Heart Matters

Of maladies, melodies and remedies.

Did you know your heart beats over 100,000 times a day? Of course not. And why should you? But we do have something more useful for you to keep in mind. The deadline for the Osmosis Poetry Prize is March 31. Sohini Basak, author of the award winning poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences, will judge the entries. This is a new and interesting initiative by poets, for poets: your work will be received with respect and read with care.

One other bit of news. As readers, it is of course understood we all love libraries wholeheartedly. Perhaps some of us, the undeclared Bodhisattvas, may even be so empathic as to extend that warmth to librarians, those guardians— No, no, good people, order! Let us have order. Order! … As we were saying, librarians, like dragons and gollums, have their allotment of dukka in the scheme of things. Imagine having to brood eternally over an ever-pilfered collection of treasure; imagine having to countenance the claim your private place is a public good; imagine having your every requisition for blow-darts turned down. Now, would your disposition not eventually sour, embitter and become capable of curdling the most Vedic of milk? Eh? Eh? At TBLM, we have a shortage of Bodhisattvas, but our chests do bear warm, wet, and pulsing hearts. So this bit of news is a call to help librarians. We choose to stand with our siblings, those discontented curators of public-access content.

To wit, The Free Library Network (FLN) has been steadily raising funds to, well, keep libraries accessible all across south-Asia and India. March 15th is the LAST day to donate to their noble cause. Some of India’s best writers and illustrators have come together to help raise money for the FLN. In exchange for your donations, they are offering various deals —workshop sessions, manuscript advice, etc. Please do your bit and help out the kind-hearted folks of FLN.

Humans are a peculiar species, yes. For example, lions don’t offer buffalo-hunting workshops to other lions. Ants don’t have —as far as we know— Free Pheromone Library Networks. Hagfish have four hearts, but not one of them is ever moved to write novels about slime and punishment. Whereas human hearts beat for all sorts of reasons, strange reasons, often transcendent reasons that don’t have much to do with the necessities of biology or logic.

Or of pain. In today’s colophon, Mehr Farooqi writes about living with heart pain. The key word in the last sentence, perhaps, is “living”. The beat is broken, it wearies, there is reason to quit, but there is still memory and love and poetry and the beat goes on: da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM.

---

Colophon: Angina! Oh Angina

MEHR AFSHAN FAROOQI

Dil hi to hai na sang-o khisht dard se bhar na āye kyuñ
Roeñ ge ham hazār bār koi hameñ satāe kyūñ

It’s a heart after all not stone or brick, why wouldn’t it fill with pain?
I will cry a thousand times, why should anyone cause me anguish?

I thought I knew a lot about angina, but it turned out that I didn’t really know how it actually felt. When I felt angina, I thought the pain in my jaw was a tooth ache. Another time, I thought it was my poor stamina that made me breathless causing me pain. Yet again I thought it could be the sharp cold wind whipping against my hatless head. After many such episodes a faint doubt surfaced in my mind: Could this strange pain be angina? I rolled the musical word on my tongue. It felt pretentious to even think that I could have angina.

While angina often stems from plaque buildup in the heart's main arteries, that's not always the case. Angina can also be caused by microvascular disease, which affects the tiny blood vessels of the heart and makes it difficult for blood to flow efficiently to the heart muscle. While I am lucky in that my blockages are not in the major arteries, I am unfortunate that my condition is inoperable. My blockages are in the minor arteries and tiny blood vessels. Thus, my angina is nearly a daily occurrence. It presents mostly in the form of jaw pain when I walk fast or walk on a steep gradient. The good part is that it stops when I stop the activity causing pain.[1]

Because I had imagined it as a special pain; an ache that was associated with intellectualism of the highest caliber. Of course, that was ingrained from seeing my Father, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, suffer angina for decades. Or perhaps my view was coloured from internalising Urdu poetry.

An aching heart sounds poetic. But angina is no heartache. It is a sensation of being choked, squeezed, or constrained; in extreme forms it feels as though life’s breath is being slowly choked from the body. Ever since I discovered that I suffer from angina I have paid close attention to symptoms. Sometimes I take another short walk to reaffirm what I have felt. It varies; on occasion it is mild, other times it escalates to the point where you fear your heart will burst if you don’t stop walking.

But to return to heartache. Compare it to the physicality of pain—dard. Pain as emotion and pain as discomfort. Both are wide ranging when applied to the heart. I imagined angina to be a fusion of the two. A pain that is in the heart. As Ghalib famously asked:

Dil-e nādāñ tujhe huā kyā hai
Ākhir is dard kī davā kyā hai?

