When I was a young teenager in the early nineteen-sixties, Urdu poetry came to me not as a discipline but as a discovery. It was the age when love, romance, longing and tragedy arrive unannounced and take residence in the heart. One does not choose them; they choose you. In that vulnerable season of life, a single sher found its way into me and settled there with an uncanny sense of belonging. I never bothered to find out the poet's name. Much later I learned that it was written by an obscure poet from India, one whose identity was slowly eclipsed as the verse itself passed into common memory. The sher became a cliche and, in doing so, completely outshone its creator.

Yaade mazi azab hai ya Rab,

Chheen le mujh se hafiza mera

At that age, the verse felt almost theatrical - memory as torment, forgetting as mercy. I admired the audacity of the thought without quite believing it. How could memory ever be a burden? Memory was identity. Memory was love's archive. Memory was proof that one had lived.

Decades passed. Life accumulated - names, faces, cities,........

© The Express Tribune