the TV
channel's producer had discovered that a Doordarshan crew was present
with a camera. ``My channel has planned one whole day of programming
devoted to the birthday,'' he had said to the safari-suited man who
was leading the DD contingent, ``and this mushaira is my
centrepiece. If you even mention such and such mushaira happened, that
will spoil everything.'' A sherwani-clad man who appeared to have
stepped out of a sepia photograph tried to make peace: ``But, they are
from Doordarshan news.'' But the twentieth century had ended some
years earlier, and with it had ended the validity of the sherwani's
argument: ``Doordarshan news or BBC news, I don't care. We have spent
a lot of money on this.'' The last word having been spoken, the safari
suit had retreated to the back rows where he sat listening to
mushaira. Urdu poetry, once patronized by monarchy had now turned to
capitalism for sustenance. The socialist state's chance had come and
gone.
On the stage sat the poets - mainly middle-aged men in waistcoats with
a few young overly made-up women in bright saris and a few doddering
old men in sherwanis among them. At their centre reposed the senior
poet who was presiding over this mushaira, looking, in his all white
outfit like he was auditioning to play Jawaharlal Nehru in a TV
series. On one side sat the stern but erudite man who had been asked
to direct the proceedings. It was his job to invite poets to the mike,
introduce them and say a few words about the verse they had recited
when they were done. Following convention he was a ranking poet, old
enough to have garnered the respect of his peers but young enough for
people to believe that a part of his best work was yet to be done.
Later in the proceedings he would sternly request the audience to not
commend a poet's looks in the guise of commending poetry after a
particularly sexy lady had read. He would also urge the audience to
favour serious poetry with the same fervour they brought to a popular
comic poet's lines. But now he turned to the man near me who had
accused the poet of unoriginality at best and plagiarism at worst and
said: ``A serious accusation should be made with seriousness.''
Near the end of the night an eighty-year old's turn came. ``There was
a time when every man and woman had his poetry on their lips,'' said
the director of proceedings. The way he stressed ``woman'' imbued the
image of poetry on people's lips with sensuality, rescued it from
being a cliche. The old man's own lips were folded into his
imperfectly dentured mouth. But when his introducer said these words,
he smiled. His black sherwani was spotless, his Gandhi cap not an inch
out of place. He took slow but precise steps to the mike. When he
reached it he turned to the the man who had introduced him and,
addressing him by name, said with love: ``How are you, mian? It's been
quite some time since we met.'' Then he turned to the audience and,
without preamble said: ``na gulrukhon ke liye hai, na gulbadan ke liye
hai'' (not for the rose-face, nor for the rose-cheeked). It was a line
that any one of the hundreds of Urdu poets to precede him, or the
countless that will follow him, might have said. But he broke with all
of them when he followed it up in a ringing tone that a twenty-year
old would have been proud to produce with ``mere lahoo ki har ek boond
mere vatan ke liye hai'' (every drop of my blood is for my homeland).
We all rose as one and with our hands outstretched and our hearts
racing wah-wahed him like we had not wah-wahed anyone before.
This piece first appeared in Hindustan Times' Sunday supplement Brunch on 10th February 2008. |
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