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There are poems we inherit the way we inherit family recipes or old shawls folded into cedar trunks. They arrive wrapped in affection, carrying the scent of another generation. My mother never had the luxury of lingering over music. She was raising three children in a bustling joint family, tending to my grandparents, hosting guests who seemed to arrive with the certainty of a sunset and helping with homework, all the while ensuring lunch, tea and dinner appeared on time. Yet every now and then, almost absent-mindedly, she would begin humming. Sometimes it was Bahadur Shah Zafar mourning an empire lost but not his dignity. Sometimes it was Faiz Ahmed Faiz asking, “Mujhse pehli si mohabbat mere mehboob na maang (Don’t ask for the love of the old days my beloved).” She was not performing. She was remembering. Looking back, I realise she was teaching us something without ever intending to: songs outlive circumstances. Poetry survives the kitchens in which it is first whispered.

My grandparents taught me something similar, though in quieter ways. They had lived through Partition, yet they refused to speak of it as though humanity itself had fractured. Borders had changed, they would say. Maps had been redrawn. But people were still people. Love had not acquired a religion overnight. Grief had not begun asking for passports. My maternal grandparents spoke of Lahore and Delhi, of friends left behind, not with bitterness but with longing. My paternal grandfather found his deepest peace not in political arguments but in travelling to Agra, to the Radha Soami satsang (spiritual gathering) where his guru awaited. We children waited for something altogether more earthly: the laddoos (sweets) he would bring back. Years later, he would breathe his last there, at the feet of the spiritual teacher he revered. I was barely five, too young to understand death, yet old enough to understand that devotion had somehow softened its arrival. Even then, memory was teaching me that faith was never meant to divide. It was meant to deepen.

The first protest I ever attended unsettled that childhood certainty.

Safdar Hashmi had been murdered. An artist had been killed because he believed theatre belonged in the streets, among ordinary people, rather than safely behind curtains. I stood amid the crowd as a schoolboy, overwhelmed by adults whose grief had become public. Somewhere between the placards and the silence, between the slogans and the tears, I understood that poetry was not merely something recited at mushairas (poetry recitals) or remembered from schoolbooks. It could stand in front of power. It could become witness. It could become dangerous.

That was the day Sahir Ludhianvi stopped being a lyricist of beloved film songs and became something much larger in my imagination. He became a companion. His immortal words did not feel like literature. They felt like a moral compass:

“Zulm phir zulm hai, baṛhtā hai to miṭ jātā hai; Khoon phir khoon hai, ṭapke gā to jam jāegā.” (Tyranny remains tyranny. When it grows beyond measure, it destroys itself. Blood remains blood. Once spilled, it does not vanish. It remains. It remembers.)

“Zulm phir zulm hai, baṛhtā hai to miṭ jātā hai; Khoon phir khoon hai, ṭapke gā to jam jāegā.”

(Tyranny remains tyranny. When it grows beyond measure, it destroys itself. Blood remains blood. Once spilled, it does not vanish. It remains. It remembers.)

A year later, in 1990, came the Mandal Commission protests. Again I found myself among students, but this time the air itself seemed charged with desperation. What frightened me was not the shouting. It was the fire. Young people were setting themselves alight. What astonished me was not merely that they did it, but that they believed death might be the only language left capable of being heard. Even today, I remember wondering what kind of nation leaves its children believing flames speak more loudly than words.

That question has never left me.

Perhaps that is why I have never believed that poetry belongs only to romance. Long before politicians invented slogans, poets had already named the wound. Long before newspapers counted casualties, poets had documented the cost to the human soul. History records victories and defeats; poetry records what victory felt like to the mother who waited, the child who watched, the neighbour who buried a friend.

Mirza Ghalib understood this with astonishing precision when he asked:

“Ragon mein daudte phirne ke hum nahin qa’il, Jab aankh hi se na tapka, to phir lahoo kya hai?” (What is blood if it never rises to the eyes, never becomes tears, never responds to another’s suffering?)

“Ragon mein daudte phirne ke hum nahin qa’il, Jab aankh hi se na tapka, to phir lahoo kya hai?”

(What is blood if it never rises to the eyes, never becomes tears, never responds to another’s suffering?)

Between Ghalib’s question and Sahir’s answer lies an entire philosophy of citizenship. Blood is not just what flows through our veins. It is memory. It is witness. It is the quiet refusal to allow another human being’s pain from becoming anonymous.

The first protest I attended did not teach me whom to support. It taught me something infinitely more enduring. It taught me that every generation eventually arrives at a moment when it must decide if it will merely observe history or remember its humanity. And perhaps that is why the greatest poems never really belong to yesterday. They wait patiently for another frightened young person standing in another crowd, asking the same ancient question: What do we owe one another when conscience calls? 

Years after those first protests in Delhi, another city, another continent and another set of marches would teach me that Sahir’s poetry had quietly crossed oceans before I ever did.

New York became my university in ways no classroom ever could. I marched with friends for LGBTQ rights when the AIDS epidemic still carried with it not only disease but also shame, fear and astonishing indifference. ACT UP activists would lie down in the streets, allowing their bodies to become the protest itself. As police officers........

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