Incendiary Circumstances Read online

With all the swerves of history

  I cannot imagine your future...

  I no longer guess a future.

  And do not know how we end

  nor where.

  Though I know a story about maps, for you.

  "THE GHAT OF THE ONLY WORLD"

  Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn 2003

  THE FIRST TIME that Agha Shahid Ali spoke to me about his approaching death was on April 25, 2001. The conversation began routinely. I had telephoned to remind him that we had been invited to a friend's house for lunch and that I was going to come by his apartment to pick him up. Although he had been under treatment for cancer for some fourteen months, Shahid was still on his feet and perfectly lucid, except for occasional lapses of memory. I heard him thumbing through his engagement book, and then suddenly he said, "Oh dear. I can't see a thing." There was a brief pause and then he added, "I hope this doesn't mean that I'm dying..."

  Although Shahid and I had talked a great deal over the past many weeks, I had never before heard him touch on the subject of death. I did not know how to respond; his voice was completely at odds with the content of what he had just said, light to the point of jocularity. I mumbled something innocuous: "No, Shahid—of course not. You'll be fine." He cut me short. In a tone of voice that was at once quizzical and direct, he said, "When it happens, I hope you'll write something about me."

  I was shocked into silence, and a long moment passed before I could bring myself to say the things that people say on such occasions. "Shahid, you'll be fine; you have to be strong..."

  From the window of my study I could see a corner of the building in which he lived, some eight blocks away. It was just a few months since he moved there; he had been living a few miles away, in Manhattan, when he had had a sudden blackout, in February 2000. After tests revealed that he had a malignant brain tumor, he decided to move to Brooklyn, to be close to his youngest sister, Sameetah, who teaches at the Pratt Institute—a few blocks away from the street where I live.

  Shahid ignored my reassurances. He began to laugh, and it was then that I realized he was dead serious. I understood that he was entrusting me with a quite specific charge: he wanted me to remember him not through the spoken recitatives of memory and friendship but through the written word. Shahid knew all too well that for those writers for whom things become real only in the process of writing, there is an in-built resistance to dealing with loss and bereavement. He knew that my instincts would have led me to search for reasons to avoid writing about his death: I would have told myself that I was not a poet, that our friendship was of recent date, that there were many others who knew him much better and would be writing from greater understanding and knowledge. All this Shahid had guessed, and he had decided to shut off those routes while there was still time.

  "You must write about me."

  Clear though it was that this imperative would have to be acknowledged, I could think of nothing to say. What are the words in which one promises a friend that one will write about him after his death? Finally I said, "Shahid, I will. I'll do the best I can."

  By the end of the conversation I knew exactly what I had to do. I picked up my pen, noted the date, and wrote down everything I remembered of that conversation. This I continued to do for the next few months. It is this record that has made it possible for me to fulfill the pledge I made that day.

  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."

  In 1998, I quoted a line from The Country Without a Post Office in an article that touched briefly on Kashmir. At the time all I knew about Shahid was that he was from Srinagar and had studied in Delhi. I had been at Delhi University myself, but although our time there had briefly overlapped, we had never met. We had friends in common, however, and one of them put me in touch with Shahid. In 1998 and 1999 we had several conversations on the phone and even met a couple of times. But we were no more than acquaintances until he moved to Brooklyn the next year. Once we were in the same neighborhood, we began to meet for occasional meals and quickly discovered that we had a great deal in common. By this time, of course, Shahid's condition was already serious, yet his illness did not impede the progress of our friendship. We found that we had a huge roster of common friends, in India, America, and elsewhere; we discovered a shared love of rogan josh, Roshanara Begum, and Kishore Kumar, a mutual indifference to cricket, and an equal attachment to old Bombay films. Because of Shahid's condition, even the most trivial exchanges had a special charge and urgency: the inescapable poignance of talking about food and half-forgotten figures from the past with a man who knew himself to be dying was multiplied, in this instance, by the knowledge that this man was also a poet who had achieved greatness—perhaps the only such that I shall ever know as a friend.

