“Write that…books strewn across the room, ashtray full of ash and stubs of cigarettes, crumpled jacket resting against the chair and an upside-down pair of shoes now cry for the evidence of their existence/ write that… office clerics, students and workers appear like scratches to the ones sitting in the cars that zoom down the road/ write that…how long the yesterday’s chewed up newspaper would take to go down from the footpath to the gutter/ Write because you may not be able to compose even such stuff in the times ahead.”

Who could be the poet who effortlessly wrote such prosaic but charged lines way back in a culture where deviating from the poetic conventions handed down from generation to generation is considered some kind of literary heresy. The poet who along with some others committed this heresy by doing away florid imagery, meter, sentimental filigree and bulimic nostalgia was an unusual man who mounted the literary horizon of Punjabi language like a nova in late 60s and early 70s of the last century. He appeared like a shooting star from nowhere. But he was gone before we could pin down the cause of his rise and sudden death. Many of younger generation don’t know him. This was none other than Zamurad Malik, a passionate intellectual, literary critic, inspiring teacher and above all one of the pioneers of modern Punjabi poetry this side of the border. He can be neglected as he has been in our factionalised cultural world but no one would ever dare to shout ‘kill him for his bad verses.’

He came to Lahore from Sialkot in 1970. It’s surprising to discover that the man who lived most of his life in sluggish towns and sleepy cities already had developed cosmopolitan outlook well before he settled in Lahore, the metropolis and cultural hub of the country.

Zamurad Malik was born in 1929 in a conservative city of Mianwali in Punjab. His father was a police officer who had his stints at different cities such as Sahiwal, Campbellpur [present day Attock], Lyallpur [Faisalabad] and Rawalpindi. He did his Masters in English literature from Murray College, Sialkot. After having shifted to Lahore, he taught at Shah Hussain College. According to Amin Mogul, a highly respected teacher and leftist intellectual, Malik was a good billiard player and took deep interest in ESP, palmistry and astronomy. He actively participated in activities of the professional associations of teachers and was detained during the dictatorship of General Yahya Khan. He is remembered by his colleagues and students as a wonderful teacher who treated his students not only as his friends but also as his equal in a society where a competent teacher was considered a sort of infallible demi-god.

Zamurad, Shahid Malik tells us, was a great tea drinker. He would have readily agreed with what English essayist Sydney Smith said: “Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.” He loved acting as a Guru in matters of love concerning his friends and male students. He would happily volunteer to write love letters on their behalf. Love letters shouldn’t be somber or traditional, he believed.

Late Khalid Hassan says that Zamurad was also a dilettante who would love to carry books with him ostentatiously as a sign of his being a knowledgeable man. He would spend hours consulting Oxford English Dictionary as if it was a thriller. One of his idiosyncrasies was his obsession with punctuation but he almost hated the use of full stop. He took pride in his literary discoveries; Swastika, he believed, was a semicolon which has been totally misconstrued and Shakespeare’s sonnet number 129 [When in disgrace with nature and men’s eyes] was his greatest. He called the girl he loved the ‘third cousin’ of Mona Liza. The kind of man he was can be guessed from the anecdote told by Khalid Hassan. A rich man in Sialkot advertised his Royals Royce for sale. Zamurad with his empty pocket visited the seller along with friends, requested him to allow him to test drive the vehicle.When he hit the road, he caused traffic mayhem because he couldn’t control the steering to the chagrin of motorists. He loved to have dialogue and debate but was so cool headed that he would neither be irked nor would raise his voice even in an extremely provocative situation. To sum up, he was the kind of man you come across in Russian novels. By the way if given the chance he would be a Kremlinologist. He predicted Lavrenty Beria’s fall, the ruthless head of secret police in erstwhile Soviet Union during Stalin era, writes Khalid Hassan. His sixth sense wouldn’t mislead him regarding Russians, he claimed.

Zamurd Malik lived a lusty and vivacious life as a person who in the words of great seer Baba Guru Nanak believed in ‘savouring every shade [of life]’. With benefit of hindsight one can assert that his enduring achievement was his creative expression. A quote from Brecht’s poem aptly describes Zamurad’s poetic attitude: “When I speak to you/coldly and impersonally/using the driest words/I speak to you merely like reality itself which in my view you seem not to recognize”. His poems written about more than forty years ago have stood the test of time. They carry whispers of freshness and waft of intimacy in a poetic construct that blurs the boundaries between the local and universal. He made poetry everyday experience as did our maestros in the past. “We stand today beside the turning, that, it seems, will continue to turn around/we will be forced to start our journey afresh/a fresh journey with neither a beginning nor an end/the wind will go beyond carrying our fragrance and odour/But we will keep standing where we stand, beside this turning.”

Let’s celebrate Zamurad as a tactile poetic presence and not allow the poetasters to trip over him.

Note: The book ‘Zamurad Malik’ published by Classics, Lahore, has been used as reference material for this column. The book compiled by senior Punjabi writer Fakhar Zaman and sponsored by Quratul Ain Malik contains articles, write-ups and comments on Zamurad Malik and his poetry by prominent authors. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2018