A Correspondence #5 : ये काली काली रातें
Written by Dadaji on 4th March 1952, sent to Dadima. A friend and artist, let's call them A, added their voice and thoughts to this letter
To know how it all began, read this :
The Letter
This is the first one of my Dadaji’s letters to be shared here.
I have more letters from Dadima and less from him. Maybe because he was the one who saved the letters written by his lover, where as Dadima didn’t. Maybe because he could afford to save these bold declarations of love, whereas Dadi always had to worry about prying eyes.
Before he gets into the reason for writing the letter, he spends a bit of time explaining what his opinions on God are. Which I find the most provocative part of this letter. My memory of Dadaji begins when his life had already begun dissolving into grey. He was a devout Hindu, his feet firmly inside the threshold of the temple, and his black rubber chappals carefully placed outside.
To imagine Dadaji in throes of romance, disavowing God, in full technicolour, is going to take a bit getting used to!
(A Hindi transcription of the letter can be found here. And an English translation is available here.)
In A’s Words (Images? Videos? Fragments?)
(I spent days looking at what A had shared. A sense of time, of suspended time, of eternity, of stillness and movement, of “हिज्र का दिन” and “वस्ल की रात “1 - I felt all of that and more when I saw their response.)
Phrasing courtesy Faiz sahab, in his evocative नज़्म, ‘दश्त-ए-तन्हाई’