Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; January 18, 2019)

Kisko sunaoon haal dil-e-bekaraar ka
Bujhta hua charag hoon apne mazaar ka
Aye kaash bhool jaaun magar bhoolta nahi
Kis dhoom se utha tha janaza bahaar ka
Yeh duniya yeh mehfil
Mere kaam ki nahi…

When Chetan Anand decided to bring the folk legend of Heer Raanjha to the screen in verse, it was a one-of-its-kind experiment. Half a century later, Kaifi Azmi’s words still resonate. “He was a serious poet and his songs were simply an extension of his poetry,” asserts Shama Zaidi, screenplay writer, art director, costume designer, and theatre artiste who knew him since her days with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA).

She flashbacks to when young writers and journalists, theatre artistes and his daughter Shabana Azmi’s actor friends would hang out at his place. Zaidi remembers that writer-playwright, Rajinder Singh Bedi, had suggested M S Sathyu make his directorial debut with the story of a Muslim family which does not migrate to Pakistan after the Partition. The script was based on an unpublished short story by Ismat Chughtai half of whose family had crossed the border.

“I showed the script to a few people, including my father (politician-educationist Bashir Hussain Zaidi), who liked the story but told me the politics was all wrong so I took it to Kaifi Saab and asked him to fix that aspect,” says Zaidi, pointing out that using the same situations and characters, he rewrote the entire film in a couple of months. “I edited it again, he made a few changes and we were ready to roll.”

Prod her on the changes and she reveals that the original story, which begins in 1947 in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence from British rule, ended with the whole family leaving India only to realise, disappointed, that even in Pakistan things were not hunky dory as it had appeared from afar. “Kaifi Saab reasoned that since it was a story of people who don’t wish to relocate, they shouldn’t go to Pakistan at all,” informs Zaidi. The film eventually concluded with the patriarch, Salim Mirza, turning back from the railway station to join his younger son Sikander and a crowd of protestors marching against unemployment and discrimination, staying back in India to fight for his rights.

The story which Chughtai had placed in Lucknow being from western UP herself, was also shifted to Agra, as Kaifi saab, who was from Azamgarh, “didn’t think the characters behaved like those from western UP”. And Mirza Saab who started out as a railway employee, became the owner of a small shoe shop. “Kaifi Saab had worked with leather workers in Agra and Kanpur as a trade union leader and knew the world well,” says Zaidi, who shared the Filmfare Award for best screenplay with Kaifi Saab who also took home the Black Lady for dialogue. Garm Hava was India’s official entry to the Oscars in the Best Film in a Foreign Language category and at the National Film Awards was adjudged the Best Feature Film on National Integration.

Prod her on the man himself and she remembers him as someone who didn’t speak much and had a dry sense of humour. “He would say something with a straight face, only later did you realise that he was pulling your leg,” says Zaidi, who breaks into peals of laughter as she recalls them visiting all the haunts of Sultana Daku, including a fort on the foothills of the Himalayas where he’d been imprisoned after the British labelled the villagers a criminal tribe and forcibly tried to convert them to Christianity, for a film they were writing together. “He escaped with many others and they became dacoits. While trying to piece together his life story, we met a man who offered to put us in touch with someone who’d known Sultana Daku, along with some nimboo pani while we waited. The sherbet took an hour coming, with someone being sent to the market to buy lemons. After that, when he asked us to stay for dinner, Kaifi saab told me quietly that we should make our escape because a meal would take even longer coming.” Sultana Daku was shelved after director Sukhdev got into a fight with the producer and so was a film version of Laila-Majnu because someone else came out with a bad film on the same subject. “The last thing he was working on was a play based on his long Urdu poem Zehr-e-Ishq . We had a reading before he fell ill and never recovered. It can never be performed because half the manuscript is lost,” sighs Zaidi.

Kaifi saab’s birth centenary was celebrated on January 14.