The Half-Inch Himalayas: Miniature Edition

Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz (J. 20 November 1984) "You are welcome to make your adaptations of my poems." 1 You wrote this from Beirut, two years before the Sabra-Shatila massacres. That city's refugee air was open, torn by jets and the voices of reporters. As always, you were witness to "rains of stones," though you were away from Pakistan, from the laws of home which said: the hands of thieves will be surgically amputated. But the subcontinent always spoke to you: in Ghahb's Urdu, and sometimes through the old masters who sang of twilight but didn't live, like Ghalib, to see the wind rip the collars of the dawn: the summer of 1857, the trees of Delhi became scaffolds: 30,000 men were hanged. Wherever you were, Faiz, that language spoke to you; and when you heard it, you were alone —in Tunis, Beirut, London, or Moscow. Those poets' laments concealed, as yours revealed, the sorrows of a broken time. You knew Ghalib was right: blood must not merely follow routine, must not just flow as the veins' uninterrupted river. Sometimes it must flood the eyes, surprise them by being clear as water. 30 2 I didn't listen when my father recited your poems to us by heart. What could it mean to a boy that you had redefined the cruel beloved, that figure who already was Friend, Woman, God? In your hands she was Revolution. You gave her silver hands, her lips were red. Impoverished lovers waited all night every night, but she remained only a glimpse behind light. When I learned of her, I •was no longer a boy, and Urdu a silhouette traced by the voices of singers, by Begum Akhtar, -who wove your couplets into ragas: both language and music were sharpened. I listened: and you became, like memory, necessary. Dcu>t-e-Saba, I said to myself. And quietly the -wind opened its palms: I read there of the night: the secrets of lovers, the secrets of prisons. 31 3 When you permitted my hands to turn to stone, as must happen to a translator's hands, I thought of you •writing Zindan-Nama on prison walls, on cigarette packages, on torn envelopes. Your lines were measured so carefully to become in our veins the blood of prisoners. In the free verse of another language I imprisoned each line — but I touched my own exile. This hush, while your ghazals lay in my palms, was accurate, as is this hush that falls at news ofyour death over Pakistan and India and over all of us no longer there to whomyou spoke in Urdu. Twenty days before your death you finally wrote, this time from Lahore, that after the sack of Beirut you had no address . . . I had gone from poem to poem, and found you once, terribly alone, speaking to yourself: "Bolt your doors, Sad heart! Put out the candles, break all cups of wine. No one, now no one will ever return." But you 32 still waited, Faiz, for that God, that Woman, that Friend, that Revolution, to come at last. And because you -waited, I listen as you pass with some song, a memory of musk, the rebel face of hope. 33 This page intentionally left blank ...