# The Wish-Granter's Measure The old woman sat by the window of her cramped room on the fourth floor of a crumbling building in North Calcutta, and counted the days on her fingers. Thirty years she'd been here. Thirty years of the same view—the rooftop of a printing press, two clotheslines strung between buildings, and beyond them, the blur of the city's indifferent face. Her name was Asha, though people had stopped using it long ago. They called her Ashaji—a small courtesy that cost nothing and granted her a measure of respect she'd never quite earned. She'd been a schoolteacher once, in a different life, in a different Calcutta. That woman seemed like someone else's memory now. The room was narrow and tall, with a door that stuck in the monsoon and a window that rattled when the wind came from the north. On one wall hung a calendar from 1987—she'd forgotten to change it, and somehow the act of changing it had become an impossibility, a small paralysis of the soul. The calendar girl's smile had faded to a ghost's smile. Asha found this comforting. She was waiting for something, though she couldn't have said what. Not a person. Not a letter. Not a knock on the door that would deliver her into some other life. The waiting itself had become the shape of her days. She woke at six—her body's clock needed no winding—made tea on the small gas stove, and took her chair by the window. There she sat, watching the city move without her, touching her without touching. The neighborhood had changed. The printing press had become a storage facility. The clotheslines remained, though no one hung clothes on them anymore—they held rope, plastic bags, things that had lost their owners' names. Younger people had moved into the building, people with mobile phones and urgent footsteps. They didn't acknowledge Asha on the stairs. She didn't expect them to. One Tuesday, a girl came to her door. She was perhaps nineteen, with the kind of beauty that was already becoming a hardship for her—Asha could see this in the way she held her shoulders. The girl wanted to rent the room for the afternoons. There were reasons, whispered reasons, reasons that made the girl's eyes look away. "I'll give you five hundred rupees," the girl said. "Just the afternoons. Two to five." Asha didn't ask questions. She'd learned, over the decades, that questions were a luxury. She nodded and the girl produced the money, folded small and exact, and after that, Tuesdays and Thursdays and sometimes Wednesdays belonged to the girl and someone who came to meet her in the afternoons. Asha would move to the common room in those hours, a space shared with three other tenants where a television broadcast cricket matches and soap operas into the thick air. She'd sit in the corner with her knitting—a shawl she'd been making for ten years—and listen to the lives that unfolded in the blue light. She felt like a spy in her own displacement. The girl would emerge from the room after an hour or two, composed and careful, and leave money on the small table by the door. Asha never looked up. They never spoke beyond the initial transaction. But Asha noticed things: the girl wore the same two salwar suits, alternating them. She carried a small school bag though she was clearly not a student. Her left hand had a mark, a thin crescent scar between thumb and finger, which she would touch when she was thinking. One afternoon, the girl didn't come. Then another didn't. Asha kept the money from those days in a tin box under her bed, and its growing weight began to feel like an accusation. The money was a story, and the story was not Asha's to have, but it was hers to hold. Three months passed. Six. Then one morning, there came a knock. Not the girl's knock—that had always been tentative, almost apologetic. This was a man's knock, official and hard. Police, Asha thought immediately. She was right. They wanted to know about the girl. When she came, what she did, who came to see her. Asha sat in her room and told them nothing. She said she'd rented the space to a girl for typing work—sometimes young people did typing from home, she said. The officers looked at her as if she was a very old ghost telling very old lies, and perhaps she was, and perhaps the lies were so old they'd turned into a kind of truth. After they left, Asha opened the tin box and looked at the money. There was quite a lot of it now. Enough for a year, perhaps. Enough to matter, though it didn't. She never saw the girl again. She should have felt relief, or at least the normality of emptiness. Instead, she felt a strange displacement, as if the girl had taken the room's one window with her when she left. Weeks turned to months. The calendar still showed 1987. Asha stopped updating it, then stopped noticing that it hadn't been updated. Time became something that happened to other people. She counted the days still, but no longer on her fingers. Now she counted in the way stones count in a river—not adding up, just existing, submerged. Then one afternoon, there was a knock. Asha's hands stilled on her knitting. The knock was soft, the girl's knock, unmistakable now in its gentleness. Asha rose and opened the door. The girl stood there in the hallway, but she was changed. There was something settled in her face, something resolved that hadn't been there before. She wasn't asking to rent the room. She was holding a baby—a small child, no more than a few months old, wrapped in a cloth that had once been yellow. "I wanted to show you," the girl said. "I wanted you to know." Asha didn't understand at first. Then she did. The girl was showing her an ending that wasn't an ending, a continuation, a life that had split and reformed into something new and stubborn and real. "His name is Rohan," the girl said. "Rohan Kumar. I'm married now. I'm living with my husband's family outside the city. In a small house. There's a garden." Asha found herself smiling. It was an unexpected action, her face creasing into lines that had forgotten their purpose. "He's beautiful," Asha said. This was true. The child had the girl's eyes, dark and questioning. The girl stayed for twenty minutes. She told Asha things—about the man, how he came back for her, how he fought with his family, how he'd waited while she tried to become someone else and then helped her become someone true. The words tumbled out like she'd been saving them for someone specific, and Asha was the someone she'd chosen. Before she left, the girl pressed money into Asha's hands. More money than their transaction would have cost. "For your kindness," the girl said. "For not asking. For giving me space to become." After she left, Asha sat by her window and held the money and felt, for the first time in thirty years, like she'd been granted a wish. Not her own wish—someone else's. And yet. That evening, she changed the calendar. 1987 became 2015 with a small violence, a tearing away. The room looked different immediately, as if it had aged another decade in a single moment. Asha looked at the new year pasted on the wall and decided she would count the days differently now. Not as an absence, but as a measure. A measure of what, she couldn't say. Perhaps the measure of a room that had held a girl's secret and then let it go. Perhaps the measure of a woman who had learned that the most generous thing you could give someone was your lack of judgment, your willingness to not ask, your quiet allowance of their becoming. The sun set over the printing press turned storage facility. The clotheslines held their rope. The city moved and did not move. And Asha sat by her window, counting—not the days anymore, but the small wishes granted, the ones that went unnamed and unreckoned, the ones that passed through your life like prayers you'd answered without knowing you were praying.

