And no birds sing
In spite of everything, in spite of some tired visuals and a general ordinariness about Ismail Merchant’s film adaptation of Anita Desai’s novel, I liked the film. I liked the unhurried small-town geography, crumbling old buildings, curved domes, cool waters, marketplace, scooters, jeeps, thin green trees that suddenly add colour to the dusty picture. The struggle to keep certain things alive even as other ways of life are changing. The kushti, the dust rising, the evening falling around the wrestlers as they twist and turn and roll over each other endlessly.
The new morning. The mother getting her little boy to finish breakfast. The tonga, packed with little boys in school uniform; the schoolbag that falls out, the mother who runs behind the tonga to pick it up and give it back to the boys. The morning conversation of the married couple, the unspoken tension, the spilt chai, the deferred promise about going to the market together after he returns from work.
He, a college lecturer, cycling off to work, past goats, sunlit lanes and roadside stalls. Brown fields, pink bougainvillea, open skies. College boys in dark glasses crowding around him. Chaos on the corridors. The classroom, the laughter, the discovery that this slight, unremarkable man in a half-sleeved shirt has a double life… that he writes poetry. That he teaches Hindi to these boys, but writes poems in Urdu.
Urdu, the “right to left language”, the language with a once glorious past, the language that is now dying. The colleague in the college staff room who shows our poet a postcard of Disneyland and says, let’s go to America.
The paan-chewing editor from Bhopal who edits a journal named Awaaz. Who has come to meet his poet friend in Mirpur. The Pepsi logos on the walls of the small restaurant where they have lunch. The editor’s frustration: Who reads Urdu nowadays? The poet’s offer to give him some of his poems to publish.
Who’ll read your nazms?
The editor’s plan to bring out a special issue on the great poets. You can’t leave out Nur Shahjehanabadi, says the poet sharply. (The unshaken conviction in his voice)
The plan that he will interview Nur for the journal. The bus journey to Bhopal, the dust trails, the boys playing cricket in the dirt. The wide streets and grand buildings of Bhopal. The long trail to Nur’s house, led by Chotu, the boy from the chai-stall. The hostile reception at Nur’s house.
Nur himself, lying indolently in the dark behind a chik curtain.
On the terrace. Nur with his pigeons on his shoulders, his arms. The “symbols of flight and song” - until they go back to their cages on the terrace.
The clutch of young self-proclaimed poets, their raucous demands for food and drink. Unforgettable tableau: Nur on the swing, surrounded by this noisy crowd, andfrom an inside room the thin voice of his little son crying.
Nur lying on the carpet in his second wife’s room, lying in his own vomit. Imtiaz Begum abusing him for what he has become and the life that he has given her.
Our poet-interviewer, shaken, getting down on his knees to clean up Nur’s vomit - and reading a line of poetry on the paper with which he has cleaned it up.
The fight to make the interview happen. The struggle with the college bureaucracy. The Annual Day samosas, kala jamuns and chief guests. The mysteries of modern technology.
The desperate search to find and preserve something deserves to endure. The poetry of Faiz. The lecturer’s passion not only for the words, but for the way they sound when they are strung together by Nur and spoken by Nur.
The first wife’s question: should the families of poets starve while college professors make money writing about their poetry?
The second wife’s demand: that she will write poetry too. That the lecturer must record her interview too. That he must acknowledge her voice.
That she, too, is a poet.
Nur’s voice reciting Keats:
Most of all, the actors. Shabana Azmi as a spirited Imtiaz Begum, all flashing eyes and tears of rage; Shashi Kapoor as Nur, the heavy-lidded great poet destroyed by his desires; Om Puri as Deven, imperfect husband and reluctant Hindi lecturer but perfect follower of Nur’s poetry, perfect lover of Urdu; and a young, fresh-faced Neena Gupta as his wife Sarla, sweeping the yard, cleaning the house, wanting only to go to the bazaar in the evening to buy new shoes for her son…O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
