My heart is vibrant with complaint as is the harp with music.
Give it the slightest touch and hear the strains it will pour forth.
pur hoon main shikve se yun raag se jaise baaja
ik zara chhediye, phir dekhiye kya hota hai
I think to myself, I sent both letters unstamped. I cannot conceive that they should have been lost. Anyway, it was a long time ago. No point in complaining now. You don’t re-heat stale food, and ‘service means servitude’ [a proverbial saying].
On another occasion he cheerfully admits his own responsibility:
Exalted sir, the ghazal your servant brought has gone where I am going—to oblivion. That is, I have lost it.
His distrust of the British postal services was a long-standing one. Letters that date from as early as 1848 express it, and in 1854 he writes to a friend:
What do you think of the state of the British postal services? I don’t know what innovations they’ve introduced, but all organization is at an end and you simply can’t place any reliance on it. An Englishman had one or two of his letters in English go astray. He spoke to the post-office here about it and when nobody paid any attention to him, he addressed a complaint to the head postmaster. He got a reply to say that they accepted no responsibility; he had handed in his letter and they had sent it off; it was not up to them whether or not it reached its destination. Complaints have come from Meerut too, and one hears the same thing in letters from Agra. So far no letter of mine has gone astray, but in a general epidemic who is safe? I’ve felt obliged to make a new rule. I’ve sent word to Major John Jacob at Agra and to you at Aligarh and to a cousin of mine—my mother’s brother’s son—at Banda, and one or two other friends in various districts, telling them that in future we should send our letters to each other unstamped. Neither of us will owe the other anything, and it puts our minds at ease. In future if you send me a letter postage pre-paid I shall be cross with you. Send them unstamped; and get Munshi Hargopal Tufta to do the same; in fact show him what I have written. A lot of pre-paid letters go astray. Unstamped ones can be trusted to get there.
And a few months later:
The post-office department has gone all to pieces. It may have been an idle foreboding, but I had thought it proper, as a precaution, to start sending my letters unstamped. The letter would go to the post-office and I would get a receipt—stamped with a red-ink stamp for a pre-paid letter and a black-ink stamp for an unstamped one. My mind was at rest, because I could look at my mail-book and remind myself on what date I had sent such-and-such a letter and how I had sent it. Now they’ve put a big box in the post-office. It has an open mouth and anyone who wants to post a letter can go and drop it in the box and come away. No receipt, no stamp, no evidence of posting. God knows whether the letter will be despatched or not. And even if it is, when it gets to the other end there’s no prospect of a tip to tempt the postman to deliver it, and no incentive to the authorities to collect what is due on it. They may not even give it to the postman to deliver, and even if they do he may not deliver it. And if it doesn’t arrive, the sender has nothing in writing to base a claim on—not, that is, unless he pays four annas extra and sends it registered; and we send off letters all over the place practically every other day. Where are we going to get eight annas and more a week to register them all? Suppose I calculate that a letter weighs three masha and stick a half-anna stamp on it. It turns out that it’s two ratti overweight, and the addressee has to pay double. So you’re forced to keep a balance to weigh your letters. The tongue of every balance is different, and shows a slightly different weight. In short, sending off a letter is a headache; it’s asking for trouble. I’ve written this letter on 10th Muharram. Tomorrow I’ll send for the necessary stamps, stick them on the envelope and send it off. It’s like shooting an arrow in a dark room. If it hits, it hits, and if it misses, it misses.