# Asha Bhosle and the Intimate World of the Ghazal

I was listening to “Dil Cheez Kya Hai” the night I heard the news. April 12th, 2026. Breach Candy Hospital, Mumbai. Asha Bhosle was gone. Ninety-three years old. She had been admitted the day before with chest infection and severe depression; the next day, multiple organs failed her at once. Two days later, the cremation was performed at Shivaji Park with full state honors.

Everyone is talking about her cabaret songs, her pop hits, “Dom Maro Dom.” But I want to write about her ghazals instead. They get less discussion, yet they are the ones that have held fast to that place in her voice—where light ordinarily doesn’t reach.

## What Is the Ghazal, and Why All This Talk

The Arabic word *gazal* means love-talk, the art of love, sweet conversation. There is a popular folk etymology claiming the word comes from the death-cry of a wounded doe; that final call at the threshold between pain and beauty. Linguists don’t much care for this explanation, but ghazal lovers cherish it. And why not? The sweetness of love and the wail of anguish existing together—that is the very soul of the ghazal.

It began in seventh-century Arabic poetry. There existed then a long, formal poetic mode called the *qasida*, used for praising kings, recounting valor, the official language of royal courts. At the start of each qasida came a section called the *nasib*—which in Arabic means fate or destiny, but in the poem it served as that obligatory prelude where the poet would pause before launching into royal praise, as if catching his breath, allowing himself a moment of lamentation over the memory of his beloved. Within formality, it was a wholly human rupture. One day, that lamenting section broke away, abandoned the royal court, struck out on its own path. And thus the ghazal was born.

