Wo jo shayar tha/The Poet
Gulzar has addressed the themes of poetry—a poet’s agony and death—time and again. None better than the one where he speaks of a poet who dealt in silences and spoke in riddles, ‘a strange’ poet who would wake up in the night and rise on his elbows to kiss the moon (another of Gulzar’s obsession as he insists on not only holding a copyright on the moon but also swallowing it whole in the celebrated song Namak ishq ka. And then the punchline about the poet having departed that startles you with its suddenness.
Modh/Crossings
Many fans of Gulzar’s film songs will be aware of the song in the film Aandhi called Is modh se jaate hai. This poem reproduces the first two lines of the song but what makes the poem special is the way Gulzar conveys the spirit of a lover waiting at the crossroads for the beloved, convinced that a day will come when the latter will arrive at the crossing and pause to take the lover by the hand and show him the way.
Seelan/Dampness
No one speaks of the plangent sound of rainfall as evocatively as Gulzar does in this poem. As he says, Bas ek hi sur mein, ek hi lay pe, subah se dekh, dekh kaise baras raha hain udaas paani, the mind’s eye conjures the image vividly—the monotonic and melancholic rhythm and melody of the rain. Who else but Gulzar could think of describing it as udaas paani? And he goes one better, personifying thoughts and memories, which too are soaked—the rains having rendered even thoughts sodden, from which memories keep dripping.
Kitabein / Books
There isn’t an ode to books and the joy of reading better than this. Gulzar gives voice to our increasingly fragile relationship with books in the digital age. In his words, the very act of turning a page, replaced by a click of the mouse, now elicits a sob as the printed words begin to lose their meanings. And the way he invokes the forging of relationships in the act of exchanging books (finding dried flowers tucked away in them), now forever lost. Holding a book never felt this romantic.