My eldest recently lost his childhood friend to a hit-and-run. Over the years, the young man had grown into almost family. He was a most loving son, brother and friend. An adventurer, a storyteller, a musician, always the life of the party. Blessed with every gift but the gift of years.
No matter how well prepared you think you are, death always splits something open. A child’s death, however, is something entirely else. It is not just loss but an inversion, a glitch in the natural scheme of things. Like sunset at dawn or a story half told that suddenly jumps to the end. Millions of years of evolution and humans still haven’t developed the ability to cope with it. The grief sits forever with the bereaved parents, slipping inside their inner most recesses, changing them at the cellular level. We all know, at least, one such set of parents.
In the days following the fatal accident in England and before the funeral in Pakistan, there were many times I thought of messaging the bereaved mother but couldn’t bring myself to. I had no words, just verses in Urdu and Punjabi giving words to thoughts too deep for us ordinary mortals cursed with a crushing poverty of language. I kept thinking of the dear boy returning home from saat samundar paar (across the seven seas)—that old incantation our elders used, infused with impossible distances and longing. Factually incorrect, as we know now, but in those hours, it felt truer than any geography lesson.
There were also hazy memories of handwritten condolence letters in chaste Urdu addressed to my parents from when my grandparents passed away in quick succession while I was still in single digit years. My heart broke all over again for my parents, years younger than I am now having the kind of shelter taken away from them that none but a parent can provide yet having to find refuge in the elegance of handwritten condolences.
I was almost tempted to write a condolence letter myself but wasn’t sure my fingers could manoeuvre themselves deftly enough to trace the Urdu alphabet anymore.
Moments like these brought home a realisation. The pitiful inadequacy of the English language in cradling our grief, our metaphor, our idiom, our cultural, religious, and emotional nuances that shape how we mourn through rituals we have devised over the centuries that—no matter how briefly—calm shattered hearts and soothe battered souls.
How do you explain to someone who doesn’t know, how nothing comes close to capturing the finality, the stoicism and the continuity of Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raje’un (To Allah we belong and to Him we must return). The phrase carries an entire cosmology within it where death is not departure but a return to origin, a realisation that we do not go somewhere else when life ends. That the real ‘elsewhere’ was this mortal world all along. Our years here lent to us for all too brief a while.
Having lost seven children, Mirza Ghalib captures a culturally specific stage of grief where the immediacy of loss allows for a strange, momentary irreverence toward the promise of Judgment Day
And it is within the ache of ancestral words, the deep river of verses in Urdu and Punjabi that our grief and our understanding of life and death find the deepest resonance. These are languages where dukh (grief) rhymes with sukh (joy). Languages in which the great masters had managed to map mourning long before Psychologists codified the stages of grief. Couplet after couplet rich in lived experiences of personal losses rendered universally and timelessly and refusing to adhere to linear timelines or neat categories. Every word acting as a mirror for the mourner, not always explicitly named but intensely felt and enshrined in the diction of our ancestors.
How do you explain to those who don’t speak the language, the poetic profundity of supurd-e-khaak? How Anwar Masood, widely loved for his humorous poetry, wrote a single, searing couplet for his beloved wife. Just one, but it is one for the ages:
“Khaak main dhoondte hain sona log,
Humne sona supurd-e-khaak kiya.”
(Some search for gold among dust,
Some of us, entrust the dust with our gold.)
Then there is Mirza Ghalib who encountered death like few others, losing child after child to infant mortality—seven in all—followed by his beloved foster son, too, taken in the bloom of youth.
“Jaate hue kehte ho Qayamat ko milenge
Kya khoob Qayamat ka hai goya koi din aur”
(You left, the promise is to meet on the Day of Judgment
How absurd! As if today were anything less than that day!)
The couplet names a stage of grief that is culturally specific to societies like ours, steeped in religious tradition and the idiom of faith—irreverence. Unthinkable in any other moment but mandated just this once by the immediacy of the loss. A brief unmooring when compared to the apocalypse that is the immediate, future promises of consolation seem unbearably remote and cruel. How does one explain the strange sanctity of such momentary irreverence?
Then there is the kind of grief endemic to mystical tradition that permeates ‘arifana kalam’ and ‘kaafis’ where all sorrow pales in front of the ultimate sorrow: separation at birth from the only Beloved that ever was or will be—the Almighty. A separation from which all wretchedness that permeates life’s journey takes root. A grief that begins not in the world but long before it, every misery an echo of that original severing.
Shah Hussain transforms this perennial, nameless grief in all its intensity into a tangible, searing metaphor like none other when he says:
“Dukhan di roti, soolan da saalan, aahen da balan baal ni
Maaye ni main kinoon aakhan dard vichoray da haal ni”
(Bread kneaded from sorrow, curry made of thorns, simmered over a fire fueled by wails
O Mother, with whom do I share the pangs of this wretched separation?)
