Love among the ruins

There is this newspaper story in front of me, which everyone must have read, about the rickshaw driver in Lahore driven by poverty and debt to take his own life and that of his two young daughters. A photograph of the family in what must have been good times shows them all reasonably happy. But then something must have happened for darkness to take over and for this tragedy to have unfolded.

Life doesn't come in one piece. It is made up of different things: joy and tragedy, triumph and sorrow, kindness and cruelty, the stars and the gutter. Hegelians perhaps would call this the clash of opposites. Yet no theory of philosophy, no history of the world, quite prepares one for a drama as grim as this.

But even as I write this bromide -- full of sentimentality -- I know that if it is history we are scanning, it predisposes the mind to accept the tragedy of human existence. Life is full of suffering. Even in this century -- forget about the 20th which witnessed war, death and destruction on a scale unparalleled -- the spectres of famine and genocide have stalked different part of Africa. But as Stalin said, an individual's death may be a tragedy. A million dead is a statistic.

We can feel the death of the rickshaw driver because it is, relatively speaking, so close to us. Distant death, say in Rwanda or even at the gates of the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, reads like a statistic.

And I was about to write about Noor Jahan. Should I not write about her? Should I apologise for doing so? In a world full of surprises few things are as amazing as the circumstance that even at the height of the Second World War, when the tide had shifted and the Nazi legions were being rolled back, concert performances were still being held in Berlin.

Even as Jews were being transported to death camps across Europe, Furtwangler was conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. There are downloads on YouTube showing him conducting the Ninth Symphony (Beethoven's) with

the Nazi elite in attendance, listening to the music with rapt attention, giant swastika drapes hanging from the walls. Music among the ruins. Bombs falling all around, death on the march, but concert halls, at least some of them, still open.

We have some rain and we cancel the military parade on March 23. In November 1941 the Germans were at the gates of Moscow. The Soviet Politburo was in two minds whether to go ahead with the Revolution Day parade on November 7. Then Stalin decided that the parade would be held. As he and the rest of the Soviet leadership stood atop the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square, the Soviet divisions marched past and from there went straight to the front, not 20-25 miles away to the west.

Stalin's speech on the occasion is worth listening to (it's on YouTube). Lasting barely seven minutes, in it he says it all, recalling Russia's glorious military past, evoking such names as those of Suvorov and Kutuzov, mentioning Lenin more than once, and exhorting the Soviet masses to defeat and overthrow the Nazi tyranny. It was Stalin's leadership which saved the Soviet Union. He was also a mass murderer, killing far more people than anyone in history, far more than any of the Mongols, and they were destroyers of empires. Stalin was a great man, one of history's colossuses. He was also a tyrant. Such is life.

In his memoirs Babar describes how he had to give up Samarkand to Shaibani Khan Uzbek. Most of his people left him… "Among them were well known begs and old family servants." Only 100 people were left with him. His elder sister, Khanzada Begum, fell into Shaibani Khan's hands. All night they wandered in the darkness, losing their way. But when the morning sun rises what does the fugitive prince do? Does he give way to despair? Does he sit on a rock and mourn his fate? No: "On the road I raced with Qasim Beg Quichin and Qambar Ali Mughal. My horse was leading." Ruin stares him in the face and Babar is racing his horse.

Then, after another day's hard journey, they arrive at the village of Dizak where there were "…fat meats, loaves of fine flour, plenty of sweet melons and an abundance of excellent grapes. From acute deprivation we came to such plenty! From what anxiety to what repose!" Was ever a prince such a romantic at heart as Babar?

Countless are the occasions in his memoirs when he talks of taking wine. He came to drink late but then became very fond of it. If a garden took their fancy he and his begs laid out a drinking party. If they were encamped near a river they would board a boat for an araq party. And Babar was always having maajun (a concoction of bhang, if I am not mistaken), as in this description: "We marched at sunrise. Later, we ate maajun. While under its tranquillising influence, we enjoyed wonderful fields of flowers…We sat on a mound to enjoy the sight…The flower fields near Peshawar were indeed very lovely."

On every page there is something to delight the reader: "At dawn we took our morning drink (of spiced wine)…At noon we rode to Kabul, reached Khawaja Hassan's house quite drunk, and slept briefly." On the next page: "Shah Hassan Arghun, son of Shah Shuja Beg Arghun, asked permission to hold a wine party. I gave it." A few paragraphs later, "Tingri Birdi and other warriors gave a party in Haidar Taqi's garden. I went and drank there. We rose from it at the Evening Prayer when a move was made to the great tent where the drinking continued." And this priceless entry: "Tonight I chose to take opium because of my earache. Another reason was the lustre of the moon." The epicure, the moon's lustre eclipsing the earache.

And there is Babar's famous description of his infatuation with the youth, Baburi. But let me stop here lest upright souls take umbrage. Great injustices may move us not but we take offence at trifles. We like to think of ourselves as successors to the Mughals. Looking at our moralizing and self-righteousness, a far cry from Babar's free and easy ways, this lineage looks doubtful.

But where is Noor Jahan lost in all this turmoil? A few weeks back I wrote about the defunct newspaper The Muslim's first managing editor, flamboyant Jahangir A Khan, and this is something I received from him: " A riposte methinks is due to 'All those years ago' nostalgically recalled in Islamabad Diary, 2nd May. Ref Noor Jahan: but who else if not Jahangir to pair with her in Chan-ve? (the film in which they both starred)…Noori was truly a goddess reincarnated -- a diva of course but also a courtesan in moments of passion. Need I say more? I mourn the fact that Allah Vasai of Kasur whom the magic hand of the Muses touched and who deserved a temple and monument in her hometown of Kasur should lie buried in some God-forsaken suburb of Karachi."

I have been listening to some of her old ghazals recently and the more I listen to that full voice, rich and throaty, cured as if in a wine-chamber of the elect, the more the realisation sinks in that she was truly blessed. Generations from now, when the present will be forgotten, her voice will live on.

Just a few nights ago I happened to come across something I had never heard before, Noor Jahan singing that famous Ghalib ghazal "Nukta cheen hai gham-e-dil, usko sunaye na bane…" Suraiya sang this ghazal to perfection in the film Mirza Ghalib (music by the incomparable Ghulam Muhammad) and I used to think it was impossible to surpass her. But listening to Noor Jahan was a revelation. The voice sounds a bit raw, and here it is less polished than Suraiya's. But the effect is far more overwhelming.

True, her repertoire is uneven. Some of her popular hits, sung for the crowd, are pretty unbearable. But when she sang for the gods there was no one to beat her. As for the diva as courtesan, lucky the souls who knew her in her moments of passion.



Email: winlustyahoo.com