Ustad Amanat Ali Khan, the celebrated scion of the Patiala gharana [clan] of our classical music, did wonders when he took to singing geet and ghazal. When young, I regularly used to listen to Khan’s classical and semi-classical renditions, including ghazals, on those audio cassettes that needed to be flipped over manually inside the metal or plastic chamber of the tape recorder after every 30 or 45 minutes.

Some of my contemporaries and older friends may remember that we would always keep a pencil handy to fix the cassette when the tape would get stuck in the chamber. The pencil was placed in one of the two holes in the cassette and rotated slowly within the hole to bring the tape back to its original position.

On summer afternoons and during vacations from school or college — in the humid heat of Karachi or the dry heat of Lahore or Hyderabad — I remember switching off the always irritating ceiling fan in the room and gladly bearing the brunt of the heat while listening to music. All other sounds and noises had to be cut to enjoy the music fully — especially when it was something like Ustad Amanat Ali Khan singing Ada Jafarey’s ghazal, the one that ends with the couplet: “Baaqi na rahay saakh Ada dasht-i-junoon ki/ Dil mein agar andesha-i-anjaam hi aaey [The wilderness created by my madness, Ada, will lose its integrity/ If my heart, for once, feels fear of the consequences].”

This year marks the 100th birth anniversary of Ada Jafarey — the outstanding poet........

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