Leave No Grain for Tomorrow

He brought me a cup of tea. It was winter then, a winter of content confinement as he looked lovingly at the woman who lay snuggled in bed. Years ago he had assured her, “There can be no one else…no one…you are my daughter….I your son.”

That afternoon I realised what it meant as I watched his frail frame and disheveled hair, a boyish man, a painter, who had left his home to be with a much older woman who never hid her love for someone else. No cross-border love story, no internet romance between an Indian and a Pakistani, can come anywhere close to what Imroz and Amrita Pritam experienced.

The day I had met her at her Hauz Khas home she sat like a queen propped up with pillows – blanket, shawl, heater, cigarette warming her up.

Could drink in one breath a bowl of sunshine
And give part of the sun himself to my womb

Could she then so impregnated feel the warmth of motherhood or burn inside and strew the ashes across the skies? Amrita Pritam had taken long sips of nectar; sometimes it had turned to acid.

Where was the sun she so craved? Why does it happen that after the hard climb there is always the plateau, so placid that you wonder whether the effort was worth it? You rebel, you write, you tear the pages of the rule books. Then what?

Then you approach old age. You sit on that bed, look reposed, and talk in measured tones about consciousness. Is this an achievement? Is life all about pricking thorns in your flesh so that one day you can talk about having experienced the roses?

Amrita Pritam’s life has been recounted a number of times. I therefore intend this to be a perspective of one who too wanted to sup on the sun. I want to know how another person, more experienced, more aware, had coped with the blisters on her tongue.

I eat what I earn
Not yesterday’s leftovers – and leave no grain for tomorrow.

“My today left me scarred, I accepted that,” she said. Acceptance led to strength. Rejection did, too. Her first writings were designed to catch her father’s attention. As she was to write later, “My only desire was to please father. It is the same now. I am not in the least mindful of what others think of me. My only desire is to be at peace with my innermost self.”

The self is a fragile thing to live with. How can one live at peace with that which is filled with longing and causes such upheaval? At 16, Amrita’s intentions were far from serene thoughts. Her father who initiated her into the mysteries of versified meters, thought she’d write about religion, while the daughter was holding her secrets very close where every veil demanded a curious ripping: who were those apsaras seducing the rishis?

But imagination is one thing, and life another. Engaged at the age of four, she had to be married off. The cup was just placed in her hand – it was empty. “The distance between the way our minds ticked and our nerves reacted was immeasurable,” she wrote of her marriage. Both understood it. Two peaks that had seemed to merge in the mist accepted their separate routes. The cup remained empty.

Because a drop of your love got mixed in my cup
I could drink the bitters of life…

Who was this who was making her drink to life?

In 1956 she got the Sahitya Akademi award. A reporter and photographer had come to do a feature on her. During the photo-session she was asked to pose with a sheet of paper…in a trance she filled the sheet with the word ‘Sahir’.

Years ago, as a little girl, she had noticed her grandmother place three tumblers in a corner of the kitchen shelf, away from the rest. These were for her father’s Muslim friends. “Neither my grandmother nor I knew that the man I was to fall in love with would be of the same faith as the branded utensils were meant for.”

We all have our ideas about romance, but few can reach that fine balance between illusion and reality. As one scrapes through another woman’s past one finds a precious something nestled in soft cotton-wool. For a writer to admit that she turned into a mere woman as she rubbed Vicks on a man’s back does take great honesty, for we must remember we are not talking about a docile doormat but one who had rebelled at an early age against the rules of the game. One who had a jawan tell that after reading her works men dare not treat women with disrespect.

It takes a kind of courage to admit that someone can overwhelm you without in any way taking away from you. When Sahir visited her house in Lahore, he’d fill the ashtray with half-smoked cigarettes and leave. “I would then take up the butts and, one by one, sit smoking by myself. Smoke from his cigarettes met mine in air. His breath and mine mingled in air.”

The silence was palpable; the alliance realised only subliminally. She was still the fan who had thrust out her palm for his autograph. He had spread the ink on his thumb and left his impression.

This was illusion.

Reality was Imroz, the tranquil sea to the stormy winds that blew. The trier who taught her that everything in life was an effort.

He remained just Imroz – rootless and yet grounded in a mental space where she could rest her feet. She, even in her name, carried a history in which he had played no part. Yet, it was he who shared more than half her life with her, who was there near her funeral pyre.

I have many contemporaries.
I alone am not contemporaneous with myself

Amrita Pritam that day talked less about poetry, romance and cigarette stubs. She told me instead about the journey of consciousness. “First understand the word ‘I’, and then break it. Murti ko banao, phir tod do. Experience it,” she said, between puffs and coughs. The mercury dipped further. Emotions recollected cease to be mere emotions; they become the map delineating every area – the rich greens, the drab browns, the cut-off borders.

When she set off to write her autobiography, Khushwant Singh had told her, “What is there to your life? Just an accident or two…you could use the back of a revenue stamp to write it.”

So she called her book ‘The Revenue Stamp’. Her life did not in any way get reduced because of that. Yet there is always one thing – the most significant – that can be fitted on the back of a tiny stamp. What would she have put there? I asked. “My own evolution. Ideally, one should be in love with it.”

No one has understood Narcissus better than a creative person. Spending most of one’s time with one’s own creation can turn the head of the most humble artist. Does the search not dwindle into a selfish exercise?

“Not if it means going beyond oneself to discover something larger. This is where I feel the artist in the public eye has to take a second look at himself. There is a difference between being a personality and an individual. I did not choose to be a personality because it needs others. It depends on how they accept you. I chose to be alone. When I combine my emotions with my intellect I find that I have a better grasp of human problems. In writing, if one’s experiences come in, the canvas becomes bigger.”

There is often a dilemma. If you write about what you have gone through, true honesty can incline towards only one – either the experience itself or its depiction. “You are essentially yourself. I try to be objective, but the limitations of expression are there. Only experience can understand itself; writing can merely indicate it. Words are borrowed but totally inadequate. How can one completely express the agony and ecstasy of life?”

Personalised writing, which Pritam had honed into a fine art, involves the readers totally. They embellish their own thoughts on the work. There is the danger of misinterpretation.

“I have no complaints against the readers, they understand me. I don’t ask them to believe this or that. There are difficulties from contemporaries and religious fanatics. They have swollen egos but very little awareness. If people find small ways to live, it is not my fault. Why should I regret not living by conventional standards? It is the only blessing I have.”

And a strange blessing it is to be able to watch the world pass by and not be dragged into its frenzy. What is the yardstick for victory for such a person?

“Victory and defeat are problem words. To be a winner you have to defeat someone, you cannot even anticipate the reaction of the defeated person. You don’t know when and how he will wreak vengeance. If you are true to yourself you do not hate those who cannot understand. You feel sorry for them that they have not tasted life.”

How does one know that a person has tasted life?

She wrote in the poem ‘My Address’, “Today I effaced my house number and the name of the street where I live. I wiped away the direction of every road; and still if you must search me out, just knock at the door in each street of each city of each country. It’s a curse, a benediction – both…and wherever you find a free soul, that is my home!”

It is an easy-to-find house. You couldn’t question Amrita Pritam’s freedom. Just as you wouldn’t ask whether sunlight is the prisoner of the sun.