Iftikhar Nasim
It became customary to describe Ifti Nasim as an openly gay Pakistani Muslim poet living in Chicago. The way I saw him everything about him, except the fact of him being a poet, was either incidental or extraneous or both.Ifti Nasim was all poet and everything he did in his life was an extension of that sensibility.
“Yaar shayar hun. Usi nazariye se sab dekhta hun (I am a poet and I view everything from that standpoint)," is how Ifti would describe himself. “Aur jo bhi karta hun (Whatever I do), including doing men, I do so with the passion of a poet,” he once told me as he burst out into his somewhat high pitch guffaw.
I was introduced to Ifti by fellow journalist and friend Ashok Easwaran over five years ago. So somehow it seems fitting that it was Ashok who called me yesterday afternoon to ask, “Are you coming for Ifti’s funeral?” It was only on Friday afternoon that Ashok had informed me that Ifti had had a stroke and the prognosis did not look good. Ashok and I were planning to jointly appear on Ifti’s radio show Sargam most likely this evening at a studio in downtown Chicago.
When I first met Ifti, I was reminded of a question that waiters in London restaurants ask, “Sparkling or still?” to find out whether you want carbonated water or just plain water. Ifti was like sparkling water, forever effervescent. He had an expression that always suggested of an impending banter. More often than not he did not let you down. Whenever the three of us got together, which was rather seldom, our conversation would leap from the sublime to the profane to the ridiculous to the profound.
“Yaar, yehi to zindgi ka sarmaya hai. Kabhi shayari, kabhi gaali, Kabhi haasil, kabhi khayali, (This is what life’s sum total is. Sometimes poetry, sometimes profanity, Sometimes real, sometimes imagined,” I once told him. Ifti’s response was, “Maynak, kyun aur nahi likhte ho? (Maynak, why don’t you write more?”) Like of a lot of people from Punjab, both India and Pakistan, Ifti too happily and unselfconsciously mauled my name from Mayank to Maynak.
A prolific poet and writer, Ifti said he discovered poetry as a boy of 12 when one of his cats went missing. “Billi to kho gayi lekin shayari mil gayi (I lost the cat but found poetry),” is how he put it. A dandy dresser, who turned sartorial conventions upside down, Ifti was a genuine humanist who deeply cared about the human condition. Never unmindful of and forever grateful to America, Ifti said he discovered his creative and personal freedom after coming to Chicago.
A deeply committed anti-war and human rights activist, Ifti was also a quiet worker for the cause of his own Pakistani community. “The orthodox among the Pakistani community in Chicago did view me with wariness and even hostility initially but after they saw my involvement in helping the local Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11, they learned to look beyond it,” Ifti used to say.
Ifti had that rare combination of being a great raconteur who had amassed so many great stories and anecdotes. For instance, he once told me quoting the great ghazal singer Mehdi Hassan that the best way to get that deep tone in one’s singing voice was to smoke cigarettes.
Ifti was also gifted in the art of making friends. There was something to his demeanor that spoke easy amiability. But that could also be a bit misleading because he could just as easily filter out those he could not suffer.
He described himself as a post-modern poet whose idiom was not the traditional Urdu poetry type. He summed up his life’s philosophy in these two lines:
“Jo khuda par nahi, insaan pe rakhta hai yekin
Dil ko achchha laga us shakhs ka kafir hona”
(The one who trusts humans more than god
The heart likes that unbeliever)
Note: It is possible that my translation of the last two lines is way off the mark. Unfortunately, Ifti is not around to correct it.
