Munir Niazi was the only egoist whose ego irritated no one because it came through with such charm and humour. After Faiz Ahmed Faiz died, someone asked Munir how the great vacuum created by the poet’s death would ever be filled. “That vacuum I was filling even when Faiz was alive,” he replied. Vintage Munir Niazi.

One of his friends and companions from the old days in Lahore, the Punjabi poet and writer Masood Munawwar, who now lives in Norway, reminisced about their long association in a memoir for the Punjabi quarterly Saanj , published from Washington by the Academy of Punjab in North America. Munir’s journey through life began in the small town of Khanpur in District Hoshiarpur, East Punjab. It took him through Srinagar, Bahawalpur and Sahiwal – when it was still Montgomery (though always called “Mintgumri”) – and ended in Lahore on December 26, 2006. While people waited in a hotel auditorium for him where he was to preside over a literary meeting, no one realised that at that precise hour, he lay dying in a city hospital instead. As Munawwar observes wistfully, Munir always had a fascination for the act of dying. This makes me think of one of the most famous of his Punjabi quatrains: The going was always difficult/And the yoke of grief around my neck was heavy/Cruel were the people of the city, no doubt/But infatuated with death I always was.

Munir spent a brief time in the Navy but never talked about it; water, however, always remained one of the central symbols in his verse. I have yet to run into someone who does not know Munir’s couplet that runs: Another river lay in front of me Munir/That was what I saw after I crossed one river. One of his Punjabi quatrains that Munawwar quotes goes: If you keep walking on this earth, you will come upon water/If you dig up the earth, you will hit upon water/From all four directions we are trapped by water/And when water sees the moon it hisses like one demented.

Munir was also fascinated by snakes. Another of his Punjabi verses, quoted by Munawwar, is: Where there is fragrance, there is snake/Where there is melody, there is snake/Deep under the ground in the dark it lives/Where there is gold there is snake.

Munir loved drink and always referred to it by its Arabic name, ummul khabais – the mother of all evil. Munawwar recounts a pleasant evening on board a ship in Karachi harbour where Munir had been invited by one of his admirers. When the first drink was poured into his glass, he picked it up and threw some over the railing into the sea below, “That is for you to drink, baby,” he said. Munir always addressed younger poets and writers as kaka , baghal bachha or Glaxo baby. Munawwar was one of his Glaxo babies.

Speaking for myself, I first became aware of Munir Niazi when Zamurrad Malik and Mehdi Naqvi came to Murray College from Montgomery and told us about this poet who wrote poetry as nobody had written it before. I still remember some of the Munir verse from those days. We found poetry of such intensity electrifying. We all knew by heart Munir’s lines about wishing the thunder to roar in the sky so that the little heart of that flirtatious girl should begin to beat violently. Then there was the couplet that asked all desolate people to take that quiet, unspeaking road, wherever it led. There was also Munir’s vision of a girl on her rooftop who looked like a stray cloud or a string of pearls. Another verse spoke about a window out of which the blossom of desire sprang no longer. It has long remained unopened.

Outside Pak Tea House, Lahore’s principle haunt of writers, there came to life in the evening an informal watering hole. Glasses, water and ice were obtained from the corner paan and cigarette kiosk. Munir and Munawwar, having suitably “irrigated” themselves one evening, were walking in the direction of Regal, both floating on cloud nine, when they ran into Habib Jalib, who, being dry and sober, was in a foul mood. He was also depressed about the political storm blowing in the country. “Don’t you worry. I have a lot of power and I can take care of all that ails you,” Munir declared grandly, as he often did. “Sure, because you have the Army and the government on your side,” Jalib shot back. That was enough to “turn around” Munir’s “meter,” “Listen, you geriatric bear, you always need a Kalabagh or an Ayub Khan to bash your head against and when you can’t find any of them, you try to ram into your friends.”

Munawwar writes, “Drinking was Munir’s ride to that strange and unique territory peopled by fairies and other worldly beauties from another dimension. There were so many worlds that lived inside Munir. The closed doors of the mansion of his intellect would be thrown open with the key “the red fairy” handed him. Behind those closed doors lived centuries that had passed, and generations that had vanished from the earth. Strange creatures inhabited those unknown spaces: ghosts, witches, banshee spirits with turned-back feet, [a] genie that took possession of men only to let them go, men of God, mendicants, wandering minstrels. It was a universe not visible to the rest of us.” Once someone asked Munir, “Khan sahib, how can you drink? Whenever I try to drink, blotches break out all over my body.” “Son,” Munir replied, “The drink always knows who is drinking her.” When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto banned drinking in the summer of 1977 to appease the mullahs, Munir was very sad. “Such a harsh measure even Hazrat Umar never ordered.”

Munir’s wit was devastating. He used to call Zaheer Kashmiri “golden scorpion.” He was utterly irreverent. Once he said to Sufi Tabussum, who was surrounded by his fawning students, “Hello Baby Tabussum.” Baby Tabussum was a child star of the Bombay cinema of the 1950s.

But let me end this with a Munir poem that he called Six Coloured Doors. In front of my house/have sprung up flowers in six colours/as if they had risen from a dream/ doors leading to a new peace/More colours behind their colours lie/And much more that can only be imagined/There are many cities that lie behind those flowers/And many other doors.

If Munir Niazi is reading this, I only ask him to forgive my translations, for old time’s sake.

(Friday Times - July 13, 2007)