Yet the message itself was neither a presaging nor a prediction; it lay merely in the acknowledgment of the loss of a map. But to be aware of the death of a teleology is not to know of what will take its place. The truth is that on the morning of September 11, I had nothing to say to my children that had not been said in Michael Ondaatje's poem "The Story":
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…"