Once i was a little kid.
I know everyone was a little kid once .. Even you.
I didn’t hear you tell me a story that started like this,
so you might as well just listen, instead of already having an opinion. 

I wasn’t the only kid my mother had.
I was her first though.
I had two brothers and four sisters even before i was born.
Two out of the six of my siblings were almost as old as my mother.
She couldn’t share the joys and suffering of bringing up
all of us, with my fathers first wife, because my fathers first wife had died two years before my mother got married to my father.
Soon, i also had a younger brother and a little later,
a younger sister.

All my brothers and sisters were crazy about the movies.
I wasn’t much.
One day, on my annual winter holiday, back at home from school,
I heard a voice on the radio.
That voice has stayed with me all my life.
It was the voice of Mehzabeen.
She was more widely, but not better, known
as Meena Kumari .. the actress.
My mother though called her Mehzabeen.

Then i started watching a lot of movies with my brothers and sisters and friends.
Now i like to watch films alone, only with strangers in a cinema theater.
Through a series of accidents over the years,
i am now making films.

Now where did Mehzabeen go from this story ?
Not far. For she is the heart of this matter.

A few years after that voice on the radio
and many seen movies later ..

I was on a visit to one of my elder sisters,
who lived in Bombay at that time.
I bumped into an old school friend one day.
I hadn’t met him in years.
It was pouring cats and dogs.
After a chat in which we felt we had bridged the years,
he said he wanted us to go to a man’s house and pelt stones at it.
I didn’t like the random idea too much,
but was very curious to know why he wanted to do that.
He said he wanted to get back all the poetry that actually belonged to Mehzabeen, and was in that man’s possession.
My friend was biologically related to Mehzabeen, closely.

So off we went, and enroute i told him,
that a chat would be a first step idea,
with the stone pelting being a second step one, in case.
He said all chats had failed.
He was now not allowed to even enter that man’s house.
On one occasion the security guard had set a dog upon him.
And this was a house that Mehzabeen had gifted to that man.

It was pouring sheets of rain as we climbed up a road that went uphill in Bandra.
We stopped at a roadside teashop.
My friend took out a completely worn notebook now also wet from the pouring rain
Most of it was in tatters and most of it illegible.
The writing was in Urdu.
It was then i heard the couplet which i have translated ..

patta patta din pighla
boota boota raat ghali
jiska jitna daaman tha
utni hi saugaat mili.

© Mehzabeen

The rain and the storm refused to let up
and by the time it did,
my friend and i had both decided to talk to an uncle of his,
who would help us get back the notebooks.
So off we went.
We met the uncle.
He was a pragmatic man.
He said he knew about all this, but there was no way to prove what the truth about the notebooks matter, really was.
Still, he would try to do something about it.
It was after all Mehzabeen who had gifted him this palatial bungalow, as easily as she had gifted so many loves, and faith and passions and trust, and careers, and houses and cars,
to so many people.

For herself she had kept just the bottle.

Again a few years passed and i reconnected with my friend.

We spoke about the notebooks and that rainy day.
My friend said he had figured by now, to let some things be.
I said we should still try.
I wanted to do a translation of the poetry in English.
He said he didn’t think we could do much about this matter.
He did tell me though that there was a book published.
He didn’t know by whom or where.
I tried looking for it over a few years,
not much determinedly though.
I never found it.

Just that one couplet remained.
And came back.
On an ssT post-
on a network called Caferati.
I wrote,

Leaf by leaf
the day melted
petal after petal
Fell the night..
Only as much true as your heart could be,
Just that much, is what you got ..

The accidents continue showing their truths.

Some readers elsewhere contended that Mehjabeen was the proper pronounciation, and pointed to the care one must take when writing the names of people well known. Or something like that.
I have called her Mehzabeen because that is how i first heard her name,
from my mother and the Radio Announcer (RJ in current terminology)
My mother still remains my mother, terminology changes notwithstanding.