(This is an extract that appeared in the 'Books and Authors' section of Dawn newspaper, Pakistan)

The singer adjusted her sequined chiffon sari, her face puffed with lard and layers of make-up. She waved her hand in the air to reach out to a besotted audience. Did she know what she was singing? The pain and the pining – could they be the masks she too was wearing?

Teri baatein hi sunaane aaye
dost bhi dil hi dukhaane aaye
phool khilte hain to hum sochte hai
tere aane ke zamaane aaye

Ahmed Faraz does not wrench your gut; he slowly reaches out inside you and you watch as a part of you leaves. He makes you an observer of your own foibles; he forces you to embrace anguish and the evanescent.

It is quite likely that the singer would be among his admirers. High society in Pakistan courts rebels for their sheer curiosity value. If they rebel long enough, then they become antiques. Shelves make space for their revolutionary ideas to gather dust. A mutiny in sepia.

Soon after Partition, the new country decided that it needed new opponents. It found them in writers. They carried no weapons, but in their minds there was no room for quiet acceptance. They lost their privacy; prisons began to be filled with progressives.

They were tortured, physically and emotionally. Intellectually they remained alert, every jab on their flesh gushing forth freshly-wounded words. As Faraz was to wryly comment about them, ‘You are no soldiers, you professional assassins.’

His life, his poems can be interpreted in various ways, but there is no attempt to camouflage.

Tu Khuda hai na mera ishq farishton jaisa
donon insaan hai to kyon itne hijaabon mein milein

(You are no god nor my love for you angelic/ Both of us are human so why do we need to meet behind veils?)

‘My conscience never forgave Cain,’ he has said.

He might not be aware but he is indeed the conscience of Pakistan. He speaks about dead consciences and those striving to live, he speaks about consciences waiting to be woken up and consciences crying themselves to sleep.

I was to meet the greatest living Urdu poet. The National Book Foundation in Islamabad is a drab building that looked like any government-run office, which it was. He was the presiding Saab. I knocked on a wooden door. Behind a large desk sat a man in a brown shirt and spectacles with a brown frame. The uniformity and blandness of it all was disconcerting for a few seconds, until he said, ‘I am Ahmed Faraz’. He smiled with his eyes and a crease deepened on his sunburnt cheeks. Suddenly the drab brown of his shirt spotted with sweat looked like earth wet with fresh monsoon showers.

He was clearly an attractive man made even more attractive by the fact that he accepted the confusions in his life. From turbulence to tranquillity, he had seen it all. This is why I had expected a bit more. Not this broad-shouldered founder of the Academy of Letters trapped behind a desk in an office where they served biscuits with tea and there were steel almirahs to push books into. Books that people were forced to read, not ones that they had lived through. Not the ones like he wrote, sometimes like feathery petals, often like crushed flowers squeezed to produce a scent so strong that it could awaken the dead.

My eyes were riveted by a painting on the wall on his right, at an angle where he could see it each time he glanced up a little. It was a woman’s face.

Despite the lurid colours, she leaped out of that frame with a look that was haughty and helpless at the same time. She could keep you away and yet ensnare you with a plea to be by her side. Was she the Pakistani identity framed in a room so alien to a man who wanted to breathe?

He was free then, but how free? What could being a Pakistani mean to such a man who had been imprisoned for saying what he felt like, for feeling, for thinking, for being? It was during the martial law imposed by Ziaul-Haq that he wrote a poem, Siege, about overthrowing the regime.

Main kat giroon ke salaamat rahoon yaqeen hai mujhe
Ke yeh hisaar-e-sitam koi giraye ga
Tamaam um’r ki eeza naseebon ki qasam
Mere Kalam ka safar raigaan na jaaye ga

(Whether I live or die, I am sure/ Someone will break through the siege and demolish it

In the name of the tortures I have gone through/ I assure the journey of my pen will not be in vain)

Words deep as a crevice, but the voice a mere echo resounding in the valley of the hopeless. What could they contribute?

‘Isn’t that how movements are formed?’ he asked, aware that he was a symbol, like a framed painting with hurt eyes and a proud chin. He had read out that poem at a mushaira (poetry reading) and was arrested.

He was thrown in jail, sentenced to solitary confinement. He was not permitted to speak to his family, his friends or even the guards. Then someone brought him books. The light from the 25-watt bulb cast eerie shadows; his eyesight became blurred.

But he started writing again, staccato sentences like the sound of boots outside the prison bars. The world outside was perhaps even more shackled in putting on a brave face and making it look like those shackles were keeping them stable, preventing them from the burden of walking too far.

Faraz had his imagination, where imperfections could be malleable steel. Most creative people work best when they are alone, so wasn’t the confinement fruitful in a sense? He looked beyond the window into the nothingness of the sky before haltingly saying, ‘Being alone is different from being in a situation of confinement that is forced upon you. When you are alone you have the choice to respond to the environment, to do things that are relevant.’

During this confinement, what did he experience most — humiliation, a feeling of repression or just restricted? ‘I think it was the feeling of repression that affected me the most.’ But he knew he was playing with fire and getting burned would be the consequence of his actions. ‘I did. I knew what I was writing, but it had to be said; it was a form of protest. In all major revolutions in the world, intellectuals have formed an important backdrop.’

Activism through art is often like painting with water on glass. ‘I don’t like the term activism. Anything that you are active about and act upon is important. What I say may play a very minor role but I feel I have done my bit. I believe that the power of the pen will prevail over the power of the gun.’

Ahmed Faraz does not wrench your gut; he slowly reaches out inside you and you watch as a part of you leaves. He makes you an observer of your own foibles; he forces you to embrace anguish and the evanescent.

