Lata Mangeshkar, the nightingale of India passed away last month on February 6 at 92, plunging not only her Indian admirers but fans across the sub-continental divide into sadness and gloom. While the untimely passing away of the nonagenarian legend drew responses from Pakistanis across the board from the Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to television, cinema and social media celebrities, one of Pakistan’s most prominent poets and playwrights in the second half of the 20th century, Amjad Islam Amjad, wrote a moving tribute to Lata on February 9.
It begins and ends with the refrain:
Gum sum gum sum saaz pade hain sur ki rani chali gai
A notable thing about Amjad’s poem is that it states the uniting power of music across borders, commenting in the second-last stanza that Lata’s voice was heard the same across both India and Pakistan:
Us ke geeton ki mehkaar
Aik si aati jaati thi
Mulkon ki sarhad ke paar
So Amjad’s entire poem titled Lata Ki Ke Liye Aik Nazm (A Poem for Lata Ji) is being presented here in my original English translation – a rare tribute from one of Pakistan’s most distinguished Urdu poets to one of India’s legendary singers on World Poetry Day today, not only to honour the craft of one of our great living subcontinental poets, but also to celebrate the power of poetry to speak to our common humanity and our shared values across borders and divided loyalties:
The instruments are lying disappointed, the queen of melody has departed
Ruined is the world of colours
The fragrance is angry with the flowers
Dry is music’s river
Making the world’s sanity fragmented, that madwoman has departed.
Whenever she would beat time in singing
The wheel of time would stop rotating
And into it the musical note would end up disappearing
The faces of the tunes became dejected, the youth of rhythm has departed.
As if they were childhood friends
For every pain of life they were the treatment
As if her songs were an ointment
The river of seven notes very much existed, its flow has departed.
It opened the dream’s doors
Scattered is that voice like flowers
Granting freshness to the ears
That morning star has drowned, the pleasant evening has departed.
Her song’s cologne
Would come and go as one
Across the border of many a nation
Every heart she intoxicated, that madwoman has departed.
The instruments are lying disappointed, the queen of melody has departed.
All the translations from the Urdu are by the writer.
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