The rain of stones is finished

From the Express Tribune:

He added that Nasir was born in 1928 to an aristocratic family of Hyderabad Deccan and became a communist while studying at the University of Cambridge. He became a member of the CPP soon after it was formed and banned after the 1951 Rawalpindi conspiracy. As a result, the government started a crack down on leftists. In 1954, he was in and out of jail and was also exiled for a year. “He went to Deccan when he was exiled but managed to return to Pakistan the day his sentence was over,” he said. “Nasir’s commitment to the cause was commendable.”

By 1957, he joined the National Awami Party where he flourished as a communist leader. He was last arrested on August 2, 1960 and killed in a cell at the Lahore Fort in November at the age of 32.

I knew nothing of Hasan Nasir before I read Faiz Ahmad Faiz. It was in Agha Shahid Ali's translation of Faiz' ghazals/poems in a collection The Rebel's Silhouette that I read khat'm hui barish-e-sang - the rain of stones is finished. There is an epigraph right before the poem in Urdu, and its translation:

(for Hassan Nasir, tortured to death in the Lahore Fort, 1959)

which conflicts with the date given in the above report. Memory plays tricks where time is concerned, as I know from listening to arguments about births and deaths in the family.

The image of someone being tortured in the Lahore Fort is a visceral one. Torture is that, as it is, but I had been to the Lahore Fort a number of times as a child, and wandering through the halls of the old Mughal edifice, it never occurred to me that this was a place where people were tortured in the twentieth century.

Reading the poem with the knowledge that it is about a man who was killed, makes it even more poignant. I can post it here in (roman) Urdu, but I am not finding an English translation.

Na gahan aaj meray taar e nazar se kaT gaye

TukRay TukRay huay aafaq pe khursheed o qamar

Ab kisi samt andhera na ujala hoga

Bujh gaye dil ki tarah raah e wafa meray baad

Dosto qaflai dard ka ab kya hoga

Ab koi aur kare parvarish e gulshan e gham

Dosto khat'm hui didai tar ki shabnam

tham gya shor e junoon khat'm hui barish e sang 

Khaak e reh aaj liye hai lab e dildar ka rang 

Koo e janan maiN khula mere lahoo ka parcham 

Dekhiye dete haiN kis kis ko sada mere baad 

Kaun hota hai hareef e mae mard afgan e ishq 

Hai muqarrar saqi pe sala mere baad 

It is a poem which describes nothingness. Everything in the heavens is scattered to bits. Nothing is in his vision any longer. There is neither light nor dark. Let someone else tend to the flowers. The noise of the crowds has gone, the rain of stones is finished . . . .

Reading this report here, I still feel I know so little about Hasan Nasir.