Incendiary Circumstances (11 page)

 

The pessimism engendered by the loss of these ideals—
that map of longings with no limit
—resulted in a vision in which, increasingly, Kashmir became a vortex of images circling around a single point of stillness: the idea of death. In this figuring of his homeland, he himself became one of the images that were spinning around the dark point of stillness—both Shahid and Shahid, witness and martyr—his destiny inextricably linked with Kashmir's, each prefigured by the other.

 

I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir,
and the shadowed routine of each vein
will almost be news, the blood censored,
for the
Saffron Sun
and the
Times of Rain

 

Among my notes is a record of a telephone conversation on May 5. The day before he had gone to the hospital for an important test, a scan that was expected to reveal whether or not the course of chemotherapy that he was then undergoing had had the desired effect. All other alternative therapies and courses of treatment had been put off until this report.

The scan was scheduled for 2:30 in the afternoon. I called his number several times in the late afternoon and early evening—there was no response. I called again the next morning, and this time he answered. There were no preambles. He said, "Listen, Amitav, the news is not good at all. Basically, they are going to stop all my medicines now—the chemotherapy and so on. They give me a year or less. They'd suspected that I was not responding well because of the way I look. They will give me some radiation a little later. But they said there was not much hope."

Dazed, staring blankly at my desk, I said, "What will you do now, Shahid?"

"I would like to go back to Kashmir to die." His voice was quiet and untroubled. "Now I have to get my passport, settle my will, and all that. I don't want to leave a mess for my siblings. But after that I would like to go to Kashmir. It's still such a feudal system there, and there will be so much support—and my father is there too. Anyway, I don't want my siblings to have to make the journey afterward, like we had to with my mother."

Later, because of logistical and other reasons, he changed his mind about returning to Kashmir: he was content to be laid to rest in Northampton, in the vicinity of Amherst, a town sacred to the memory of his beloved Emily Dickinson. But I do not think it was an accident that his mind turned to Kashmir in speaking of death. Already, in his poetic imagery, death, Kashmir, and Shahid/Shahid had become so closely overlaid as to be inseparable, like old photographs that have melted together in the rain.

 

      Yes, I remember it,
the day I'll die, I broadcast the crimson,

 

so long ago of that sky, its spread air,
its rushing dyes, and a piece of earth

 

bleeding, apart from the shore, as we went
on the day I'll die, post the guards, and he,

 

keeper of the world's last saffron, rowed me
on an island the size of a grave. On

 

two yards he rowed me into the sunset,
past all pain. On everyone's lips was news

 

of my death but only that beloved couplet,
broken, on his:

 

"If there is a paradise on earth,
It is this, it is this, it is this."

 

Shahid's mother, Sufia Nomani, was from Rudauli, in Uttar Pradesh. She was descended from a family that was well known for its Sufi heritage. Shahid believed that this connection influenced her life in many intangible ways; "She had the grandeur of a Sufi," he liked to say.

Although Shahid's parents lived in Srinagar, they usually spent the winter months in their flat in New Delhi. It was there that his mother had her first seizure, in December 1995. The attack was initially misdiagnosed, and it was not till the family brought her to New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, in January 1996, that it was confirmed that she had a malignant brain tumor. Her condition was so serious that she was operated on two days after her arrival. The operation did not have the desired effect and resulted instead in a partial paralysis. At the time Shahid and his younger brother Iqbal were both teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His sister Hena was working on a Ph.D. at the same institution. The siblings decided to move their mother to Amherst, and it was there that she died, on April 24, 1997. In keeping with
her wishes, the family took her body back to Kashmir for burial. This long and traumatic journey forms the subject of a cycle of poems, "From Amherst to Kashmir," that was later included in Shahid's 2001 collection,
Rooms Are Never Finished.

During the last phase of his mother's illness and for several months afterward, Shahid was unable to write. The dry spell was broken in 1998, with "Lenox Hill," possibly his greatest poem. The poem was a canzone, a form of unusual rigor and difficulty (the poet Anthony Hecht once remarked that Shahid deserved to be in the
Guinness Book of Records
for having written three canzones—more than any other poet). In "Lenox Hill," the architectonics of the form create a soaring superstructure, an immense domed enclosure, like that of the great mosque of Isfahan or the mausoleum of Sayyida Zainab in Cairo: a space that seems all the more vast because of the austerity of its proportions. The rhymes and half-rhymes are the honeycombed arches that thrust the dome toward the heavens, and the meter is the mosaic that holds the whole in place. Within the immensity of this bounded space, every line throws open a window that beams a shaft of light across continents, from Amherst to Kashmir, from the hospital of Lenox Hill to the Pir Panjal Pass. Entombed at the center of this soaring edifice lies his mother:

 

...Mother,
they asked me,
So how's the writing?
I answered
My mother
is my poem.
What did they expect? For no verse
sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir
and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of Kashmir

 

(across fifteen centuries) in the hospital.
Kashmir,
she's dying!
How her breathing drowns out the universe
as she sleeps in Amherst.

 

The poem is packed with the devices that he had perfected over a lifetime: rhetorical questions, imperative commands, lines broken or punctuated to create resonant and unresolvable ambiguities. It ends, characteristically, with a turn that is at once disingenuous and wrenchingly direct.

 

For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir,
and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the universe
when I remember you—beyond all accounting—O my mother?

 

For Shahid, the passage of time produced no cushioning from the shock of the loss of his mother: he relived it over and over again until the end. Often he would interrupt himself in mid-conversation: "I can't believe she's gone; I still can't believe it." The week before his death, on waking one morning, he asked his family where his mother was and whether it was true that she was dead. On being told that she was, he wept as though he were living afresh through the event.