  One afternoon the writer Suketu Mehta, who also lives in Brooklyn, joined us for lunch. Together we hatched a plan for an adda—by definition, a gathering that has no agenda other than conviviality. Shahid was enthusiastic, and we began to meet regularly. From time to time other writers would join us. On one occasion a crew arrived with a television camera. Shahid was not in the least bit put out: "I'm so shameless; I just love the camera."

  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 21; 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 tumor 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 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. "I love it that so many people are here," he told me once. "I love it that people come and there's always food. I love this spirit of festivity; it means that I don't have time to be depressed."

  His apartment was a spacious and airy split-level on the seventh floor of a newly renovated building. There was a cavernous study on the top floor and a wide terrace that provided a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline, across the East River. Shahid loved this view of the Brooklyn waterfront slipping like a ghat into the East River, under the glittering lights of Manhattan.

  The journey from the foyer of Shahid's building to his door was a voyage between continents. On the way up,
the rich fragrance of rogan josh and haak would invade the dour gray interior of the elevator; against the background of the songs and voices 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 Mos-lem!" 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 center of a perpetual carnival, an endless mela of talk, laughter, food, and of course poetry.

  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: it was after this encounter that he began to experiment with strict metrical patterns and verse forms such as the canzone and the sestina. No one had a greater influence on Shahid's poetry than James Merrill; indeed, in the poem in which he most explicitly prefigured his own death, "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World," he awarded the envoy to Merrill: "SHAHID, HUSH. THIS IS ME, JAMES. THE LOVED ONE ALWAYS LEAVES."

  "How did you meet Merrill?" I asked Shahid once.

  "I heard he was coming down for a reading and I told the people in charge that I wanted to meet him. They said, 'Then why don't you cook for him?' So I did." Merrill loved the food, and on learning that Shahid was moving to Hamilton College in upstate New York, he gave him his telephone number and asked him to call. On the occasion of Shahid's first reading at the Academy of American Poets, Merrill was present—a signal honor, considering that he was one of America's best-known poets. "Afterward," Shahid liked to recall, "everybody rushed up and said, 'Did you know that Jim Merrill was here?' My stock in New York went up a thousandfold that evening."

  Shahid placed great store on authenticity and exactitude in cooking and would tolerate no deviation from traditional methods and recipes; for those who took shortcuts 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.

  At a certain point I lost track of you.

  You needed me. You needed to perfect me:

  In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.

  Your history gets in the way of my memory.

  I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.

  I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.

  Your memory gets in the way of my memory...

  There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.

  I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain

  only to myself.

  There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.

  If only somehow you could have been mine,

  what would not have been possible in the world?

  Once, in conversation, he told me that he also loved Bengali food. I protested: "But Shahid, you've never even been to Calcutta."

  "No," he said. "But we had friends who used to bring us that food. When you ate it, you could see that there were so many things that you didn't know about, everywhere in the country..."

  This was at a time when his illness had forced him into spending long periods in bed. He was lying prone on his back, shielding his eyes with his fingers. Suddenly he broke off and reached for my hand. "I wish all this had not happened," he said. "This dividing of the country, the divisions between people—Hindu, Muslim, Muslim, Hindu—you can't imagine how much I hate it. It makes me sick. What I say is, why can't you be happy with the cuisines and the clothes and the music and all these wonderful things?" He paused and added softly, "At least here we have been able to make a space where we can all come together because of the good things."

  Of the many "good things" in which he took pleasure, none was more dear to him than the music of Begum Akhtar. He had met the great ghazal singer when he was in his teens, through a friend, and she had become an abiding presence and influence in his life. In his apartment there were several shrinelike niches that were filled with pictures of the people he worshipped: Begum Akhtar was one of these, along with his father, his mother, and James Merrill. "I loved Begum Akhtar," he told me once. "In other circumstances you could have said that it was a sexual kind of love—but I don't know what it was. I loved to listen to her, I loved to be with her, I couldn't bear to be away from her. You can imagine what it was like. Here I was in my midteens—just sixteen—and I couldn't bear to be away from her."

  His love of Begum Akhtar was such as to spill over into a powerful sense of identification. He told me once that the singer Sheila Dhar, who had known Begum Akhtar well, had told him that he even bore a resemblance to Begum Akhtar: "It's something about our teeth and mouth."