O naïve heart, what has happened to you?
Is there a remedy for this pain?

Ghalib has asked an existential question. The answer he provides is cryptic because it is a question: Ākhir is dard kī davā kyā hai? Is there a remedy for this pain? Or what possibly could be the remedy for this pain? Referring to the heart as nādān implies several options for interpretation—ignorant, simple, innocent, foolish etc. The heart doesn’t know what the pain is all about!

The ghazal also speaks of the wailing cry, the nālah or lament that rises from the agonized heart. When I randomly opened Dīvān-e Ghalib to find verses referring to nālāh. There was this verse from a ghazal that I had not paid attention to before:

Tab chāk-e garībāñ kā mazah hai dil-e nālāñ
Jab ek nafas uljhā huā har tār meñ āve

Tearing the collar is worth relishing O complaintive heart
When a tangled breath is captured in every thread

Of course, dil-e nālāñ is different from dil-e nādāñ; the former means a complaintive or lamenting heart. I believe this is another of Ghalib’s neologisms. But what a marvellous verse! Such a random, serendipitous discovery for me. A lover tears his collar in a fit of passion. Breath (nafas) is tangled or labored when one is upset. Tār could be a thread from the torn collar or a tār-e nafas, that is the thread or rhythm of breath. The torn collar bares the chest above the heart. All these ideas are subsumed in the two lines. The passionate lover tears his collar and complains, but the fun is when every breath is arhythmic (tangled).

My tendency to visualize abstractions leads me to imagine angina as the heart’s lament.

I suffer from angina every day. It has upended all my notions of what causes pain in the heart. I can no longer laugh at the dramatic scenes from Indian cinema that show actors clutching their heart or collapsing on hearing some heart-breaking news. Indeed, the word heart-break is so meaningful now. I put my hand on my heart whenever angina surfaces. Why does it surface? It surfaces during walks if I increase my pace; if the weather is cold or the gradient slightly steep. But there are smaller pinches of pain to longer episodes that are produced by any piece of unwelcome news. I am trying to meditate; meditating on my breath, on angina, likening it to a lament, an aching vein.

آہ

“Āh”, a deep sigh, voice of pain or lament is poetically comparable to the to music emanating from the flute or the نے the famous opening lines of Rumi’s great Masnavi:

Listen to the reed, when it narrates its tale
And complains against the pains of separation

Ghalib has dived deep into the music of the lament. In a masterful ghazal that he unfortunately chose not to publish, our poet has touched dizzying heights in eulogising the voice of pain.

Mauzūnī-e do ālam qurbān sāz-e yak dard
miṡrā-e nālā-e nay saktah hazār jā hai

Metricality worth the two worlds could be sacrificed over
the sound of one cry of grief
The line of verse in the reed’s lament is un-metrical in a thousand places

The voice of pain is worth more than all the mauzūn (metrical) voices of the world. Even the notes from the flute are not equal to the voice of pain because the notes from the flute can have (a thousand) breaks in meter.

One may have the fullest power of composing in meter, or be a poet in full expressive and communicative command, but this command is at best external, even mechanical, for it depends on an artificial device, the meter. The Urdu metrical system is almost mathematically precise because it is fully quantitative. So, in theory, anyone can compose a metrical text. Whereas the voice of pain or grief comes from the heart; it is not contrived or mechanical. Even the reed (the flute) whose sound is extremely similar to the human voice cannot compete with the voice of pain, because the reed’s sound, although routinely described as a lament, is after all man-made: it is the product of someone breathing or blowing into it.

Yak dard, an expression coined by Ghalib means synchronicity of pain; one grief. Sāz-e yak dard—sound of one cry.

(The word sāz as used here by Ghalib is a feat of expression. Sāz has many meanings: wherewithal; harmoniousness; capacity or capability; style or manner; a musical instrument, some of which are in fact quite different from each other and many of them fit here beautifully. The commonest meaning ‘a musical instrument’ is also quite appropriate.)

I have wandered into a difficult terrain. Ghalib’s “unselected” verses whose meaning are often beyond reach. But let me try to explicate further. Mauzūnī or Metricality, that is the ability to write poetry, communicate through words is a wonderful quality; but it can be foregone for one cry of grief. The cry of grief or pain not only is from the heart, and therefore devoid of artifice (which metricality may have), but it far more musically perfect than the flute’s melodious lament. Perhaps this verse was somewhere in my mind when I thought of angina as musical!