It traveled from Arabia to Persia. In Persia, Hafiz, Rumi, and Saadi infused Sufism into the ghazal. They taught people to see God within the beloved, to taste spiritual intoxication in a cup of wine, to grant longing the dignity of spiritual practice. Then in the twelfth century, the ghazal came to India with Sufi mystics, crossing deserts and mountains like a merchant’s song. In the thirteenth century, Amir Khusrau blended Persian with Hindavi—that spoken language of North India, ancestor to today’s Hindi and Urdu. Between these two languages, a new music was born. Then came Mir, Momin, Ghalib, and Faiz, who took the Urdu ghazal to a place where a single *shер*—that small poetic unit of two lines—could carry the weight of an entire epic. A person could spend hours with it, because within every word another word lies hidden.

Let me explain the structure briefly. The first couplet is called the *matla*, that opening like dawn itself, where both lines rhyme, and it immediately tells the listener in what key, what mood, one must proceed. This rhyme is called the *qafia*, the end-rhyme that brings you back to a familiar room at the close of each couplet. After the qafia, at the very end of every couplet, returns the *radif*—the ghazal’s constant companion, a familiar face that grows more beloved with each seeing. The final couplet is the *makhta*, the closing verse where the poet inscribes his pen-name or *takhallus*; as if the artist signed his own painting, saying, this is mine, this suffering is mine, this love is mine. The couplets in between can each be about different things—one about longing, the next about philosophy, the one after perhaps about anger—yet the entire ghazal is bound by an invisible thread. This freedom is what sets the ghazal apart from every other poetic form.

# Like Life—Each Day Apart, Yet a Single Life

Without Sufi Philosophy, the Ghazal Is Incomplete

The melody of a ghazal pleases the ear, but without knowing the philosophy within, the listening remains incomplete. It’s like seeing a painting without understanding the language of color.

The Sufis call love *Ishq*. This Arabic word runs far deeper than ordinary affection—it is a feeling so vast it lifts a person from the earthly toward the Absolute. And *Ishq* is of two kinds. *Ishq-e-Majazi*—earthly love, the love between mortals, what we know, what the eye can see; and *Ishq-e-Haqiqi*—true love, divine love, love for God, which cannot be grasped yet draws with the force of one’s entire being. Here lies the magic of the ghazal. The poet never reveals which *Ishq* he speaks of. Both meanings dwell together in the ghazal, like shadows cast upon one another. The listener chooses which to take, and that choice alone tells where the wound lies within.

*Fana* is “self-annihilation.” Though this Arabic word means “to be exhausted,” in Sufi philosophy it is not death—it is that state when the “I” no longer stands separate, when the seeker merges into the Absolute. As a drop of water dissolves into the ocean, no longer to be found, yet it has not been lost—only become vastly greater. I recall Rumi’s words: “Logic stands at the door thinking, while Love has already leapt in.”

After *Fana* comes *Baqa*. This Arabic word, meaning “to remain” or “to endure,” speaks of that rebirth, that remaining after dissolution. A rebirth where the old “I” is gone, replaced by another, someone who is part of something larger. When Begum Akhtar or Mehdi Hassan sang, this *Fana* occurred—voice and song were no longer separate; the singer lost himself in his own singing.

One must know the symbols of Sufi poetry, or half the meaning of the ghazal is lost. Say the poet writes: sitting in the tavern, drinking wine. Heard literally, it seems mere drunkenness. But the *Maikhaneh*—this Persian word for a place—is no ordinary bar. It is that spiritual meeting-place where the seeker goes to quench an inner thirst; the wine is the intoxication of love for God, a drunkenness that, once tasted, makes all worldly intoxication worthless. The one pouring is the *Saki*. In Persian, the wine-server—here the Guru, or God Himself, who shows the way.

The *Bulbul*—this word of Persian-Turkish origin names a bird: the lover-poet, yearning, voiceless except through song, singing only what his heart knows. And the rose toward which the bulbul gazes is the beloved—could be human, could be divine. Hold this key once, and a *Sher* can be read three, four times over, each time yielding something new—like peeling an onion, each layer brings a new fragrance.

Ghalib wrote: the agony of love is love’s greatest reward. The words sound paradoxical, yet think deeper—there is a cruel truth within. Possession kills longing. What we have won, we cannot mourn. Longing keeps us alive, because the thirst remains, the song remains. Asha’s finest ghazals stand at that very precipice, on the edge of want, from where all beautiful things can be seen.

