Shahid's gregariousness had no limit: there was never an evening when there wasn't a party in his living room. "I love it that so many people are here," he told me once. "I love it that people come and there's always food. I love this spirit of festivity; it means that I don't have time to be depressed."
His apartment was a spacious and airy split-level on the seventh floor of a newly renovated building. There was a cavernous study on the top floor and a wide terrace that provided a magnificent view of the Manhattan skyline, across the East River. Shahid loved this view of the Brooklyn waterfront slipping like a ghat into the East River, under the glittering lights of Manhattan.
The journey from the foyer of Shahid's building to his door was a voyage between continents. On the way up, the rich fragrance of rogan josh and haak would invade the dour gray interior of the elevator; against the background of the songs and voices that were always echoing out of his apartment, even the ringing of the doorbell had an oddly musical sound. Suddenly Shahid would appear, flinging open the door, releasing a great cloud of heeng into the frosty New York air. "Oh, how nice," he would cry, clapping his hands, "how nice that you've come to see your little Mos-lem!" Invariably there'd be some half-dozen or more people gathered inside — poets, students, writers, relatives — and in the kitchen someone would always be cooking or making tea. Almost to the very end, even as his life was being consumed by his disease, he was the center of a perpetual carnival, an endless mela of talk, laughter, food, and of course poetry.
No matter how many people there were, Shahid was never so distracted as to lose track of the progress of the evening's meal. From time to time he would interrupt himself to shout directions to whoever was in the kitchen: "Yes, now, add the dahi now." Even when his eyesight was failing, he could tell from the smell alone exactly which stage the rogan josh had reached. And when things went exactly as they should, he would sniff the air and cry out loud, "Ah! Khana ka kya mehek hai!"
Shahid was legendary for his prowess in the kitchen, frequently spending days over the planning and preparation of a dinner party. It was through one such party, given while he was in Arizona, that he met James Merrill, the poet who was to radically alter the direction of his poetry: it was after this encounter that he began to experiment with strict metrical patterns and verse forms such as the canzone and the sestina. No one had a greater influence on Shahid's poetry than James Merrill; indeed, in the poem in which he most explicitly prefigured his own death, "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World," he awarded the envoy to Merrilclass="underline" "SHAHID, HUSH. THIS IS ME, JAMES. THE LOVED ONE ALWAYS LEAVES."
"How did you meet Merrill?" I asked Shahid once.
"I heard he was coming down for a reading and I told the people in charge that I wanted to meet him. They said, 'Then why don't you cook for him?' So I did." Merrill loved the food, and on learning that Shahid was moving to Hamilton College in upstate New York, he gave him his telephone number and asked him to call. On the occasion of Shahid's first reading at the Academy of American Poets, Merrill was present — a signal honor, considering that he was one of America's best-known poets. "Afterward," Shahid liked to recall, "everybody rushed up and said, 'Did you know that Jim Merrill was here?' My stock in New York went up a thousandfold that evening."
Shahid placed great store on authenticity and exactitude in cooking and would tolerate no deviation from traditional methods and recipes; for those who took shortcuts he had only pity. He had a special passion for the food of his region, one variant of it in particular: "Kashmiri food in the Pandit style." I asked him once why this was so important to him, and he explained that it was because of a recurrent dream in which all the Pandits had vanished from the valley of Kashmir and their food had become extinct. This was a nightmare that haunted him, and he returned to it again and again, in his conversation and his poetry.
At a certain point I lost track of you.
You needed me. You needed to perfect me:
In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory…
There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain
only to myself.
There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.
If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not have been possible in the world?
Once, in conversation, he told me that he also loved Bengali food. I protested: "But Shahid, you've never even been to Calcutta."
"No," he said. "But we had friends who used to bring us that food. When you ate it, you could see that there were so many things that you didn't know about, everywhere in the country…"
This was at a time when his illness had forced him into spending long periods in bed. He was lying prone on his back, shielding his eyes with his fingers. Suddenly he broke off and reached for my hand. "I wish all this had not happened," he said. "This dividing of the country, the divisions between people — Hindu, Muslim, Muslim, Hindu — you can't imagine how much I hate it. It makes me sick. What I say is, why can't you be happy with the cuisines and the clothes and the music and all these wonderful things?" He paused and added softly, "At least here we have been able to make a space where we can all come together because of the good things."
Of the many "good things" in which he took pleasure, none was more dear to him than the music of Begum Akhtar. He had met the great ghazal singer when he was in his teens, through a friend, and she had become an abiding presence and influence in his life. In his apartment there were several shrinelike niches that were filled with pictures of the people he worshipped: Begum Akhtar was one of these, along with his father, his mother, and James Merrill. "I loved Begum Akhtar," he told me once. "In other circumstances you could have said that it was a sexual kind of love — but I don't know what it was. I loved to listen to her, I loved to be with her, I couldn't bear to be away from her. You can imagine what it was like. Here I was in my midteens — just sixteen — and I couldn't bear to be away from her."
His love of Begum Akhtar was such as to spill over into a powerful sense of identification. He told me once that the singer Sheila Dhar, who had known Begum Akhtar well, had told him that he even bore a resemblance to Begum Akhtar: "It's something about our teeth and mouth."
I said, "I don't see a resemblance between you and Begum Akhtar."
He directed a wounded glance at me. "Yes, there is," he said. "Sheila Dhar told me so."
"Well" — I quickly corrected myself—"she knew Begum Akhtar, so I think she knows more about it than I do."
He nodded. "Yes," he said. "It's something about the teeth. Her teeth were a little prominent [dant agey they]—so are mine."
It may well have been this relationship with Begum Akhtar that engendered his passion for the ghazal as a verse form. Yet, ardent advocate of the form though he was, he had little time for the gushing ardor of some of its contemporary American fans: "Imagine me at a writer's conference where a woman kept saying to me, 'Oh, I just love guh-zaals, I'm gonna write a lot of g'zaals,' and I said to her, in utter pain, 'OH, PLEASE DON'T!'" Always the disciplinarian in such matters, he believed that the ghazal would never flourish if its structure were not given due respect: "Some rules of the ghazal are clear and classically stringent. The opening couplet (called matld) sets up a scheme (of rhyme called qafia; and refrain — called radif) by having it occur in both lines — the rhyme immediately preceding the refrain — and then this scheme occurs only in the second line of each succeeding couplet. That is, once a poet establishes the scheme — with total freedom, I might add — she or he becomes its slave. What results in the rest of the poem is the alluring tension of a slave trying to master the master." Over a period of several years he took it on himself to solicit ghazals from a number of poets writing in English. The resulting collection, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, was published in 2000. In establishing a benchmark for the form it has already begun to exert a powerful influence: the formalization of the ghazal may well prove to be Shahid's most important scholarly contribution to the canon of English poetry. His own summation of the project was this: "If one writes in free verse — and one should — to subvert Western civilization, surely one should write in forms to save oneself from Western civilization?"