he chair designated for Amjad Islam Amjad to sit in was left vacant throughout the Pakistan Literature Festival held in Lahore last week. Needless to say, he was invited but did not make it due to the intervention of providence.

It was not a surprise that he had been invited to the festival. Such was his stature that he was invited to all such events. People loved to listen to him talk about the various issues that seemed to pull the country as, indeed the world, asunder. As the world moved away from the certainties that drew the lines in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, new challenges seemed to brew up that were not that well defined and have stayed fuzzy in the fast-changing international scenario.

The geniality of Amjad Islam Amjad put a balm on the scalding bodies and smouldering materials that seemed to be threatening the social fibre, not only here but across the world. And the panacea or it was what Amjad Islam Amjad propagated, a little laid-back approach, not rushing head-on into either a situation fomenting itself or an issue already coagulated. His was an artistic response rather than that of an activist wishing well for the world but ending up only inflaming the issue. He was not there to pour oil on the flames but rather water to extinguish the fire and lower the temperature, even if unwillingly.

yeh jo hamain her shai ki farawani hae

yeh bhi toe apni jagah aik pareshani hae

(The plenty of everything, too, is a concern by itself.)

He was a poet who spoke of love and romance in a world that saw it as a compromise or escape. He did advocate a more self-assured response that still rested on hope and the possibility of redemption rather than the usefulness of upheavals considered by some to be good in them. He was able to navigate the unbridgeable divide that spread over the intellectual and artistic horizon in the years following the Partition. He was fortunate in that he lived long enough to see validated his position that hope and the desire for romance, even if a little naïve, can go a long way in settling a dispute and the splits that seem permanent.

takht say takhta door nahin hota

bus yehi baat hamain aap koe batlani hae

(All I have to tell you is that the thrones are never too far from the gallows.)

He grew up in Pakistan and in Lahore and thus was not exposed to the colonial era. He had stars in his eyes and breathed the air of a free city. The growing pestilence in the air did not dim his glittering hope in love and the undying wish to be there for everyone. He was, ironically, better known when he started writing for television, and the focus shifted to his other work. Poetry was his foremost form of expression. The poet in him probably had the potential to live much longer than the immediate flutter of the flame of instant popularity that teleplays brought.

He was able to navigate the unbridgeable divide that spread over the intellectual and artistic horizon in the years following the Partition. He was fortunate in that he lived long enough to see his position validated: hope and the desire for romance, even if a little naïve, can go a long way in settling a dispute and the splits that seem permanent.

It must be said that he was no ordinary playwright. His words, characters and situations resonated with the audiences, wanting whatever to be manageable rather than irresolvable and too hot to handle. The strict censorship also aided him to say much between the lines rather than state plainly. He went along the temperament that he had framed himself into.

Basically a non-ideological person, in the sense that he did not wear it on his sleeve, he was more interested in getting to the roots of behavioural patterns and archetypes embedded in the long history of the meshing up in the course of social and biological evolution. His diction and the simplicity of the rhythmic structure also testified to the non-complication of the issues otherwise complicated or made so by some. A more steady response to the limitations of human thought and acts made him avoid extremes. He stayed firmly in the middle.

The growing diaspora did help the cultural icons in many ways, most of all financial. The people living abroad yearned for everything back home. That longing also manifested itself in the cultural expression of poetry and music –both easily transportable rather than plays, though the trend there too gathered momentum with time and greater financial security of those settled abroad. Many in the diaspora yearned for the touch of the land in a phrase, a word or a metaphor and finding one in his poetry, they immediately identified with him. He became their voice. These people were not very educated and working in good positions in England and the Middle East but those from the working class or lower-level management positions. His audience was more diverse. It included a large segment of the urban middle classes at home, and more so, abroad.

Amjad Islam Amjad was extremely prolific. He wrote scores of plays for television - serials and long plays despite his teaching assignments and the few jobs running organisations that he was made to do during his career in the government. The number of poetry books, too, is impressive. He also wrote about his travels abroad. He was frequently invited and interacted with the Pakistanis there. His prose was simple, having no barrier to scale in understanding the text.

His poems and his prose were the man himself: full of a desire to see the world; a place to love and express with the overarching wish that it remained so, at least even if, on the surface, it appeared to be naïve. As he said many a time in his verses, what appears simple on the surface may not always be so.

Kisi ki aankh joe purnam nahin

Na samjho yeh keh us koe gham nahin.

(If you see somebody with no tears in their eyes, do not conclude that they are free from care.)

The writer is a culture critic based in Lahore