So stable was our world those days thatthe heart transplant performed by Dr Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town registeredwith our untrained imaginations as something of a miracle which only prophets inBiblical times performed.
Soon after the daily editorial conference most of the reporters (I was thejunior-most) assembled in that broad verandah of Statesman House on BarakhambaRoad, looked towards CP, lit our cigarettes and discussed the heart of a blackman which had been grafted into the chest of a man who was white. The detail wasof supreme interest because not only had the frontiers of transplant surgerybeen pushed beyond belief, but racial distance had also been symbolicallynarrowed in apartheid-era South Africa.
From behind the columns of CP appeared a man with a receding hairline, long greyhair settled on his shoulders and a thick bushy beard, making him look ratherlike Karl Marx. It was Niaz Haider, or Niaz Chacha as we called him, an Urdupoet of incredible talent, but permanently at odds with the literaryestablishment because of his cantankerous ways and frequent, drunken brawls. Hehad persuaded himself that being a poet in penury gave him total access to thepockets of his admirers.
"Dus rupaye de," he said. He looked disturbed. "They are denying usour symbols — the moon, the heart." He said he was going to the bhaangtheka in Hauz Qazi, and would later write a poem on heart transplant.
Just then Lakshmanan in the teleprinter office passed me a message from DesmondDoig, my senior colleague in Calcutta. The filmstar Shirley Maclaine, a friend of Desmond’s, was in Delhi. Desmond wantedme to pick her up from the Imperial hotel and give her an off-beat tour of thecity. It was important for my future in The Statesman that she gave agood report of my resourcefulness to Desmond.
Like a flash, an idea suggested itself. An Urdu poet, teeming with ideas, in alicensed bhaang shop in old Delhi! Off we went in my two-door StandardHerald in search of the bhaang shop in Hauz Qazi, along the lane startingat Turkman Gate.
What fascinated Shirley was that marijuana, banned in the west, was openly soldin India. This required some explaining. The cannabis plant yields threeintoxicants—the resinous charas, leafy ganja and the root of theplant, bhaang. The first two which are smoked are indeed banned. Bhaangis drunk with milk or mixed with Indian sweets, a standard concoction duringHoli.
Shirley and Niaz got on like a house on fire. They both had two glasses of bhaangthandai and retired to the Imperial hotel, in separate rooms, paid for byShirley Maclaine.
It was in these opulent surroundings that Urdu’s original street poet wrotehis poem on heart transplant, including this couplet:
"Woh paimana jo dil ki/ tareh dilkash hai, pila saqi!" (Give me, ohwine-bearer, the cup which is as exquisite as the human heart.)
Like many of Niaz’s poems, this one too was never published and is lost. Butif readers are interested, I can coax my memory and reproduce all that I canremember for an instalment some day in these pages.
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This article originally appeared in Delhi City Limits, January 15,2006
