***
The Last Letter ('Aakhiri Khat') I wrote for Sahir was to be published as 🅰a book, for which I needed an illustrator. I tho𓆉ught some parts of it should be illustrated ...
[...] And then one day Devender brought along an illustrator [who used to work for Shama] to illustrate Last Letter.
Last Letter was published in Punjabi [Gurumukhi] as well as in Hindi [Devnaagri] but both these languages were ꧙silenced as they could not reach Sahir for whom this last letter was written...
Shama was a monthly and those days the same group had also launched a magazine called Aainaa. I got the Last Letter published t💃here in the hope that it might cross his ey🍸es...
After that there was silence ... nothing else.
I learnt it many years later, from Sahir himself: 'When I read the Last Letter in Aaina, I immediately felt like running to Abbas's house, to Krishna Chander's house, an♉d to other friends' as well, to tell them that this letter is written for me, is written in my name. But I remained silent. I thought, if I say this, the friends would mock: 'Yeah, yeah, it's written for you, come son, let's take you to the lunatic asylum.'
It 🍌was such a silence from Sahir tha🌞t all the years of my life could not comprehend, and perhaps he too was incapable of understanding this silence.
[....] Then suddenly one day Imroze (those days he was called Inderjeet, illustrator) came to visit me in the afternoon from his office. Very happy. he had received a letter from film director Guru Dutt in Bombay, offering him work in his films. The salary on of💖fer was good, boarding and lodging was taken care of and the artist was happy...
I was happy that he had wished to share this appreciation for his art with me first. God knows that at a conscious level I did not see any thing linked with him, but at that time it felt as if something was slipping 𝓀from my grasp...Once the same Bom💟bay had taken Sahir from me, and now the same Bombay, for the second time...
I could not understand thཧe mystery of this 'second time'. Only destiny knew it...
(from Rasiidi Ticket)
***
Sahir too met Imroze with me. He was sad the first time. We sat and drank together, but our empty glasses remained on his table for some time. That night he wrote a poem - "mere saath𒅌ii khaalii jaam ...[empty 🗹glasses are my companions...]" - which he read out to me at around 11 at night on the phone. He said he was pouring and drinking whisky from the three glasses, by turn. But during our second meeting in Bombay, Imroze had fever and Sahir immediately sent his doctor for treatment...
(from Rasiidi Ticket)
***
I had heard of the word 'magic' in childhood stories, but then it suddenly entered my body, and started growing in the folds of the flesh of my own body... This was sometimes in the last days of 1946. I had read in newspapers and books that the pictures and photographs in the room of an expectant mother, or her own imagination, could shape the face of her baby. And my imagination, surreptitiously whispered in my ear: 'If I visualise Sahir's face all the time, my baby's face would be like his...' What I had not got in life, I knew, or perhaps it was an endeavour to ꦚget it miraculously...
An endeavour to be the creator like God...
An independent act by the body...
Free not just of the inculcated values, but also of the reality of blood and flesꦏh...
In this crazed stꩵate, when the baby was born on July 3, 1947 and I saw its face for the first time, I was cಞonvinced of being God, and along with the developing face of the baby, my imagination too kept growing that it face perhaps actually resembled Sahir's.
Anyway, one cannot stand on the edge of madness,✃ there should be ground beneath for the feet to rest on, so in the ensuing years I would mention it like a fairy-tale...
Once I narrated this to Sahir, mocking myself. I don't know about his other reaction, but I do know that on hearing it, he began to laugh, and he only said: "Very poo🌜r taste".
The biggest complex of Sahir's life is that 💞he is not 💮good looking, which is why he called it my poor taste. [ ... ]
Then many yeཧars passed. When I came to Bombay in 1960, Rajinder Singh Bedi was my benevolent friend. We'd often meet. One evening, as we sat talking, he asked, "I once heard Prakash Pandit say that Navraj is Sahir's son..."
That evening I tol🐈d the story of my crazed state to Bedi Saheb and said, "It is the truth of imagination, not the truth of reality"
Aro♐und the same time, Navraj asked me—he was then some 13 years old. "Mama, if I ask you something, would you tell me♉ the truth?"
"Yes"
"Am I Sahir uncle's son?"
"No"
";But if I am, tell me. I like Sahꦗir uncle"
"Yes, son, I like him too, b👍ut if this were the truth, I would certainly have told you."
The truth has its own powerℱ, so my🌌 son was convinced.
I think the truth of the imagination was not small, but i♛t was only for me...so much that it was not the truth even for Sahir.
(from Rasiidi Ticket)
***
You who catch shadows!
The fire that burns in the heart
Has no shadow...
(epigram on her autobiography, Rasidi Ticket)
***
In 1990 when Jalandhar Doordarshan made a documentary on me, they asked me to s💝ay something about my relations♓hip with Sahir and Imroze. I said at that time:
There i༺s only one relationsh🍸ip in the world—of feverish disquietude and the sobs of separation, of Shahnai, which can be heard even in the sobs of separation—and that very relationship I had with Sahir and have with Imroze. It was love for Sahir when I wrote:
Again I remembered you:
Again I kissed the flame
Love may well be the cup of poison
Again I asked for a mouthful
An꧑d i🍌n the face of Imroze I saw the extremity of sensitivity. It was a mad passion which made me say:
kalam ne aj toRayaa giitaaN daa kaafiyaa
ishq meraa pahuchiyaa eh keRe mukaam te
uTh apne ghaRe choN paanii daa kaul de
dho lavaaNgii baiTh ke raahNvaa de haadse
The pen today broke the rhyme of the song
Which destination has my love reached now
Get up, give me a cupful of water from your pitcher
I will sit and wash away the misfortunes of passage
(from aksharoN ke saaye)
***
Whenever Sahir would visit me in Lahore, it was as if a part of my own silence would sit on a chair and go away. He would just quietly smoke a ♈cigarette, stub out the half-smoked cigarette in the ash-tray, and then light a fresh one. Once he was gone, only large, half-smoked cigarettes would remain in the room.
Sometimes ... once, I wished to touch his hands, but my upbringing created a distance that could not b🐓e bridged. Even then the wonders o✤f imagination came to my aid.
After he had gone, I would gather all those cigarette stubs and put them🐠 away in the almirah. And then I'd sit and light them one by one; when I held them between my fingers, it seemed as if I w𒊎as touching his hand.
This is how I got ﷽addicted to smoking. Whenever I lit a cigarette, it seemed as if he was nearby🌜. He would appear like a djinn in the cigarette smoke.
Then many years later, I wrote about this in my novel "ek thii anita", but Sahir perh𝔉aꩵps still doesn't know the history behind my cigarette-smoking.
(from Rasiidi Ticket)
***
Amrita Pritam
ik dard si...
jo cigarette di tarah
maiN chup chaap piitaa hai
sirf kuchh nazmaaN han
jo cigarette de naal maiN
raakh vaagan jhaaRiyaaN
There was a pain
That like cigarettes
I inhaled quietly
Just a few poems remain
That I flicked along
With ash from the
Cigarettes
(undated poem, from Amrita Pritam, Shairii)
(Copy right: Amrita Pritam. Hurried translation by Sundeep Dougal)
