Incendiary Circumstances (10 page)

Shahid was himself no mean practitioner of repartee. On one famous occasion, at Barcelona airport, he was stopped by a security guard just as he was about to board a plane. The guard, a woman, asked, "What do you do?"

"I'm a poet," Shahid answered.

"What were you doing in Spain?"

"Writing poetry."

No matter what the question, Shahid worked poetry into his answer. Finally the exasperated woman asked, "Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous to the other passengers?" At this Shahid clapped a hand to his chest and cried, "Only my heart."

This was one of his great Wildean moments, and it was to occasion the poem "Barcelona Airport." He treasured these moments; "I long for people to give me an opportunity to answer questions," he told me once. On May 7 I had the good fortune to be with him when one such opportunity presented itself. Shahid was teaching at Manhattan's Baruch College in the spring semester of 2000, and this was to be his last class—indeed, the last he was ever to teach. The class was to be a short one, for he had an appointment at the hospital immediately afterward. I had heard a great deal about the brilliance of Shahid's teaching, but this was the first and only time that I was to see him perform in a classroom. It was evident from the moment we walked in that the students adored him: they had printed a magazine and dedicated the issue to him. Shahid, for his part, was not in the least subdued by the sadness of the occasion. From beginning to end, he was a sparkling diva, Akhtar incarnate, brimming with laughter and
nakhra.
When an Indian student walked in late, he greeted her with the cry, "Ah my little subcontinental has arrived." Clasping his hands, he feigned a swoon. "It stirs such a tide of patriotism in me to behold another South Asian!"

Toward the end of the class, a student asked a complicated question about the difference between plausibility and inevitability in a poem. Shahid's eyebrows arched higher and higher as he listened. At last, unable to contain himself, he broke in. "Oh, you're such a
naughty
boy," he cried, tapping the table with his fingertips. "You always turn
everything
into an abstraction."

But Begum Akhtar was not all wit and
nakhra:
indeed, the strongest bond between Shahid and her was, I suspect, the idea that sorrow has no finer mask than a studied lightness of manner. Shahid often told a story about Begum Akhtar's marriage. Although her family's origins were dubious, her fame as a beauty was such that she received a proposal from the scion of a prominent Muslim family of Lucknow. The proposal came with the condition that the talented young singer would give up singing: the man's family was deeply conservative and could not conceive of one of its members performing onstage. Begum Akhtar—or Akhtaribai Faizabadi, as she was then—accepted, but soon afterward
her mother died. Heartbroken, Akhtaribai spent her days weeping on her grave. Her condition became such that a doctor had to be brought in to examine her. He said that if she were not allowed to sing, she would lose her mind. It was only then that her husband's family relented and allowed her to sing again.

Shahid was haunted by this image of Begum Akhtar, as a bereaved and inconsolable daughter, weeping on her mother's grave; it is in this grief-stricken aspect that she is evoked again and again in his poems. The poem that was his farewell to the world, "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World," opens with an evocation of Begum Akhtar:

 

A night of ghazals comes to an end. The singer
departs through her chosen mirror, her one diamond
cut on her countless necks. I, as ever, linger

 

It was Shahid's mother who had introduced him to the music of Begum Akhtar: "With her I'd heard—on 78 rpm—
Peer Gynt.../
and Ghalib's grief in the voice of Begum Akhtar." In Shahid's later poems, Begum Akhtar was to become an image for the embodiment of his own sorrow after his mother's death. Shahid's mother, a woman of striking beauty, happened to have a close, indeed startling, resemblance to Begum Akhtar. Shahid's walls were hung with many pictures of both, and I would frequently mistake the one for the other. What then of Shahid's belief that he resembled Begum Akhtar? There is a mystery here that I am content to leave untouched.

