The summer has been packed with exploring Lahore and making documentaries about the hidden treasures of the city. During these meanderings, couplets of various poets have come spontaneously, a contemplative recall of the moment. As I go deeper into the vaults of my memory, almost all the couplets and poems are those that I heard from my father who I had the good fortune of having with me for 43 years.
He would recite couplets based on the moment, to beautify a point or to give an example. He loved poetry—from the masters to contemporary poets. Farsi to English, he read them all in his vast collection of books and heard them at mushairas he loved attending. I would tag along at times and he would make it a point to explain both the literal and suggestive meaning of the poem. “Suna beta (did you listen son?)” he would begin by relishing the couplet while explaining its meaning. He had inherited this interest from his mother who was immersed in literature and language and my oldest memories are of mother and son doing “baith baazi”, a linguistic game and a genre of Urdu poetry played by composing verses of Urdu poems.
I suppose it is these childhood influences that have shaped my own interest in literature though I am nowhere close to my father’s depth and range of understanding.
As Sa’di (one of his favourites) writes in the Golistan:
“Gil-e-khushbu-e-dar hammam rozay
Raseed az dasth mehboob-e-ba dastham
Ba du gufti keh mishki ya abeeri?
Keh az bu-e-gul avazay tho mustam
Ba gufta man gil-e-nacheez boodam
Magar yak muddathay ba gul nashistam
Jamal-e-ham nasheen dar man asar kard
Vagar na ham nama khakam ke hastham”
One day, the poet says, I received in the
hammam, a wonderfully fragrant cake of clay (an early substitute for soap) from
the hand of my beloved. Amazed, I turned to the clay and asked: ‘what are you
that you smell so sweet? Amber? Musk?’ In answer, the tablet said softly: ‘I am neither. I am but a clod of earth; my fragrance comes only from the company of the flower that I once sat with.
M. Anwarullah Khan would have been 89 today.
