It is a standing joke among my old friends that every two weeks I develop a “latest crush.” This started back in my college days, and they were mostly harmless infatuations. I suppose I never quite outgrew the habit. The only difference now is that instead of cricketers or movie stars, the objects of my fascination are politicians, tech leaders, or people of that sort. It’s less “OMG look at him!” and more “I deeply admire this person.”
Faiz entered my life in a strange and unexpected way. He is, so far, the only poet suggested to me by AI—
After a few days of reading, staring into space, sighing, shaking my head, and repeating the cycle, I decided to read the poems in Romanized Urdu. Conveniently, the second part of the book offered exactly that. This led to even more staring into deep space, the realization that dusk has many more dimensions than I had ever allowed it, and the sudden understanding that old stone structures can, in fact, speak. (Yes, I am whimsical. The world knows.)
Then came the third phase: why not just learn Urdu?
So I am.
My goal is to read Naqsh-e-Fariyadi in the original Urdu script. Along the way, I’ve found myself painting old structures and pairing them with Faiz’s lines, writing friends’ names in Nastaliq script, and enthusiastically informing family and unsuspecting acquaintances about my newest obsession. At this point, I am fully aware that I have fallen into a deep, unapologetic hole of Persian and Urdu culture—and I am not trying very hard to climb out.
Somewhere along the way, this reading turned into making.
I began painting a series alongside Faiz’s poems—not to illustrate them, but to sit with them. Five large canvases, each anchored in a single word or line: Tanhai, Maghrib, Paas Raho, Tasleem, Nargis. Lanterns left lit. Terraces at dusk. Moonless nights. Morning light that does not soften anything, only clarifies it. Courtyards with still water and flowers that do not explain themselves. These were not narratives, and they were not characters. They were states.
The paintings do not tell Faiz’s poems. They answer them. Sometimes they argue back. Sometimes they simply stay silent in the right way. Over time, it felt less like inspiration and more like conversation—across languages, across decades, across histories that neither of us fully owns.
I should say this clearly --
What I realized, however, is that I had not read serious poetry in languages outside that small orbit. And then came Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
He swept me off my feet not with ornament or excess, but with his strange, uncompromising ideas of love—love that simply is. Love that does not explain itself, does not apologize, does not ask to be returned in equal measure. It exists. It endures history. It survives prisons, partitions, disappointments, and altered selves.
You can read that love as devotion to a person, or to a country, or to something larger and harder to name—much like the way Rabindranath Tagore dissolves the boundary between the beloved and the divine. Faiz leaves that choice to you.
For me, his love settles among old stone ruins, oil lamps lit at dusk, and thoughts that turn inward. It belongs to spaces that remember more than they speak.
My paintings converse with his lines over time and space. That, I have come to believe, is the best kind of conversation.
No resolution.
No conclusion.
Just presence—held carefully, and then let be.
