Discovering Agha Shahid Ali

Another stumble-upon find. Anyone familiar with this poet please quote some more!
Not much pirated stuff of his online. Must go hunt for his poetry.



This I found at a blog by one Eduardo C. Corral. Thanks Eduardo!

The Dacca Gauzes

. . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those transparent Dacca gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:

a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. "No one
now knows," my grandmother says,

"what it was to wear
or touch that cloth." She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from

her mother's dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.

Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys

were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.

In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,

and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,

my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only

in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.

One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.

_______________________________

I remember Tha'mma from The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh; Ghosh seems to have been influenced by Agha Shahid Ali - he has written about him;
it's that same kind of absent sadness with which she asks where the borders are...

This is one poet worth pursuing.

Links to:
THE SHADOW LINES by Amitav Ghosh [via Google Books]
THE COUNTRY WITHOUT A POST OFFICE by Agha Shahid Ali [via Google Books]

The poetic and the prosaic

I went to a Landmark today, the Fox Books in India these days, it seems. My dad was promoted recently; what this translates to, in real terms, is among other things a car-and-driver at disposal. Anyone's disposal. The per day mileage limit is so huge that Lucknow could not possibly use it all up. We've even been to Kanpur and back.

Anyway.
So I had the car today, much to my discomfort; not being used to royal treatment and all. So I had to deliver my day's plan to the folks first, before I could just up it and go, like I could if I didn't have to see if the driver had time for lunch, etc. etc. etc. But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth.

My first stop was Wave, a mall on the side of my house closer to Polytechnic and further from Hazratganj, where I was headed next. I went up to Landmark first, with Kundera on my mind. I just finished Ignorance, and after The Unbearable Lightness of Being and now this, I wanted more. As it happened, I found The Art of the Novel, which had been recommended. When I read the blurb, and the first few pages, I put it down. Sadly, this is exactly the kind of stuff I don't want to read right now. As if Terry Eagleton is not enough, not to mention Gauri Viswanathan, Edward Said, Raymond Williams and countless others whom I have to read as part of the English Hons. syllabus.
Then I didn't pick up Life is Elsewhere, [although come on, that's such a lovely title; like The Sun Also Rises. Sigh.] because I have an ebook version. Free.
There was also Testaments Betrayed, which was just a tad too obscure. Even for me.

So I wandered around.
Then I remembered S mentioning a book on Delhi, something that had gone out of and come back into print. Of course I had no clue what it was called.
So I go to the counter and ask the woman there to run a search on all books with "Delhi" in the title. She says But that'll show you even travel guides and stuff. I say Fine, I'll look. The list wasn't very long anyway, but nothing familiar showed up.
I call S, who is mercifully not asleep at 1 pm, and ask

- So what is that book on Delhi?
- City of Djinns.
- [No. Geez.] The one with kabootarbaazi in it (why it had been mentioned in the first place)?
- Oh, um, er.
- [Great.]
- No, wait.
- [Uh-huh. Lovely. Balance running out. Roaming charges. Drat. MTNL phones can't be recharged in non-Mahanagar towns.] Author?
- Er...Aijaz Ahmed...
- Can't be!
- No, no, something like that...
Something about...um...
AHMAD ALI!

The woman looks, finds it,
Twilight in Delhi! J and S yell.

Sigh of relief. Ok, got it.

- It's not in stock. You can place an order though.
- Does that mean I have to buy it?
Tough. I like a little leeway, man. That's why I hate the college Reference Section. You can't browse.

So I place the bloody order. There are by the way 3 hits for this search, Rs. 95, 195 and 295. Naturally I want the first one. Turns out that was from the 1993 inventory. So now it's either 195 or 100 more. No prizes for guessing which one I picked.

Khair, still undaunted, I continue to browse. After looking through a depressing Non-Fiction section which is full of terrorism and religions of saffron and all other colours, I return in the general direction of Kundera, and then decide to spice up my life by going to the other side of the same shelf (which you can't lean against, by the way, it just slides away!).
Then a board boldly declares, POETRY, so I look for Emily Dickinson, whom I didn't buy in Daryaganj last time; I spent my last bit 150 bucks there on a jacket instead. No, poetry does NOT keep me warm.
I don't find her, but stumble instead upon Jeet Thayil, whose name I had heard [here] only recently, not knowing he was a poet. So to create serendipity, I opened These Errors Are Correct and found a poem called 'My Paris'. I read,

Maybe on the Metro
singing my three and a half songs

I like this line so much (and of course one of the songs I knew, but anyway) that I wanted to copy it down. So I take out my handy pen and notepad and begin to write.
As finish writing Maybe, this chap in Landmark sanctioned uniform comes and says

- Madam yeh allowed nahin hai.
- Kya?
- Copying.
- Are you serious?
- Yes, Ma'am, yeh allowed nahin hai.
- So you mean I should memorize this?
- Memorize kar lijiye...
- You realize you're killing any creative impulse.
- Ma'am...
- MAYBE ON THE METRO
SINGING MY THREE AND A HALF SONGS. Not going to forget this anytime soon. [Fume and storm out happily]

Yes, it was unnecessary. I agree.
Perhaps I just needed to vent somewhere.

Now what's eating me is that S was the one who recommended The Art of the Novel, which I didn't like, and S who recommended Twilight in Delhi. Hmm. Hakuna matata.

Did I mention I also bought much-needed new shoes today? And also much-needed second pair of jeans?

So not a wasted day after all!