Summary
Writer Amitav Ghosh and poet Shahid Ali were friends for a little while.Shahid was dying with blood cancer and their friendship bloomed when one of them was dying.One day Shahid asked Amitav to write about him, his poetry and about his Kashmir after his death.It was an unusual request and quite confused pained, Amitav agreed.Shahid died, better say, his soul left his body at 2 A.M. on December 8.An unbridgeable emptiness filled the author’s mind.“So brief a friendship” resulted in “so vast a void”.Both Sháhid and Shahid – “witness and martyr” – mingled and melted into eternity.The author kept his promise. He wrote this article on Shahid Ali – “Ghat of the Only World.”
Starting – Shahid As a Poet
Shahid or Shahid Ali was a poet. Through his poems, through his melodious words and stunning sentences, he gave liberty to life to shake hands with death.Knowing the fact very well that time was limited, Ali opened his treasure-trove of enormous life force and tied Ghosh with the ropes of nostalgia.
Shahid’s Love for Kashmir
His words revealed the heat of the political lava during his stay in Kashmir.During this short period of their friendship Shahid had left some fabulous brushstrokes of an unambiguously different Kashmir.Even being a firm believer in the separation of politics and religious practice, he set apart the separatism, atrocities and violence that had already led the paradise to a paradise lost.When his childhood loitered about in the room of Srinagar, he fervently placed a desire of desires to his parents. It was but to establish a small Hindu temple inside his room.He was no pharisaic at all, even at the time of his standing on the burning atlas of Kashmir.With the passage of time, idols and other trappings were bought by his mother, and the innermost part of their house became the holiest place a temple.In this way, his house became a religious confluence of Hinduism and Islam.
Shahid’s love for Food
Even during his last stage of cancer with everything confirming his death, Shahid was able to enjoy food and talked about food.Whenever there was a party around, he attended it without failure.Was it to please his hunger or was it to please his companions, we do not know.
Shahid and Cancer
For Shahid Ali cancer was like a joke. He admitted it but never admitted his defeat to cancer.“Almost to the very end, even as his life was being consumed by his disease, he was the centre of a perpetual carnival, an endless mela of talk, laughter, food and of course, poetry.”He celebrated life that anybody could think he was defeating death day by day. But death builds no paradox.Shahid was suffering from cancer, some fourteen months at the beginning of the account.When he could see nothing, his words appeared to be a moving epitaph, “I hope this doesn’t mean that I’m dying…”
Shahid and Amitav
Amitav kept his promise, and opening into painful and tender memories with concealed skill, which hid his pain even from himself.Agha Shahid Ali was everything Amitav Ghosh lost and hence The Ghat of the Only World has been written to reincarnate him – to breathe life into their unbroken friendship.
