Daily Times

I know it is not August yet but why wait and keep our thoughts captive till the date coincides? Why celebrate or give tribute to someone only on a certain date? The everlasting source of pride, the man, the legend, the one and only icon who transcended borders, languages, colour, religion and nationalities.

Being holed up in the summer of 1996 in a seven-story office building on the sixth floor with manila folders in a room that was dearly called a ‘fish bowl’ is still engrained in my memory. I was very young, very energetic and very zestful, beaming with the energy of bulls. What would ordinarily take someone a couple of hours to handle, I would be able to do three times as much in those couple of hours. The company I had joined was soon to become the 10th largest bank in the US. It was housed in that building located in the foothills of one of the oldest cities of our state. An Armenian co-worker, who introduced himself and was very impressed with my speed, struck up a conversation with me after the revelation that I was originally from Pakistan. He asked me whether I had heard of ‘Ali’. I asked him whom he was referring to. “You know,” he said in awe, “Ali Khan.” I stared at him, and he made a gesture with his hands like someone trying to sing. I cracked up and asked, “You mean Nusrat?” He lit up and confirmed my assumption. He went on, “Nusrat was at the House of Blues when I saw him. He was phenomenal. Unstoppable. The audience did not know a single word of what he was singing but, my friend, he brought the house down. No one could resist his music. The predominantly American crowd thoroughly enjoyed him to the core. People cried, laughed, and gave him a standing ovation for several minutes. The chants, the claps and the applause were deafening.”

Very quietly, a PIA flight brought someone to Lahore Airport all the way from London. There were very few people to greet him and take him to his final resting place in Faisalabad — some artists, some family members, some distraught, some in disbelief and some in a state of shock. A man so humble and so selfless who drew crowds everywhere he went was only able to garner a few people, all because he was no more. My younger brother had sent me the e-mail from Pakistan on that ill-fated morning in August of 1997. I was heartbroken and grief-stricken, and almost felt like the energy that I once possessed had been completely sucked out of me by a vacuum.

Two brothers by the names of Sunny and Bobby Deol were vacationing in London in the summer of 1997 when they heard of the ailing maestro. They went to his hospital to pay him a visit. The maestro was there, battling a hepatitis infection that he had picked up from India. Soon afterwards, the two brothers found themselves again at the same hospital, bidding a final farewell to the same maestro as the ‘ultimate maestro’ had silenced the voice of the earthly maestro forever.

In a dark movie theatre, with my better half and a young son in my lap, I saw Nusrat on the giant screen in a movie called Aur Pyar Ho Gaya (And they fell in love). The sheer energy he exhibited in singing the famous number Allah, Allah was simply a treat. The entire movie theatre was enthralled. The reigning beauty queen, by the name of Aishwariya Rai, was launched with this movie and, if my memory serves me right, Nusrat was the music director of the movie.

One of my friends had returned from Karachi in the early 1990s and had brought with him the tape of Nusrat’s Dum Mast Qalandar. We played that number so many times that the tape and the player started begging for mercy. He shared the sentiments of the people of Pakistan, especially Karachi, where every shop, ever car and every household was playing the same number. Nusrat had taken the entire country by an irreversible storm. A copycat by the name of Viju Shah, re-did the original with the voices of Udit Narayan and Kavita Krishnamurthy as Tu Cheez Bari Hai Mast for a movie called Mohra. What an insult, yet a humble Nusrat disregarded all of this and went on to record many unforgettable movie numbers for Bollywood.

The simple, down-to-earth and humble Nusrat conquered the hearts of many because his art was pure. His renditions were soulful because they stemmed from the heart. No one could take anything away from the ocean. No language, no translation, no explanation was needed. His sorrow was ours and his joy was the basis of our being. Can anyone bid farewell or, for that matter, say goodbye to their own self? Nusrat is a reflection of our inner self in its purest form. He is beauty beyond any words, an unadulterated beauty beyond any comprehension.

The writer is a Pakistani-American mortgage banker. He blogs at http://dasghar.blogspot.com and can be reached at dasghar@aol.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/dasghar