~
Ghalib had always kept in touch by letter with friends and fellow poets in other parts of India, but after the revolt of 1857 he felt an urgent need to do so. He had been in Delhi when it was in the hands of the rebel soldiers, and witnessed terrible atrocities on both sides. Once the British had taken control they expelled almost all Muslims and Hindus living in Delhi, and Ghalib was only able to stay because he was protected by the Sikh Maharaja of Patiala, who had supported the British throughout. Hindu residents were allowed to return three months later but it was more than two years before Muslims were allowed to. All this time Ghalib was there, and terribly lonely. His friends were scattered far and wide. He comforted himself by writing letter after letter to them. He wrote to Tufta:
In this solitude it is letters that keep me alive. Someone writes to me and I feel he has come to see me. By God’s favour not a day passes but three or four letters come from this side and that; in fact there are days when I get letters by both posts—one or two in the morning and one or two in the afternoon. I spend the day reading them and answering them, and it keeps me happy. Why is it that for ten and twelve days together you haven’t written—that is haven’t been to see me? Write to me, Sahib. Write why you haven’t written. Don’t grudge the half-anna postage. And if you’re so hard up send the letter unstamped.
In other letters to Tufta he describes the acute sense of loss which the catastrophe of 1857 caused him. He begins it with a couplet from one of his own ghazals:
If Ghalib sings in bitter strain, forgive him;
Today pain stabs more keenly at his heart.
rakhiyo Ghalib mujhe is talkh navaai mein muaaf
aaj kuchh dard mire dil mein siva hota hai.
My kind friend, first I have to ask you to convey my greetings to my old friend Mir Mukarram Husain Sahib. Tell him that I am still alive and that more than that even I do not know... Listen, my friend, when a man has the means to devote all his days free of care to the pursuit of the things he loves, that is what luxury means. The abundant time and energy you give to poetry is proof of your noble qualities and your sound disposition; and brother, the fame of your poetic achievement adds lustre to my name too. As for me, I have forgotten how to write poetry, and forgotten all the verses I ever wrote too—or rather, all except a couplet-and-a-half of my Urdu verse—that is, one final couplet of a ghazal, and one line. This is the couplet. Whenever my heart sinks within me it comes to my lips and I recite it—five times, ten times—over and over again:
Ghalib, when this is how my life has passed
How can I call to mind I had a God?
zindagi apni jab is shakl se guzri, Ghalib
hum bhi kya yaad karenge ki khuda rakhte the?
And when I feel at the end of my tether I recite this line to myself:‘O sudden death, why do you still delay?’ and relapse into silence. Do not think that it is grief for my own misery or my own ruin that is choking me. I have a deeper sorrow, so deep that I cannot attempt to tell you, and can only hint at it. Among the English whom those infamous black scoundrels slaughtered, some were the focus of my hopes, some my well-wishers, some my friends, some my bosom companions, and some my pupils in poetry. Amongst the Indians some were my kinsmen, some my friends, some my pupils and some men whom I loved. And all of them are laid low in the dust. How grievous it is to mourn one loved one. What must his life be like who has to mourn so many? Alas! so many of my friends are dead that now if I should die there will be none to weep for me. ‘Verily we are for God, and verily to Him we shall return.’ [An Arabic sentence commonly spoken when someone dies.]
He attached great value to personal friendships, and he made them without regard to his friends’ religion or race:
I hold all mankind to be my kin, and look upon all men—Muslim, Hindu, Christian—as my brothers, no matter what others may think.
He once wrote to Tufta:
What you have written is unkind and suspicious! Could I be cross with you? May God forbid! I pride myself that I have one friend in India who truly loves me; his name is Hargopal, and his pen-name Tufta. What could you write which
would upset me? And as for what someone else may whisper, let me tell you how matters stand there. I had but one brother, who died after thirty years of madness. Suppose he had lived and had been sane and had said anything against you: I would have rebuked him and been angry with him.
He lived on in Delhi for the rest of his life. He describes some of its tribulations in a letter of 1860:
Five invading armies have fallen upon this city one after another: the first was that of the rebel soldiers, which robbed the city of its good name. The second was that of the British, when life and property and honour and dwellings and those who dwelt in them and heaven and earth and all the visible signs of existence were stripped from it. The third was that of famine, when thousands of people died of hunger. The fourth was that of cholera, in which many whose bellies were full lost their lives. The fifth was the fever, which took general plunder of men’s strength and powers of resis-tance. There were not many deaths, but a man who has had fever feels that all the strength has been drained from his limbs. And this invading army has not yet left the city. Two members of my own household are down with fever, the elder boy and my steward. May God restore both of them speedily to health.