  I said, "I don't see a resemblance between you and Begum Akhtar."

  He directed a wounded glance at me. "Yes, there is," he said. "Sheila Dhar told me so."

  "Well"—I quickly corrected myself—"she knew Begum Akhtar, so I think she knows more about it than I do."

  He nodded. "Yes," he said. "It's something about the teeth. Her teeth were a little prominent [dant agey they]—so are mine."

  It may well have been this relationship with Begum Akhtar that engendered his passion for the ghazal as a verse form. Yet, ardent advocate of the form though he was, he had little time for the gushing ardor of some of its contemporary American fans: "Imagine me at a writer's conference where a woman kept saying to me, 'Oh, I just love guh-zaals, I'm gonna write a lot of g'zaals,' and I said to her, in utter pain, 'OH, PLEASE DON'T!'" Always the disciplinarian in such matters, he believed that the ghazal would never flourish if its structure were not given due respect: "Some rules of the ghazal are clear and classically stringent. The opening couplet (called matld) sets up a scheme (of rhyme called qafia; and refrain—called radif) by having it occur in both lines—the rhyme immediately preceding the refrain—and then this scheme occurs only in the second line of each succeeding couplet. That is, once a poet establishes the scheme—with total freedom, I might add—she or he becomes its slave. What results in the rest of the poem is the alluring tension of a slave trying to master the master." Over a period of several years he took it on himself to solicit ghazals from a number of poets writing in English. The resulting collection, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, was published in 2000. In establishing a benchmark for the form it has already begun to exert a powerful influence: the formalization of the ghazal may well prove to be Shahid's most important scholarly contribution to the canon of English poetry. His own summation of the project was this: "If one writes in free verse—and one should—to subvert Western civilization, surely one should write in forms to save oneself from Western civilization?"

  For Shahid, Begum Akhtar was the embodiment of one such form, not just in her music but in many other aspects of her being. An aspect of the ghazal that he greatly prized was the latitude it provided for wordplay, wit, and nakhra (posturing): Begum Akhtar was a consummate master of all of these. Shahid had a fu
nd of stories about her sharpness in repartee. On one occasion he had accompanied her to the studios of All India Radio for a recording session. On the way in they met a famous singer, a man who was reputed to be having an affair with his dhobin (washerwoman). Begum Akhtar greeted the ustad with a deep salaam, as befitted by his standing in the world of music. But then, in passing, she tossed off the line "Arrey Khan-sahib, what a very clean kurta you're wearing today." Later, once out of the maestro's sight, they fell over laughing.

  Shahid was himself no mean practitioner of repartee. On one famous occasion, at Barcelona airport, he was stopped by a security guard just as he was about to board a plane. The guard, a woman, asked, "What do you do?"

  "I'm a poet," Shahid answered.

  "What were you doing in Spain?"

  "Writing poetry."

  No matter what the question, Shahid worked poetry into his answer. Finally the exasperated woman asked, "Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous to the other passengers?" At this Shahid clapped a hand to his chest and cried, "Only my heart."

  This was one of his great Wildean moments, and it was to occasion the poem "Barcelona Airport." He treasured these moments; "I long for people to give me an opportunity to answer questions," he told me once. On May 7 I had the good fortune to be with him when one such opportunity presented itself. Shahid was teaching at Manhattan's Baruch College in the spring semester of 2000, and this was to be his last class—indeed, the last he was ever to teach. The class was to be a short one, for he had an appointment at the hospital immediately afterward. I had heard a great deal about the brilliance of Shahid's teaching, but this was the first and only time that I was to see him perform in a classroom. It was evident from the moment we walked in that the students adored him: they had printed a magazine and dedicated the issue to him. Shahid, for his part, was not in the least subdued by the sadness of the occasion. From beginning to end, he was a sparkling diva, Akhtar incarnate, brimming with laughter and nakhra. When an Indian student walked in late, he greeted her with the cry, "Ah my little subcontinental has arrived." Clasping his hands, he feigned a swoon. "It stirs such a tide of patriotism in me to behold another South Asian!"