Zia Mohyeddin column
Wherefore art thou Romeo?
A friend I had not seen for many years invited me, a few days ago, to lunch at his farm. My friend, who is anything but a farmer, is an urbane, slightly over-worked advertising executive, and he wanted to discuss his new publication on methods of disseminating information.

It is now more than eight years since Taufiq Rafat died in Lahore at the age of 71. He was a master of his craft. He wasn't only the finest poet in English ever produced by the subcontinent; he was, in my view, one of the eight best poets in English in the world to emerge in the years after the Second World War. The other seven, on my list, are the American poets Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Theodore Roethke and Sylvia Plath, the British poet Philip Larkin, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney and the West Indian poet Derek Walcott.

Two of the poets on this list -- Heaney and Walcott -- won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Lowell, Wilbur and Larkin should have won it too. We must add their names to the list of surprising omissions. Sylvia Plath, arguably the best-ever female poet in the English language, committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Had she lived, she, too, might have gone on to win the Nobel Prize -- judging from the quality of the searing poems she was writing at the time of her death.

I mention these things in order to make the point that Taufiq Rafat's work kept very distinguished company indeed. In my opinion, he, too, should have won the Nobel Prize.

But then, some of the twentieth century's greatest writers didn't win the Nobel Prize either. They include James Joyce (whom many critics regard as the greatest novelist in English in the twentieth century), the American poet Ezra Pound (to whom T. S. Eliot dedicated his masterpiece 'The Wasteland', calling Pound 'il miglior fabro' -- 'the better craftsman'), the great American poet Wallace Stevens, and the British poet W. H. Auden.

Auden's poetry was a strong influence on Taufiq Rafatís early work, as we can see in such lines as: "This child born of water / And a double grief. / Lies quietly with the green / Innocence of a leaf." Rafat's much quoted poem "The Time To Love" might have been written by Auden himself:

The time to love

is when the heart says so.

Who cares

if it is muddy August

or tepid April? --

for Love's infallible feet

step daintily

from vantage to vantage

to the waiting salt-lock.

If Spring

has any significance

it is for us

the rhymesters,

who need

a bough to perch on

while we sing.

Love is a country

with its own climate

If Auden influenced Taufiq Tafat's early work, Wallace Stevens poetry influenced much of the work of his later years. Like Stevens, he came to believe that poetry itself was the only proper subject for a poet writing in the second half of the twentieth century, an age charecterised by the loss of faith. Stevens said poetry "must take the place of empty heaven and its hymns." Rafat echoes this refrain in poem after poem, as in, for example, his long poem 'Reflections', which is centred on the theme that: 'Words are male and female, / But we are faced with the hell of plurals."

In many of his poems, lurking below the surface of their ostensible subject matter is the underlying theme of what goes into the making of a poem. His wonderful poem 'Going After Geese' is a case in point. At one level, the poem's subject is what the title suggests: a hunt for geese. At another, and much more profound level, however, the poem posits the thesis that what matters in life, as in the making of a poem, is not success or failure but commitment. The poem's first stanza sets the stage for this:

After geese, ferry and horseback, the last stage

is on foot. The warm and facile territory

of quail and partridge is behind us. Marshes

and what one presumes are marshes further

ahead, right up to the shifting foot-hills.

This, such as it seems, is the last level stretch

before the Himalayas. No one comes

to these treacherous flats except the committed.

The poem's fourth, and last, stanza brings is to the denoument of this commitment, using the imagery of the geese flying towards where the hunters, with their shotguns, are lying in wait for them behind some bushes. Dawn is breaking as the geese appear.

No magnet works so well. To the armed

bushes they come, their wings tied to our sights.

In an air heavy with low-flying geese

and cordite, what we see and smell

is not success but passion. The instant

drops its death-white verticals. Beyond

the curtain of these plumaged beads, the

horizon labours to deliver the sun.

Taufiq Rafat's poems often had an electrifying effect on people encountering them gor the first time. I am reminded in this context of a dinner party at my cousin Irfan Hussain's house in Karachi some years ago, back in the days when Taufiq was still alive. One of the guests at the party was the famous writer V. S. Naipaul, along with his soon-to-be-wife, Nadira.