—

# Asha—The Impossible Path from Cabaret to Ghazal

Asha’s life itself is like a ghazal. It begins in one place, ends in another, with such turns in between that cannot be foreseen. Yet when the whole is done, you realize: how else could it have been?

Let me try to show you.

September 8, 1933. The village of Gowar, in Sangli.

# Born into the House of Pandit Dinanath Mangeshkar

Born into the house of Pandit Dinanath Mangeshkar. Her father was a man of Marathi classical music, and his voice was like the breathing of a household. That breath stilled when Asha was nine years old; her father left them. The family wandered from city to city, hunting for livelihood, seeking some anchor, until they finally settled in Bombay. At sixteen, against her family’s wishes, she eloped with Ganpatrao Bhosle—a man nearly twice her age, her sister Lata’s personal secretary. The marriage cracked the family so deeply that Lata and Asha’s bond spent decades in conflict, two sisters in two separate orbits, occasionally near, mostly far. In 1960, that marriage shattered bitterly, leaving behind three children and an industry that would never quite take her seriously.

In the early years of her career, Asha’s luck brought B-grade films, cabaret numbers, filmi songs over Helen’s dancing—songs that the bigger singers wouldn’t touch. The industry branded her a “cabaret singer,” as if slipping her into a slot were the end of the story. No one imagined that this girl would one day sing ghazals, and sing them in a way that would earn her a national award.

Her relationship with R.D. Burman began as something creative—a strange alchemy between an unusual composer and a remarkable voice. From 1980 onward, it became something more. This would be the most fertile chapter of Asha’s life. What hadn’t Pancham made her sing! Cabaret, rock, disco, mountain folk songs, echoes of Tagore, shades of Western pop. And songs that weren’t quite ghazals, yet were born with a ghazal’s soul. “Mera Kuch Samaan” from *Ijaazat* was one such. More on that in a moment. First, the story of 1981 needs telling.

## *Umrao Jaan*—Cinema’s Most Beautiful Accident

The very creation of the ghazals in this film is itself a wonder. They almost didn’t exist.

In the beginning, the composer was Jaidev, a long-time collaborator of Muzaffar Ali from the earlier film *Gaman*, a man capable of bringing the depths of classical music into cinema. But early in the work, differences with Ali forced him to step aside, and his preferred singer Madhubala went with him. In came Khayyam, and it was then that Ali understood: these songs were destined for Asha Pawar’s voice.

Shahryar—his real name, Akhlaq Mohammad Khan—was not part of this upheaval. He was Ali’s old friend, their collaboration stretching back to *Gaman*. His journey in Bollywood was brief but unforgettable. He was a professor in the Urdu department at Aligarh Muslim University, later the department head. As a poet, his reputation far exceeded his cinema credits—the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987, the Jnanpith Award in 2008, only the fourth Urdu writer to receive it. He wrote for film rarely, only when a friend called. The fruit of those rare calls: “Dil Cheez Kya Hai,” “In Aankho Ki Masthi,” these very verses.

On the first day of recording, Khayyam told Asha something startling: she would have to sing a full step and a half lower than her natural register—from D sharp down to C. His research had revealed that Umrao Jaan possessed a voice that was deep and astringent, like the earth of Lucknow itself, which gives off a richer fragrance when wet. He was blunt: “We don’t want Asha Pawar. We want Umrao Jaan.” Asha resisted at first; she had spent a lifetime building her voice, and now they were asking her to dismantle it. Finally, she relented. Singing in that lower register, Asha herself said: “There’s a magic in this.” Then she heard the playback and fell silent. “Is that me singing? I’ve never heard myself like this before.” A second take was unnecessary.

Into Asha’s voice came a velvety depth that hadn’t existed before; as if there had always been a layer beneath the earth, and Khayyam had simply dug it out.

Listen to “Dil Chiz Kya Hai” with full attention and you’ll understand where the magic lies. In the first line, there’s a certain tenderness in the voice, as though someone is reaching out a hand; in the second, it intensifies, as if realizing that what is being given can never be taken back. Each couplet is a separate room of emotion, and Asha understood this; that’s why each time she opened a door and entered another.

