Her name was Shamim Ara

Late film star seemed to belong to another, more gracious era


Aamer Hussein October 15, 2016
Shamim Ara passed away after prolonged illness on August 5, 2016. PHOTO: FILE

LONDON: A film star bought a house in PECHS, Karachi, down the road from Block 6 where we lived. We had first seen her in the colour blockbuster Naila in 1965, just after the Indo-Pak war and we knew that she’d had hit after hit since then. She was graceful, demure — “simpering”, my older sister would have said – and seemed to belong to another, more gracious era. Her name was Shamim Ara.

It was 1967. I was 12, my sister 11, and we had recently discovered the guilty pleasure of watching Urdu movies. Our interest was fired by Sohail Rana’s catchy songs. In 1966, with Koko Korina and Akele Na Jana topping the hit parade, we almost gave up listening to The Beatles, The Stones and Sandie Shaw. When our father’s much older stepsister, on her annual visit from Shikarpur, had asked us to accompany her to our local Khayyam Cinema for an afternoon showing of Ehsaan, with its lilting songs that played on the radio all day, we had not needed much persuasion. An added attraction was the ‘silver jubilee’ pair of Waheed Murad and Zeba, who had starred in Heera Aur Pathar, the first of only two Urdu movies we had seen until then.

Wishing for Shamim Ara’s speedy recovery

Such films were unfashionable in our circle; they were black and white and very romantic. Waheed Murad, the romantic hero of the day, looked like a small-town boy with his big hair and outdated drainpipes, but there was something winning about him. (The year before we had been given his private phone number; he chatted to us for about half an hour, and then embarrassingly said: “Bete aap ki mummy shayad bahir gayi hongi nahin to aap ko phone par itni lambi baat karne ki ijaazat nahin detin.” We had thought we sounded very grown up.) As for Zeba, even the snooty teenagers agreed, after Armaan, that she was pretty, like a home-grown Natalie Wood. We had gone along for the songs and a laugh, because weepy scenes made us guffaw. But we did not laugh: we were moved.

So Urdu films became our part-time addiction — we saw about five in as many months, partly because our usual fare of Hollywood films was suddenly scarce. Even after my aunt went back to her hometown of Shikarpur, we found excuses to watch them. Sohail Rana, Waheed Murad and Zeba, in any combination, were the main attraction. Doraha was released, with its Rana-Waheed combination and arguably the best songs of that year, Bhooli Hui Hun Daastan, Mujhe Tum Nazar Se. We went to the very first afternoon showing. We mildly resented the absence of Zeba, replaced as heroine at the last minute because she had gone off on her honeymoon with Mohammed Ali, but we had to admit that Shamim Ara, in spite of her mature and old-fashioned demeanour, was a fitting replacement for the teenagers’ idol. She certainly knew how to make a scene her own; she had been a star long before her very urban rival brought her urban modernity to the screen.

Was it after seeing Doraha that we heard that about Shamim Ara’s arrival in our neighbourhood? Dragged along by a little group of children who lived close by, we went to ask her for an autograph. We were greeted by her watchman, who asked us to come back the next day. On our second or third visit we met not her, but her grey-haired grandmother. My sister and I never went back. Maybe the neighbours got her autograph.

There are unexpected compensations for disappointed adolescents. Iqbal Bano, whose songs we had heard since we were infants, briefly visiting Karachi from her base in Multan, came to lunch with Ustad Umrao Bundu Khan, who guided our family’s musical inclinations. Singers do not like to perform after eating, they say, and Iqbal Bano did not like to sing in public then, but after tucking into naan-kabab, she decided to entertain us youngsters with an impromptu recital of her greatest hits, accompanying by a tanpura. She also gave a spirited imitation of Reshma, who I had seen at Radio Pakistan a few days before.

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Iqbal Bano was back a few days later, to sing for a small group of Persian-speaking women, four Farsi ghazals from her rich repertoire — by Amir Khusrau, Nizami and Faizi —  which, even if we only vaguely understood them, touched  us with their power and grace. Khan sahib held that Iqbal Bano, like Mehdi Hassan, whom I had also heard perform at Radio Pakistan, was a ‘serious’ singer; but the difference between high and low forms of music, of ghazal, geet and pop songs did not concern us: melody was paramount.

As she left that December afternoon, Iqbal Bano, who thought my younger sister very pretty, wrote in her autograph book, “Hum bhi to pare hain raahon mein.”

