That drunk debauched colourful king
dances again with hoofs of sorrow
As Nadir skins the air with swords
Horses galloping
to the rhythm
of a dying dynasty.
[Agha Shahid Ali, Qawwali at Nizamuddin Aulia’s Dargah]
*
The emperor was tired. He was almost an octogenarian today. This day was marked for the urs of Khwaja Moin ud-din Chisti. He had witnessed, attended and officiated this festival for as long as he had been the Emperor of Hindustan. How strange, he thought, and not strange at all too, that he was born on the day a sufi had passed on to the ultimate station of being. How strange, this too, that he should be celebrating his birth anniversary sitting in the courtyard of a mausoleum where generations of his family lay buried. The dead lay so still under the earth, and the earth had spun so swiftly in these centuries.
The emperor stirred in his seat. Zeenat had made the servants refill his cushion with peacock feathers. She had made some vague references to the Peacock Throne, but stopped short of reminding him where that throne rested now. The sharp ends of the feathers pricked his softer, sagging skin; the emperor squirmed, but only and ever so slightly. There is a delicacy to pain, he reminded himself, what can be endured must be endured till the pain exceeds its bounds and turns into its own cure. The verse, stale like a week old crusted naan, stuck to his thought. Wherever his thoughts went he found his rival’s mark left behind already. There was no other man Zafar was so envious of and detested at the same time. We shall have this pillow consigned to flames too, he vowed, or carve it in with time till it frames our shape.
He had felt the ache reach his bones of late. Sometimes he would lie awake in the Khwabgah, his personal ‘dreamatorium’, late into the night in the hope that the pain would either subside or push him into a junoon, a liberating madness that came upon the sufi during zikr. Rumours had reached him that his subjects were calling him peer sahib. Peer, the knowledgeable one. But peer also stood for pain, the pain that cannot be shared, cannot be separated from oneself; it is a suffering that remains with you when nothing besides remains. Tum mere paas hote ho goya, jab koi doosra naho hota.
But the rumor brought him nothing more than a lingering sense of failure. How could an emperor, who walks on velvet and feasts on fifty-six delicacies daily become a peer? Peer Sahib, the emperor grimaced, do we look like an Angrezi mulazim to them? But he would lie in his bed, the sheets soaked wet with sweat leaching through his shirt, afraid to move a limb. In those moments he would imagine himself lying in his tomb, under this very sandstone platform, upon which he sat today, paralysed, as he was now for an eternity, till he would be raised with the rest of humanity to answer for his life’s worth. He, the emperor of Hindustan, would stand with the rest of his subjects, made common and negligible again. Maybe, then, the heat of hellfire will culminate into the pain that would push him into a junoon of the peer sahibs.
Fanaaiyat, Zafar, may yet be in your destiny;
But you will meet it on the urs of your destiny.
He swirled the couplet in his mouth for a while. When his tongue had pared it down into a fitting metre, he turned to commit it to paper. He fidgeted around to get hold of his pen and his daftar – that loving confidante of his most secret desires and distresses. He scribbled down the couplet hurriedly and read it out again. He was happy with the way he had paired Zafar, his takhllus which stood for victory, with death. He had even managed to plant the moment of his death in the culmination of the urs he was presiding over today. He wondered what Ghalib would make of this shi’r. That gifted shai’r would probably shift a word here and replace another there, and exclaim:
‘Huzoor! I do believe that this is the best shi’r I have read in my life! If the matla is so masterful, how beautiful must the entire ghazal be!’
‘Would you exchange your entire diwan for this ghazal, Mirza?’
‘I would offer my head for it, huzoor!'
Such banalities! Ghalib is a genius, but he will spin and spin for money! At least Zauq had the decency to leave the sher untouched.
The emperor read the couplet in Ghalib’s voice and with a violent swing of the brush he scratched it out. The splotch of ink spread across the page and blotted out the words completely.
“I am not a peer. I am not a shair. I am the sultan of Hindustan.”
Without meaning to, Zafar had spoken his frustration out loud.
The singers paused. The tabla fell silent. Mirza Mughal, his son and the heir apparent, turned to him in surprise.
“Did you say something, Abba Jan?’
Zafar stood up and stretched to his full height. He might have become old with age but Timurid blood still surged through him. The prince, courtiers and the performers stood up along with him. The afternoon sun beat down on the courtyard of Humanyun’s tomb. The fair was at its height. Men, women, children, all frolicked around the park. Some older men sat in the shade of the trees and were cutting out ganjifa cards for a fresh round of play. Princesses ran up and down the stairs of the main building. Their excited voices echoed underneath Zafar’s feet. This is, he thought, what paradise could have been, had Adam not been ousted from it so ignominiously.
