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fJ; tko w{b nro/h ftZu fbfynk j'fJnk woj{w ;zs f;zx ;/y'A dk b/y i' ;kB{z s/itzs frZb s'A gqkgs j'fJnk j?. fJj b/y gqf;ZX T[od{ kfJo ? nfjwd ? pko/ j?. n;hA fJ; B{z nro/h ftZu jh ofjD fdZsk j? sK i' gkme gikph b/yeK tZb'A fbyh iKdh nro/h dk Bw{Bk d/y ;eD.

Sant Singh Sekhon

Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Having completed seventy-six years of my sojourn on this earth, l often fall to thinking of how much the crowd of my contemporaries has thinned out and last week when l was pondering over Rajinder Singh Bedi's death who was by seven years my j u n i o r, s u d d e n l y, p a r h a p s b y association with Panjabi writers of Urdu, the name of Faiz Ahmed Faiz came into my mind. I wondered how long he or I myself might be expected to escape the process, for Faiz was my junior by only three years. The very next day I was dismayed and surprised Faiz Ahmed Faiz that Faiz had been bowled out too. To me the Span of life after seventy begins to cause anxiety, same as the life of a batsman in a cricket match. But though the most anxious period of a batsman's life at the pitch are the last three decades of his score-and the anxiety goes on increasing with the completion of every decade a larger percentage of batsmen to complete their century, than men or women generally do in life; very few men or women indeed complete a century of their life in this
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world. And the ripest years of the human crop for the mover of death are the two penultimate decades of the century, As for myself I have completed three quarters of a century, frankly speaking, rather against my expectations or I have been frail of constitution from early childhood. Fiaz Ahmed Faiz looked quite strong of body when we first met in life in the middle of the thirties, and he looked even more stout and strong when he was here in India a couple of years ago. But then I have beaten many of my stronger and stouter contemporaries, and Faiz Ahmed is so far the last of them to fall. I may not be reprimanded for writing these reminiscences in this rather light tone, for a man's death, even a friend's at this ripe age may not be considered a tragedy and one may be excused for reviving only the happier moments of the life of one's friends, especially of they die after winning laurls as Faiz has done. I came to know Faiz when in 1936 he came to Amritsar as Lecturer in English at the M.A.O. College. Dr. Mohammed Din Tasir was then Principal. As if to compete successfully with the wellestablished khalsa college at Amritsar, the management of the M.A.O. college had taken care to recruit the best of men and women teachers available then in the Muslim community. Among other teachers at the M.A.O. college at that time were Sahibzada Mahmood Muzaffar a young man of an aristocratic Muslim family of Aligarh or there about and his beautiful wife Rashid Jahan who was the daughter of or Mohammed Abdulla, a renowned professor of the Muslim University, Aligarh. Rashid Jahan, had by

