Nur Jehan – one in a million
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Khalid Hasan
One of Madam Nur Jehan’s great regrets, and one she took to her grave in the sandy earth of Karachi, a city she had no feeling for, was that her illness and the insistence of her daughters and doctors had forced her to stay away from Lahore, which she loved. It was where she could feel the evening breeze blowing in from the town of Kasur where she was born and which she never forgot. What a lovely miracle it is that two people who brought such immense joy to the world, the saint Bulleh Shah and Nur Jehan, both belonged to Kasur, as Kasur belongs to them.
In the 1980s, when Nur Jehan returned to Lahore after a heart operation in the United States, she said she was unable to express the joy and the feeling of well-being that came to her the moment she stepped on the soil of Lahore. “The gentle breeze of Lahore touched my face and I knew I was home and I was well,” she said. I asked Husain Haqqani, who used to visit her during her last illness at her daughter Hina and her son-in-law, Olympian hockey star Hasan Sardar’s house, why Madam was buried in Karachi and not brought to Lahore and taken to Kasur where she wanted to lie. He told me that her daughters felt it would be auspicious to bury her on the day she had died because it was the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan. “But didn’t they know that Nur Jehan, the light of the world, was among the blessed of the earth because not every day does God bestow such talent on a mortal?” I asked.
A few years earlier, in an interview for BBC, Nur Jehan said that she had never been afraid of death because she believed that whereas life is an illusion, death is the truth. She said her faith in God is deep because to Him belongs all life and He does what He considers best. “It is my duty to beseech Him and His supreme will to give because even alms have to be begged for. I have always felt connected to God.” In one of her last conversations, she spoke about spurious drugs that both Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and she had been administered. “What greater shame can there be that for a handful of coins some people should play with the lives of others?” she asked.
Hamid Mir in a tribute to Madam after her death recounted a conversation he once had with revolutionary poet Habib Jalib. He asked Jalib why it was that while movie producers and music directors had to await their turn to be received by Madam, all he had to do was make a phone call and be welcomed. He laughed and said, “This is the same question that I put to Madam once. I said to her that though she is a woman, she allows no man to get the better of her and she never minces her words – including four-letter ones – if someone displeases her, even if he is a big shot producer. But she always ignores what I say even when I am being impertinent.” She replied, “Jalib sahib, a love affair with you I can rule out because you simply do not have it in you to undergo the scandal and the suffering that love requires. All you do is versify the truth, get roughed up by police and end up locked in jail. It is my honour to be nice to such crazy men of principle as you.” Some time later, Jalib saw a picture in a newspaper that showed General Zia-ul-Haq holding Madam’s hand in both of his close to his heart. Jalib immediately got on the phone, “Madam, what are you doing holding hands with a man whom I denounce in my verse every day?” Nur Jehan replied, “Zia sahib it was who took my hand in his. If you come, I will take your hand in mine, I promise.” Jalib lost no time arriving at Madam’s house. Nur Jehan held his hand in hers, while Jalib recited his defiant poem about his refusal to describe darkness as light, man as God, stone as diamond etc. Not only did Nur Jehan ask him to recite it several times, but she called in a photographer and told Jalib, “Now you can have this picture printed in every newspaper. I fear no general’s wrath.”
Hundreds of tributes were paid to Madam Nur Jehan after her death, one of the most eloquent being that by Jamiluddin Aali. He wrote, “Had I been a Hindu, I would have declared Madam Nur Jehan an avatar sent by the Great Creator, but there can be no doubt that she was a gift from heaven which is conferred on mortals only after centuries. She has left us with the treasure of her voice, which will become the cultural heritage of the entire world. Nature is munificent in what it confers on us and the fact is that this was Nur Jehan’s century, and she was its bride.”
Madam was her own person. She once told me that she had become Nur Jehan because of her own hard work. I wrote that she was women’s lib before there was a women’s lib, and that is a fact. She had no illusions about the contempt in which men hold women in our society and she lived life on her own terms and let no man take advantage of her.
Ali Sufyan Afaqi has recorded a unique story about Nur Jehan. On a visit to Dhaka, she stayed at the only nice hotel in the city in those days, Hotel Shahbagh. The food served to her was so good (she herself was a fantastic cook), that she asked to see the chef. When he came, she complimented him and asked what he would like. He said, “Madam, we love your voice but we hardly ever are able to go to the cinema. If you want to reward me, please sing a few songs for the hotel’s working staff.” She promised to do that after an early evening engagement. When she returned to the hotel, she learned that the management had invited what it called the “higher gentry” of Dhaka for the promised evening. She was furious. “I did not invite them; so send them packing or I will do that myself,” she told the manager. After the bewildered and bejewelled ladies and their self-important husbands had been told to go home, she appeared and sang till the small hours of the morning for the cooks, waiters and workers of the hotel and their families.
That was Madam Nur Jehan, the once and forever queen.