Exhaustion enveloped the emperor again. He steadied himself on his cane and mumbled out his command, “Please continue; I shall take a walk amongst the tombs of my ancestors,” he thumped his royal scepter on the red sandstone, “below.”
“Would you like me to accompany you?” Mirza Mughal offered.
Zafar heard the reluctance in his son’s voice.“
That won’t be necessary.”
The Abyssinian guards flanked the emperor, ready to escort him to the burial chambers below. He signalled them to remain in their place.
“But the rooms inside are no less than a bhoolbhulaiya. And there is always the fear of snakes and scorpions hiding in the damp corners below. Take at least one guard along, just in case…”
Mirza didn’t have to finish his sentence for Zafar to understand how he would have concluded it. Emperors who had ruled over their kingdom, had lost their lives in the most unusual circumstances. Falling from library stairs, lost in the jungle, killed in a hunt, poisoned, murdered in a mosque. The list was as long as it was astonishing. He considered his son’s request and gave a definitive response, “To Allah, to dozakh, and to our forefathers, we must present ourselves alone.”
The guards stood uneasily for a moment and then made way for Zafar to pass through them. The emperor walked to the nearest passageway and, with unsteady steps, climbed down the stairs. The air grew cold and musty as he descended the stairs. The fragrance of incense, mixed with the scent of damp soil, made his nostrils flair. An intense blackness met his eyes. He paused on the last step for a moment and let his eyes adjust to the darkness.
What for others was a bhoolbhulaiya, for Zafar was a familiar mohalla.
He had traced a familiar path through the array of tombs in his early years, crossing from one open chamber to another, carefully avoiding the scant remains of crumbling tombstones of his unfamiliar ancestors. He didn’t feel overly sentimental then. To be fair, only a few amongst these dead had done anything important enough to merit mention in the stories passed down to him by those who had his ear. The tales an emperor is told is filtered through the sieve of expectations and caution of the tellers. Even the dastango dared not narrate with the same wit and gusto they used when unfolding the adventures of Amir Hamza and Amroo Ayyar in the streets of Shahjahanabad.
But here, amongst the dead, only one story held sway – that of death and decay. Like mice and dogs, the emperor reminded himself, it will end the same for us all. If only we had been sealed within the red walls of our fort, perhaps the discovery of death would’ve sent us looking for an answer too. But Siddhartha did not choose to be an emperor. This maze was made for us. We will lie here one day. Like mice and dogs, it will end the same for us.
The emperor stepped across the tombs, careful not to disturb the long sleeping. He was walking, unknowingly, a familiar path he had traced a long time ago. Once, as a child, he had gotten lost in this maze of underground chambers. He had been playing hide and seek with his cousins in the catacomb. Zafar, ever the victorious, decided no one should find him. He spied a small hole in the wall and climbed into it. The hole had been big enough for his childish frame. Now, as his feet brought him to the breach in the wall, he wondered if a full grown man would be able to climb through it. But he had also shrunk with age. What could not be done since childhood, perhaps could be accomplished as an old man.
Inside, time had passed over the damp earth without leaving a mark. The emperor bent down to touch the earth. Not even a pebble seemed to have moved in these years of his absence. He heard the excited echoes of children’s ringing under the sandstone domes, trying to find their way out. There are only voices here, Zafar told himself. Bodies, once placed inside their tombs, did not rise until the day of judgement.
One day we will be laid here for a long time too. Our children will also come down here looking for our remains.
But his children, he thought, gave little thought to death. They were too preoccupied with life, with the world, with beauty, with youth. He wasn’t very different from them when he was young. He too had chased beauty, chased a kind of love whose burning touch could make him a poet. Since then he had been chasing a poem that could make him abandon everything he had chased all through his life. But an emperor could not wait for a woman in her street, nor could he climb into her house at midnight hours. An emperor was a subject of his assigned role in the scheme of the world. And a poet was against every such role. How could he have been both? Here, too, in this small corner of the earth, he was neither the emperor, nor a poet. Here, he had been a child hiding from the world once. How had he not come back to this spot in all these years?
In the hazy darkness he perceived the shadows cutting along the tombs. Zafar did not feel the need to ask who it was who had found him even in this instant of reprieve. The voice was familiar and distant at the same time. It reminded Zafar of his childhood as if he were listening to the voice of poets – words detached from the being, words that existed before existence.
Na tha kuch toh khuda tha…
Without you,
Nothing,
in nothing,
only you.
My ruin is my being,
were I not me,
I would be you.