A few days after our pilgrimage to Shamim Ara’s gate, we had bought 45rpm records of Doraha and Ehsaan, pretending that they were gifts for our cousins, but we could not bear the thought of being without those songs for the long winter we expected to spend in India. We were leaving Karachi to attend a cousin’s wedding. We added Iqbal Bano’s words to our records, which included a single of Mehdi Hassan singing Faiz Ahmad Faiz with Farida Khanum on the flip side, and my little portable record player, to carry away.

Trips to India were never less than two months long, but we didn’t guess that while the others would return, my youngest sister and I would not be coming back to live in Karachi. We had moved on to study in London, and I would not even see the city of my birth again until the mid-1990s.

In spite of her dramatic claim, Iqbal Bano wasn’t “lying at our feet”; she might have wished, more precisely, that her songs would stay on our tongues ... as they did. Within about 10 years, I acquired, to accompany the musical gifts she and Ustad Umrao Bundu Khan had given us, enough proficiency in classical Farsi to read, with ease, the ghazals she sang in an accent I no longer understood: now I saw, as if in a painted miniature,  the poet parting from his beloved as the cloud parted from the rain, the desert deer awaiting their fate at the hunter’s hands, the beautiful adversary seated in front of the proud Turk, and the lover who pretended that his murderous vanity was the appointed hour of death.

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I met Iqbal Bano again, in London; I didn’t remind her of moments she wouldn’t have remembered. She had captivated another generation now, with her grand renditions of Faiz Ahmad Faiz. From the 1970s onwards, and with the advent of EMI Pakistan and the ‘personal’ or concept album, Iqbal Bano, Farida Khanum, Mehdi Hassan, Malika Pukhraj, Tahira Syed and their contemporaries would no longer need films as an outlet for their haunting versions of poets’ words. Film music lost its charm for the lover of poetry I became. Selective in my tastes, I had as often be drawn to a recording by the name of a poet as by the singer’s name: significantly, when I came across a cassette named Nayyara sings Faiz, it was the mention of Faiz that made me play it, not Nayyara Noor, whose voice I hadn’t yet heard.

This August, overwhelmed by news of murder in Kashmir and Dhaka, I heard that Shamim Ara had died, half-forgotten, in a London clinic. I paid tribute to her by watching clips on YouTube from her films, most of which I had not seen. She seems to personify some of Noor Jehan’s best songs of the time. Among these were Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s classic Mujhse Pehli Si Muhabbat and Josh Malihabadi’s Man Ja Man Ja Balam, which was set to a Sindhi folk melody, and luminously staged, the ghazal by Himayat Ali Shair I had memorised the year I left Karachi: Har qadam par nit naye saanche mein dhal jaate hain log/Dekhte hi dekhte kitne badal jaate hain log.

It was one of those film songs of the 1960s that had made me susceptible to a weave of words and music. Munir Niazi, Josh Malihabadi, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Shakeel Badayuni, even Mir, Daagh and Ghalib  – their verses, set to music by popular composers and sung by Noor Jehan, Mehdi Hassan and many others, were our introduction to Urdu poetry. I often wonder what impact lyrics and poems have on our unformed minds, why those words we do not completely understand can wound or awaken us, in intangible ways. Why the uncomfortable twinge of recognition, every time I heard the lyrics Kaise kaise log hamare ji ko jalane aa jate hain/Apne apne gham ke fasane hamein sunane aa jate hain when I was very young? Which friends did I feel had sung me with stories of their woes, that I should be so affected by those words? Or had I seen adults in that situation? Are children equipped with emotional batteries of which they are unaware, until songs recharge them? Or does art, as some philosophers tell us, train us to anticipate feelings we are still too immature to understand? Do poems and songs foreshadow our future choices? Or help us choose the roads we take?

Remembering Shamim Ara, I recovered memory-tapes I thought I had deleted. Granting myself a storyteller’s imagination, I can swear today that I when I sang it for family and friends in my teens, I understood, and meant, each word of Himayat Ali Shair’s ghazal about people who, at every step, change shape as we watch, and far from searching for a lost paradise, content themselves with clay toys.

The writer is a London-based academic, essayist who has authored five collections of short stories and two novels

Published in The Express Tribune, October 16th, 2016.

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COMMENTS (1)

Bunny Rabbit | 7 years ago | Reply I feel she resembled in face and voice Nutan a lot Both are from courtesan families . who knows there could be a connection.
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