Asha didn’t just sing. Muzaffar Ali said that Asha had seized hold of him—she insisted he translate Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s novel *Umrao Jan Ada* into Hindi. That 1899 Urdu novel which tells the life story of a courtesan of Lucknow; with a certain distance maintained, a touch of nostalgia woven in. Tawaif—though the Urdu word originally meant ‘wanderer,’ its meaning had evolved to denote that particular class of artist in Lucknow, those who were deeply educated in classical music, poetry, dance, and Urdu etiquette. Through that book, Asha absorbed the entire *tehzeeb* of Lucknow. *Tehzeeb*—this word of Arabic-Persian origin means far more than just ‘culture’; within it lies that refinement where showing emotion is discourtesy but concealing it is art, where silence speaks louder than words. She even entered Ali’s kitchen and learned a few dishes of Lucknowi cuisine from his cook, because to understand Lucknow, reading alone won’t do—you must breathe it in, taste it. What she sang after that was not a song, but the very soul of Lucknow.

The ghazals Asha sang in this film:

“Dil chiz kya hai aap meri jaan le liye”—the heart is merely a trifle, take the life itself. In Sufi language, this is a call to *fana*, that effacement of self, a plea to dissolve oneself in love. But listening to Asha’s voice, Sufism doesn’t come to mind. It seems as if someone is truly gathering herself into a gift, without theory, without philosophy, just one human being wanting to give everything to another.

“In aankhon ki masti ke mastane hazaron hain”—thousands are intoxicated by the drunkenness of those eyes. In Asha’s throat, the word *masti* has a certain reeling quality, like the first sip of wine—a little sweet, a little sharp, a little uncertain. In Sufi poetry, these eyes belong to the divine cupbearer; the guru’s gaze that loses you from the path once it falls upon you, only to open the true path then. But the way Asha sings, it recalls less the mystical doctrine and more the eyes of a courtesan sitting in a mehfil of Lucknow; that highly educated artist-dancer in whose kotha—that gathering room where music and poetry assembled, where nobles and poets alike came—only her eyes’ language mattered. Here lay Asha’s strength. She could bring theory down from the heavens into the body, from sky to earth.

“Ye kya jagah hai dostoon”—what kind of place is this, my friends? There is a weariness in Asha’s voice, that weariness which comes not merely from walking a path, but from living through year after year. As if someone has walked a long road and suddenly stopped, looking back to see how far they’ve come, then looking ahead to see how much remains.

“Justuju jiski thi”—what I was searching for, I found. But at what cost? This question doesn’t make a ghazal; instead, it lets the listener wonder.

“Jab bhi milti hai”—people discuss this ghazal less, but for me it’s the most honest of them all. Every meeting brings a new grievance. That daily wound of love, which neither heals nor kills. Writing poetry about great separation is easy, because there’s drama in it. Writing about the daily weariness of love is hard, because there’s only truth. This ghazal did that difficult work.

These ghazals brought Asha her first National Film Award. More than that, they wiped away the stamp of ‘cabaret singer.’

# When a man is confined in a box, his liberation becomes proof not just for himself, but for everyone. Muzzafar Ali said, grief-stricken: “Umrao Jaan has lost all her voices. First Shahryar, then Khayyam sahib, and now Asha.” Shahryar went in 2012, Khayyam in 2019, Asha in 2026. Three deaths, the collapse of three pillars of a ghazal.

## At Asha’s Makhta

The history of ghazal singing is fundamentally a history of men. Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali, Jagjit Singh, Talat Mahmood. Begum Akhtar was there, certainly, but everyone kept her confined to Lucknow’s semi-classical tradition—locked in a specific category, for a specific audience.