Like a thief I steal from him even in my unformed thoughts. The pronoun took the emperor by surprise. This I was another in him. I had not spoken to him in a very long time. I would not say that he did not think in the first person singular, nor had he become so habituated in the hum of royalty to become a complete leviathan. It was the unfamiliarity of the voice which besieged him. I sounded like no one he had heard before. I was an old friend he had never met.
I pronounced, “There are two Ghazals, and two alone. One you will write and lose it to the world; another will be written by your takhallus. The second will come to be your last words too. Words that you could never possess in your lifetime will become verses that possess you after your death.”
Zafar did not know where this voice had risen from. Nor was he certain that someone had really spoken to him or if it was a jumble of echoes that had momentarily straightened itself into a prophecy. But the voice had addressed him and so he responded in his own words.
“It is too late, or too early, for prophecies. Speak clearly. What do you intend to tell me?”
“Prophecies are neither too late, not early. The future arrives precisely when it should, in the very terms it would.”
“Have you only come to inform us that we will die one day? That much we know, tell us something we don’t.”
“Then know this Zafar, you are not even capable of finding two steps worth of burial ground in the graveyard of your ancestors. You will meet your end thousands of miles away from here, far beyond the imagination of your country, amongst people who will not speak your language, in a grave where even your bones will be melted down with limestone.”
The pronouncement shocked Zafar into silence. After a long pause, he uttered, “Will I be able to stand and narrate my side of events on the day of judgment?”
“Your story shall outlast you, for emperors are not forgotten till centuries pile upon their graves. Their stories are useful. They become the pivot upon which people churn the myth of their nations.”
“I am not interested in the writing of history. My courtiers take note of everything that goes on in my kingdom. And where they fail, the Angrezi hukumat gives it their own spin. There can be no truth in history. But tell me, will I be remembered as an emperor only?”
“Those who remember you, emperor, will remember you as they would think of a sad path that leads towards a tragic tale.”
“And more beautiful still for its tragedy?”
“Would you like to see that path for yourself?”
“Will you show me, O keeper of the future?”
Like a wave, years passed over Zafar’s eyes. From a distance, his sight held a ship floating over the mighty river. He recognised himself, standing on the precipice of his chamber. And through the holes of a latticed window he witnessed a fort rise from the muddy banks of the river.
“You have transported me from one prospective grave to another?” Zafar laughed. “I am an old man looking for a suitable place of burial, but you ought not to tease me like this.”
“Would you have liked to be buried here?”
“Where else could one find a better resting place than in the company of Khwaja Qutubuddin Kaki and his father, Syed Kamaaluddin. It would only be fitting that I lie beside the father and son in the grounds of the fort built brick by brick by my forefather Jahampanah Akbar.”
“Then leave this damp earth upon which you lie, emperor. Each man has claim to only two steps worth of land, and no more.”
Zafar felt an empire’s worth of sand slip through his fingers. He woke up shivering. The wetness of the Earth has leaked through his shirt and pricked his skin. He hunched his knees close to his chest. The echoes of children’s laughter and play had dissolved into the silence that hung heavily in the darkness surrounding him. And within that silence, a verse bloomed like light. Din zindagi khatm hui shaam ho gayi/ faila ke paaon soyenge kunj- e mazaar mein.
Life like day
Is over
The evening is upon us
It is time to spread
Our feet and sleep
In a corner of our tomb.
Boldened by the freshness of the shi’r, Zafar challenged the voice. “Are you only a messenger of death? A seller of graveyard plots to dying men?”
“I have come to warn you of walking on the path you are on. It will make you your enemy; you rob yourself of your posterity.”
“And you have come to show me the true path, farishte? Or are you the shaintan who wants to test me?” Zafar scoffed. “If this is what a test is, what will you offer me as torment?”
I could not hold on to the disguise anymore. It would have been foolish to expect friendship from Zafar. Why should he, having been acquainted with his ignominious death, accepted this prophecy, emptied out of living meaning, so readily? Even now as the old emperor witnessed himself imprisoned in the very fort his brother had been jailed within, he kept his life concealed within himself.
I confessed, “Old friend, I am neither a farishta, nor am I a minion of shaitan. I come from a moment where you are nothing more than a tragic story told and retold to illustrate the failures of an old and decrepit emperor. You are an instance at the end of a dynasty. I have come to rescue you. I want to offer you a way out of this labyrinth history where you have been consigned amongst the hopelessly lost. Even now, even as you sit in the graveyard of your ancestors, perhaps there’s a chance for you to become something else! Look, if you do not believe my words, look how they will come for you; they’ll lay siege to your city; they will take the empire from you; they will take your family hostage; they’ll ruin you! You’ll come here once again, and for the last time, too, seeking your freedom amongst your dead ancestors. You’ll flee your fort and you’ll come here, to this very graveyard, for your last stand, for your last refuge. But even this graveyard will give you up. You will lose Delhi, and with it the last hope of your decent burial. I have not come to sell you a grave, Zafar. I have come to offer you two steps worth of land in your beloved’s street. Won’t you take it?”