When we speak of the voice of pain in the world of the ghazal, we are not speaking of just the human lover. Love in the ghazal is universal. Think of the ghazal universe as time’s garden—all the seasons affect the garden, but the two most symbolic ones are spring/bahār and autumn/khizān. The garden is populated with birds and animals, flowers and trees. The most poignant love story is the bulbul’s love for the rose/gul. The rose fades in autumn leaving the bulbul to mourn its absence through soulful laments. Sometimes the hunter comes and catches the bulbul and puts him in a cage. The bulbul’s lament symbolises the separation of lovers and some of the most beautiful verses attest to it. Here is one of my favorite bulbul verses from Ghalib:

Kahtā hai kaun nalah-e bulbul ko be aṡar
Parde meñ gul ke lakh jigar chāk ho gaye

Who calls the bulbul’s lament ineffective
in the rose’s veil a million livers became torn

Second translation:

Who can call the bulbul’s lament wasted?
In garb of the rose, a million hearts were sundered

This verse is both lyrical and perplexing. What does the poet mean by (pardah-e gul) ‘rose’s veil’? One of Ghalib’s well-known commentators has offered the following interpretation: He has constructed the blooming of flowers as the liver's becoming torn. Other Ghalibians see the rose’s veil as its petals that are also livers and upon hearing the bulbul’s lament/nālah they are scattered or torn. Thus, the first line asks a question and the second provides an answer. The bulbul’s lament is not ineffective. It has a powerful effect on the rose. It causes its petals to scatter.

I have been meditating on this verse and came up with some new interpretations. First let me point to the visual image of the petal-livers being sundered on hearing the lament. The rose petals, traditionally red and the liver full of blood. Now close your eyes and imagine the sad song of the bulbul and a waterfall of blood-petals in response.

But what of the perplexing veil? Pardah has a slew of meanings ranging from ear drum to screen, seclusion, reticence, mystery. Pardah in musical terminology (istilāh) that refers to musical tone or mode; a note of the gamut, the frets of a musical instrument. Could Ghalib be referring to ‘the frets of the rose’? It begins to make sense when read in conjunction with the bulbul’s song.

Thus, the bulbul’s mournful song is echoed in the frets (petals) of the rose causing them to fall apart.

The interpretation that is closest to my heart is reading pardah as garb or guise. It is obvious that the bulbul’s song causes the rose heartbreak or torn liver, but there is a slew of lovers out there who are so affected by the bulbul’s song that their hearts-livers are torn. We know the story of gul-o-bulbul, but what of the others? Those of us for whom the gul-o bulbul love story is a foil, a screen; the bulbul’s lament moves us too. Our hearts and livers are torn with pain and love. These lovers are represented by the red rose, the quintessential symbol of love.

A similar verse might help in understanding the affect of song in Ghalib’s poetry, but also add its own enigmas:

Nah gul-e naġhmah hūñ nah pardah-e sāz
Main hūñ apnī shikast kī āvāz

I am not the rose’s song, nor the fret/melody of a musical instrument;
I am the sound of my own breaking

[Gul-e naghmah has eluded me this far. It may be a musical term. I will continue to ask around for someone to enlighten me.]

Returning to the bulbul’s lament, I dare to offer another somewhat far-fetched reading.

Most people translate bulbul as nightingale, a bird known for its melodious song. Bulbul is a Persian word and I have no idea what the bird was called before Persian infused the north Indian speech beginning from the 11th century onward. The Indian bulbul in all its varieties surely cannot be the Persian bulbul whose song was akin to a lament so pure and true in its notes. The Persian bulbul is a bird of a thousand tales (hazār dāstān). Pronounced bolbol (sometimes bolboli) in Persian, the bolbol has been translated as ‘nightingale’ although I am not sure if the bolbol’s song can be compared to the European nightingale’s dulcet notes. I think such a comparison was not needed. Really, the bolbol’s role in the ghazal is not so much about the quality of its song as its undying ardor for the rose.

I don’t think the Persian poets cared a whit about the nightingale. Their bulbul’s concern was time’s garden where beauty had a short span. The rosebud blossomed and the bulbul sang; the rose petals scattered and the bulbul lamented the loss. The bulbul and the rose in time’s garden symbolise the eternity of love. One rose will fade, another will bloom, and a new bulbul will be born. The bulbul’s egg, baizah-e bulbul causes excitement in the garden because a new lover is on its way.

