Posts Tagged Enshrined in Nations Hearts:Her Beauty & Poetry

Parveen Shakir

by

Malik Shahnawaz Khar

(a freelance columnist, written in 2006)

I know ‘absolutely’ nothing about Parveen Shakir, never met her, never read her poetry, only heard it read out loud or sung by someone else, so I really have no business in writing a tribute to her but even then for some odd reason my fingers are ‘doodling’ on the keyboard as if I were about to compose a Mozart symphony.

I remember when Parveen Shakir died in a car accident; I was only a few cars behind her. I remember the Suzuki-van (Suzuki-Dabba) with a government plate at Faisal Chowk all battered. By the time I reached home the news had spread like wild fire all over the city. Some said a bureaucrat had died, while others said a poet, while it was actually a bit of both.

Next day I had some work with a renowned political butterfly of Islamabad, one of those people whose pictures you see on the second page of an Urdu newspaper or the 9 o’clock PTV Khabarnama, always standing ‘behind’ an important person or late at night sitting in Marriot’s Nadia Cafe with a bunch of men in crumpled up over-starched, white shalwar kameezes. Usually the deal with such people is that in order to get your work done, you have to tolerate their company and political views for at least half the day. As luck would have it this political butterfly’s photo-opportunity-pit-stop for the day was Parveen Shakir’s after funeral prayer service.

I remember the day quite vividly, the funeral was held at a government school, somewhere in or around Lal-Quarter, not to be mistaken for our version of New Orleans, ‘French Quarters’. The weather was gloomy; the sky was completely frosted with stormy clouds. In between the leafless branches of trees the sky appeared as if it was about to crack open any minute. Aitzaz Ahsan and Sartaj Aziz were one of the prominent attendees.

What got my attention was the young cleric employed for the prayer service; he didn’t have a bushy goat like beard but a neatly trimmed one. The young Mullah’s pre-prayer speech was so eloquently sermonized as he interspersed the loss of Parveen Shakir with the tragedies of Islamic history that one felt that one was watching a beautiful rendition of a Greek play. Behind the curtains came the wailing sound of an older woman and people whispered that it was Parveen Shakir’s mother. The melancholia that day: the loss of Parveen Shakir, the young cleric’s sermon, the wailing of women and the grey weather had on overwhelmingly sad, yet redeeming affect on the spirit as I felt tears welling up in me, even though like most of the dignitaries, I was gate-crashing the funeral.

Couple of mobile phone models later I had relocated to America; one night I got a call from a Christian Jordanian friend of mine who needed a ride to Chicago because his Filipino girlfriend was coming from New York. I was reluctant to go because it was late, Chicago was 2 hours away and there was a storm warning and the weather channel had sent out a warning that Counties North of Chicago would be boggy-trapped with tornadoes.

Reluctantly I agreed to drive my friend to Chicago. By the time we got on the expressway, the downpour got heavier. Seeing my handgrip tighten around the wheel, my friend started to sing some Arabic love songs, in order to lighten up the mood, although if he hadn’t told me, I would have probably thought that he was reciting verses from a Holy book.

Our destination was a rundown house in a bad neighbourhood in Chicago; I was made to sit in the living room with a couple of Filipinos watching television, while my Jordanian friend disappeared for a while. Bush was on the television screen saying something, while in the living room, a naked, diaper-less Filipino-toddler was running back and forth in front of the television screen like a moving-pendulum on a grandfather’s clock, ‘yes time was running out for Bush’, I thought.

A Filipino guy sitting next to me asked where I was from, to which I replied Pakistan. The first thing he said to me was, “Have you heard of Parveen Shakir, the poet? We were in Harvard together”. I was slightly humbled by the revelation because condescendingly I had taken the guy to be a cook at a Chinese takeaway. Then he started talking about Parveen Shakir’s life at Harvard, how influential and well known she was at Harvard, everyone liked her and that she was dazzlingly brilliant. For the next couple of hours we kept discussing Parveen Shakir till my Jordanian friend came back. It was a weird moment, I wouldn’t say I felt proud to be a Pakistani because giving a feeling a ‘nationality’ kills the universality of it but here I was pastmidnight in a crime ridden neighbourhood in Chicago where tornadoes were swirling like French wines in the North, with a Filipino I didn’t know from Jack, discussing Parveen Shakir.

Backtracking to present day Pakistan, the other day I was watching PTV, depressed because my cable was down and I could not watch my favourite channel where women are aimlessly exercising on the beach. Suddenly Mehdi Hassan came on air and started singing a Parveen Shakir ghazal. The ghazal was so beautiful and refreshing that at that moment all the associated and unassociated memories of Parveen Shakir came back to me, like in a western Symphony when all the different melodies congregate back to the central theme for a grand finale. At that moment I thought, who cares whether Musharraf doffs his uniform or not or whether Shahbaz Sharif comes back or not; in times to come, like the cardamom in our teas, Parveen Shakir and ‘people like her’ will always be more relevant than all the power hungry Generals and politicians of Pakistan put together.