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 unir
Niazi was the only egoist whose ego irritated no one because it came
through with such charm and humour. After Faiz Ahmed Faiz died,
someone asked Munir how the great vacuum created by the poet’s death
would ever be filled. “That vacuum I was filling even when Faiz was
alive,” he replied. Vintage Munir Niazi.
One of his friends and companions from the old days in Lahore, the
Punjabi poet and writer Masood Munawwar, who now lives in Norway,
reminisced about their long association in a memoir for the Punjabi
quarterly Saanj , published from Washington by the Academy of
Punjab in North America. Munir’s journey through life began in the
small town of Khanpur in District Hoshiarpur, East Punjab. It took him
through Srinagar, Bahawalpur and Sahiwal – when it was still
Montgomery (though always called “Mintgumri”) – and ended in Lahore on
December 26, 2006. While people waited in a hotel auditorium for him
where he was to preside over a literary meeting, no one realised that
at that precise hour, he lay dying in a city hospital instead. As
Munawwar observes wistfully, Munir always had a fascination for the
act of dying. This makes me think of one of the most famous of his
Punjabi quatrains: The going was always difficult/And the yoke of
grief around my neck was heavy/Cruel were the people of the city, no
doubt/But infatuated with death I always was.
Munir spent a brief time in the Navy but never talked about it; water,
however, always remained one of the central symbols in his verse. I
have yet to run into someone who does not know Munir’s couplet that
runs: Another river lay in front of me Munir/That was what I saw after
I crossed one river. One of his Punjabi quatrains that Munawwar quotes
goes: If you keep walking on this earth, you will come upon water/If
you dig up the earth, you will hit upon water/From all four directions
we are trapped by water/And when water sees the moon it hisses like
one demented.
Munir was also fascinated by snakes. Another of his Punjabi verses,
quoted by Munawwar, is: Where there is fragrance, there is snake/Where
there is melody, there is snake/Deep under the ground in the dark it
lives/Where there is gold there is snake.
Munir loved drink and always referred to it by its Arabic name,
ummul khabais – the mother of all evil. Munawwar recounts a
pleasant evening on board a ship in Karachi harbour where Munir had
been invited by one of his admirers. When the first drink was poured
into his glass, he picked it up and threw some over the railing into
the sea below, “That is for you to drink, baby,” he said. Munir always
addressed younger poets and writers as kaka , baghal bachha
or Glaxo baby. Munawwar was one of his Glaxo babies.
Speaking for myself, I first became aware of Munir Niazi when Zamurrad
Malik and Mehdi Naqvi came to Murray College from Montgomery and told
us about this poet who wrote poetry as nobody had written it before. I
still remember some of the Munir verse from those days. We found
poetry of such intensity electrifying. We all knew by heart Munir’s
lines about wishing the thunder to roar in the sky so that the little
heart of that flirtatious girl should begin to beat violently. Then
there was the couplet that asked all desolate people to take that
quiet, unspeaking road, wherever it led. There was also Munir’s vision
of a girl on her rooftop who looked like a stray cloud or a string of
pearls. Another verse spoke about a window out of which the blossom of
desire sprang no longer. It has long remained unopened.
Outside Pak Tea House, Lahore’s principle haunt of writers, there came
to life in the evening an informal watering hole. Glasses, water and
ice were obtained from the corner paan and cigarette kiosk.
Munir and Munawwar, having suitably “irrigated” themselves one
evening, were walking in the direction of Regal, both floating on
cloud nine, when they ran into Habib Jalib, who, being dry and sober,
was in a foul mood. He was also depressed about the political storm
blowing in the country. “Don’t you worry. I have a lot of power and I
can take care of all that ails you,” Munir declared grandly, as he
often did. “Sure, because you have the Army and the government on your
side,” Jalib shot back. That was enough to “turn around” Munir’s
“meter,” “Listen, you geriatric bear, you always need a Kalabagh or an
Ayub Khan to bash your head against and when you can’t find any of
them, you try to ram into your friends.”
Munawwar writes, “Drinking was Munir’s ride to that strange and unique
territory peopled by fairies and other worldly beauties from another
dimension. There were so many worlds that lived inside Munir. The
closed doors of the mansion of his intellect would be thrown open with
the key “the red fairy” handed him. Behind those closed doors lived
centuries that had passed, and generations that had vanished from the
earth. Strange creatures inhabited those unknown spaces: ghosts,
witches, banshee spirits with turned-back feet, [a] genie that took
possession of men only to let them go, men of God, mendicants,
wandering minstrels. It was a universe not visible to the rest of us.”
Once someone asked Munir, “Khan sahib, how can you drink? Whenever I
try to drink, blotches break out all over my body.” “Son,” Munir
replied, “The drink always knows who is drinking her.” When Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto banned drinking in the summer of 1977 to appease the
mullahs, Munir was very sad. “Such a harsh measure even Hazrat Umar
never ordered.”
Munir’s wit was devastating. He used to call Zaheer Kashmiri “golden
scorpion.” He was utterly irreverent. Once he said to Sufi Tabussum,
who was surrounded by his fawning students, “Hello Baby Tabussum.”
Baby Tabussum was a child star of the Bombay cinema of the 1950s.
But let me end this with a Munir poem that he called Six Coloured
Doors. In front of my house/have sprung up flowers in six colours/as
if they had risen from a dream/ doors leading to a new peace/More
colours behind their colours lie/And much more that can only be
imagined/There are many cities that lie behind those flowers/And many
other doors.
If Munir Niazi is reading this, I only ask him to forgive my
translations, for old time’s sake.
(Friday Times - July 13, 2007) |