My old friend Azhar Karim, a former member of the Pakistan bridge team and an admirer of Taufiq Rafat's poetry, was also one of the guests at the party. At one stage during the evening, Azhar asked me to recite Taufiq's poem 'The Kingfisher', which, like so many of his poems, has poetry as its underlying theme. This is how the poem goes:

Bird or hovercraft, your angling skill

proclaims the confidence

of repeated success; you flash

rainbows as you plunge to kill.

The luckless minnows in their drifting know

only when the beak is home.

No sound or shadow warns that death

is poised and pointed below.

But what about tomorrow? Will they hiss

and boo from the sidelines

as you find, pause fold and dip towards

the horror of your first miss?

I'll learn to love you then, for lost

causes link all temperaments.

What drains my speech of sap will blunt

your keen iridescent thrust.

When I finished reciting the poem, Naipul said, "That's a wonderful poem." Then, he said something that struck me as rather odd at the time. "How old is the man who wrote it?" he asked. His question immediately put me on my guard, since I was not sure why Naipaul was asking the question. Could the reason be that he wanted to use the information in the next book he was planning to write, I thought. Whatever the reason, I decided to play cagey and said, "What's his age got to do with it?" When no answer to my question was forthcoming from Naipaul, my suspicions were confirmed!

On another occasion, in Islamabad in 1989, I recited the same poem to Nicholas Barrington, the then-British High Commissioner to Pakistan, and two English friends of his, a husband-and-wife couple, who were visiting Islamabad. Barrington had invited the three of us to a picnic lunch by the side of a stream near Islamabad.

Just as we arrived at the picnic site and got down from the car, a beautiful kingfisher took off from a boulder where it had been perched and went winging off low over the water upstream, eventually disappearing around a bend in the gorge. Barrington, who is a bird-lover, said, "What a beautiful sight!" "Yes" I replied, and added, "it's like the poet said." I then proceeded to recite Taufiq's 'The Kingfisher' to Barrington and his two English friends, without telling them who the author was.

When I finished reciting the poem, there was a stunned silence for a couple of minutes. Then Barrington said, "My God! Who wrote that? Phillip Larkin?" "No," I replied, savouring the moment. "Actually, it was written by a friend of mine who lives in Model Town in Lahore." Of such moments is life made. There is a sequel to this story, but it will have to await recounting some other time.

It is quite revealing to read women writers who happened to be related in some way to a great or a well known man. What may be a grand heroic life for men may only be a series of pitiful acts for these women.

Noor Sajjad Zaheer has written 'Merey Hissay Ki Roshanai', an autobiographical account focusing on her father Sajjad Zaheer. A take on 'Roshnai', the famous account of the establishment of the Progressive Writers Association in India by its prime mover, Sajjad Zaheer, it is sad and full of regrets and also quite cynical and dismissive of the reflected glory that came her way as a daughter.

Similarly, the account penned by Hameeda Saalam, the sister of Majaz Luckhnavi, too reads like a sob story. The side of Majaz is revealed which may be of the least interest to the common reader and an admirer of Majaz.

Majaz Luchknavi was an archetypal poet who burnt the candle of his life at both ends. A brilliant poet, he was otherwise a total misfit in society .He changed one job after another, landed himself in a series of 'failed relationships' and finally ended up in a lunatic asylum. He literally drank himself to death because he was not worldly-wise.

This totally self destructive attitude is what has made him so endearing to the people. Imagine what would have been the image of a poet if Majaz had been a teetotaler, worked a nine-to-five job, had a family and baby-sat for the children, seen in the morning dropping them to school and in the evening waiting in a queue at a tandoor to get rotis which the wife had ordered him to get.

The classical poet is a chagrin to his wife and parents. He defies the commonplace and the ordinary. He is temperamental and moody and can walk out on any job, with no care for the wife and family. He is unwilling to compromise for the sake of security and well being. The world is too large a stage for him to be limited to his immediate family. He abhors material reality and is totally in contradiction to the common grain of humanity.

