Meena Kumari: A Poetess Without An Audience
‘Main Shayara Hoon!’
If it had ever occurred to Mahjabeen (her real name) that she would have to time-travel to be heard, she would have done it sooner than later.
Sooner than later?
What a vexing conundrum, she thought, assaulting a spittoon with a gob of chewed paan.
Nirmala, her maid, was sitting on the floor, tidying clothes.
Mahjabeen was coughing her last phlegm, anticipating death to be closer than farther. Another vexation.
It had been three weeks since the release of Pakeezah. The film had been long in the making, mainly due to acrimony with her producer-director husband Kamal Amrohi, and her deteriorating health caused by chronic alcoholism.
In between, she had been to London for treatment. She had been diagnosed with cirrhosis. Her liver had shrunk. One of the symptoms of the illness was the depression that came along with fame.
Doctor Sheila Sherlock had cured her. It took no less than a detective’s namesake to reach the root cause and put a stopper on the bottle. After she had returned to Bombay, she had abstained from drinking.
Mahjabeen also suffered from acute lovelessness. The nights were too long in waiting.
Pakeezah’s lukewarm reception aggravated her symptoms. Was there no one to love Sahib Jaan?
She relapsed. It was her thirst for alcohol mixed with her loneliness that began to play with her mind. She became delirious.
Nirmala, intrigued by the strange translucent windsock lying on the floor mat, said, ‘Aapa, this jaraab, it’s not even your size.’
Mahjabeen tailed her malignant cough with laughter. ‘Pagli, blow it first. It’s the kafan I ordered from Mecca.’’
Nirmala’s eyes widened. She adjusted her dupatta over her head, sanctimonious at once, ‘I don’t have so much air in me.’
Mahjabeen grew irascible, ‘You’re full of gas, do it fast now.’
The girl sat upright on the mat, bunched the fabric and held the wide mouth of the windsock close to her lips and blew a short burst of air into its deflated glassy lung. The windsock lit up into a dull white light. Nirmala felt the windsock rising from her fingers.
‘This is flying,’ she cried.
‘Oh hurry up, hold it silly girl,’ Mahjabeen scolded her, ‘I don’t have much time, stop playing with it, it’s my burial bag.’
Mahjabeen took ill the same night and was taken to St Elizabeth’s Nursing Home. For two days she complained of a dry throat that water could not quench.
On the third day, she went into coma in her sleep.
Three days later, Nirmala was staring at Mahjabeen aapa, who was stuffed in the big sock, its mouth tied with a cheery red ribbon. The pale woman looked like puffed, day-old pastry wrapped in a diaphanous cellophane shroud. Nirmala had seen something similar once at a confectionary store in Colaba. It looked expensive and stale as jaundice yellow.
The fresh sweets were at the local halwai in Mahim where Nirmala went to buy curd and milk. The halwai let her pick the sticky murabba and press it between her thumb and forefinger. A treacly liquid rose up through its translucent centre, surging her greed.
‘Give me this one,’ she grinned at him, sinking her teeth into the spongy sweet as she walked out with her day’s purchase.
Mahjabeen was that kind of sweet. Crusty on the outside, but gooey from within.
Her body was brought to her eleventh floor apartment in the Landmark building. Her sister Madhu gave her a bath. Her friends flocked for a final glimpse as she lay in her bed for deedar.
In the evening, her mourners began chanting La Illaha IllAllah and carried her body on their shoulders. Ministers, actors, relatives, many, men took turns as pallbearers to hold the coffin as it grew heavier with grief.
On her way out, a neighbour played a song from Pakeezah.
Yun hi koi mil gaya tha sar reh rah chalte chaltehttps://medium.com/media/9d4a10cb0af830618c4784d7a9e86f5a/href
Wahin tham ke reh gayi hai meri raat dhalte dhalte
Mahjabeen was laid in an enamelled coffin and lowered into the earth.
Dharmendra arrived at the cemetery, placing a white handkerchief on his head and raising his hand up, saying, ‘Allah, forgive the deceased her sins and grant her eternal peace in heaven.’
Mahjabeen’s ears would have rebelled against those very words. She had not sinned alone, if this was her punishment for a crime: her paramour reading her faatihaa.
Kamal Amrohi wanted to bury her in his village in Amroha. Here, she lay in Mazagaon. He held a fistful of dust and tossed it in the pit where her coffin was laid.
Her epitaph read:
Rah dekha karenge sadiyon tak
Hum chale jayenge jahan tanha
You will wait an eternity for me
Where I will now walk in solitude
‘From dust to eternity indeed,’ Kamal said.
An hour before midnight, her grave was covered in warm soil. Nirmala hoped Mahjabeen would melt from the heat inside the shiny bag and disappear as she had told Nirmala before she died.
‘I will not go into an afterlife. I defy faith. I will be back. In this life, in all of my wretched existence, no one paid attention to my fariyaad. I could not be a poetess. What then did I become, haan?’ Mahjabeen had ranted a few days ago.
Nirmala had sat silently, listening to her tirade. Nirmala had found her very becoming of a maharani and had nicknamed her so.
Mahjabeen’s career as an actress was long over. She was bloating and gloating. She wished to start another, as a poet in the stature of Mir, Firaq and Ghalib. Everyone had laughed at her. Some were even appalled at her temerity.
They liked her talking in the talkies, her ‘loony-moony’ voice full of sorrow, but when she began with her poems, they loved her even more. They roared with applause and filled her glass with cheap whiskey. Men who roamed the streets at night came in droves, the regular rascals Mahjabeen had befriended one evening, shouting from the ivoried balcony as her pallu slipped, baring her ample bosom to an unsuspecting crowd, ‘Poochte ho toh sunoh kaise basar hoti hai?’
Someone had yelled back ‘kaise?’
That’s how her new endeavour began.
A bunch of hooligans, Nirmala thought, milling at Mahjabeen’s doorstep every night in search of daaru and chalu shayari.
Poochte ho toh sunoh kaise basar hoti hai
Raat khairat ki, sadqe ki sehar hoti hai
Saans bharne ko toh jeena nahi kehte ya rab
Dil bhi dukhta hai na, ab aasteen tar hoti hai
Jaise jaage huye aankhon mein chubhe kaanch ke khwab
Raat iss tarah diwaanon ki basar hoti hai
Gham hi dushman hai mera gham hi koi dil dhundta hai
Ek lamhe ki judaai bhi agar hoti hai
Ek markaz ki talaash, ek bhatakti khusboo
Kabhi manzil kabhi tamhid-e-safar hoti hai
Poochte ho toh sunoh kaise basar hoti hai
Raat khairat ki, sadqe ki sehar hoti hai
***
Listen if you are asking about my woeful existence
The night goes by charity, as alms comes morning
Breathing alone is not called living oh lord
The heart cries and the sleeves are wet
Open eyes are pierced by the shard of dreams
This is how the night of the mad lovers is spent
Sorrow is the enemy my heart seeks
If even for a moment it abandons me
In search of a centre, a wandering fragrance
Sometimes finds a destination, sometimes a journey
Listen if you are asking about my woeful existencehttps://medium.com/media/d4fff061999194869358c6fda3eee354/href
The night goes by charity, as alms comes morning
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s overactive imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely a reflection of form.
