For Shahid, Begum Akhtar was the embodiment of one such form, not just in her music but in many other aspects of her being. An aspect of the ghazal that he greatly prized was the latitude it provided for wordplay, wit, and nakhra (posturing): Begum Akhtar was a consummate master of all of these. Shahid had a fund of stories about her sharpness in repartee. On one occasion he had accompanied her to the studios of All India Radio for a recording session. On the way in they met a famous singer, a man who was reputed to be having an affair with his dhobin (washerwoman). Begum Akhtar greeted the ustad with a deep salaam, as befitted by his standing in the world of music. But then, in passing, she tossed off the line "Arrey Khan-sahib, what a very clean kurta you're wearing today." Later, once out of the maestro's sight, they fell over laughing.
Shahid was himself no mean practitioner of repartee. On one famous occasion, at Barcelona airport, he was stopped by a security guard just as he was about to board a plane. The guard, a woman, asked, "What do you do?"
"I'm a poet," Shahid answered.
"What were you doing in Spain?"
"Writing poetry."
No matter what the question, Shahid worked poetry into his answer. Finally the exasperated woman asked, "Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous to the other passengers?" At this Shahid clapped a hand to his chest and cried, "Only my heart."
This was one of his great Wildean moments, and it was to occasion the poem "Barcelona Airport." He treasured these moments; "I long for people to give me an opportunity to answer questions," he told me once. On May 7 I had the good fortune to be with him when one such opportunity presented itself. Shahid was teaching at Manhattan's Baruch College in the spring semester of 2000, and this was to be his last class — indeed, the last he was ever to teach. The class was to be a short one, for he had an appointment at the hospital immediately afterward. I had heard a great deal about the brilliance of Shahid's teaching, but this was the first and only time that I was to see him perform in a classroom. It was evident from the moment we walked in that the students adored him: they had printed a magazine and dedicated the issue to him. Shahid, for his part, was not in the least subdued by the sadness of the occasion. From beginning to end, he was a sparkling diva, Akhtar incarnate, brimming with laughter and nakhra. When an Indian student walked in late, he greeted her with the cry, "Ah my little subcontinental has arrived." Clasping his hands, he feigned a swoon. "It stirs such a tide of patriotism in me to behold another South Asian!"
Toward the end of the class, a student asked a complicated question about the difference between plausibility and inevitability in a poem. Shahid's eyebrows arched higher and higher as he listened. At last, unable to contain himself, he broke in. "Oh, you're such a naughty boy," he cried, tapping the table with his fingertips. "You always turn everything into an abstraction."
But Begum Akhtar was not all wit and nakhra: indeed, the strongest bond between Shahid and her was, I suspect, the idea that sorrow has no finer mask than a studied lightness of manner. Shahid often told a story about Begum Akhtar's marriage. Although her family's origins were dubious, her fame as a beauty was such that she received a proposal from the scion of a prominent Muslim family of Lucknow. The proposal came with the condition that the talented young singer would give up singing: the man's family was deeply conservative and could not conceive of one of its members performing onstage. Begum Akhtar — or Akhtaribai Faizabadi, as she was then — accepted, but soon afterward her mother died. Heartbroken, Akhtaribai spent her days weeping on her grave. Her condition became such that a doctor had to be brought in to examine her. He said that if she were not allowed to sing, she would lose her mind. It was only then that her husband's family relented and allowed her to sing again.
Shahid was haunted by this image of Begum Akhtar, as a bereaved and inconsolable daughter, weeping on her mother's grave; it is in this grief-stricken aspect that she is evoked again and again in his poems. The poem that was his farewell to the world, "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World," opens with an evocation of Begum Akhtar:
A night of ghazals comes to an end. The singer
departs through her chosen mirror, her one diamond
cut on her countless necks. I, as ever, linger
It was Shahid's mother who had introduced him to the music of Begum Akhtar: "With her I'd heard — on 78 rpm—Peer Gynt…/ and Ghalib's grief in the voice of Begum Akhtar." In Shahid's later poems, Begum Akhtar was to become an image for the embodiment of his own sorrow after his mother's death. Shahid's mother, a woman of striking beauty, happened to have a close, indeed startling, resemblance to Begum Akhtar. Shahid's walls were hung with many pictures of both, and I would frequently mistake the one for the other. What then of Shahid's belief that he resembled Begum Akhtar? There is a mystery here that I am content to leave untouched.
Shahid was born in New Delhi in 1949. Later, in one of the temporal inversions that marked his poetry, he was to relive his conception in his poem "A Lost Memory of Delhi":
I am not born
it is 1948 and the bus turns
onto a road without name
There on his bicycle
my father
He is younger than I
At Okhla where I get off
I pass my parents
strolling by the Jamuna River
Shahid's father's family was from Srinagar, in Kashmir. They were Shiites, who are a minority among the Muslims of Kashmir. Shahid liked to tell a story about the origins of his family. The line was founded, he used to say, by two brothers who came to Kashmir from Central Asia. The brothers had been trained as hakims, specializing in Yunani medicine, and they arrived in Kashmir with nothing but their knowledge of medical lore; they were so poor that they had to share a single cloak between them. But it so happened that the then maharajah of Kashmir was suffering from terrible stomach pains, "some kind of colic." Learning that all the kingdom's doctors had failed to cure the ailing ruler, the two brothers decided to try their hand. They gave the maharajah a concoction that went through the royal intestines like a plunger through a tube, bringing sudden and explosive relief. Delighted with his cure, the grateful potentate appointed the brothers his court physicians. Thus began the family's prosperity. "So you see," Shahid would comment, in bringing the story to its conclusion, "my family's fortunes were founded on a fart."