The Ghazal He Sang Under My Window
Off-key, borrowed verses at midnight, and the whole lane listening.
At sixteen minutes past midnight on a June night with no electricity, a man with no talent and no shame stood under my window and sang Faiz badly enough to wake three buildings.
You have to understand the stage he chose. Old Bhopal, 2004, the kind of lane where two scooters cannot pass without a negotiation. The power had been gone since ten, so the whole mohalla had dragged cots onto terraces and balconies to sleep in the open, which meant his audience was already assembled, fanning themselves in the dark, wide awake with heat and grievance. He could not have sold more tickets if he had tried.
The first line floated up, and I use the word floated generously. It lurched up. “Gulon mein rang bhare,” except the tune was wrong, the Urdu was wounded, and somewhere in the second phrase he changed keys the way a truck changes lanes, without indicating.
I lay there for exactly four seconds before vanity got me off the mattress. Because I knew... I absolutely knew... it was Salman. Final-year, cricket-team Salman, who had smiled at me twice near the college gate and once said my dupatta was the colour of first-class train curtains, which I had chosen to receive as poetry. I leaned out of the window with my heart arranged... fully prepared to be adored.
It was Irfan.
Library Irfan. Glasses taped at one hinge, kurta ironed by somebody's mother, standing in the pool of the one streetlight that ran on some private supply the electricity board had never understood. Irfan, who worked the issue desk three evenings a week and had reissued the same battered collection of Ghalib to me eleven times without ever once saying a full sentence.
He could not sing.
I want to be precise about this, because time makes people generous: he could not sing at all. A dog two houses down began to howl along in what I can only call solidarity.
From the terrace across, old Farooq chacha's voice came down like a court ruling: “Beta, it is 'gulon mein rang bhare, baad-e-naubahaar chale.' What you just did to it, even the poet's enemies never managed.”
The lane laughed.
All of it, in the dark, one laugh moving across the terraces like wind through a field. And here is the part I have never been able to explain to people from quieter places... nobody told him to stop. Instead, somebody's grandmother completed the second line for him from her balcony, in a voice that had clearly sung it properly fifty years ago. A window opened and offered the next couplet. Within two minutes, an entire lane of half-asleep strangers was feeding lines to a tone-deaf boy under a streetlight, the way you push a stalled car: everyone's hands on it, nobody asking whose it is.
Then he did the thing.
Midway through the ghazal, he stopped borrowing. He held up one hand, as if asking permission from Faiz himself, and said, not sang, said, in plain everyday words with the meter limping on one leg: “I renewed the same book eleven times. The fine I owe is not to the library.”
Silence. Complete. Even the dog.
I stood at the window with my dupatta over my mouth and understood that something had shifted in the lane's accounting, because it had shifted in mine. Anyone can copy a beautiful thing out of a book. Every romantic gesture built on poetry runs on borrowed money at the start. But that clumsy little couplet was his, made of his own evenings, his own stamped due-dates, his own eleven silences at the issue desk.
A borrowed verse says: other people have felt this. A clumsy original says: but I felt it about you.
The verdict came from the window next to mine, where my grandmother, a woman feared by vegetable sellers across three markets, had been listening the entire time. She looked down at Irfan for a long moment and announced, loudly enough for the whole jury:
“The singing is a crime. The couplet is not.”
Then she looked at me, and went inside, which in her language was a signature on a document.
It was not a film, so nothing happened quickly. What happened was chai, months of it, at the stall equidistant from both our houses because propriety has a geometry. What happened was arguments about whether Ghalib or Mir understood loss better, arguments I lost on knowledge and won on volume. What happened was a written undertaking, drafted by me on the back of a library slip, in which Irfan son of Yusuf solemnly promised never to sing again in any public or private capacity. He signed it. I still have it, dated, in the tin box with the wedding cards.
The lane, of course, never let either of us forget. For years afterward, whenever the power failed on a summer night, some joker on a far terrace would call out the first line of that ghazal into the dark and a dozen households would answer with the second, a private anthem nobody outside the lane could have decoded. At our wedding, Farooq chacha stood up, cleared his throat with terrible ceremony, and recited the library couplet back to the groom, word for word, six years after hearing it once at midnight.
That is what a lane is. A memory with washing lines.
We have been married nineteen years. He still cannot sing. The glasses are better but he still reads with his thumb keeping his place, like a man afraid the sentence will escape. A few years ago I finally typed out his couplet, the original crime, and posted it on a community wall for poets, where strangers from countries he will never visit left comments under it. He said it was a foolish thing to do and asked me twice how to take a printout.
Our daughter found the story when she was ten, the way children find everything, by interrogating her grandmother at the exact hour of maximum honesty. She demanded a reenactment. He refused with the horror of a man asked to repeat his own surgery. But on her twelfth birthday there was a folded page under her plate, four lines, meter still limping, aim still perfect, and I watched her read it and become, in eleven seconds, a person who will someday expect too much from love. Good. She should.
People ask me sometimes, when I write about memory, or about love, why so much of it happens at night, in lanes, in June. This is why. Everything I know about both subjects was installed in one power cut.
Even now, when the electricity fails at midnight in summer and the fan winds down and the heat leans in, I lie in the dark and catch myself waiting, out of pure habit... for a bad voice to start under the window.
Sometimes, when the waiting gets long, I get up, lean on the sill, and hum it myself. Off-key, naturally.
It is the only way that ghazal was ever sung.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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