Asha came by a different route entirely. No gharana; in Hindustani music, gharana is not merely a “school”—it is an inherited musical lineage, where knowledge passes from guru to disciple, where generations of singing craft generations accumulate into a distinctive color. Her training came in studios, in thousands of recording sessions, working with hundreds of composers. Talim—that Arabic-Urdu word for the kind of training that builds not just technique but a particular cast of mind. This very diversity set her ghazals apart. She was not the voice of a gharana; she was the voice of an era. She took the ghazal out of the court and brought it into the living rooms of ordinary people.

As she moved from note to note, her voice carried a liquid pull; that smooth drift of the meend, as if walking the entire path between two notes rather than leaping, feeling each intermediate tone. This is how you preserve the depth of classical music. In the murkis came velocity—those ornamental flourishes where the voice spirals quickly through several notes, tosses them up, startles the ear, then returns with a flash. And yet beneath all this craft lay such effortless naturalness in her phrasing that it seemed she was writing a letter, not performing on stage. For true mastery is precisely that: what cannot be seen, only felt. Listen to Ghulam Ali or Mehdi Hassan, and you feel you’re sitting at a grand mushaira, in that assembly of poetry where poets face each other reciting their verses, where listeners bow before art. Listen to Asha, and it seems someone has closed the door wanting to say just one thing—and that one thing is meant only for you.

The comparison with Begum Akhtar belongs here. In Begum Akhtar’s ghazals, emotion is naked; pain can be heard directly in the quaver of her voice, the listener knows the singer is in distress. Asha’s path was the reverse. She held the emotion in check, and in that very restraint lay such tension that the listener would break instead. She did not weep; she made the listener weep. Muzzafar Ali says: “There are singers who, when they pronounce a single word, transform the entire feeling of that word. Asha had this power. She poured the essence into every word.” When you heard any Urdu word from Asha, it seemed to emerge from a mouth for the first time, as if language itself were being discovered in that moment. This is not the display of mastery; it is confession.

The difference may seem small. It is immense. By virtue of this very difference, the ghazal crossed the boundaries of court and mushaira, spreading through cinema to millions of people—people who had never attended a mushaira, who don’t fully understand Urdu, yet could recognize sorrow in Asha’s voice.

## Non-Film Ghazals

In Asha’s ghazal journey beyond cinema, the most crucial name is Ghulam Ali. He is the emperor of Pakistani ghazal, and in his voice the ghazal speaks in its most natural temperament. Their joint album: “Meraj-e-Ghazal.”

# Meraj

“Meraj” in Arabic—that ascent, where the seeker reaches the closest point to God; the very name speaks of its ambition: the summit of the ghazal, that height which is difficult to attain. Two greatest voices from two countries, together, when the relationship between those two countries was not easy. Politics may say what it will, but music finds its own path.

Listen to “Salona Sa Sajan Hai,” sung by Asha with Ghulam Ali, and you understand what the chemistry was like. When two voices sing together, each remaining distinct, they create something third, something entirely new. A few years ago, in a video call, Asha taught singer Babul Supriyo the subtle ornaments of this song. Where in the meend to pause slightly, where in the murkis to move a bit faster. At ninety years of age. Think about it.

“Aabshaar-e-Ghazal” (1985) with Hariharan. In Persian, *aabshaar* means spring, waterfall; the name itself tells you what was expected from this album. Eight ghazals, all the music composed by Hariharan himself, the lyrics written by Bashir Badr, Hasan Kamal, and others. Six sung by Asha alone, two as duets with Hariharan. “Kuch Dur Hamare Saath” and “Pehle Bhi Jite The.” In these duets, the chemistry of the two voices was such as if water from two different rivers was meeting in the same channel, each preserving its own nature.

The moment the album was released, it struck a chord. 1984-85 was the time of the ghazal wave beyond Bengal. Jagjit-Chitra Singh, Pankaj Udhas—one after another releasing albums, listeners entering that intimate world of tabla and sarangi. In that wave, “Aabshaar-e-Ghazal” established itself distinctly, because here Asha’s voice was different—carrying that depth of Umrao Jaan, but in fresh light. The album was so successful that later Hariharan himself re-recorded all the songs and rereleased them under the name “Kuch Dur Hamare Saath.” The very existence of that version proves how essential Asha’s voice was to these songs. In 1994, the album won the Diva Award for Best Album—nearly ten years later, which tells you it was not some immediate hit, but something that slowly settled into people’s hearts.

