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Passion in the bosom of poetry

Syed Badrul Ahsan
My earliest memory of Mehdi Hassan's magic goes back to summer 1963. At the annual Quetta Festival, where my parents took me and my siblings, Faiz Ahmed Faiz's gulon mein rang bhare / baad-e-nau bahar chale was being played in one of the stalls. Too young to comprehend the import of the lyrics, I nevertheless thought there was something deeply haunting about the song and went around humming it at home, in school during tiffin break and on the ride back home from school.
That was a long time ago. And in all these decades, Mehdi Hassan has carved a musical niche in my life the likes of which can only be understood by those with a sense of the beauty that underlay the voice of the ghazal singer. There is yet a song I keep singing, away from the crowds — ae jaan-e-wafa dil mein teri yaad rahegi / duniya-e mohabbat men abaad rahegi. There is that perfect pitch of sadness in the song, a mixture of pain and memory brought alive in the expressions of the actor, in this case Santosh Kumar, lip-syncing the song. And then, of course, there are all the other songs. The ubiquity of Mehdi Hassan is what surprises you. And what certainly stuns you is the feeling that here was a voice shaped and modulated by the heavens to sing ghazals. Be it in the movies, be it outside them, the profundity which underscores the composition of ghazals found a perfection of expression in Mehdi Hassan.
Yes, there was pathos in the ghazals. And there was, too, the purity of romance that those who have been in ardent love have consistently felt; and such purity came through Mehdi Hassan's rendition of duniya kisi ke pyar mein / jannat se kam nehi / ik dilruba hai dil mein jo / phoolon se kam nehi. Tty imagining the beat and you are certain to have that old feel of the pastoral well up in you once more. The man sings on; the beloved dances on. What more could you ask of the world? And yet Mehdi Hassan's treasure was vast. When he sings ye kaghazi phool jaise chehre / mazaq urhate hain aadmi ka, there is that subtlety of sarcasm hurled at the nouveau riche, the anti-romantic, that you do not fail to sense. Or consider pain once again, in hamari sanson mein aaj tak wo / hina ki khushboo
mehek rahi hai. The loved one has passed on, the essence of love has remained.
There was splendour, a certain elegance in Mehdi Hassan's songs. A serenity, almost implacable, punctuated such dirge-like songs as tark-e-ulfat ka sila paa bhi liya hai maine / ab to aaja ke tujhe yaad kiya hai maine. And then there was that sense of the contemporary, of the modern as it were, in such numbers as jab koi pyar se bulaye ga / turn ko ek shakhs yaad aaye ga. The broken heart of the lover had hardly had a voice before Mehdi Hassan came along. You only need to watch the twilight descend and hum the lyrics of ae duniya kya tujh se kahen / jaa chherh na hum diwano ko. But if he could lend his voice to a cracked heart, he could also bring that same voice to bear on consoling the one confronted with darkness before her. When Waheed Murad sings, for Shabnam, khamosh hain nazare ik bar muskura do / kehti hain ye baharen hansna hamen sikha do, hope rises, however painfully, out of the detritus of despair. Spring is on its way back.
Great artistes are but huge, unending volumes of history. So it was with Mehdi Hassan. You somehow know, when you hear him in pyar bhare do sharmile nain, that an entire heritage is symbolic of the man. And this feeling goes on — through mere dil ke taar baje bar bar / hua tujh se pyar aaja, through ik naye morh pe le aaye hain halaat mujhe, through tere bheege badan ki khushboo se / lehren bhi huin mastani si, through ik bewafa ne daagh-e-tamanna diya mujhe, through rafta rafta wo meri hasti ka samaan ho gaye.
That point about history coursing through the lives of great artistes gets to be further reinforced in our journey through the Mehdi Hassan landscape. Passion held in the bosom of poetry is what you are reminded of, through vales and hills and deserts and starry paths, when you recall such imperishable melody as ik bar chale aao, shikwa na kar gila na kar, mera imaan mohabbat hai, ik sitam aur meri jaan, zindagi mein to sabhi pyar kiya karte hain, hum se badal gaya wo nigahen to kya hua.
The songbird flies off to skies beyond the reach of the living. The reverberations of its melodies remain, as part of the timelessness of human memory.