~
His own personal life was full of disappointments. He was a very self-conscious aristocrat, inordinately proud of the greatness of his ancestors, and a firm believer in the principle of noblesse oblige; and he felt correspondingly despondent about his own limited physical and material resources. Four years before his death he wrote:
Of all the aspirations my Creator placed in me—to roam in happy poverty and independence, or to give freely from my ample bounty—not even a thousandth part of them was realized. I lacked the bodily strength; else I would have taken a staff in my hand, and hung from it a checkered mat and a tin drinking-vessel and a rope, and taken to the road on foot; now to Shiraz, now sojourning in Egypt, now making my way to Najaf I would have roamed. I lacked the means; else I would have played host to a world of men; or if I could not feast a world of men, no matter; at least within the city where I lived none would have gone hungry and unclad...
Within his straitened circumstances he lived as free and independent a life as he could and observed the high standards of conduct which aristocratic values demanded. Here too his aspirations were often thwarted. Patronage was meagre, and his own high standards of conduct often led him to clash with others who proclaimed these same standards but did not observe them—so much so that he wrote to a friend in 1861:
You are a prey to grief and sorrow, but... to be the target of the world’s afflictions is proof of an inherent nobility—proof clear, and argument conclusive.
Marriage, and the need to incur debts if he were to maintain his standards, were both an encumbrance to him and a fetter on his freedom. He writes to a friend who proposed to arrange a second marriage for his son after his first wife had died, leaving him two sons:
My friend, you’re involving the poor boy in the toils of marriage. But, God keep them, Abdus Salam and Kulsum are enough to preserve his name. For my part, my friend, I believe in Ibn-iYamin’s words:
Wise is that man who in this world refrains from just two things:
He who would pass his days in peace must steel himself to say,
‘I will not wed, though I might have the daughter of a king;
I will not borrow, though I get till Doomsday to repay.’
I hope it’s not the case that he doesn’t want to marry and you are pushing him into this misfortune.
He himself was too late to act on the first of these two pieces of advice. (He had been married at the age of thirteen.) And he felt constrained by circumstances to saddle himself with debt, a burden which he had to bear all his adult life.
He loved children. In one of his letters he writes to a friend whose baby son had died:
My friend, I know exactly what such a loss means. In my seventy-one years I have had seven children, both boys and girls, and none lived to be more than fifteen months. You are still young. May Exalted God give you patience, and another son in his place.
He looked upon his wife’s nephew Arif as a son, but Arif and his wife died within a year of each other in 1851 and 1852 respectively. Ghalib thereupon took their two sons, then aged five and two, into his own home, and they brought much comfort to him. When Tufta once wrote to him apologizing for sending him so many verses to correct, he replied:
Listen, my good sir. You know that the late [Arif] was my ‘son’ and that now both his children, my grandsons, have come to live with me, and that they plague me every minute of the day, and I put up with it. God is my witness that you are a son to me. Hence the products of your inspiration are my spiritual grandsons. When I do not lose patience with these, my physical grandsons, who do not let me have my dinner in peace, who walk with their bare feet all over my bed, upset water here, and raise clouds of dust there—how can my spiritual grandsons, who do none of these things, upset me? Post them off at once for me to look at. I promise you I’ll post them back to you at once. May God Almighty grant long life to your children—the children of this external world—and give them wealth and prosperity, and may He preserve you to look after them. And on your spiritual children, the products of your inspiration, may He bestow increase of fame and the gift of men’s approval.
To the day of his death he continued to hold himself responsible for the fortunes of his two ‘grandsons’, and in his last severe illness wrote increasingly desperate letters to his then long-time patron, the Nawab of Rampur, begging him to send money so that he could pay off his debts—to die in debt was a deep disgrace to a Muslim of noble family—and to celebrate the wedding of his ‘grandson’. The Nawab did not respond.
