Memoirs of Three Continents

Typical poetic symposia are still common in the Indian subcontinent, though less frequent; they wore a great charm in British India. A senior poet presided over the gathering and read his poem at the last. In 1930s a certain Warsi presided over many Mushaïras, one after the other, saying the same composition of his, the even-lyres rhyming ‘year after year’, till it became a boring joke. Shaadan then composed its parody, spotted out a young enthusiast, groomed him into a satirist poet and brought him to such a Mushaïra that parody in hand. Satirists, if present, recited those days immediately after the formal session was over. So ‘Karoli Shikaarpuri’ was invited as soon as Warsi finished his. And you can imagine the effect his parody of the preceding poem, read in the same meter and the same rhyme, produced on the audience!

In those very youthful days Shaadan went out roaming around Lucknow and happened to pass through Malihabad where the famous national poet Shabbeer Hasan Josh lived. Shaadan called at the celebrity and the doorkeeper refused him entry, because ‘Sahib’ was busy. At the visitor’s insistence and persistence he went in to inform Josh who promptly called him in. The host was enjoying taari (toddy, very little intoxicating palm juice) held in a large earthen pot, and every one present dipped his earthen cup turn by turn in. Shaadan also got one to keep company.

After sometime the jovial Shaadan started feeling financial crunch out of the dwindling family resources. What to do? He did not have any professional training. With some efforts, however, he succeeded in making some furniture and selling it out on door-to-door persuasion. Per chance he happened to visit a mechanical shop, and adapted from it design for a nib suitable to Urdu and Persian calligraphy, naming it meaningfully ‘nigar’ – piece of writing as well as the beloved. He developed a small workshop that a partner financed. To him Shaadan sold it after a while for the price of a ticket by sea to London, and reached that city penniless soon after the Second World War ended; he took to earning as a laborer. With savings slowly accrued, he secured admission in some evening classes and gradually progressed to enter an Engineering College. That led him to the career of a mechanical engineer. Then he called in his wife, bought a small house and in summer 1964 set out to Paris for a couple of weeks in vacation. There I met him two successive years, as said in the beginning of this article. European ladies appreciated his polish and politeness, while he appraised the color and shades of their eyes.

Shaadan began his job in America at the age of 57 or so. In addition to rising there in professional position continuously, he secured a doctorate in Industrial Psychology. He refused to retire at his sixty-fifth birthday and signed instead a contract with his employer to work ten years more and then to retire without pension, thus committing in heat of action a big loss of money for the last seventeen years of his old age. Inaayat Hussain stayed in America as a consultant a few years more, but then returned to England among his Birmingham ‘friends’ on an old man’s pension. His old house had dilapidated in the meanwhile and collapsed to complete loss of many a useful belonging, including a set of non-consumable tools the manufacturing company of which somebody had purchased and destroyed since. He procured, therefore, a one bedroom flat in an old people’s house at Hicks Road and settled down with wife.

The carefree Shaadan then started traveling east. On his second visit to India with wife, he sent me a word from East Delhi and I fetched him with Mrs Shaadan to Aligarh. Taxi culture did not exist at Aligarh upto then, but we managed to handle the British guest well. Inaayat visited the University and the adjoining market, recited his poetry, argued rationality with irrationals and tried his recipes on gas cooker, while Sa’adia, our younger daughter, sang his lyrics as he directed and recorded them on tapes. My wife took Mrs Shaadan to Agra and Seekri with other family members, thus enjoying the bumper rainy season thoroughly in and out of Memon Manzil. Shaadan gave a serious thought to adopting Sa’adia as his daughter, but we could not swallow the idea and then the lawyer pointed out that Islamic law has no provision for that.

After a few years, Shaadan visited us alone. He came this time with the specific project of editing his poems with my assistance, and getting them calligraphied in India for publication from England. By then I had responsibility to departmental administration as well, nevertheless I read his manuscripts with care to mark my selection. Then he gave his collection a finish; I brought to him a charming young man, who, in leisure from his job as a library assistant, gave evening hours to calligraphy. Shaadan rejected his sample outright, saying he lacked even the ABC of the art. Upon that my wife heaved a sigh of relief with the remark: ‘The young man will earn less but live longer, free from the old man’s tyranny’.

Shaadan applied his mind of an engineer to ‘discover’ formulae for composing poetry in its various form. He was against ‘ghazal’, also because it did not fit into any formula he tried, though it was fashionable too to say so when he was young, under the spell of many like Dr Andaleeb Shaadaani. When he showed to some- one any of his compositions he always asked him to consider its ‘technique’ rather than what we prefer as literary elegance. I regret he did not oblige me to leave with me a small description of the poetry ‘formulae’ he said to have discovered.

Then I took Inaayat Hussain to the house of Yousuf Ali Khan in Ghaziabad, with double purpose; that the new host interact with the senior engineer and find to him a useful calligrapher from Delhi. Shaadan enjoyed living there a couple of months discussing with Yousuf the latter’s construction problems, visiting his factories, criticizing his set-up, lecturing basic engineering methodology to junior engineers, proposing ways and means to improve efficiency and reducing losses. Shaadan’s criticism hurt the pride of the young and self-made Yousuf, he listened to the elder politely but took his words with a pinch of salt, offering counter-remarks in his absence that the old man had little sense of modern systems and so on. But what Shaadan told him dig deep impression on his mind; various inputs in the years after the old man left him triggered an avalanche of rethinking and reform. Then Yousuf acknowledged to me his gratitude to Shaadan for inducing into his mind need to reorganize his set-up and to streamline his affairs, but more on him and Ghaziabad later.

Yousuf found out for Shaadan a calligrapher of his satisfaction in Delhi, giving me impression that he would finish his work as he liked. But it so happened after his departure back to England that no collection of his poems appeared in print till he died and then up till now.

Before leaving India, Shaadan traveled in reserved first class coaches of Indian railways to Bombay, where he visited Mrs Sen among others, and the family of a niece of her wife in Baroda (new Vadodra). Soon after he returned to Ghaziabad, he discovered to his horror that he had lost in the journey the bulk of British pounds he carried with him. The trauma he experienced thereupon for a few days worried Yousuf so much that he drove Shaadan to Aligarh and took me with him back to Ghaziabad for a day or two. But Shaadan absorbed the shock in the meanwhile and became normal.