“For what price?”
“For the price of your crown.”
Zafar was silent. The news of unrest in Meerut had reached him a few days ago. Why, it was Mirza Mughal himself who had brought him the news. Only his son had cared enough to keep him abreast with the goings-on in his kingdom. Perhaps he still believed that he would inherit something in the end. The Mughal empire had become the empire of Palam. Had Zafar not heard the taunts at the hands of the nawabs who had all but declared their independence from the Mughal canopy? His courtiers, too, had given up all hope in him. They were already stretching their tongues for the bottoms of the British residents. And the company he kept, of poets and bawds, thought it a virtue to be uninformed of the affairs of the world. What are the affairs of the world to a poet? Bazeecha e atfal hai duniya mere aage…
The world before me –
Nothing but
A child’s play
What will become of Ghalib after him? Will he look for another patron? Will the poet still find this world a playground before his eyes?
He would, all the more so… what could be closer to the playground than a graveyard? I, too, am sitting now where I used to play once.
Zafar saw himself as a child, sitting in this very spot, waiting for someone to come and find him. How long had he waited here before the guards had discovered him, concealed within his forgotten cove that day. Had they not found him would he have been able to thread this labyrinth and make his way into the light of the world above once again? Even then, he had relied on the strength of others to prove himself. He was the last in a long line of monarchs who had gained and lost nothing less than the world itself. To him was bequeathed only a name. Zafar. What had he done with it?
Zafar wept. “I’ve lost it; I have lost all of it. The bravery of Babur, the tenacity of Humayun, the glory of Akbar, the grandeur of Shahjaha – the world has slipped out like water from my hands. I am left with this old broken body and a name that remains to mock me. Zafar, who lost an empire and what’s more, his will to live! Let me lie here forever, farishte; allow me just this much. For on the day of judgement when my forefathers ask me what I did with their legacy, I can say that I held on to it till my last breath.”
“Will that be enough? What will you tell your children when they ask what happened to their heritage, their inheritance?”
“Will my son inherit the throne after me?”
“If you walk another path, then yes. For a while, yes. I don’t know what would happen then. History is a river in flood. It will take another course. No one can tell what course it will take, but if you don’t pass on the crown to your son, or elect another in your stead, or show the bravery befitting an emperor, your ship will sail on unto the open sea.”
And another scene washed over Zafar’s eyes. He saw his ship floating over the river, yawning wide towards the horizon. First there were several boats where the river opened to the sea, and then only a few fishing boats dotted the horizon. And then, nothing but the open sea. In this far flung loneliness, he saw the empty wall. He witnessed his handwriting, etched into its white limestone wash with a piece of charcoal. Umr-e daraz maang ke laaye the chaar din/ do aarzu mein kat gaye, do intezaar mein.
We borrowed only four days
Being so old of age
Two were spent desiring
Two were lost in wait.
“So, a sher awaits me at the end of my journey?”
“A ghazal, and no more.”
Zafar considered the irony with a smile on his dry lips.
“Now I know who you are.”
I was lost for words.
“You are like me. An image of failure etched within your eyelids. No respite in waking, and no solace in sleep.”
“I am you.” I replied.
“Perhaps. Perhaps, you are only an echo of my ill begotten future. If you are who you say you are, then you are merely an image trapped in the mirror.” Zafar spat out his words, “No, you’re not even that! You are a shard of that mirror stuck to our side.”
“I am not here to cause you torment, Zafar.”
“You cannot! You are nothing!” His entire frame shook with rage, his voice bolder than ever. “While We? We are the Emperor of Hindustan!”
He sprang up on his feet, but his old bones could not sustain the speed of his rising. He sought the support of the wall, but his hand only met a dark emptiness. He lost his balance and fell on the ground.
There he lay, the Emperor of Hindustan, sprawled on the floor, injured, and inconsolable. His voice, neither that of a poet, nor that of an emperor, was one of abject pain, an animal howl that he fiercely sought to contain. But the pain was deep enough to carry him into a swoon, a junoon, this time.
Upon his closed eyes I sent a different vision this time. Zafar saw the bitter end of his dynasty that is snuffed out of existence with his own life. His children beg for morsels; his daughters are carried away on the soldiers of the commoners; the fort is made a military camp; its walls are barbarously bombed out of existence. Shahjahanabad, the streets through which his wedding processions had passed; is a deserted ruin now.
