Faisal’s Blog | Words & Feelings

On my birthday…

‘LEKIN’ by Jaun Elia
Reviewed by Peerzada Salman

As I hold Lekin in my hand, I see Jaun Elia smiling at me rather wryly, as if saying, “I have yet again expectorated blood in verse.” It’s his fourth collection of ghazals, quat’at and nazms, and the third published posthumously, thanks to two gentle souls, Khalid Ansari and Dr S.N.M Shehzad. Had they not made a concerted effort to print his unpublished pieces, which the master poet had himself given to Khalid Ansari for making their fair copies, the world of contemporary Urdu literature would have been so very bland.

Lekin embodies poetry which typifies Jaun Elia: ghazals that shake the very essence of existence, and nazms that give away the helplessness of a sensitive being. Jaun’s story is the story of an asthmatic with no one around to help him inhale life. As a result, he is bitter, at times even acerbic. He is nihilistic, at times (and ironically) to the extent of deconstructing himself. But, my word, what benefits the reader reaps. His vitriolic attitude and nihilism make him create couplets that titillate the mind and wrench the heart, with technical prowess that can only be labelled “matchless”.

It is not just the content, as it were, that makes Lekin an incredible book to go through. It is also the stupendous verse-writing style. Who can use the word employed in the misra-i-oola as the rhyming utterance in the misra-i-saani like Jaun, and with finesse that almost appears divine and not pre-worked?

(You, sweetheart, were a romance once
Now your name is all but a romance)

Let’s shy away from the potentially tedious process of discussing technicalities. For it’s not just metrical compositions and words that Jaun Elia had immense command over. Jaun sees life eyeball to eyeball. When he does that he finds himself painfully lonely. And that’s where his creative self tries to turn loneliness into a meaningful solitude, churning out couplets, lines and phrases that simply blow the reader away.

(A shadow was my Messiah
Who knows who it was, what it was)

(If only desire were not a killer
Longing was better than union)

(I could not live up to my own standard
See, how sure I was of myself)

(Frankness of the body had to be matched
Telling lies fell to the soul)

Frankness, Saaf goee, is something that Jaun Elia never flinches back from. So when he contemplates life in its entirety, he finds no hesitation in claiming that to exist is to constantly dangle between the “toilsome” and the relatively “easy”. This kind of conditioning leads to the thinking where even romance becomes an ambiguous struggle. Jaun Elia often appears to be longing for difficulties, loathing easy pickings.

(Damn difficult it is to get her
Damn easy! What to do now?)

It would be way off the mark to think that Jaun loves being difficult. That’s where he is worlds apart from his contemporaries as well as predecessors. He is, perhaps, the only poet in the history of Urdu poetry who has dealt with mirth and sorrow with utter disdain, and in equal measure. It’s a Hamlet-like situation: nothing makes him revel in life. Like a semi-existentialist, he does not find any inherent meaning of this world. Yes, “meaning” is the one word that pesters Jaun Elia no end.

(A fire burns in the heart, so be it
There ain’t much meaning in love)

When there’s meaninglessness around, what do you do? You consider the entire enigma of existence as one mundane, banal reality. And that’s what Jaun does. He is unlike a “normal” human being who would get in a queue to pay his utility bills. He simply detests such perfunctory exercises.

(Routine of life is bizarre
It’s night and sleep must come)

(How do I go through life?
Who doesn’t have to make a living)

Chores dissuade Jaun Elia from domesticity. Not only that, his feeble, pen-bearing shoulders droop with the burden of performing family “duties”, which his detractors claim he never did. So what? Not every family man is a poet of the highest order. One should always respect creative individuals.

(Heart has to travel the world
Home is everywhere I turn)

Discussing meaninglessness and an escape from life doesn’t imply, by any manner of means, that Jaun Elia was a man devoid of spirituality or delicate emotions. In Lekin, when he writes couplets on (or about) women, romance seems to reach special heights. He makes even the most robotic of people think about treading the amorous path. Once Jaun flings an epithet at his beloved, she, no matter how ugly or breathtaking she may be, assumes a mythical appeal.

(Red are her lips and how very red
Don’t you set about blushing them)

(Her flexibility I bade farewell
Even a twist of her waist I could not match)

But for Jaun Elia, love never leads to complete annihilation of the self. Here’s another interesting side to the poet: After discovering that life means nothing to him and that the people he loves are not loyal to him, Jaun goes into the jungle and stops by a pool to have some rest. He sees his own reflection in the pool and immediately falls in love with it. And that love of his remains with him till he breathes his last. You think its narcissism? I don’t.

(Finding a man was my quest
I chose myself for it)

It’s not that Lekin is brimming with many a top-notch ghazal. The book contains some of Jaun Elia’s mind-blowing nazms too. These are the nazms that are perhaps more give-away of his personal life than his ghazals, which tend to express his opinions wrapped in the stylised garb of poetic artistry. To boot, the 16 pieces that I’m referring to give a fair idea of Jaun’s versatility as a poet and his mastery over the different sub-genres of the genre. There are qafia-bund nazms and azad nazms. All are constructed in a way as if the poet was born to employ those forms of expression. Be it “Be maani” aur “Hai jamal ahsani”, Jaun surprises with lines that just simply get etched in the reader’s literary memory.

In the final analysis, Lekin, with all the verse-wielding magic that’s associated with Jaun Elia has the ability to make the reader thumb through it over and over again. I sincerely wish that like Jaun’s previous collection, Gumaan (which was given the Allama Iqbal award for the best poetry book of 2004 by the Academy of Letters Pakistan), Lekin causes such a splash in the Urdu literary world that would create an infectious effect and make the barrenness of modern Urdu poetry appear green with freshness. After all, it’s the different colours of life that Jaun always splatters his poetic canvas with:

(Colour but makes it different
What is blood save water?)

— English translation of verses by Murtaza Razvi