Yet he was sympathetic to a military leader: ‘Musharraf was an instrument and not the author of Kargil. He has not discarded the democratic spirit.’

His experience and observations have forced him to believe that democracy does not mean condoning the acts of democrats. When the dishonesty goes too far the army, he feels, fills the vacuum.

There is an obvious contradiction here. For someone who was at the receiving end of a military regime, how could he say this? ‘The difference between then and now is that Musharraf is more civilised. While Zia crushed even literary activities, this regime has not done so.’

He spoke too soon. The progressive Musharraf had to play politics. Under pressure from the leaders of the Mohajir Quami Movement who claim to have ownership of the Urdu language, Ahmed Faraz had to give up his post as chairman of the Book Foundation. For one recognised as the finest living Urdu poet, this seemed farcical if not tragic.

In the last couple of years he has been humiliated. Things from his house were taken and thrown out in the streets. And finally in 2005 he was asked whether he wanted to quit or be sacked. He chose to be sacked. It made a point.

He was giving them the chain to whip him with. Their hands got bloodied. The gashes on him would form more lines. He would be history’s victim and recorder.

Can a creative person not be apolitical?

‘Again — political-apolitical, romantic-unromantic are only terms. If you are a part of something you cannot remove yourself from it. I am a social animal.’ And yet he chose to be a lonely reaper. ‘I did not choose it; I just felt it was important to say certain things. I suppose I am over-sensitive. I cannot see injustice; it makes me boil with anger.’

This ire took him to England where for four years he lived with the uncertainties of his imagination. Pakistan was still that framed painting — loud at the edges but etched beautifully at the core. He was not the sort to seek shelter, but he could have sought political asylum. He never did. ‘There are emotional reasons for it. When you give up your passport, you give up your identity.’ And what does this national identity mean to him? ‘It has to do with the concept of the homeland, one’s people. I feel very strongly about these. I express the aspirations of the Pakistanis, therefore I represent not just myself but my entire country. My people have given me love because I speak their thoughts. They are a part of my cultural heritage.’

And his art? ‘Culture includes art and lifestyle.’

But culture can confine art — religious repression can completely destroy artistic expression. ‘It is possible to protest against it.’ That is a limited route — rebels often end up forming some sort of establishment themselves. ‘But it has its relevance. Take fundamentalism. It does not have a popular base here, but there are a few who want to create a nuisance and propagate it. We have to speak out and find out what our role is.’

So how would he define himself in terms of Pakistani culture? ‘I think it is best conveyed in a strong feeling for roots, a sense of belonging and expressing. I feel we do produce some of the finest poets. In India all are gone…. here Faiz could make the sharpest political comment with the lightest touch. There are those who say that our culture will survive until the ghazal dies, and that is not likely to happen.’

What about the political turmoil — does it feed creativity? ‘In many ways it does. You are trying to cope and respond to various stimuli and they challenge you.’ But once out of the system, doesn’t numbness set in — after all one has purged oneself. ‘No. Sometimes it is only an expression; often I cannot say more. For the ghazal ‘Ranjish hi sahee’ I wrote only three verses and after one year I managed to write three more. I had stopped when I felt that was all I could say.’

After a year when he returned to the poem, was the inspiration the same or were his feelings towards it the same? ‘I think I was in a similar frame of mind when I went back to it. There are times when you take the eyes of someone and the lips of someone else to create a whole, and then the feeling recurs.’

Does this not dehumanise the inspiration? ‘No. I am not saying that only those eyes are the ones that matter.’ How did he feel when the ‘same’ emotions recurred for different people? ‘I think it is a process. I am trying to fill in the gaps. One is always searching.’ Does it have to be a real person, a real thing to shake him up, wake him up? ‘Always. I cannot respond to inanimate objects.’

I turned once again to that life pinned to the wall, which was becoming an allegory for the artistic temperament of the country itself. Take that painting, I said, it is inanimate …would it be able to make him do anything? For the first time during our conversation, he looked at it as though he had been trying to hold himself back all along. Finally, he said in a voice that I now register as belonging to one who had just drunk of a goblet of wine and a bit of vinegar, ‘That was my first love and she has haunted me for years…I may be doing something totally unconnected to her and she would appear in my thoughts.’

Was he obsessed with nostalgia and memories even if they hurt him? ‘I don’t think I am a masochist, but some things linger in your mind. Sometimes new people too give you the feeling that you have met them before, which makes you wonder about reincarnation.’ But he did like to cling on to things.

Aa phir se mujhe chhod ke jaane ke liye aa…dil hi dukhaane ke liye aa

(Return if only to leave me again/ return to cause me sorrow)’…why? ‘Sometimes one is just so captivated, like some thoughts that stay with you forever.’ How did he feel when he put so much emotion in what he wrote, and then it was out of his hands? ‘I am aware that the way I want my words emoted does not always happen — there are many times when I am not happy with the way things are expressed, about where the emphasis should be.

But then I too have rejected my own thoughts — my mind follows a system where some ideas are thrown out, others are filed away.’ When he recreated these filed-away thoughts, did he find them better than what he had immediately expressed? ‘In some ways.’ Then, was he honest to begin with? ‘I may not be a completely honest person, but I am honest to my work.’

There appeared to be some confusion here – he was this optimist on the one hand looking for acceptability and on the other his work revealed a tortured soul. ‘It is true. When I am with my friends I am laughing and joking and then there are my poems, which reveal a pain I genuinely feel. I sometimes wonder whether the other is a pose, but I don’t think so because I am a spontaneous person.’

Sorrow is spontaneous too. ‘It is. Such situations make me feel like a fish in water.’
Even if the water is murky?

‘It is better than no water.’

(copyright Farzana Versey)