When memory begins to tremble

When I was a young teenager in the early nineteen-sixties, Urdu poetry came to me not as a discipline but as a discovery. It was the age when love, romance, longing and tragedy arrive unannounced and take residence in the heart. One does not choose them; they choose you. In that vulnerable season of life, a single sher found its way into me and settled there with an uncanny sense of belonging. I never bothered to find out the poet's name. Much later I learned that it was written by an obscure poet from India, one whose identity was slowly eclipsed as the verse itself passed into common memory. The sher became a cliche and, in doing so, completely outshone its creator.

Yaade mazi azab hai ya Rab,

Chheen le mujh se hafiza mera

At that age, the verse felt almost theatrical - memory as torment, forgetting as mercy. I admired the audacity of the thought without quite believing it. How could memory ever be a burden? Memory was identity. Memory was love's archive. Memory was proof that one had lived.

Decades passed. Life accumulated - names, faces, cities, conversations, losses, small triumphs, unfinished sentences. And then, quietly, almost politely, memory began to hesitate.

Now, at seventy-seven, I find myself pausing mid-sentence, searching for a name that insists on remaining just beyond reach. What frightens me is not the forgetting itself, but what it gestures toward. Dementia. Alzheimer's. Words that hover like shadows at the edge of thought.

I have seen this silence up close - especially in Canada, where many suffer with a dignity so complete that it borders on invisibility. They sit among us, present yet partially absent, as though some inner room has been locked from the inside. They smile. They nod. But something essential has withdrawn.

What do they feel inside? That is the question that troubles me most.

Is there panic when a familiar world begins to dissolve? Or is there a strange calm, a gradual dimming rather than a violent rupture? Do emotions survive after memory loosens its grip? Does love linger when names are gone? Perhaps feelings remain long after facts have fled - like fragrance after the flower has withered.

I imagine memory not as a single faculty but as a fragile architecture. First the labels fall away, then the sequences, and finally the sense of continuity. The past ceases to line up obediently behind the present. Time stops behaving. One may remember childhood with startling clarity yet fail to recognise the face beside the bed. What cruelty, or what mystery, decides the order in which remembrance departs?

And suddenly that old sher, once absorbed without context or authorship, no longer sounds theatrical. It sounds prophetic.

What if memory is an affliction when it fractures? What if half-memory, neither fully present nor fully absent, is the real torment? To remember enough to feel loss, but not enough to explain it. To sense that something precious is missing without knowing what it is.

Perhaps those who suffer do not live in emptiness, as we fear. Perhaps they live in a different density of time, where moments float untethered. Perhaps their silence is not always despair but sometimes withdrawal - a turning inward, away from a world that demands too much coherence.

And yet, the fear remains. Not of death, but of erasure while still breathing. Of becoming a body whose stories have misplaced their narrator.

That is when the old sher returns - not as youthful melodrama but as an exhausted supplication. Not a desire to forget, but a plea for mercy - from partial remembering, from the cruel in-between. It seems almost fitting that the poet himself has faded, while the verse survives, anonymous and intact, enacting its own argument about memory and disappearance.

Yaade mazi azab hai ya Rab…

Once, memory was my shelter. Now, as it trembles, I understand both sides of the prayer. To remember is to be human. To forget completely may be extinction. But to hover between the two - aware of loss without access to what is lost - may be the hardest trial of all.

And so I hold on, gently, to words, to verses, to names - knowing that poetry, at least, has always known how to speak when certainty fails.

Tamam umr lagi thi jisay bhulanay mai

Bus aik lamha laga us ko yaad aanay mai