Caesar’s wife, we have been told, must be above reproach. But what about a poet’s wife? Is there a template for her? Must she be a silent muse or long-suffering soul-mate? Or, like Victorian children, should she be neither seen nor heard? Alys Faiz, wife of Urdu’s best-known poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, defies any such facile categorisations. Very much a person in her own right, she was a teacher, journalist, human rights activist, social worker and a poet. Without a doubt, she would have lived a rich and meaningful life had she not married Faiz. But being Faiz’s wife brought an extra dimension. For, not everyone has lived through CID raids and jail visits. Nor crouched against bedroom walls as Israeli rockets fly overhead and bombs are dropped over Beirut.
Daughter of an English bookseller, Alys and her sister Christabel became active among left-leaning Indian students during the early 1930s. Her circle of friends included M.D. Taseer, Mulk Raj Anand, Iqbal Singh and Sajjad Zaheer, who would form the powerful literary grouping known as the Progressive Writers’ Association. A brief stint as secretary to Krishna Menon led to greater involvement with the freedom movement. When Christabel married Taseer in 1938, Alys took a boat to India and ended up spending the rest of her life in the sub-continent. In Amritsar, where Taseer was the principal of the MAO College, she met a shy young teacher “who came regularly, was so silent, reciting poetry when called upon and claiming my early attention”. This was Faiz whom she was to wed in 1941 in Srinagar, where no less than Shaikh Abdullah performed her nikah.
Married into a large family, Alys paints an affectionate portrait of the diverse members of her new life, especially Faiz’s mother Bebi-ji, who was initially unaccepting but eventually proved to be a pillar of support. Written in an episodic manner with scant regard for chronology, Over my Shoulder is more a series of cameos drawn from memory than a conventional autobiography. And so there are nonchalant references to meeting Mahmoud Darwish and Yasser Arafat, interspersed with evocatively titled short essays such as ‘Portrait of a Mother-in-law’ and ‘Days that still shake the Middle East: 22 December, 1979’.
Vignettes from Alys’s old life, before she became Mrs Faiz, appear and reappear: her grandmother’s sewing machine, a visit to Ypres with her father, music lessons and a memories of a happy childhood. And then there are cameos from her peripatetic life with Faiz: travelling to Ulan Bator, Ho Chi Minh City, Damasacus, Moscow.... But the most haunting passages are about her life with Faiz and her matter-of-fact descriptions of both the joys and tribulations. When Faiz was jailed on trumped-up charges in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, Alys is transformed into a latter-day Mother Courage. Holding a job as editor of the women’s and children’s pages of the Pakistan Times, looking after Faiz’s extended family, travelling across the Sindh desert to meet Faiz in Hyderabad Jail—Alys takes every trauma in her stride.
Later, when life became intolerable for the Faizes under the military dictatorship of Gen Zia, they decide on self-exile. Faiz accepted the position of editor of the journal Lotus and the hospitality offered by the Palestinians, even though it meant getting accustomed to “rockets flying across the bay from Israeli warships at sea, and the answer of anti-aircraft guns, on the seafront, manned by Palestinians”. In her typically wry manner, Alys writes, “We lacked nothing, it seemed, but a certain future, and that neither Zia nor the Israelis would give us”.
