Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

Once when Shahid was at dinner with my family, I asked him bluntly, "What do you think is the solution for Kashmir?" His answer was, "I think ideally the best solution would be absolute autonomy within the Indian Union in the broadest sense." But this led almost immediately to the enumeration of a long list of caveats and reservations. Quite possibly, he said, such a solution was no longer possible, given the actions of the Indian state in Kashmir; the extremist groups would never accept the "autonomy" solution in any case, and so many other complications had entered the situation that it was almost impossible to think of a solution.

The truth is that Shahid's gaze was not political in the sense of being framed in terms of policy and solutions. In the broadest sense, his vision tended always toward the inclusive and ecumenical, an outlook that he credited to his upbringing. He spoke often of a time in his childhood when he had been seized by the desire to create a small Hindu temple in his room in Srinagar. He was initially hesitant to tell his parents, but when he did, they responded with an enthusiasm equal to his own. His mother bought him mur tis (religious icons) and other accoutrements, and for a while he was assiduous in conducting pujas (Hindu ceremonies of worship) at this shrine. This was a favorite story. "Whenever people talk to me about Muslim fanaticism," he said to me once, "I tell them how my mother helped me make a temple in my room. 'What do you make of that?' I ask them." There is a touching evocation of this in his poem "Lenox Hill": "and I, one festival, crowned Krishna by you, Kashmir / listening to my flute."

I once remarked to Shahid that he was the closest that Kashmir had to a national poet. He shot back: "A national poet, maybe. But not a nationalist poet — please, not that." If anything, Kashmir's current plight represented for him the failure of the emancipatory promise of nationhood and the extinction of the pluralistic ideal that had been so dear to intellectuals of his father's generation. In the title poem of The Country Without a Post Office, a poet returns to Kashmir to find the keeper of a fallen minaret:

"Nothing will remain, everything's finished,"

I see his voice again: "This is a shrine

of words. You'll find your letters to me. And mine

to you. Come soon and tear open these vanished

envelopes"…

This is an archive. I've found the remains

of his voice, that map of longings with no limit.

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: