Aakhri Paher Ki Dastak

Aakhri Paher Ki Dastak

Akhri Paher ki Dastak

-Reflections

Akhri paher ki Dastak-I know how personal this book is to my father who has never ever, as far as I can trust the portals of my memory, expressed his feelings overtly before us. He has been a man of few words when it came to familial or social interactions .Words had to be prized out of him but when he did speak, we listened. We had no choice. I didn’t want to have a choice. His words always left their mark on my mind.

I have fond memories of my childhood when he would make me recite Jaadu tha sapna tha kyatha ..maine tujh mein kya dekha tha.At the time when children my age were into Brother Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes,I was reciting Iqbal and Nasir Kazmi.Not that he deliberately kept us away from the fashionable language learning devices but there was a kind of an aloofness , a beneyazi, that made him say words that were there in his mind. I mirrored them. I think I have inherited this aloofness from him.

I never learnt Urdu in school because I studied in public schools that did not have Urdu as a subject.Whatever little Urdu I know is because of him.Payam-e-taleem and khilona were our childhood companions besides Archie comics and Readers’Digest. When I was in  Kindergarten I was an audience to his play Mitti ka Bulawa which was dramatized at Kennedy Hall, Aligarh .For months I had been witness to innumerable dramatis personae visiting our place,trying out sound effects, dialogue delivery and I saw how passionately my father would give shape and expressions to his words. I can give the effect of horses galloping by strumming my fingers on the walnut engraved table in our living room.He showed me how to do it.

We had a large number of visitors at our place and the sound of teaspoons and aroma of green label tea is still fresh in my mind.When he was with people, he was very vocal.However it was his quietude and passivity that I saw at home with  him sitting on his takht  , writing or reading. He never used a writing table. Another inheritance from him..I always study with my books scattered about me either on the carpet or on my bed.

I had questions I never asked,perhaps I never will.His silence spoke volumes.I don’t need answers. I need his presence which is far more enriching than all the treasures one  finds in an encyclopedia or a thesaurus.He rarely expressed excitement or regret over issues that were quick to excite or disappoint us.Restraint. This is what I learnt from him.

When I read two of his dramas-Mujhe Ghar yaad aata haiand Mitti ka Bulawa  , I knew he missed certain people and things in life. When this realization dawned on me I looked at him as a son of my grandparents, as a brother to his siblings and a friend to innumerable people who were closed to him. I think we all pass through this stage of realization.To a child, a father is just a father. He can’t be anyone other than this.It's much later in life that one sees other facets of a person’s identity.

Yesterday,Rekhta launched his first ever compilation of ghazals-Aakhri Paher ki Dastak. This title was disturbing . Perhaps mirroring his trait of hiding emotions, I did the same. I did not question him.For the last six months he has been struggling with Cancer. I have been with him through all the sessions of chemotherapy, his treatment, innumerable visits to the hospitals and  a thousand pricks of needles in his veins. But never once did I see him flinch or express his anguish to anyone. For that matter no one at home did .We are made of sterner stuff I guess! Lying on the hospital bed,with the drips ,monitors and machines he would tell me tales of his childhood, his student days and his friends whom he missed. It was as if his  life was  reflected in tiny broken pieces of glass and I desperately tried to collect those pieces and fix them up like a jigsaw puzzle,wiping the dust of bygone days that had blurred some of the images and what emerged was the picture of a man who was my hero, my idol and a meaning for life.I would walk with him in the corridors of the hospital and I found myself holding on to his hands as a toddler when he guided my very first steps. Such were his words to me.I learnt from every step, at every step.

His ghazals speak of darkness and shadows, colours fading into dusk, heavy eyelids and sorrows but never ever of detachment .He is very much a part of the emotional landscape that he paints through his words.He is very much an insider, a part of the painting, a subject that thinks and feels but does not revel in nostalgia. Nostalgia is often arrogant and melodramatic bordering on abstractions.His nostalgia is concrete and tangible. He sees through stones. I saw the tenderness of the stone.

Sooraj dheere dheere pighla

Phir taaron mein dhalne laga

Mere andar ka sannata

Jag ke aankhein malne laga

Neele surkh safed sunehre

Ek ek karke doob gaye

Samton ki har pagdandi pe

Kaala rang pighalne laga..

These lines remind me of  Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night . He was one artist who expressed his emotions through the harsh ,well defined strokes of his brush. Shamim Hanfi paints his words in deep dark colours. One needs to swim into the depths to understand his thoughts.

I am really thankful to Mr. Sanjiv Saraf , Zamarrud  Mughal  and the entire Rekhta team who made it possible for us to see Shamim Hanfi as poet. The critical intellect of a great writer of critique has always been there before us. His creativity comes alive through this publication. Thank you very much. Akhri Paher ki Dastak is a new beginning.

-Ghazal

9thJune, 2015