And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—
God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.
"Tonight," Agha Shahid Ali
You’ve drowned me in the wine of raisins tonight,
Now, who’ll mourn with the red-winged ravens tonight?
To you what was “mere,” is no less than my Mir,
Your jeweled pashminas clad my inns tonight.
Exiles from Atheism—no prison shall have us,
In Mercy’s desert, we are Bedouins tonight.
Kali’s ash-cold nails drip arsenic trails—
What hill dare halt what she begins tonight?
“Milord,” cry the pilgrims, “don’t brand us kafir;
Only we can unmask the Momins tonight.”
Westminster casements—let your stained sonatas,
Smother me at once with violins tonight.
She’s bled some sulfur from the furious Hell,
She’s locked each gate of the Heav’ns tonight.
In the soul’s charred dargah, all hubris has curdled—
No saffroned priest takes confessions tonight.
Charlatans swore there would be no Judgment Day,
Until Time bared its rictus grins tonight.
Malmsey oozes at the pastor’s altar—
Surely, Richard will betray Clarence tonight.
The hunt’s begun; see the temple chorus
Rend the membranes of our sheepskins tonight.
My rivals in her wrath—she’s pardoned them all!
And marked me—the last of the lynchpins—tonight.
God emblazes my hearth for Qasim’s sins,
Call me, Ishmael! She’s slain all your djinns tonight.
Why I Wrote ‘Tonight’
When I sat down to write ‘Tonight’—dedicated to Agha Shahid Ali—I intended to pay an earnest tribute to the maestro of the English ghazal. Meanwhile, I could not conceal how deeply I longed to meet the soul of Shahid and, perhaps, lament about what his legacy had been turned to! I cannot, therefore, conceal the political motivations behind writing ‘Tonight.’ The poem’s temporal space—tonight—is not just the radeef but also an incomplete, an ever-procrastinated space of reckoning. It is in that ‘tonight,’ for instance, that I hope to conjure Shahid and argue with him, plead with him, caress his leap of imagination, find blatant faults with his orientalism (and mine too!), drink absinthe with his aura, laud his unending struggles, abscond with him to Casablanca, and scream to the sea that I could be his sole legatee …
And, in all of this, I cannot afford to lose sight of the fact that Shahid’s followers are simply and emphatically and patently not what he was … Shahid was not a thematic and formal bigot. Oh, far from it! He was not an aesthete, forget an atheist (unlike what he claimed in his version of ‘Tonight!’). The only concession I was willing to make for the master was that he—Shahid—was entitled to the hubris of wanting to be called Ishmael. I, on the contrary, shudder at the notion of according myself such a privilege. The most I could hope for is to be called by Ishmael, or perhaps be texted some cryptic message … it was thus that I expressed my version of Shahid’s self-christening.
Those who believe to have known Shahid would plunge to offer an alibi for his reasons for articulating his perpetual states of exile—his constant diasporicity, his indifference to belonging to a faith, so to speak. Alas, we too have our elegies to sing of, in the present age! We too have our homelessness, our several crosses to bear. We too are displaced from the forsaken linearity of our pasts.
I do not envy Shahid for his otherworldly brilliance and his share of suffering. But I cannot, in the manner of John Keats, find bliss in his happiness! I am his hostage, as much as I am one of Austen’s and Tagore’s and Ghalib’s and Sankaracharya’s and Wilde’s and Chesterton’s and Dickinson’s! Shahid is to me what Mir was to Ghalib. The existence of the form of the ghazal in me—oh, and in the English language, at that—is squarely determined by Shahid’s historicity. Never can I deny that. But what if I cannot ever bring myself to agree with the hegemonical inspirations of vapid form and substance that his followers have drawn from him?
Why must I stock my conversation with Shahid with hackneyed Arabian tropes that are as insincere as anachronistic and as unfelt as our pedestrian versions of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan? Why must there exist in my most passionate rendezvous with him any trace of that which did not make me burn to ashes with its sheer blaze? Why must not the intermediary of an unpartisan Shakespeare come to witness my conversation with my mentor, and record it in a historical tragedy? Why should Kali’s arsenic nails not leave acidic trails on the earth where I finally conjure Shahid’s resurrection? Why should I not reveal before Shahid what sordid chicanery we—the denizens of a metropolitan intellectual postcolonial sphere—have have dealt out to the peripheral and the indigenous of our nations, all in the name of inauthentic mantras that we have learned to parrot but haven’t the gall to execute …
There is and shall remain space in ‘Tonight’—my unfinished ghazal for Shahid—for a dargah and a temple, for Ishmael and for Qasim, for ravens and for church altars, for malmsey and for cannabis, for the Momin and the saffroned priest—both of whom have been disempowered outside of the doors of the ‘inns’ sketched inside the ghazal. Surely, no Ishmael will call me. But Shahid will have known … and will have understood!
Photograph Courtesy: Lukas Baumert, Pixabay.
Arup K. Chatterjee 