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Amrita Pritam's Last Love Poem

NIRUPAMA DUTT

 

 

 






“So Niru, any new love?” she asked me.

There she was, the high priestess of love, frail and all wizened with age, but the eyes still twinkled as she asked me this girlie question reminiscent of the many heart-to-heart talks over some thirty odd years.

It was Amrita Pritam, of course, the grande dame of Punjabi letters, who nurtured some two generations of Punjabi writers, and was friend and confidante to many.

“Not really, Amrita ji,” I hesitated for a moment, as I sat by her bedside, and then went on to confess because lying to her would be sacrilege. “But there was this Malayali painter that I was seeing. He wanted to exhibit at an art gallery and once I tied up with a gallery, he moved on to romance the gallery owner.”

I had thought she may laugh at this but she became a little sad and said sighing, “This is happening often now that if you have work with someone you have an affair. This was not so common earlier."

This was to be my last exchange with her some months before she passed away. Her health was failing. She had closed down the literary magazine ‘Naagmani‘, which she and her partner Imroz had published for some three decades. She was seeing few people and was usually in pain. But once a month or so the phone would bring the familiar voice saying, “Hello Niru, come over for I have written something and want to show it to you”.

This last time I stopped at Mehrauli’s Phool Mandi en route to my flat in Gurgaon to her home K-25, Hauz Khas, and picked up a bunch of orange poppies with blood-red strokes. The blood red reminded me of her birthplace Gujranwala in pre-Partition Punjab.

Imroz had once joked, “You know Gujranwala is famous for just two things, blood-red citrus fruit malta and Amrita Pritam!”

On reaching her home I picked up a glass vase from their kitchen and arranged the flowers. When I put them on her bedside table, Imroz was sitting by her side stroking her head that was resting on a pillow. She was obviously in pain. Seeing me enter, Imroz cheered up, propped Amrita’s head on the pillows and said, “Forget your pain and age. Just look at the flowers coloured with the prime of youth and love.”

THE PRECOCIOUS POET

Love indeed was the brand name of Amrita, even though she is described by critics as a feminist before feminism, a firebrand poet, or an agnostic. The other labels were justified in many ways, but it was love that led the way in her life. This Gujranwala beauty lost her mother when very young and grew up alone in the home of a scholarly and spiritualistic Sikh father who encouraged her to read and write.

She was a precocious poet and as she was to record in her autobiography ‘The Revenue Stamp‘, she earned her first slap for lines written to an imagined lover she had named Rajan. Ironically, it was a loveless marriage at 16 for this Venus in Lahore, where she lived before the Partition of Punjab, but the heart yearned for a poetic soul mate and it was the verses of Sahir Ludhianvi that drew her to him.

Sahir too responded but he was not the one for commitment even though he fancied some outstanding women of his times. For Amrita it was a passion and also an obsession. Even when the illusion came to a close and a companionship was growing between her and Imroz, she was drawing Sahir’s name with her finger on his back.

Amrita and Imroz were together nearly for half a century and the poet spoke of the glory of love such:

    rall gai si es vich ik boond tere ishq di
    esse layi main zindagi di saari kudattan pee layi

    Just because a drop of your love had blended in
    I drank down the entire bitterness of life.

The Gujranwala girl and village Chak Number 36 boy chose to be together outside marriage way back in 1958, when living together was living in sin.

Love in Amrita’s literature was not just a narrow man-woman exchange but extending to love for the other, the lost composite culture of Punjab and the great betrayal of the bloodshed of Partition. It was Waris Shah that this woman, who had started her literary journey with ‘Thankdian Kirnan’ (Cool Rays) in 1935 and never looked back, turned to. For it was Waris, who had written the immortal love legend of Punjab two-and-a-half centuries ago, whom she called out to.

    ujj akhaan Waris Shah noon
    kiton qabran wichon bol,
    te ajj kitab-e-ishq da koi
    uggla varka phol


    I call out to Waris Shah today
    To speak out from his grave
    And turn today the next leaf
    Of the book of love.