In the aftermath of the tragedy, it was this image—Shah Hussain’s impossible meal—that kept recurring. The grief in those lines no longer metaphorical or mystical but immediate, almost palpable. Bread kneaded from sorrow, curry of thorns, a fire fed by sighs: perhaps the only words that did some semblance of justice to the intensity of the hurt without making any pretence towards premature closure.
Funerals of the young have traditionally been likened to a wedding procession that would never be. The burial of young girls evokes the image of rukhsati, leaving their father’s house for the marital abode. Faiz Ahmad Faiz employs the same metaphor in his heart-rending Falasteeni Bachche ke Liye Lori (A Lullaby for the Palestinian Baby) when he writes:
“Teri baaji ka dola paraye daes gaya hai”
(Your elder sister’s palanquin has left for an unfamiliar land.)
A quietly devastating reference to mass murder at the hands of genocidal maniacs perpetually on the loose since the many decades these lines were written.
No less heartbreakingly, funerals of young men are a wedding procession turned on its head, except there is no celebratory song or dance, as tradition might once have allowed. Only wails and the chant of the Kalima.
Poet Aslam Kolsari employs the same metaphor in this couplet eulogising his school-going son. The cruel duality of flowers, once meant to adorn a sehra, now scattered over the grave:
“Jo phool sajaane thay mujhe teri jabeen par,
Bheegi hui mitti par phelaaye nahin jaate.”
(Flowers once meant to grace the sehra over your brow
How does one scatter them over the damp mud of your grave?)
There comes a moment at every funeral when, from the periphery, you turn into the main character. Anywhere else, you might shrink at the sheer selfishness of it, but this is the nature of the beast that is communal mourning. It pulls you backwards through memory, stirring the ghosts of griefs past: those gone too soon and those taken in their time, the near and the far, the distant and the recent. In that moment, you ache to embrace, one last time, the ones now held in the earth’s eternal embrace. And you think of Iqbal’s lines:
“Haan dikha day aye tassawur phir woh subah shaam tu
Daur peeche ki taraf aaye gardish-e-ayyam tu.”
(In my mind I relive those days and those nights
For a fleeting moment, I turn backwards the march of time)
When the dust settles and pain makes its home in a deeper place, it is festive occasions when, ironically enough, loss makes itself felt with the most intensity. This recognition is behind the age-old tradition of visiting the bereaved family on the first Eid after the loss. Mian Mohammad Bakhsh gives voice to families who brace themselves for absence and the gnawing ache that returns with each festive gathering:
“Eidan tay Shabratan aayiyaan, saare loki ghar noo aaye
O naeen aaye, Mohammad Bakhsha, jehray aap hathi dafnaye.”
(Eid and Shab-e-Barat came; everyone returned home
But not those, O Mohammad Bakhsh, whom we buried with our own hands)
Over time, grief takes as many forms as the people it visits. Some manage to reconcile themselves with the new abode of the deceased, directing their love to their final resting place. For those who attain this reconciliation, no prayer is more tender than Allama Iqbal’s for his mother, rendered in a language of such luminous beauty that it can bring tears even to those who have not known such a personal loss:
“Aasmaan teri lehed pay Shabnam afshani karey
Sabza o lala iss ghar ki nigehbani karey”
(May the sky bathe your grave in dew
May flowers and verdant greens watch over your new abode)
There is, too, another posture of mourning: that of transcendence. It is the pinnacle of all stages of grief that only a few rare individuals through history have experienced, the rest of us mortals only encountering it second hand through their impassioned words. It is ascent towards a realm where death is not severance but an ascension to our purer selves. The one lying entombed beneath mounds of earth no longer the hazy figure of memory but who they were always meant to become. Nothing captures it more vividly than Bulleh Shah’s assertion:
“Bulleh Shah asaan marna naahin
Gorr peya koi horr”
(Bulleh Shah the self never dies
No mortal dwells in that grave)
Beyond all these binaries—neat and messy, codified and free-flowing, native and alien—are parents who outlive their children, like those of the precious boy whose departure set these thoughts in motion. Condemned to the cyclical nature of grief, their lives governed for all their days by that singular loss, in Ghalib’s lament they find a mirror. Ghalib, that high priest of parental pain, who penned:
“Maqdoor Ho To Khaak Se Pouchon Ke Ae Laeem
Tu nay woh ganj haiye garan maaya kya keeye?”
(If I could, I would ask the dust: O wretched one
What did you do with those priceless treasures?)