SUDEEP SEN - MONT BLANC - for Kaifi Azmi on his 100th birth anniversary

Blue-black ink tip of your fountain pen’s nib
etches words on your sepia notebook –

lines outliving the instrument itself.
Ink slow fills the belly of your pens,

its capillary pressure coursing through
the gold nib, the unseen veins parting

leaking words, phrases, lyrics, lines.
Lines singing, protesting, ploughing

Azamgarh in your ancestral Mijwa –
sustenance for body, mind, soul.

Your writing tools, periodically shipped far
to New York’s Fountain Pen Hospital –

a facelift – pristine architecture restored –
18 Mont Blancs to remember you by.

I vividly recollect the first inscription
you penned for me on a photocopied flyleaf

of your out-of-print poetry chapbook –
the subtle seduction of Urdu’s cursive script,

its parabolic slants, serifs – your hand
scripting codes for life. Your lyrics rose –

ghazals’ mellifluous, sonorous baritone —
your nib fertile, metrical, sharp, sure.

Poetry’s passion – a love I shared with a man
I never met, but crossed paths through

the measure of his ink on a page. I recall my Ma
powerfully elocuting your nazm, ‘Aurat’:

Uth, meri jaan! Mere saath hi chalnaa hai tujhe
Rise, my beloved! With me, you must walk along.
܀

SUDEEP SEN – MONT BLANC – for Kaifi Azmi on his 100th birth anniversary