The “Kaashish” album was of a different temperament. Nine ghazals, sung by Asha alone, published by Saregama. No companion like in “Meraj-e-Ghazal” or “Aabshaar-e-Ghazal”—just one voice and that voice’s own solitude. The ghazals too were introspective, as if speaking to oneself behind closed doors.

In 2005, Asha did something that surprised many. She re-recorded the most famous ghazals of four ghazal maestros in her own voice. Mehdi Hasan’s “Ranjish Hi Sahi,” “Raafta Raafta,” “Mujhe Tum Nazar Se.” Ghulam Ali’s “Chupke Chupke,” “Aavaargee,” “Dil Mein Ek Lehar.” Farida Khanum’s “Aaj Jane Ki Jid Na Karo.” Jagjit Singh’s “Ahista Ahista.” These are songs of legends, songs it takes courage to touch. Pandit Somesh Mathur gave them modern orchestration; in place of tabla and sarangi came contemporary instruments. Asha said the new generation doesn’t understand the language of tabla and sarangi; for them, the ghazal must be told in a new language, otherwise it will be lost. The words cause a small ache, because the old language was beautiful, but she wasn’t wrong.

“Mera Kuch Samaan” and the Shadow of the Ghazal Everywhere

After Umrao Jaan, a ghazal-consciousness remained in Asha’s voice; even in songs that are not, strictly speaking, ghazals, but are kindred to the ghazal in soul.

The greatest example is “Mera Kuch Samaan Tumhare Paas Pada Hai” from *Ijaazat* (1987). Words by Gulzar, music by R.D. Burman. It has no matla, no opening couplet that holds the key of the rhythm; no qafia-radif, no rhyme scheme that makes a ghazal a ghazal. Technically, it isn’t a ghazal at all. But what is inside it?

# Pure Ghazal

A girl is asking her ex-lover to return something she’s left behind. What things? The smell of monsoon rain. A silver evening. A few damp dreams. It’s a catalog of memory, but in the language of ghazal, memory means more than the past; it means those feelings that are still alive, the ones that cannot be returned because they are still breathing. To ask for memory back is to ask for a piece of yourself back. This is the eternal subject of ghazal, only spoken in wholly modern language. This song brought Asha a National Film Award, and Gulzar won Best Lyricist for the same composition. In “Khali Hath Shaam Aayi Hai” from the same film, there is that same melancholy of evening—the ‘shaam’ of ghazal, a symbol where day ends but night has not yet come, a moment of suspended uncertainty.

In “Iitbaar” (1985), with Bappi Lahiri’s melody and Hasan Kamal’s words, “Kisi Nazar Ko Tera Intezaar Aaj Bhi Hai”—Asha Parekh and Bhupinder Singh in duet, and its theme is waiting. Intezaar; in Urdu-Persian, this word is not merely the passing of time but that active expectation which becomes itself a form of worship. In Sufi poetry, waiting is another name for devotion. The devotee waits at the Sakir’s threshold for that one sip, even if it takes eternity, because the waiting itself is the prayer.

## On the World Stage

The world came to know Asha not for ghazal alone, but for the totality of her artistry. For that voice, which could sing anything and make it entirely her own. Yet the ghazal-consciousness was so woven through all her work that it brought to that recognition a depth that comes not merely from pop hits.

Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha” came out in 1997 and at first made little impact, reaching only number sixty on the UK chart. But in Norman Cook’s remix, released as Fatboy Slim in February 1998, it climbed to number one on the UK Singles Chart, displacing Céline Dion. The song’s title carries ‘Asha’—at once the name of Asha Parekh and the Hindi word for ‘hope,’ that hope which immigrants carry in their hearts to a new land. Multiple sources confirm that lyricist Tjinder Singh was not unaware of this double meaning.