Ghalib followed the classical tradition in his verses on the bulbul; but he often adds a novel spin to the bulbul legend. Sometimes he uses the esoteric, less familiar word ‘andālīb’ for the same bird. A verse that he discarded but became famous nonetheless has to do with the bulbul.

Huñ garmī-e nishāt-e tasavvur se naġhmah sanj
main andālīb-e gulshan-e nā āfrīdah huñ

I sing from the warmth of the passionate joy of my imaginings
I am the bulbul of a garden yet to be created

The bulbul is singing with the passion of imaginings; his themes are unusual and original; but the garden where its songs will be received it yet to be created. Ghalib, the poet-bulbul is exulting in the imaginative flights his song is capable of, and the confidence that in the future there will be an audience for the song. The creativity being celebrated through the image of the uncreated garden is so powerful and ingenious that I wish Ghalib had put this verse among his very best. I use this verse as an example of the choices Ghalib had to make in pruning his Divan.

I have wandered from angina to bulbul and an uncreated garden. I need to get back to the voice of pain, the nālah. A poet as ingenious as Ghalib can take a serious theme as lament and make it humorous:

Nālah-e dil ne diye aurāq-e laḳht-e dil bah bād
Yādgār-e nālāh ek dīvān-e be shīrāzah thā

The heart’s sighs gave pages of the heart’s pieces to the breeze
The memories of the lament became an unstitched book of poems!

Ghalib’s laments are nowhere close to the laments of Mir Taqi Mir in the kind of emotional depth they offer. Mir, was more prolific than Ghalib. Mir has seven divans in Urdu while Ghalib has only one. Mir dwelt on the heart in more demonstrative ways than Ghalib. Mir wasn’t afraid to bare his heart:

There were other problems, but losing the heart
Is like a calamity!

Ghalib on the other hand is self-mocking:

Jama‘ karte ho kyūñ raqīboñ ko
Ek tamāshā huā gilah nah huā

Why do you gather rivals?
It’s become a spectacle not a lament!

Ghalib’s death centenary (1969) was celebrated across the globe through publications, conferences, symposiums and what not. Father in anticipation of the century began a column Tafhīm-e Ghalib (Understanding Ghalib) where he demonstrated the layers of meaning Ghalib could pack in a two-line verse. I grew up regarding Ghalib as the greatest poet of all time; the impact of Father’s scholarship on my thought was deep. Thus, much later in life, when Father began his monumental work on Mir, I wasn’t quite ready to embrace Mir in the same manner as I had done Ghalib. Father’s work on Mir grew into a monumental four-volume exposition of the classical ghazal.

Father’s scholarship on Mir is magisterial. One of the last Mir works that he published was a thick volume of translations of Mir’s poetry: Mir Taqi Mir, Selected Ghazals and Other Poems, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2019). After all, the seven divans needed due representation. This is what he inscribed when he gave me the Mir book with a smile:

For my extremely accomplished and darling daughter Baby [1], from Bhai, February 2019, Allahabad. You have seen a lot of Ghalib, now enjoy Mir’s Garden of Kashmir.

There are several myths or misconceptions about Mir [2]. Some have to do with his personality others about his poetry. All the anecdotes about him show him as a haughty gentleman, disinclined to talk, extremely proud of his so-called high Saiyyed lineage. There are false notions about his poetry; it is perceived to be excessively sad and overly passionate. Unlike Ghalib, Mir was not fond of abstraction and cerebral themes. His poetry has a lot of kaifīyat or mood evoking quality that gives it emotional power. It is flowing and musical.

I have always liked Mir’s long poems, one of his best, Shola-e Ishq (Flame of Love) is about love and the heart. I am quoting and spontaneously translating some lines from the prelude here:

When love comes into action
the hearts beat in harmony with burning pain.
…
Love is what generates the heat for the heart’s affliction.
Love is a strange dream that causes bloodshed.
Love is a calamity that captures the heart.
…
The fire of love turns the heart into a live ember—
The heart is a lump of rock without love.
Love has an easy path to this garden
even the bud’s constricted heart has love in it.
It’s love alone that makes you weep for your heart.
Because of love alone you give away your life at no price.
Love sets water on fire.