The respectability of Sajjad Zaheer's family demanded, like that of any ordinary member of an upper-middle-class household, a life that brought name, prestige and financial reward, but instead he chose a life which brought him plenty of notoriety and financial ruin.

But this was to be expected when he decided to put into practice the socialist ideals that he believed in. He forsook his family name; this son of a knighted Sir Wazir Hasan, a judge of the Superior Judiciary, renounced everything that the father stood for and decided to lead a life of a card-carrying communist committed to bringing about change in society. He had to distance himself from his brothers too, or the brothers had to distant themselves because they were also into politics but played ball according to the rules that had been firmed up by parliamentary democracy of independent India. Ali Zaheer, his elder brother, rose to the chief-ministership of their home state of Uttar Pardesh.

The renunciation and denunciation by Sajjad Zaheer of his class backgroundis, for most, a very laudable act, the cause of much admiration, an act that made a leader out of him, a hero in the eyes of the people. Sacrifice, endless struggle, hardship, incarceration, poverty, are all professional hazards and the real test of the mettle of the real leader or a political worker. He goes about forsaking everything, the comfort, the convenience, the traditional rakh rakao because he is aiming for something higher and more than what ordinary mortals aspire for and are content with. This baggage comes with the decision to lead a life other than the ordinary.

Like others, he too could have joined the civil services, the higher judiciary or made law his profession and a lucrative one, or chosen any other field not considered to be risky, dangerous, unpredictable and full of pitfalls. He too could have opted for a secure future, cashing in on his family's name and inheritance. Everyone would have been so happy and content looking up to him as the bread winner.

But then what is all this hue and cry about? The change and sacrifice and forsaking the present for a happier future? What is all this admiration for those who bring about a change in society, who sleep hungry because the others can eat. Who will be the men who will lead from the front, not caring about their lives and homes?

Or should one redefine almost everything to suit the women at home? Make sure there is plenty to eat and drink when hard times come calling? If to provide is the first requisite of a man's life, if this is so or was so, there would have been no great people, no men who put their lives in danger to achieve a goal, only those who played safe for the fear of leaving their families defenseless and humiliated.

These people are great because they put the interest of others above that of their own and their families. They have risked everything, the future of their children and the present of their womenfolk, and left even their properties and assets at the mercy of any punitive steps that may have been taken. Who will fight this battle if everyone listens to the protests of the wife and children that need a home and hearth?

As women are stepping forward to play a more public role, a time may come and soon when their husbands, sons and daughters too will be constrained to write how their mothers neglected the household for a larger good. Or a public role that courts danger should be the reserve of single men and women. Long live Ho Chi Minh,the bachelor.

A friend I had not seen for many years invited me, a few days ago, to lunch at his farm. My friend, who is anything but a farmer, is an urbane, slightly over-worked advertising executive, and he wanted to discuss his new publication on methods of disseminating information.

When I arrived, my friend was making a pretence at tending to his chrysanthemums. He took me on a walking tour. The farm was landscaped tastefully; the fruit orchards were separated from the vegetable patches by rows of thick shrubberies. It was while I was admiring his radishes that a family (my friend's brother-in-law's) descended upon us. I think it was an unexpected visit, for my friend was over-cordial in receiving them. The balding husband wore glasses which must have been loose, for he kept pushing them up to the bridge of his nose all the time. The plump wife, drenched in good fellowship, showed ample promise of early obesity. There was a daughter in tow, a pigtailed, solemn looking girl with her teeth bound in braces. The good woman, as soon as she was introduced to me, stepped back, looked at her daughter and said, "you know who uncle is, na? Let uncle hear your speech."

There are times when I regret having developed the reputation of a dramaturge. This was one of them. The wife then turned to me, "She is so good in acting, so good. Last week she won a prize in her school." My heart sank, not because the prize-winner was going to declaim, but because I knew there would be a long period during which the parents would coax and the daughter would decline. Parents have an enormous propensity for showing off their offspring to newly-acquired 'uncles'. I braced myself to wait. Surprisingly enough, the daughter needed no further prodding. She took up a stance, held an imaginary lantern in her left hand, which she waved about, frantically, in an effort to search for her lover in the dark, but which looked more like she was warding off an evil spirit, and burst forth into:

O Romeo Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo...