Love and defiance go hand in hand, which is why the protagonist of her Partition novel ‘Paro‘, abducted before the communal frenzy resulting from her uncle’s kidnapping a Muslim girl following a land feud, chooses to stay with her man in Pakistan even when her brother and fiancé come to fetch her to take her to the newly created India. She is hurt too that her parents refused to accept her when she escaped and went back for she was now “tainted”. Her abductor shows her respect and honours her wishes even though he had to do the ugly act. They come together and to return would be to accept the bloodshed, the rape, the sorrow and the prejudice that had marked the great divide.

That day Amrita shared with me one of her last poems, ‘Main Tainu Phir Milangi’ (I will meet you yet again) dedicated to Imroz and what is now considered one of the most intense love poems for a tie that even death could not do apart. And I had the satisfaction of translating it and experiencing the joy that she read it before slipping into slumber.

Yes, that day when she was asking me whether there was a new love in my life, she was playful even in pain. If her love Imroz went out even to fetch her a glass of water, she would call out a line of a Punjabi folk verse: ‘maradi nu chhad ke na jaayin mittara (Don’t leave a dying woman, O friend!)

Here's the last of Amrita’s love poems:

    I will meet you yet again
    How and where
    I know not
    Perhaps I will become a
    Figment of your imagination
    And maybe spreading myself
    In a mysterious line
    On your canvas
    I will keep gazing at you.
    Perhaps I will become a ray
    Of sunshine to be
    Embraced by your colours
    I will paint myself on your canvas
    I know not how and where –
    But I will meet you for sure.
    Maybe I will turn into a spring
    And rub foaming
    Drops of water on your body
    And rest my coolness on
    Your burning chest
    I know nothing
    But that this life
    Will walk along with me.
    When the body perishes
    All perishes
    But the threads of memory
    Are woven of enduring atoms
    I will pick these particles
    Weave the threads
    And I will meet you yet again.
    — [Translated from the Punjabi “Main Tainu Phir Milangi” by the author]


[Courtesy: Scroll. Edited for sikhchic.com]

September 8, 2016
 

Conversation about this article

1: Sangat Singh (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), September 09, 2016, 3:58 PM.

Nirupama ji, what a lovely picture you have painted of Amrita Pritam. It is hard to believe that such a person walked this earth. Many years ago I read her autobiography, 'Raseedi Ticket', and then on a subsequent visit to Delhi on an impulse went to Hauz Khas hoping to catch her glimpse but met only Imroz. Amrita ji was resting and couldn't be disturbed. I ended up buying a subscription for 'Nagamani'. Her outpouring of "ujj akhaan Waris Shah noon / kiton qabran wichon bol", was enough to immortalise her, shattering the artificial line of the Partition. Then came her last love poem for Imroz in the incomparable voice of Gulzar. It is not to be missed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um6QOvOPol4 I see that the temple of Amrita at Hauz Khas is now demolished; it could have been turned into a memorial but seems it couldn’t contain her soul.

2: Jatinder Sethi (Gurgaon, India), September 10, 2016, 4:18 AM.

This is not the first time that I have read about Amrita Pritam, and it will perhaps not be the last time I would read about her. My problem is that I am, even at the age of 86, unable to hold back my tears while reading about her. As far as Sahir and his "Talkhian" is concerned, we had each and every couplet on our lips during our college days. Sahir kept his poetic imagery even in moviedom's pop songs. The love affair between Amrita and Sahir, we never wanted it to consummate because then it would have lost the Amrit that Amrita and Sahir poured out in their poetry. My love affair with poetry goes back to school days in Lyallpur when we used to crave to go to Preetnagar. 'PreetLari' used to be my regular reading though I have now slipped in my fluent reading of Gurmukhi. Love of Waris Shah and Amrita Pritam however survive even today.

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