From all these disappointments, and from his sense that the good things in life never seem to last derives much of his philosophy of life. First, he takes the stand that the pleasures of life are to be enjoyed to the full. He loved mangoes and his enjoyment of them was uninhibited. They were one of the many things that he loved in Calcutta, a city in which he had spent nearly two years in his younger days, and of which he spoke with great enthusiasm. A Persian couplet which he wrote there says:
If all the fruits of Paradise lay there outspread before you
The mangoes of Calcutta still would haunt your memory!
—and in a letter of 1860 to a friend in Marahra he describes how he used to eat them:
You invite me to Marahra and remind me that I had planned to come. In the days when my spirits were high and my strength intact, I once said to the late Shaikh Muhsin-ud-Din how I wished I could go to Marahra during the rains and eat mangoes to my heart’s content and my belly’s capacity. But where shall I find that spirit today, and from where recover the strength I once had? I neither have the same appetite for mangoes nor the same capacity to hold so many. I never ate them first thing in the morning, nor immediately after the midday meal; and I cannot say that I ate them between lunch and dinner because I never took an evening meal. I would sit down to eat them towards evening, when my food was fully digested, and I tell you bluntly, I would eat them until my belly was bloated and I could hardly breathe. Even now I eat them at the same time of day, but not more than ten to twelve, or if they are of the large kind, only six or seven.
Alas! how the days of your youth have departed!
Nay, rather the days of our life have departed!
~
But the transience of human pleasures made him wary of becoming dependent on them. This is most strikingly evident in his attitude to love, which in Mughal society was something which had nothing to do with marriage. In a Persian letter in his youth he had expressed how deeply he had been distressed when his first love died, and how he had come to realize that one should never allow oneself to be too attached to one beloved. His Urdu letters of a much later period show that he never changed this view. In 1860 he heard of the death of a courtesan who had been the mistress of one of his close friends. He wrote to him:
Mirz
a Sahib, I received your letter with its grievous news. When I had read it I gave it to Yusuf Ali Khan Aziz to read, and he told me of your relationship with her—how devoted to you she was and how much you loved her. I felt extremely sorry, and deeply grieved. Friend, we ‘Mughal lads’ are terrors; we are the death of those for whom we ourselves would die. Once in my life I was the death of a fair, cruel dancing girl. God grant both of them His forgiveness, and both of us, who bear the wounds of our beloveds’ death, His mercy. It is forty years or more since it happened, and although I long ago abandoned such things and left the field once and for all, there are times even now when the memory of her charming ways comes back to me, and I shall not forget her death as long as I live. I know what you must be feeling.
We have no means of knowing how long an interval elapsed between this letter and the next, but it seems that his friend could not overcome his grief, and Ghalib adopts quite another tone in an effort to rally him:
Mirza Sahib, I don’t like the way you’re going on. I have lived sixty-five years, and for fifty of them have seen all that this transient world of colour and fragrance has to show. In the days of my lusty youth a man of perfect wisdom counselled me, ‘Abstinence I do not approve: dissoluteness I do not forbid. Eat, drink and be merry. But remember that the wise fly settles on the sugar, and not on the honey.’ Well, I have always acted on his counsel. You cannot mourn another’s death unless you live yourself. And why all these tears and lamentations? Give thanks to God for your freedom, and do not grieve. And if you love your chains so much, then a Munna Jan is as good as a Chunna Jan. When I think of paradise and consider how if my sins are forgiven me and I am installed in a palace with a houri, to live for ever in the worthy woman’s company, I am filled with dismay and fear brings my heart into my mouth. How wearisome to find her always there!—a greater burden than a man could bear. The same old palace, all of emerald made: the same fruit-laden tree to cast its shade. And—God preserve her from all harm—the same old houri on my arm! Come to your senses, brother, and get yourself another.
A Thousand Yearnings Page 26