Friendships and (be)longing are woven through Shamim Zamanvi’s poem Faslon ki Qurbat (Destiny’s Nearness): ‘The shadow of my memory will be with you / Yours with me / The pulse of our friendship will vanquish this distance.’ He likens fate to a magician-gambler, but trickier still. Each move, each gamble, isn’t one you wanted to play, but instead were played – that dice was never yours to throw. Zamanvi, an Urdu poet and translator, knows what that feels like. Born in the vortex of mid-20th century metamorphoses of empires to nations, one of which was the 1947 partition of India, his has been a splintered reality.
His family is from Zamania, a town near Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India. The surname, Zamanvi, a trace of that attachment like driftwood settled on a distant beach. Zamanvi hasn’t been to UP in a while, which is an understatement; fatherless very early on, he has memories of Chittagong, where his mother and elder brother relocated, but he was raised by a childless uncle in Khulna before settling in Dhaka. But ‘settling’ is perhaps another understatement. Where one is from and where one settles and where home is are bent to shape like bonsais of nationalist fantasies.