 

Shahid was born in New Delhi in 1949. Later, in one of the temporal inversions that marked his poetry, he was to relive his conception in his poem "A Lost Memory of Delhi":

 

I am not born
it is 1948 and the bus turns
onto a road without name
There on his bicycle
my father
He is younger than I

 

At Okhla where I get off
I pass my parents
strolling by the Jamuna River

 

Shahid's father's family was from Srinagar, in Kashmir. They were Shiites, who are a minority among the Muslims of Kashmir. Shahid liked to tell a story about the origins of his family. The line was founded, he used to say, by two brothers who came to Kashmir from Central Asia. The brothers had been trained as
hakims,
specializing in Yunani medicine, and they arrived in Kashmir with nothing but their knowledge of medical lore; they were so poor that they had to share a single cloak between them. But it so happened that the then maharajah of Kashmir was suffering from terrible stomach pains, "some kind of colic." Learning that all the kingdom's doctors had failed to cure the ailing ruler, the two brothers decided to try their hand. They gave the maharajah a concoction that went through the royal intestines like a plunger through a tube, bringing sudden and explosive relief. Delighted with his cure, the grateful potentate appointed the brothers his court physicians. Thus began the family's prosperity. "So you see," Shahid would comment, in bringing the story to its conclusion, "my family's fortunes were founded on a fart."

By Shahid's account, his great-grandfather was the first Kashmiri Muslim to matriculate. The story went that to sit for the examination, he had to travel all the way from Srinagar to Rawalpindi in a
tonga.
Later, he too became an official at the court of the maharajah of Kashmir. He had special charge of education, and took the initiative to educate his daughter. Shahid's grandmother was thus one of the first educated women in Kashmir. She passed the matriculation examination, took several other degrees, and in time became the inspector of women's schools. She could quote poetry in four languages: English, Urdu, Farsi, and Kashmiri. Shahid's father, Agha Ashraf Ali, continued the family tradition of public service in education. He taught at Jamia Millia University, in New Delhi, and went on to become the principal of the Teacher's College in Srinagar. In 1961 he enrolled at Ball State Teacher's College, in Muncie, Indiana, to do a Ph.D. in comparative education. Shahid was twelve when the family moved to the United States, and for the next three years he attended school in Muncie. Later the family moved back to Srinagar, and that was where Shahid completed his schooling. But it was because of his early experience, I suspect, that he was able to take America so completely in his stride when he arrived in Pennsylvania as a graduate student. The idea of a cultural divide or conflict had no purchase in his mind: America and India were the two poles of his life, and he was at home in both in a way that was utterly easeful and unproblematic.

Shahid took his undergraduate degree at the University of Kashmir, in Srinagar. Although he excelled there, graduating with the highest marks in his class, he did not recall the experience with any fondness. "I learned nothing there," he told me once. "It was just a question of
ratto-maroing
[learning by heart]." In 1968 he joined Hindu College in Delhi University to study for an M.A. in English literature. Once again he performed with distinction, and he went on to become a lecturer at the same college. It was in this period that he published his first collection of poems, with P. Lal of the Writer's Workshop in Calcutta.

Shahid's memories of Delhi University were deeply conflicted: he became something of a campus celebrity but also endured rebuffs and disappointments that may well have come his way only because he was a Muslim and a Kashmiri. Although he developed many close and lasting friendships, he also suffered many betrayals and much unhappiness. In any event, he was, I think, deeply relieved when Penn State University, in College Park, Pennsylvania, offered him a scholarship for a Ph.D.

His time at Penn State he remembered with unmitigated pleasure: "I grew as a reader, I grew as a poet, I grew as a lover." He fell
in with a vibrant group of graduate students, many of whom were Indian. This was, he often said, the happiest time of his life. Later Shahid moved to Arizona to take a degree in creative writing. This in turn was followed by a series of jobs in colleges and universities: Hamilton College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and finally the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, where he was appointed professor in 1999. He was on leave from Utah, doing a brief stint at New York University, when he had his first blackout, in February 2000.

