(I)

Few people have a taste for the slow train to anywhere, anymore, but to get to Hyderabad -- one of the largest cities of the country -- there seems to be no other way, and then to have all of five minutes to jump off the train without twisting an ankle with so many people pressing against you -- old people, children, the indisposed and all their plastic bags of food and reluctant baggage that refuses to get off the train. But you are happy to be there at the sleepy old white-washed colonial-oriental railway station with bleary eyed porters and hawk eyed cabbies. All air transport to and from Hyderabad has been suspended due to political instability with no alternate solution being considered necessary or urgent.

In the early morning light, the city feels like another country with vegetables and fruit vendors plying slightly different looking fare as you catch a glimpse of lotus leave seeds and shoots or pabora and beh from Larkana, raw dates or khajji from Khairpur and custard apple or sharifa from Shikarpur being carried away on creaking bicycles from the outland to the market square.

You cannot quite understand the weather either since it is nothing like Karachi - southern Sindh - two hours away by road nor is it hot and dry like upper Sindh for Hyderabad is wedded to the moods of the Indus. When the river is fed and full, Hyderabadevenings are to die for.

But even a casual drive around the city tells you of the apartheid conditions where local Sindhi settlers live segregated on the outer periphery of the city away from the more recent migrant Urdu-speaking communities who now occupy its centre. Even so, there is no evident anger or discrimination on the streets because politics does not live on the streets but in the living rooms of politicians while people carry on as usual with the daily grind.

Too early for the markets to open, there are yet too many bookshops and printing presses along the way to ignore. This has always been a city where people read a lot, write a lot, print a lot of new works. It has sprouted several generations of poets and philosophers, singing mendicants and mystics, and while local Sindhis speak of such a time with nostalgia, it is clear the tradition continues to this day. I promise myself to get the book on Hassan Dars, a young poet recently dead, the most recent romantic who never published but only read his work with a book now written on him by the intellectual woman -- also his mother-in-law -- Mehtab Mehboob.

 *****

I travel across the river to Jamshoro with its clear air and its intense dark nights. I go to meet a poet about another poet I love deeply.

"What do you consider the most authentic collection of Shah Abdul Latif’s works?" I ask the director of the Institute of Sindhology, University of Sindh, Abdul Qasim Maka.

"All of them, read them all, and you will find the true voice. But beware of commentaries, translations, even the Ganj, or collected works, because these are personal choices, interpretation. For instance, some senior scholars throw out Sur Kedaro from the Risalo where Latif sings the song of Karbala with such passion. Others make him secular, nationalist, or a folklorist."

Maka is a Latif scholar, an archivist and poet who has compiled over a thousand recordings of the fakirs who sing the kalaam or poetry all night, every night between Isha and Fajr since the past 300 years. He is known for his radio days, his radio voice halting, thoughtful, distinct and a little self-conscious. He reads me many of his favourite couplets from Latif but I dare not reciprocate and equate the relationship.

Maka is a living example of how this city works with radio, film, music and poetry coming together. Radio has been big in Hyderabad -- big anywhere in the country just a couple of decades ago -- training ground for film stars like Muhammed Ali and later Mustafa Qureshi, when the local film industry was big too with over 18 theatres in the city, each distinguished by the local fast food they had to offer. Film songs used to be printed and sold in small, green booklets outside the theatres because music and poetry has always been connected in this part of the world.

Even classical poets like Latif wrote poetry to ragas and sang it. It was people who loved and valued him who have compiled his works and debate continues to this day on authenticity and intent. I later visit the Sindhi Language Authority for the several new and old compilations of Latif’s works, including books for children: Advani, Gurbakhshani, Nabi Baksh Baloch, G. N. Kazi in Sindhi, Elsa Kazi, Durre Shewar Syed, G. Allana, Agha Saleem, and several others in English.

"And why are there so many women as lead characters in Shah Sain’s poetry?" I ask.

Maka smiles and we talk at length about the feminine as archetype and metaphor, as the vulnerable soul in epic journeys of discovery. We also speak about the Hindu understanding of prakriti as the feminine principle, the embodied self that must ultimately pass on to become spirit.

But equally, Latif Sain is a local name, a people’s poet, local sweetshop, pan shop, barbeque outlet. His poetry is taught to school children and is sung by every senior performer; any Sindhi you come across will know a couplet or two or the refrain of a song, except for the middle classes struggling to make themselves modern. Even Hassan Dars knew that poetry had no truck with bourgeois modernity that eventually trapped him, killed him.

Dars was for years the beloved of Hyderabad’s literati but he loved his small village near Tando Allahyar and resented the changes roads and motorists had brought to it. In interviews, he spoke of why he believed modernisation was mostly about commercialism and speed that spread ugliness, slothfulness and inattention. He believed too much was being written and published which was not good, he felt he had been silenced in such noise, and yet, Dars knew he had no calling except that of a poet.

Tomorrow I will go to Gadi Khata, paradise of small publishers, hell to motorists, to look for the book on someone who disliked being made into a book. I will try to find this lifestyle of poets that was once and still is so much a part of Hyderabad.

Read: Hyderabad Diaries II: Philosophical deliberations on the meaning of a cake