In 2005, with the Kronos Quartet, “You’ve Stolen My Heart: Songs from R.D. Burman’s Bollywood”—Pancham’s melodies, on one hand a string quartet, the very spine of Western classical music, on the other the tabla of Zakir Hussain and the zheng of Chinese musician Wu Man, with vintage electronics. Three continents’ worth of sound in one album, and Pancham’s melodies stitching them together as if on a single thread—as if they were the radif, which returns at the end of everything. The album was nominated for a Grammy in 2006, not the first time, but each time it reminded us that Asha’s voice belongs to no single geography.

September 8th, 2023: Asha’s ninetieth birthday. At the Coca-Cola Arena in Dubai, Asha sang and danced. At ninety years old, she sang in a way people do not sing. She told the journalists: “Main is film industry ki aakhri Mughal hoon.” I am the last Mughal of this industry. The self-assurance required to say this at ninety is precisely what the ghazal poet does in the makhta—that final couplet of the ghazal where the poet places his own takhallus, his signature. To declare oneself. To leave one’s mark. To say: I was here, and I was this.

And then, at the very end, February 27th, 2026. In Gorillaz’s ninth studio album “The Mountain,” the song “The Shadowy Light”; the album’s theme is death, grief, crossing over. Damon Albarn has long been an admirer of Pancham, and he has called Asha’s voice ‘psychedelic’ and ‘experimental’—in the sense that breaks boundaries.

On this track were Gruff Rhys (vocalist of Super Furry Animals), flutist Ajay Prasanna, and sarod players Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash, alongside Asha’s voice. Asha recorded her vocals in her Mumbai flat. Albarn played the harmonium, as if two artists from opposite ends of the world sat together in the same tavern. The song was about crossing a river by boat; calling to the ferryman, journeying to the far shore. It has since been marked as her final professional recording. In hindsight, nothing could have been more fitting as a last song.

What will not be, and what remains

Muzaffar Ali tells us they had decided to make an album of Persian ghazals together. In that language, where the ghazal’s roots lie; in the language of Hafiz, in the language of Rumi. Asha had said: “We will do this.” That album will never exist now.

Three or four months ago, Ali had visited Asha’s home, for the release of his book and the reissue of “Umrao Jaan.” Asha had cooked kebabs with her own hands and fed him. She used to say that had she not sung, she would have been a cook—and she proved it too, opening the “Asha’s” restaurant chain in Dubai and the United Kingdom. But if only someone had known, in that final meeting, that it was the end—the fragrance of that woman’s cooking, versed in the refinements of Lucknow, the taste of those kebabs! No one knew. The ghazal teaches this too—the final moment doesn’t announce itself.

What Asha left behind in the world of ghazal is more than just songs. It is proof that the ghazal can live beyond the mushaira. In cinema, in recording studios, even in a Gorillaz album, even in the title of a British indie song that knocked Céline Dion off the charts. Another proof that the female voice on this earth is no less than the male. And proof that one can grasp the sorrow of the ghazal without understanding the tabla or sarangi, if the voice is true—because sorrow needs no language.

The Sufi poet Fakhruddin Iraqi wrote: “La ilaha illal-ishq.” There is no god but love. Asha’s journey through the ghazal was the melody of these very words—that pen name which lived in her voice, not on paper.

The final couplet

In the ghazal, the poet places the takhallus—the signature—in the makhta, the closing couplet; in that final verse, the name of the pen, the seal. It says: this sorrow is mine, this love is mine, this song is mine. Asha’s takhallus was her voice. More than twelve thousand songs. More than twenty languages. More than eight decades. These numbers are easy to say, but behind them—all those sleepless nights in the studio, all those arguments with composers, all those words sung again and again until they were perfect—one cannot even fathom.

The philosophy of the ghazal says death is not the end. After fana comes baqa. After the dissolution of self comes that persistence, where the old “I” no longer exists, but something remains, something greater. After dissolution comes return. It is a beautiful thing to say, but in these times, writing only this is not enough. Asha Bhosle’s ghazals will still play—that is true. But the voice that could take a word newly spoken and lift it to another height, that voice is gone. This absence cannot be filled with any philosophy.

The ghazal teaches this too—some emptiness remains empty. That too is a kind of fullness.

Om shanti.