AFTER UNIVERSITY HE WENT BACK TO KARACHI which was then still a young cosmopolitan capital that was so busy experimenting with its own form that it wasn’t going to berate anyone else for doing the same
AND STILL UNDER WESTERN INFLUENCES HE FORGOT POLITICS AND SOCIAL CONCERNS IN FAVOUR OF OBSCENITY AND WAS HAULED UP IN COURT FOR THIS CRIME.
‘I don’t know what goes on in the minds of these disgusting people,’ he said, speaking in his defence at his trial for indecency. ‘I’m writing about eating fruit, and they say I’m being vulgar. What exactly do they think the mango’s slippery seed and dripping juices refer to?’ And with that, he put a mango on the table in front of him, cut it open along its equator and started sucking on its seed in a manner so suggestive that the newly married judge ran home to his wife.
THE CASE WAS DISMISSED BECAUSE THE JUDGE HAD OTHER THINGS TO DO AND HE CONTINUED TO WRITE, WINNING ACCLAIM FOR HIS CRAFT BUT NOT FOR HIS SUBJECT MATTERS.
By the time he was thirty he was already acknowledged as a craftsman in whose hands language was plastic; even his detractors acknowledged as much, while still complaining that, in contrast to his impassioned student days, he made language do everything except engender ‘worthy’ emotions in those who were listening. In one public gathering he ran into his old teacher who told him that, for all his formal brilliance, he was an inferior poet to his former classmate, Maqsood. ‘When you read a Maqsood poem you feel he’s plucking his heart out of his chest and placing it in your hand,’ the teacher berated him. The Poet replied, ‘Personally I don’t want any of Maqsood’s quivering organs sweating all over my palm.’
BUT THEN IN 1963 HE TRANSLATED THE POLITICAL POEMS OF AN OBSCURE TURKISH POET WHO SHARED HIS PEN-NAME.
He said afterwards that in some ways Nazim Hikmet’s death in 1963 affected him even more than the death of his own mother. He barricaded himself in the tiny cubbyhole which was his flat and within a few weeks produced his adaptations — he never used the word ‘translations’—of some of Hikmet’s verse with all its fiery politics. With discontent rife in the country over Ayub Khan’s constitution and its Basic Democracy scheme that made a joke of democracy it was either a brave or politically naive man who could publish such inflammatory verse; the Poet himself never said to which of the two categories he belonged.
THE AYUB KHAN GOVERNMENT IMPRISONED HIM FOR TWO MONTHS ON SOME CHARGE.
The deep scars across his face date from that first incarceration. He used to say simply that he got the scars from running into barbed wire. But one day I asked him, ‘How did you manage to run into barbed wire?’
‘Simple. The prison guards led me to barbed wire, put a gun to my head and said, “Run.”’
HE EMERGED FROM PRISON WITH HIS SOCIAL CONSCIENCE RESTORED.
He emerged from prison with a scarred face and a poetic voice that seared every government in Pakistan for the next two decades.
BUT HE STILL CONTINUED TO WRITE ROMANTIC VERSE AS WELL, THE MOST FAMOUS OF WHICH WAS LAILA, PUBLISHED IN 1970.
Oh no. No, no. No leaping from 1963 to 1970. No erasing 1968. That momentous year around the world — student revolutions, a new era dawning, my mother’s first meeting with the Poet. She was twenty-three and he was thirty-six. He was already immortal by then. Immortal and ugly — a short, stout, broad-nosed man with scars across his face. And she — she had just stepped into incandescence.
She was recently out of university at the time, and had been helping her uncle in his understaffed law firm as research for the book she was planning to write on ‘Women and Jurisprudence in Pakistan’. Her timing, in joining the firm, was either fortuitous or disastrous, depending on how you viewed the path her life took thereafter because, just weeks later, her uncle was engaged to represent a woman who accused her former employer of withholding her pay for six months and locking her in chains when he left the house. As the woman was an illiterate villager and her employer was a wealthy crony of many of the most powerful people in the country, it was a wonder either she or my great-uncle believed she’d ever get a fair trial. Forget fair. The matter didn’t even get to court before the former employer produced before my great-uncle and the woman ‘credible witnesses’ who were willing to attest to the moral depravity and pathological insanity of the woman. The woman walked out of my great-uncle’s office, swearing to him that she believed in justice, broke into the former employer’s house and when he returned she was waiting for him with his gun in her hand. She killed first him, then herself.
Somehow a Canadian film team which was working on a documentary about Pakistan heard of the story and came to interview my great-uncle. Too sickened by the whole thing to talk about it without exploding in rage, my great-uncle sent my mother to meet the film team instead. On camera, she was ablaze with beauty — and with a sense of justice so newly minted it shone through her eyes. The student revolutions of 1968 had found her on their fringes in her final weeks in the UK, listening, sympathizing, Occasionally even marching, but it took the village woman’s bloodied end to draw all those political ideals away from the abstract margins of her life and place them front-and-centre.
The Canadian film team must have scarcely been able to believe their luck that day — everything about her cried out, ‘I’m ready for my close up!’ She was wearing a plain white kurta, a thick karra on her wrist — silver inlaid with lapis lazuli — and had her hair tied back with a scarf. And she could speak with passion and intelligence and flashing grey-green eyes. ‘Pakistan’s Gypsy Feminist’ was born. One of the members of the film crew was also a freelance journalist and he wrote a besotted piece about my mother for a hugely popular magazine with a global circulation. Even so, her newly discovered fame would not have penetrated below the upper echelons of Pakistani society — those households that subscribed to foreign magazines — had the Poet not seen the article and expressed an interest in meeting her when one of her cousins was in earshot.
It was Something at First Sight. Something heady and consuming.
It can’t be an easy thing for a fiercely independent woman to become a muse. But before she knew how to react against what was happening, my mother found herself being defined by what the Poet wrote about her. He even changed the year of her birth in his poems, made her two years younger than she was so that she was the same age as Pakistan — in many of the poems of this time when he writes about the Beloved his poems have both the intimate resonance of a man speaking to his lover and the grand sweep of a poet declaiming about the nation. What twenty-three-year old could retain her sense of self amidst all this?
Oh yes, at first she enjoyed it — when he made her a figure of rebellion, of salvation, she played into it. That’s when her initial incarnation as Activist came to pass, though at this point the term was wholly inappropriate — she was still little more than the dogsbody at her uncle’s office, but people all over the country read the Poet’s verse, all dedicated to her, and soon she was being invited to speak at girls’ colleges, to join panels on Women’s Upliftment, to cut ribbons, to pose for pictures. It helped that the poems placed her on such a high pedestal that is was possible to ignore the sexualized imagery and believe that it was the impossibility of ever winning the love of this young, beautiful creature that fuelled the Poet to write about her so insistently.