How Does The House of a 19th Century Urdu Poet Look Like?
Mirza Ghalib’s Haveli: Part 1
I guess I should change the title to how does the road to the house of a 19th century Urdu poet looks like. Because when a hopeful romantic and an enamored reader sets out to visit the house of their favorite poet, there are certain grand dreams and visions, hopes, and constructions they start with.
Rather it starts with the first encounter of a line from a poem. So we should start from that line.
It is impossible for me to remember how I first got introduced to Mirza. Most likely my father quoted Mirza in my early years and then somewhere it settled in for eternity, the first line.
That first line where we first found poetry, not knowing this was poetry, never to be found again in this innocent, this untaught form, ever, with the grief and nostalgia of the poet for you to carry on from there on, forever.
Mirza’s poetry continued to find its way to me long before I set out to look for him, his broken roads and abandoned house.
But it took me a while to realize that Mirza is not a poet. Mirza is a house. A dim candle-lit house with travelers and performers seated in a circle on its red-carpeted floor, facing the candles, and each reading their poems of travels and heartbreaks as a question and an answer.
This exchange is Mirza. This half light of a dark room, stones of another century, eroding, this air of artists orbiting around each other, disappearing, this sensual fire, loss of a lover, mention of poetry in any time and age, this place, this house is Mirza.
Many say if Mirza wrote in English, he would be the most famous writer of all time.
And to that I say, how are you going to bequeath someone a title or a prize, when they are the house of poetry themselves, the only true Shayar there ever was. You cannot find Mirza by just reading his poems. You need a thousand mystical journeys in a language, not yours.
بازیچہ اطفال ہے دنیا میرے آگے
ہوتا ہے شب و روز تماشا میرے آگےThis world is a child’s playground for me
A spectacle unfolds day and night before me
— Mirza Ghalib
To that, I also say something about the robberies of our languages, thieves of our literature, our symbol, and expression, but I will keep that topic for another time.
So by the time you have reached the point of seeing the actual house of the poet, you have completed a journey of its own, so other-worldly, so mysterious, so eternal that no house man-made could make sense, could come remotely close to your imagined destination.
But then, here I am, back in the mortal world, about to enter Ballimaran, the street where Mirza’s Haveli (house) is, in Old Delhi, a place that remains undefinable with its maze and chaos, its old charm and convoluted history, its human bodies and electrical wires all entangled with each other.
To be Continued….
Vaishali Paliwal