This line -- the ultimate in the amateur hour of schools the world over, is now the bane of my life, for I have seen countless schoolgirls (and boys in outlandish wigs) inflecting the word 'wherefore' as though it were 'where'. In Shakespeare's time 'wherefore' did not mean 'where' and I don't think it does today. It simply means 'why'. The lines do not make any sense otherwise.

Similar misconceptions continue to exist about other famous Shakespearean lines. "Get thee to a nunnery" is a prime example. Hamlet's famous injunction to Ophelia does not imply that she take up holy orders. The word 'nunnery' was an Elizabethan slang for a whorehouse. Hamlet here assumes a cruelty which is not in his nature; he wants to spurn Ophelia's advances with cold indifference.

Gertrude's comments on the player queen in Hamlet: "Methinks, the lady doth protest too much" (or "the lady doth protest too much, methinks" as it appears in the Quartos) is another line usually misunderstood by those who forget that 'protest' here means 'proclaim', the archaic meaning of the word. 'Protest' today has assumed a different connotation. We do not say "I protest my right to this land."

Older meanings of words notwithstanding, our speech today still contains so many phrases based on misinformation. I do not know where the expression 'drink like a fish' comes from, but it is used quite often. Fish, I learnt from a David Attenborough programme, don't drink. This is because their gullets are so tightly constricted that little, if any, water goes into their stomach. The water they take in passes through their gills. It was probably a sailor who saw bubbles gurgling out of a fish's mouth.

There are far too many misconceptions deeply ingrained in our system of thinking. I would not give them up for if I were to do so, I would have to acquire a new memory bank as well. I know that 'Chop Suey' is not a native Chinese dish, but I still expect to see it on the menu in a Chinese restaurant. It was Fredric March (a brilliant conversationalist apart from being a leading man on Broadway for years) who told me that Chop Suey originated in a California mining town, in the middle of the last century, when a Chinese cook simply threw together what he had left over and called it 'Tsa Sui',which in Chinese means a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

I also like the misconception about the expression 'humble pie' (if only because I have eaten it often enough). The 'humble' in 'humble pie' was, originally, 'umble', a term derived from umbilical. The 'umble pie' eaten by the poor, a few centuries ago, included the umbilical cords of animals. To eat 'humble pie', signified poverty, not humiliation. When and why the 'umble' turned into humble is not known to me, but I am certain that I'd never be able to bring myself to eat 'umble' -- in a pie or any other form -- so I'd go on pandering to the misconstruction.

Misconstruction and misbelief plays a significant part not only in the enrichment of a language but in the framing of our perceptions as well. Take the term Epicureanism. Who would have thought that the kindly and moderate Epicurus would have inspired the name for a way of life that has become the paradigm of self-indulgence and hedonism? Epicurus, historians of ancient Greece tell us, neither believed in, nor practiced the immodest pursuit of pleasure at all costs. He did propound that happiness is the sumum bonum of life, but he was not a sensualist. Indeed, he is said to have called for prudence and moderation, as well as temperance, in sensual pleasure.

Well, what do you say if someone asks, "Who said, 'eat drink and be merry'?" Do you say it was not Epicurus but Appolodurus or Adolphous or Aristophanes? Of course not. The notion of Epicureanism cannot be transferred to Aristotelianism. Similarly, the entire romance -- and with it a certain archetypal pleasure -- goes out of the window when I learn that Delilah did not cut Samson's hair.

There are scores of almanacs and encyclopaedias which give you information; there are other books about odd facts and little known truths. I do not recommend them. I think we need to cherish some commonly accepted fallacies, if only for the sake of cultural continuity. People who hold on to concepts -- and concepts are beliefs, at times -- without regard for scientific evidence, should be allowed to do so. Ignorance of certainty is a nice, warm feeling.