that time published a collection of her short stories, Angare (embers). After a little time of her stay in Amritsar she fell ill, I think with tuberculoris, and though she went to the Soviet Union for a better treatment than was available in India, she was not destined to live much longer. I had met her only a few times in the meetings of the Society of progressive Writers formed in those days on the initiative of Dr. Mohammed Din Tasir, and am often reminded of the Lucy poems of Wordsworh who also had known the young heroine of these poems only briefly. Sahibzada Muzafar, soon after this, left the M.A.O. college Amritsar to work, as far as I remember as a Secretary to Jawahar Lal Nehru, who was then the rising star of the Indian National Congress. I do not remember if I have met Sahibzada Muzafar since those days. The society used generally to meet in one of the porch-like buildings of the time of Maharaja Ranjit Singh around Amritsar's famous public gardens, known as Ram Bagh, again a pleasant remnant of the great Maharaja's days. My stay at Amritsar was cut short by some unpleasant events that took place in 1937 in Khalsa college, Amritsar. Faiz was to stay there at the M.A.O. college for some years more, until he joined the army as a commissioned officer in the publicity section, where he rose to the level of a coloned after partition. I came to Lahore in 1937 but kept my contacts with Dr. Mohammed Din Tasir and Faiz Ahmed. In 1940 when I had returned to Khalsa college, Amritsar, my friend and senior student Jiwan Singh opened his Book Shop which he named Lahore Book Shop and which has become since a major publishing house of Panjabi books, running now in Ludhiana. I
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think it was in 1940 or 1941 when Faiz Ahmed gave me the first collection of his Urdu poetry to get it published by the Lahore Book Shop. But Jiwan Singh was concerned solely with publishing Panjabi literature and politely declined to take up Faiz's book. These poems were later published by some other firm of Urdu publications as Naqash-Faryadi, which launched Faiz Ahmed on a brilliant career as a poet. By the way, Jiwan Singh has often regretted his decision not to publish his book, though I think only on sentimental grounds, for if Jiwan Singh was to become a major publisher of Panjabi books, Faiz book would have remained a single swallow. Dr. Tsar had come to M.A.O. college, Amritsar, as its Principal-he had been for some time a professor at the Islamic Colleg, Lahore-straight from London University where he had taken a Ph.d. He had brought with him an English wife named Christable. A younger sister of the lady, Alice had come to stay with the Tasirs at Amritsar. I could detect a tenderness between her and Faiz. Faiz actually married her some time later after leavingAmritsar. I lost contact with Faiz when he went into the army in about 1942 and I went in 1943 to Baluchistan as secretary to a firm of contractors, and then after the breakup of that firm on 1945 started on my own as a contractor and stayed in Baluchistan for another year.This enterprise proved disastrous to me financially, through my friends in the earlier firm launched me anew as a contractor in Buland Shahr and Meerut districts, where also I failed, only to be
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baled out by the management of the Khalsa college, Amritsar, through the good official of my friend Waryam Singh who died in 1974 at the age of sixty-eight to become another of my contemporaries and friends who have falled on the road of life's journey. Then came independence and partition. Faiz quite naturally opted for Pakistan, not only as an army officer but also because he belonged by birth to a Sidhu Jat family from a Village near Lahore. I kept hearing for Faiz's successful career as a poet, even when he fell foul of Government of Pakistan for being a communist and was arrested as a conspirator with General Akbar Khan,after the assassination of Liaqut Ali Khan, then prime Minister of Pakistan during the presidency of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. He remained in jail, I Think for about four years after which he was set free and allowed to go out of country. But some how after this term in jail, during which Period he published two other collections of his poems, Zindan Namah and Dast I Saba he remained a suspect in the eyes of the Government. It was during these wandering abroad that he met me again at the Afro-Asian Writers Conference at Tashkant, capital of Uzbekistan in the U.S.S.R But Faiz was there only for a brief period and I do not remember he took much of a part of the conference. It was at the end of the conference when we were invited to Moscow by the union of Soviet Writers and then among about six or Seven of the Indian Delegates, I was extended an invitation to stay a further two weeks in Moscow as a guest of the AfroAsian Solidarity Organization and I had the opportunity of renewing and even deepening my association with Faiz at the Hotel Ukraine, Gulam Nabi Taban, Sujjad Jahir

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and Rajinder Singh Bedi were also members of our Leftist group. I particularly remember the night of November 7 when after witnessing the parade at the Red Square,Sajjad Zahir, Faiz and I spent the whole night drinking and gossiping as I was to leave for India via Tashkent and Kabul the next morning. I regret to say that though Faiz visited India many times after 1958, I could not find an opportunity to meet him here. But I kept abreast of his writing as I have done in the case of only a few of my

celebrated contemporaries. one reason perhaps was that Faiz Ahmed published only poetry and that also not very voluminously, only seven rather lean collections of the poems are available in print beginning with Naquash I Farvadi to and through. Bad-i-saba and Zindan Name to Dast-i-tehi sang. Howeveer, his total contribution to Urdu poetry is in general estimation equal to that of Ghalib who wrote even less and that of Sir Mohammed Iqbal who has written much more copiously.

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