‘Couldn’t keep her request but it didn’t sour relations’
Gulzar recounts his times spent with Punjabi poet Amrita Pritam
wrote some poetry.
She asked me to recite a poem and I recited ‘Dastak’, which spoke of friends arriving from across the border coming to our home and mats being laid out in the courtyard and food being cooked, but alas it turns out to be just a dream. She made me recite it again at lunchtime and after t he pack-up she asked me to stay back with Basu Da.
There grew a literary acquaintance with the acclaimed poet and she took interest in my writing and lyrics. She also published several of my poems in a magazine she brought out with Imroz.
After some more years of struggle, I became a director and set up my one-room office in Cosy Homes at Pali Hill in Mumbai. One day Amrita and Imroz came to meet me there. I welcomed them and I gave her my chair as a respect to a senior poet, while Imroz and I sat across the table on chairs kept for visitors. She had a request that I make a film on her novel ‘Pinjar’. She had a script with her and I told her to leave it with me.
I went through the script and got a copy of the novel in Urdu and read it at night; they would be meeting me again the next day. In the second meeting, I told her that I would like to make a film on just the first three chapters, which were about Puro’s story, but for that I would have to write a screenplay. Amrita insisted that the film was to be made just as she had scripted it.
When I declined saying that this was not possible, I could see displeasure on her face when she left.
However, this episode did not in any way sour our acquaintance. Whenever I went to Delhi, I would go to meet her.
The last visit to see her was with Gopi Chand Narang, then president of the Sahitya Akademi, to give her the Akademi’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award.
Sadly, she recognised no one nor could she speak.
Imroz said, “These awards should come when a person is well enough to appreciate them.” Narang replied that he wanted it to reach her in her lifetime.
(As told to Nirupama Dutt)