Although Ghalib was a younger contemporary of Mir, and he was aware of Mir’s poetic genius, but did not emulate Mir. Sometimes it seems to me that Mir and Ghalib’s poetry are separated by centuries. I personally find that the difference in their poetic approach lies with how they perceive love in relation to the self. Ghalib’s concern is his individuality, his own self. He has no qualms in baring the insecurities of his self. Mir, struggles with presenting ishq, (love) as an emotion immersed in the larger experience of existence. His love is mixed with the spiritual as well the material aspect of existence. Mir’s lover carries the weight of relationships. The classic example of Mir’s exposition of love is the following verse:

maṡāib aur the par dil kā jānā
ajab ek ṡāniḥa sā ho gayā hai

There were other problems, but losing the heart
Has become a strange event altogether

This difference in Ghalib’s and Mir’s approaches to the heart reminds me of what my cardiologist said at the meeting I had with her. Women think differently about heart pain; perhaps they experience it differently too. There is not much research yet on why women experience heart pain differently. My angina always begins with jaw pain that travels to the shoulder and then the chest. My heart responds to stress long before my brain does. My experience of angina is very different from Father’s. I can only begin to understand now how different and similar we are.

The subject of women and their response to angina is quite fascinating. We are only in the early stages of understanding the cardiovascular differences between men and women. So, there is a “male type” and a “female type” of coronary heart disease. A recent study has found that women with coronary artery disease — a buildup of fatty substances in the lining of the arteries that prevents blood flow to the heart muscle — experience more chest pain from plaque buildup than men, even though they have less narrowing in their arteries. According to cardiologists researching angina in men and women: It is possible that women have a better capability of sensing that the heart muscle isn’t getting enough blood flow than men do! That difference has something to do with the way the nerves are wired in different parts of our bodies, and the difference in angina between women and men may similarly relate to nervous-system wiring.

Women are more sensitive to pain, but they also have the ability to tolerate pain. I hope in the coming years there will be greater focus on heart disease in women because it is the number one cause of death for women all over the world. Pain, like everything else is gendered. Did not get heart attacks? Did they not get their hearts broken? Of course they did. I didn’t specifically search for women writing about heart-pain in Urdu. My reading of Urdu poetry over the years showed that women eschewed allusion and word play. Women poets chose to be embarrassingly, inconveniently, nakedly honest in addressing issues of the heart, but they could also seamlessly merge individual experience with the universal. As Yasmeen Hameed writes in her book of poems Hum Do Zamanon Men Paida Hue:

O wind laden with sharp twigs!
There are no eyes in your path
For you to injure.
O water full with filthy slime!
No one is thirsty today.
The history of our times
Is different from the history of our hearts.

***

Notes:

1. Father always called me Baby and I addressed him as Bhai, short for Bhai sahib. The Bhai sahib nomenclature was a hand me down from my maternal aunts and uncles. Bhai sahib was too wordy so it became shortened to Bhai. Indeed, after a time everyone, even his grandchildren called him Bhai.

2. Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810) was from Agra, just like Ghalib. His father died when he was ten years old. Ghalib’s father died when the poet was only five. In 1739, at the age of sixteen, Mir moved to Delhi for better opportunities, and stayed with his step-maternal uncle the famous poet- linguist-lexicographer Sirajuddin Ali Khan Arzu. However, his relationship with Arzu was fraught with frustrations. Perhaps it was case of heartbreak. Mir began to lose his mind. He wrote some long narrative poems in the genre known as masnavī on love (ishq). Mir recovered from his disturbed state of mind, but his life’s path, despite success as a poet, was stormy. After the Persian king Nadir Shah’s sack of Delhi, Mir moved to Lucknow, in 1782, at the invitation of Nawab Asafuddaulah. Mir poetic sensibilities were infinite; between 1750-1808 he compiled six divans in Urdu. He has one Persian divan as well as an autobiography and a tazkirah or a biographical account of poets. His collected poems were published by Fort William Press in Calcutta in 1811. The publication was a nod to Mir’s poetic genius from the British colonizers.

——

MEHR AFSHAN FAROOQI
Mehr Afshan Farooqi is an author and scholar. She is a professor at the University of Viginia where she teaches about South Asian Literatures and Culture. Farooqi's recent publications are on the great nineteenth century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. She is interested in multilingualism and its impact on creativity. She is currently working on a memoir, Whirlwinds of the Heart.

---

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Banner image: The Bivacor artificial heart. © Peter Adams, courtesy Getty Images. The Bivacor is described by the IEEE Spectrum as “a centrifugal pump with just one moving part—a rotating disk, which is suspended in its titanium casing via magnetic levitation.” Magnetic levitation! We’ll have to write new poems now.

We hope you enjoyed reading this issue of Crow & Colophon. Subscribe for free to receive updates about The Bombay Literary Magazine and notes of a literary persuasion.