VENI, Vidi, Vici. As the fable goes, so said Julius Caesar in his native Latin, meaning: “I came, I saw, I conquered”, after winning one of his several battles. Zehra Nigah could have said as much after her debut public appearance decades ago in Lahore. But she has always remained too self-effacing for that, the genial and humble soul that she is.

However, Nigah can’t stop people from saying so in the third person, especially when one has the backing of an authority like Intizar Husain who has all but immortalised in his autobiographical account Chiragho’n Ka Dhua’n, the mushaira (poetry gathering) where even Jigar Muradabadi was hooted away from the microphone as the audience wanted to hear the young and lyrical Nigah.

She has moved many miles away from that beginning. She stopped focusing on ghazals midway through her journey, and no more indulges in melodic renditions, but captures the audience all the same; leaving them spellbound every single time she makes her characteristically graceful appearance on stage.

This, no doubt, is the power of the creative output of an individual who has a mind of her own and quite clearly believes in thinking before putting pen to paper. Just three collections in over half a century, having no more than a hundred offerings in each book, bear ample testimony to the simple fact the she writes only when she is absolutely sure of what she is going to write and how.

Ironically, this is precisely the element that is surely going to surprise many as they go through the book in hand, which is a selected volume of Nigah’s poetry. It has a total of 31 nazms and eight ghazals which is roughly 15 per cent of her total creative output and yet it does not feature ‘Suna Hai’ which in many ways has become the poet’s representative nazm, beseeching Divinity to implement the “law of the jungle in my city”. Forget the 15pc, it will find its way in a selection of even 1pc of Nigah’s creative talent and her intellectual depth.

Asif Farrukhi, the compiler of the volume, is himself such an established name in the realm of modern Urdu critique that the miss becomes even more glaring, almost unbelievable. So unbelievable that for a moment one would wonder if it was actually Nigah who had written that masterpiece, or is one’s memory playing a trick. In that case, it is advisable to check it out and if one does that, one would find it in her second collection of verses, titled Warq.

Intriguingly, there is enough space in the published volume to accommodate a 16-line piece of high-voltage satire penned with lucid literary finesse without having to leave anything out from the current selection. And yet it is not there. There is a four-page introduction penned by Farrukhi, which, as could only be expected, is worth every word of it except for the word that is not there; a word about the selection criterion that left out ‘Suna Hai’, which Nigah is requested to recite every time she appears in public. For many, she is known because of that very nazm. The compiler and the publisher would do well to revisit their selection criteria whenever they go for a reprint.

Zehra Nigah: Intikhab-i-Kalam

(POETRY)

Compiled by Asif Farrukhi

Oxford University Press, Karachi

ISBN 978-0195476101

64pp.