But Zafar did not flinch. He saw and unsaw in the revealed sight. For the sights attained a different meaning for him altogether. I sent him the sight of his confidantes and warriors – they stood by his side, Rajab Ali, and Bakht Khan, each pulling him towards a different destination. Bakht Khan wants him to escape into the jungles of Indraprastha. Rajab Ali tempts him with surrender, promising that the British will take good care of him in his retirement.
And there, beyond the stairs, beyond the entrance to Humayun’s tomb, is General Hodson mounted on his horse with his cavalry arranged beside him. And behind the cavalry, amass the subject of his kingdom – the potters, the carpenters, the bhisties, the tailors, the cooks, the milkmen, the butchers, the cobblers, people of all make and shape, now shrunk within the walls of Shahajahanabad, awaiting his call – one word and they’ll fall upon his enemy. They outnumber the British ten to one.
But Bakht Khan wants him to escape. And Rajab Ali wants him to surrender. And Zafar, what does he want? He is still trying to decide who his enemy is. Is it Rajab Ali, the sweet talker? Or is Bakht Khan, the stern general of the rebel troops, who took over his city and ate Delhi up from within like a pack of termites? Or is it that firang, the foreigner who had no business in his kingdom, who had already proclaimed himself the conqueror in the name of a distant queen whose name Zafar found difficult to fit on his delicate tongue.
But Zafar knew the answer to his dilemma. His real enemy were the people who still waited on his word; who believed that his command held any power; who were foolish enough to have waited for so long. They were the real cowards; they let the empire fall into the wrong hands. They would be the storytellers in the time to come and they would tell his story as they pleased. It is from their ranks that this insolent voice, which has travelled across centuries to torment him so, has come with the false offer. His trial was over before it had begun. He was history. Only one thing remained his own. His ghazal.
Lagta nahi hai dil mera ujde dayaar mein
kiski bani hai aalam e napaedar mein
Keh do in hasraton se kahin door jaa basein
Itni jagah kahan hai dil-e daghdar mein.
I am not at home
In this ruined landscape
Who, after all, has remained forever
In this temporary world
Tell these desires to find a new abode
There is barely any spot left
In this besotted, broken
heart of mine.
Zafar’s wrinkled face was wet with tears. A prayer formed upon his lips.
“Whoever you are, have mercy on this old man and take away this sight from me. Let my mind be innocent again. Let my body melt and dissolve in this world when it is the time to die. That is the way of the peer. Let me, in my annihilation, become what I was destined for. A peer, no more.”
How much longer could he have lain there? Years, like specks of dust swirled around him, and he, in the eye of this storm, had watched the ages pass over him. But his reverie was broken by another voice that reached him from the other side of the wall. Someone was looking through the hole and had spotted the emperor’s huddled figure on the floor. They had chipped away portions of the wall carefully, and now, stood haunched over him, shaking him lightly.
Zafar opened his eyes to find the Abyssinian guard’s concerned expression turn to joy.
“Praise be to Allah, you are well. We were worried…”
“I am not going to die as yet… not yet.” He responded, feebly.
The guards helped him up and carried him out. The dim evening light filtered delicately through the latticed window of Humayun’s tomb. Using the guard’s shoulders to steady his shaky steps, Zafar climbed up the stairs and came out into the light. His eyes took a second to adjust to the evening’s cool brightness. The crowd had mostly left the complex. The sweepers were starting to collect the remains of the day – flowers, fruits, fragments of paper that swirled in the light breeze. A milling silence had been behind in the grove, after the people made for their homes. Flies buzzed over the discarded banana peels and trash strewn about. So this is what remained behind in Paradise after Adam was ousted so ignominiously.
Zafar tried to remember the ghazal he had seen in vision. The words escaped him, but its meter remained, and with it, its peculiar rhythm. He hummed to the tune, knowing that the words would fall into place one day. His life had been spent in the search of a ghazal, much more was left in this chase still. He could not tell if he had made a good bargain with his takhallus – who, in their right mind, would exchange their posterity for a ghazal. But this thought too was dispelled by another. Would Ghalib have thought twice about it?
likh aur ġhazal qāfiye ko pher ‘zafar’ tū
ab tab’ kī dariyā kī tirī mauj-zanī hai
Churn the old rhyme and refrain,
O Zafar, write this ghazal again
The river surges, the waves beat on
The rhythm of your call again
Abiral Kumar is a writer, translator, and researcher from Patna, presently based in Berlin. He has written and published comics with Mainak Mitra on the Hamzanama and his most recent works document the presence of tilism in dargahs and ruins of North India.