My love and understanding of thumri, dadar, and khayal that you see here comes from my father. Even Iqbal Bano, Suraiya Multaniker, and Farida Khanum started to recognize me. Mian Tajammul likes to say that it’s not my face they recognize but my white hair. Sir, last year there was a dance troupe that came and, God prevent me from lying, there must have been a thousand people in the audience. I had to buy a ticket for Mian Tajammul as well. After completing his third hajj, he decided to stop spending money on music and dance concerts, as well as movies. That night he said, ‘There’s not one person like you in this sinful mob.’ I thanked him. Then he said, ‘I meant there’s not another old fool like you. Not another man whose hair has gone white like yours, even your eyebrows. You know, you ought to either dye your hair or give up going to concerts.’ I said, ‘Tajammul, as far as being disgraced goes, perambulating with you in this horrible alley is enough. I don’t have to do anything further.’
He Never Forgot to Pray or to Go to Concerts
As you know, my father was very well mannered and pious. He prayed five times a day and kept his fasts. God be praised! All of us children still pray five times a day. This too is due to his good example. He never forgot to pray or to go to concerts. It was 1922 or 1923. A Parsi theater company came to town for the very first time, and he went to their show every day for a month, and each day it was like he was watching the show for the first time. After several days, he became so close to the company that he got them to change the dialogue in several places. In one place he replaced a ghazal by Dagh with one by Master Zauq and got them to sing it in aiman kaliyan. He explained to Bibbo, ‘When you recite your lines, you bat your eyelashes and sway your hips. But, depending on the situation, you should choose the one deadly weapon that works best.’ Three times he lent his clean pyjamas to the lead actor. He told the manager, ‘The man you’ve chosen to play Laila’s father is younger than Majnoon! The way he’s looking at Laila from behind his fake beard is the farthest thing from paternal.’ When one musician’s bad kidney acted up, my father filled in on the harmonium. He tied a silk handkerchief doused with itr-e-henna around his head and thought that no one would be able to recognize him. He had a ruddy complexion, bright white teeth, and thin lips. He didn’t laugh much, but when he did his cheeks lit up and tears came to his eyes. He looked good in anything, so when Shireen was talking to Farhad she stared at my father instead.
My mother didn’t like his obsession with the theatre. When we had grown up, she told him, ‘Please stop going to the theatre. The kids are now teenagers.’ He said, ‘My dear, you’re really great. The kids are teenagers, and you’re telling me to be on my best behavior!’
His interest in the theatre was too much. He thought that Agha Hashr Kashmiri was a better playwright than Shakespeare. It wasn’t that he was intentionally prejudiced. He’d never read Shakespeare. Once he was arguing with his friend Pandit Suraj Narayan Shastri that Dagh Dehlvi was a greater poet than Kalidas. At one point he launched an unmentionable insult at Kalidas in order to strengthen his case, and this proved surprisingly effective. Not only did Panditji seem ready to agree that Dagh was better than Kalidas, but he went one step further to propose that Dagh’s successor Nawab Sayal Dehlvi was too. His pocketwatch read ten in the morning when he learned of Agha Hashr Kashmiri’s death. His store was busy, but he locked up and went home. He went to bed, hiding beneath the covers. When Panditji came to console him, he stuck out his head. ‘Panditji, how is Mukhtar Begum5 going to survive? How will she be able to slay the tedium of her youth?’ After a significant pause, Panditji answered, ‘Mr Khan, an axe-wielding Farhad will eventually come.’ (Who knows why he always called my father Mr Khan.) ‘Is art ever left without a champion? She’ll find a man.’ Earlier that day, with a downcast expression and heavy heart, he came home, closed the verandah’s door, and said to my mother, ‘We’ve been robbed. Today we won’t eat cooked food.’ He ate sweets at dusk and went straight to bed.
Panditji knew nothing about music, but he was very perceptive and sympathetic. The next day he came by at dawn. He looked worse than my father. He heaved and sighed. He hadn’t shaven. He brought halva puri and a dish of fried pumpkin home. He fed my father. We started to worry that Panditji might be readying to perform bhadra6 on him.
Fallen from the Sky, Stuck in a Whorehouse
Please forgive me, but I might already have told this story. I hope you won’t get bored. If the details happen to change, it’s because of my memory. I don’t mean to mislead you.
When we asked my father to let us go see a dance recital, he would write a note to the manager: ‘Please reserve some seats in front.’ In time, I would write the notes and forge my father’s signature. He knew this. One day he erupted at me, ‘If you’re going to forge my signature, then go ahead. But could you please not disgrace me by making spelling mistakes? The phrase is barah e karam, not bara e karam.’ He always sent us to a matinee. His reasoning was that the show’s negative moral effect would be half, just like the price of admission. I was just a boy, but inside I was on fire. When Munni Bai sang, everyone was spellbound. This wasn’t Dagh’s Munni Bai Hijab about whom he wrote an entire masnavi. Ours had an exquisite voice and was just as beautiful. I didn’t want to breathe, didn’t want to blink, lest I should miss something. What is that couplet, you know the one? ‘He’s talking to me, he’s right here…’?
‘Should I look at her, or should I talk to her?’
Yes, thanks. Sir, my memory’s completely shot. When I’m at a poetry gathering, I forget couplets. And if I remember, I realize after reciting that they were completely inappropriate. Just like now. It makes the embarrassment twice as bad. Right now I wanted to recite the couplet that goes ‘Just one blink ruins the spectacle.’ Well, I’ll get that one in later. What you said is right — after fifty-five, you should be happy to remember even one line. Sir, when Munni Bai sang Master Dagh’s ghazals, everyone was lost in bliss, including her.
Passion lost itself in the overwhelming spectacle. .
I know that Dagh loved debauchery and that he preferred prostitutes. But his style wasn’t depraved at all. He wrote in the high qila-e-muallah way, as though his words were bathed in the Jamuna River. Idioms and colloquialisms were his forte. His poetry was especially loved by prostitutes. Like your friend Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig says, ‘Dagh’s poetry fell from the sky to get stuck in a whorehouse, then danced into the night.’ But Firaq Gorakhpuri went too far when he said that Dagh turned debauchery into a sort of genius. You weren’t around then, but, well, even today, Dagh’s ghazals work at any concert. For those who were around, they know that Dagh was so popular that when the renowned religious scholar Maulana Abdussalam Niyazi caught the poetry bug, he became Dagh’s student. He was such a devotee that when anyone recited one of Dagh’s couplets, he would cry, ‘Subhan Allah!’ and fall prostrate to the ground. I was saying that Munni Bai sang five of Dagh’s ghazals in the film The Poison of Love. All five were tremendous, but each and every one was out of place. Sir, after ’47, prostitutes disappeared — poof! Where are those sorts of prostitutes today? It’s also true that the true connoisseurs are gone as well.