In the summer of 1990, Kashmiri businessman Irfan Hassan wrote to his childhood friend and poet Agha Shahid Ali about how all the post offices in Kashmir were closed due to the rise in militancy.
“I was walking home [near Srinagar] one day when I found the door of the post office open,” Hassan told ThePrint. A heap of letters lay there, unattended. “I found one addressed to me and one to Ali, who was in the US teaching at Amherst University.”
It became the inspiration for Ali’s volume of poems, The Country Without A Post Office (1997). The first poem in the book is dedicated to his friend, Irfan, and fellow poet James Merrill.
Each post office is boarded up. Who will deliver
parchment cut in paisleys, my news to prisons?
Hassan remembers Ali as “full of humanity”, a man who would smile at even a stranger, and loved everyone equally.
“In 1988 Srinagar, I saw him waiting at the chowk. His friend had not turned up and Shahid asked if I would like to take a walk. At the end of the walk, he handed me both the books. I still have those. One is the Half-Inch Himalayas (1987) and the other is A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987)”, he added.
Cultural ties, grief and violence are some of the recurring themes in Ali’s poems. When he was named finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry in the US, poet laureate of Maryland, Michael Collier, wrote: ”As a Kashmiri, Ali is aware of the historical vicissitudes that breed violence and hatred in people who once lived together peacefully. His poems speak to the enduring qualities of love and friendship.”’
A lover of people
Born on 4 February 1949 in New Delhi, Ali grew up in Kashmir and left for the United States in 1976. The bonds of friendship formed in his childhood did not dissipate with time or distance.
Be it as a five-year-old or 50, Ali would make friends easily, said painter Masood Hussain.
The Ali he remembers is not the globally acclaimed poet but the soft-spoken man who was a brilliant chef, an incredible friend and above all, a lover of people.
Hussain’s painting was the cover image for the first edition of The Country Without A Post Office.
In the summer of 1999, when he was back home in Kashmir, Ali invited Hussain to his house for tea. With a cup in one hand, he typed away on his electronic typewriter for an hour as Hussain watched.
“He then handed me three sheets of paper, which had seven different couplets written on it, and told me to paint them, whenever I had the time. He had dedicated all the couplets to me,” Hussain recalled.
It wasn’t until 2013 that Hussain went back to his friend’s couplets and painted all of them. The next year, his entire house was ravaged by floods, but he managed to save those paintings.
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An inspiration to friends
Growing up in Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali experienced an intellectually enriching environment fostered by his parents, the educationist Agha Ashraf Ali and his mother, Sufia.
According to Manan Kapoor’s A Map of Longings: Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali, the poet’s mother would dress him up as Krishna on Janmashtami when they lived in Delhi. His convent education also made him interested in Christianity.
This inclusive upbringing laid the foundation for Ali’s progressive worldview and set the stage for his future poetry, which drew inspiration from diverse cultures and traditions.
Consistently capturing the essence of subcontinental culture in English poems, he linked together memory and history. He rejected minimalism and sought to broaden English through the expressiveness of Urdu, despite his immersion in American poetry.
Author Rafiq Kathwari, one of Ali’s closest friends, remembers him as someone who was “an inspiration”. Speaking to ThePrint from New York, he shared his favourite memory of a trip to Barcelona with Ali to meet a potential publisher. Ali later dedicated his poem, Barcelona Airport, to Kathwari.
Are you carrying anything that could
be dangerous for other passengers?
O just my heart
“It is too early in the morning and I haven’t slept at all, but I will share this because this is what Shahid would have done,” he says over the phone.
It was “an unusually warm day for December,” when Ali and he strolled the historic Las Ramblas Boulevard.
“Our clothes were grungy. We did not look like two guys from New York chasing a book deal, but more like dinner for dogs. Suddenly, like an epiphany, a tall, slim woman walked towards us,” said Kathwari.
He recalls the confidence with which she carried herself in her knee-high boots and an unfastened, teal-coloured long coat. “She gave us a subtle glance and kept walking. The scent of roses sighed in the dry air as her charcoal hair swished glossy over her shoulders. Shahid looked at me and quoted Ghalib: Khuda jub husn deta hai, nazakat aa hi jaati hai [When god bestows beauty, delicacy naturally follows].”
Ali died of brain cancer in December 2001. His friend, Rafiq was there in his last moments.
“I don’t want to be remembered as someone who was there in his death. He was someone who celebrated life. Let us remember him like that.”
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)