After 1975, when he moved to Pennsylvania, Shahid lived mainly in America. His brother was already here, and they were later joined by their two sisters. But Shahid's parents continued to live in Srinagar, and it was his custom to spend the summer months with them there every year: "I always move in my heart between sad countries." Traveling between the United States and India, he was thus an intermittent but firsthand witness (
shahid
) to the mounting violence that seized the region from the late 1980s onward:

 

It was '89, the stones were not far, signs of change everywhere (Kashmir would soon be in literal flames)...

 

The steady deterioration of the political situation in Kashmir—the violence and counterviolence—had a powerful effect on him. In time it became one of the central subjects of his work; indeed, it could be said that it was in writing of Kashmir that he created his finest work. The irony of this is that Shahid was not by inclination a political poet. I heard him say once, "If you are from a difficult place and that's all you have to write about, then you should stop writing. You have to respect your art, your form—that is just as important as what you write about." Another time I was present at Shahid's apartment when his longtime friend Patricia O'Neill showed him a couple of sonnets written by a Victorian poet. The poems were political, trenchant in their criticism of the British government for its failure to prevent the massacre of the Armenians in Turkey. Shahid glanced at them and tossed them off-handedly aside: "These are terrible poems." Patricia asked why, and he said, "Look, I already know where I stand on the massacre of the Armenians. Of course I am against it. But this poem tells me nothing of the massacre; it makes nothing of it formally. I might as well just read a news report."

Anguished as he was about Kashmir's destiny, Shahid resolutely refused to embrace the role of victim that could so easily have been his. Had he not done so, he could no doubt have easily become a fixture on talk shows, news programs, and op-ed pages. But Shahid never had any doubt about his calling: he was a poet, schooled in the fierce and unforgiving arts of language. Such as they were, Shahid's political views were inherited largely from his father, whose beliefs were akin to those of most secular, left-leaning Muslim intellectuals of the Nehruvian era. Although respectful of religion, he was a firm believer in the separation of politics and religious practice.

Once when Shahid was at dinner with my family, I asked him bluntly, "What do you think is the solution for Kashmir?" His answer was, "I think ideally the best solution would be absolute autonomy within the Indian Union in the broadest sense." But this led almost immediately to the enumeration of a long list of caveats and reservations. Quite possibly, he said, such a solution was no longer possible, given the actions of the Indian state in Kashmir; the extremist groups would never accept the "autonomy" solution in any case, and so many other complications had entered the situation that it was almost impossible to think of a solution.

The truth is that Shahid's gaze was not political in the sense of being framed in terms of policy and solutions. In the broadest sense, his vision tended always toward the inclusive and ecumenical, an outlook that he credited to his upbringing. He spoke often of a time in his childhood when he had been seized by the desire to create a small Hindu temple in his room in Srinagar. He was initially hesitant to tell his parents, but when he did, they responded with an enthusiasm equal to his own. His mother bought him
mur
tis
(religious icons) and other accoutrements, and for a while he was assiduous in conducting
pujas
(Hindu ceremonies of worship) at this shrine. This was a favorite story. "Whenever people talk to me about Muslim fanaticism," he said to me once, "I tell them how my mother helped me make a temple in my room. 'What do you make of that?' I ask them." There is a touching evocation of this in his poem "Lenox Hill": "and I, one festival, crowned Krishna by you, Kashmir / listening to my flute."

I once remarked to Shahid that he was the closest that Kashmir had to a national poet. He shot back: "A national poet, maybe. But not a
nationalist
poet—please, not that." If anything, Kashmir's current plight represented for him the failure of the emancipatory promise of nationhood and the extinction of the pluralistic ideal that had been so dear to intellectuals of his father's generation. In the title poem of
The Country Without a Post Office,
a poet returns to Kashmir to find the keeper of a fallen minaret:

 

"Nothing will remain, everything's finished,"
I see his voice again: "This is a shrine
of words. You'll find your letters to me. And mine
to you. Come soon and tear open these vanished
envelopes"...

 

This is an archive. I've found the remains
of his voice, that map of longings with no limit.