I met my dear friend Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi and Sahir Ludhianvi and several others. Like me, they too suffered from a mental paralysis. I had begun to feel as though some of the tremors of the terrible earthquake that had so devastated us were still lodged somewhere, perhaps inside a volcano. If they were to burst forth, they might set the world right, fix its ‘temperament’ as it were and then, finally, we might get a real sense of the situation we were in.
Thinking about all this made me feel sad and fed up. And so I began to loaf around. I would loiter in the streets all day like a vagabond. I would stay quiet myself, but listen to others. I would listen to all sorts of talk — perfect nonsense, illogical arguments and half-baked political discourses. The one good thing that emerged from this aimless loitering was that the cloud of dust and smoke that fogged my brain gradually settled down and I decided to write a few light-weight, frothy little pieces. Therefore, I wrote short essays for the Imroze on ‘The Types of Noses’ and ‘Writing on the Wall’. These were liked. Little by little, humour began to take the form of satire. I never quite felt this change. I kept writing and my pen kept producing sharp and irascible pieces such as, ‘The Question Arises’ and ‘Last Morning When I Woke Up’. I was pleased when I discovered that my pen had groped its way out of the fog that had once held it in its grip and found its own path. I felt lighter, too. And I began to write prolifically. This collection of essays was later published under the title ‘Bitter, Salty and Sweet’.
(This is an extract from a much longer essay which also served as an Introduction for Thanda Gosht, Delhi, Maktaba-e-Nau, 1950.)
1 From the verse by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib: Larazta hai mera dil zahmat-e-mehr-e-darakhshan par Main hoon woh qatra-e-shabnam ke ho khaar-e-bayabaan par. (My heart trembles at the trouble taken by the shining sun;I am the drop of dew that rests on a desert thorn.)
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