In the penultimate stanza of "Lenox Hill," in a breathtaking, heart-stopping inversion, Shahid figures himself as his mother's mother:

 

"As you sit here by me, you're just like my mother,"
she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir,
she's watching, at the Regal, her first film with Father.
If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother,
I'd save you—now my daughter—from God. The universe
opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God's mother!

 

I remember clearly the evening when Shahid read this poem in the living room of my house. I remember it because I could not keep myself from wondering whether it was possible that Shahid's identification with his mother was so powerful as to spill beyond the spirit and into the body. Brain cancer is not, so far as I know, a hereditary disease, yet his body had, as it were, elected to reproduce the conditions of his mother's death. But how could this be possible? Even the thought appears preposterous in the bleak light of the Aristotelian distinction between mind and body, and the notions of cause and effect that flow from it. Yet there are traditions in
which poetry is a world of causality entire unto itself, where metaphor extends beyond the mere linking of words, into the conjugation of a distinctive reality. In Shahid's last months I thought often of the death of Babar, who was not just the first of the Mogul emperors but also a poet and writer of extraordinary distinction.

Shahid thought of his work as being placed squarely within a modern Western tradition. Yet the mechanics of his imagination—dreams, visions, an overpowering sense of identity with those he loved—as well as his life, and perhaps even his death, were fashioned by a will that owed more perhaps to the Sufis and the Bhakti poets than to the modernists. In his determination to be not just a writer of poetry but an embodiment of his poetic vision, he was, I think, more the heir of Rumi and Kabir than Eliot and Merrill.

The last time I saw Shahid was on the twenty-seventh of October, at his brother's house in Amherst. He was intermittently able to converse, and there were moments when we talked just as we had in the past. He was aware, as he had long been, of his approaching end, and he had made his peace with it. I saw no trace of anguish or conflict: surrounded by the love of his family and friends, he was calm, contented, at peace. He had said to me once, "I love to think that I'll meet my mother in the afterlife, if there is an afterlife." I had the sense that as the end neared, this was his supreme consolation. He died peacefully, in his sleep, at 2
A.M.
on December 8.

Now, in his absence, I am amazed that so brief a friendship has resulted in so vast a void. Often when I walk into my living room, I remember his presence there, particularly on the night when he read us his farewell to the world: "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World." I remember how he created a vision of an evening of ghazals, drawing to its end; of the bediamonded singer vanishing through a mirror; I remember him evoking the voices he loved—of Begum Akhtar, Eqbal Ahmed, and James Merrill—urging him on as he journeys toward his mother:
love doesn't help anyone finally survive.
Shahid knew exactly how it would end, and he was meticulous in saying his farewells, careful in crafting the envoy to the last verses of his own life.

O
N MAY
11, the Indian government tested several nuclear devices at a site near the small medieval town of Pokhran, on the edge of the Thar Desert, in the western state of Rajasthan. I traveled to the area three months later. My visit coincided with the fifty-first anniversary of independence, the start of India's second half-century as a free nation. As I was heading toward Pokhran, the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was addressing the nation from the ramparts of Delhi's Red Fort—an Independence Day tradition. Driving through the desert, I listened to him on the car radio.

Vajpayee belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or the Indian People's Party), which is the largest single group in the coalition that now rules India. The BJP came to power in March, and the Pokhran tests followed two months later. The tests occasioned outpourings of joy among the BJP's members and sympathizers. They organized festivities and handed out sweetmeats on the streets to commemorate the achievement. There was talk of sending sand from the test site around the country so that the whole nation could partake of the glow from the blasts. Some of the BJP's leaders were said to be thinking of building a monument at Pokhran, a "shrine of strength" that could be visited by pilgrims. Nine days after the first tests, the prime minister flew to Pokhran himself. A celebration was organized near the crater left
by the blasts. The prime minister was photographed standing on the crater's rim, looking reverentially into the pit.

But now, three months later, speaking at Red Fort, the prime minister's voice sounded oddly subdued. The euphoria had faded. On May 28, Pakistan had tested its own nuclear devices. This had had a sobering effect. In the following weeks, the rupee fell to a historic low, the stock market index fell, prices soared. The BJP's grasp on power was now none too secure.

I was traveling to Pokhran with two men whom I'd met that morning. They were landowning farmers who had relatives in the town. A friend had assigned them the task of showing me around. One man was in his sixties, with hennaed hair and a bushy mustache. The other was his son-in-law, a soft-spoken, burly man in his early forties. Their Hindi had the distinctive lilt of western Rajasthan.

It was searingly hot, and the desert wind chafed like sandpaper against our eyes. The road was a long, shimmering line. There were peafowl in the thorny trees, and the birds took wing as the car shot past, their great tails iridescent in the sunlight. Otherwise, there was nothing but scrub to interrupt the view of the horizon. In the dialect of the region, my guides told me, this area was known as "the flatland."

In Pokhran, my guides were welcomed by their acquaintances. A town official said he knew exactly the man I ought to meet. This man was sent for. His name was Manohar Joshi, and he was thirty-six, bespectacled, with a ready smile. He'd grown up in Pokhran, he told me. He was twelve in 1974, when a nuclear device was first tested in the district. The prime minister then was Indira Gandhi.

"In the years after 1974, there was a lot of illness," Joshi said. "We had never heard of cancer before. But after the test people began to get cancer. There were strange skin diseases. Sores. And people used to scratch themselves all the time. If these things had happened anywhere else in the country, in Bihar or Kashmir, people would rise up and stop it. But people here don't protest. They'll put up with anything."