But it was AK Ramanujan and Agha Shahid Ali who taught me about the diversity in the poetry of love. I had been drunk with an overdose of love poetry in my life, starting with Pablo Neruda and his “Tonight, I can Write the Saddest Lines” and, I have, virtually, grown up with Neruda as a young man. 71)Īnother enchanting poem that he wrote is “A Rehearsal of Loss, again a short love poem. ( The Veiled Suite, The Collected Poems by Agha Shahid Ali, pg. He continues it with “The night if your cottage industry now / the day is your brisk emporium”. “The moon did not become the sun, / it just fell on the desert / In great sheets”, Ali writes in “Stationery”. Though, of course, AK Ramanujan’s Collected Poems had a few sharply evocative poems too. Ever since Robert Frost, I had not known of anyone evoking beauty through poetry. The imagery of the poem is just enchanting. It was a love poem and a very well-crafted one too.
The poem that I fell in love with immediately was called “Stationery”. One of his earliest books which I had read was The Half Inch Himalayas, a fascinating slim volume of poems. I could not meet Agha Shahid Ali but my fascination for him continued. After completing his research at Minnesota, he now teaches at Ashoka University.
In the twenty-six years I have taught, I must have interacted with over 7000 students of different hues, Abir must count as the top three that I have known. He had already published a book of poems from Writers Workshop when he took his BA interviews. Also, I had seen books of poetry written by Agha Shahid Ali and Ranjit Hoskote, autographed by the poets themselves, with Abir Bashir Bazaz, a student I taught in BA in my first batch in 1995. Those days, Ali was alive and I had thought – as a young man with stars in his eyes as the youth are always-I would meet the great poet or at least, write an airmail to him in the US. In fact, I found out that his father lived in Zakir Bagh, opposite Surya Hotel, New Friends Colony, New Delhi. dissertation on the poetry of AK Ramanujan. My first introduction to the poems of Agha Shahid Ali was in 1995, reading works by different Indian poets in English as I worked for my M.Phil.
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