Stay close in the season of yellow

Tum mere paas raho, mere qaatil, mere dildar mere paas raho…

Stay close to me, my killer, my beloved — stay close.

It is a perilous plea. It privileges proximity over purity. It risks rupture over retreat. It dares tenderness in times that reward distance.

Faiz continues:

Jis ghadi raat chale, aasmaanon ka lahoo pee kar siyah raat chale,
marham-e-mushk liye nashtar-e-almaas chale…

When night moves, drinking the blood of the sky into its darkened veins,
when diamond-edged daggers walk carrying musk-scented balm—

The night, in Faiz, is never simple. It is blade and balm, bruise and blessing, wound and whisper. That is the world we inhabit now — sharp and soft, savage and soothing, sacred and scorched.

But my connection to this ghazal did not begin in Jaipur. It began in a classroom.

Abhimanyu Katyal — my classmate — whose father ran an export house that dealt with Pakistan. From Lahore and Karachi came cartons of commerce, yes — but also cassettes, contraband and coveted, passed like precious secrets between boys too young to understand borders and old enough to sense their burden. Mixtapes. Music videos. Magnetic ribbons wound tight with longing.

And through those tapes came Nayyara Noor — velvet-voiced, measured, magnificent — carrying Faiz not as recitation but as revelation. Through her came the ache of Fareeda Khanum, her voice thick with longing and luminous with loss. I was a pre-teen perched precariously between innocence and intensity, and those voices entered my bloodstream before politics ever could.

Faiz was not yet theory. He was tremor.

Bain karti hui, hansti hui, gaati nikle…

Weeping and laughing and singing all at once.

In Nayyara Noor’s restraint, I heard dignity. In Fareeda Khanum’s ache, I heard audacity. In Faiz, I heard humanity — not narrow, not national, but vast. He carried lust and longing, pride and protest, devotion and defiance in the same stanza.

Those cassettes from Lahore and Karachi were not imports. They were invitations. Invitations into a shared subcontinent of sorrow and song.

Years later, in Jaipur, at the Art of India 2026 edition, curated by the polyglot Alka Pande, I felt that same invitation flicker again.

Almost 200 artists gathered under one roof. Masters beside novices. Minimalism beside mythology. Protest beside prayer. The canvases did not compete; they conversed. No one demanded erasure. No one claimed monopoly. They stood, suspended and sovereign, and called it a culture.

Only four or five of us were present that evening. The rest of the room belonged to colour and canvas.

Among us stood Paresh Maity — West Bengal’s modest son turned global giant. Perhaps India’s most successful modern artist. He arrived immaculate in a black cord set — fluid yet firm — crowned by a cape stitched from swaths of textiles seamlessly joined. Not a coat but a constellation. Not fabric but federation. He looked like a peacock whose plumage had folded inward — splendour subdued, spectacle stilled.

In him, I saw aspiration realised. In him, I saw what becomes possible when a nation nurtures not narrows. When hope is housed not hounded.

Jaipur — pink, poised, plural — held it all. Mughal memory and Rajput resilience. Temple clang and Sufi chorus. Turbaned traders and tuxedoed patrons. It was not seamless. It was symphonic.

And yet — the ache persisted.

Because the world beyond the gallery grows brittle. Borders thicken. Treaties tear. Language is weaponised. Faith is fenced. A few fervent voices presume to speak for many. Power pools in narrow palms. Love is muted. Dialogue is drowned.

This is not India alone. This is a planetary pressure.

Faiz foresaw such speed:

Dard ki qaasid-e-raftaar chale…

Pain travels swiftly like a courier.

Today it travels through fibre optics and fevered feeds. It trends before it thinks. It wounds before it wonders.

To be a single man at 53 is to stand before a mirror stripped of myth. To see your staggering luck at birth — loving Hindu parents, educated elders, generous table, expansive thought. To be shaped by an India that believed in plurality without panic. That taught me I was citizen before category, human before headline.

That elasticity feels endangered.

On a farm in Hebron, New York, I tasted what happens when elasticity evaporates. Brown in a white rural expanse. Not churchgoing. Not familiar. Not fitting. There were more haters than helpers — not because they knew me, but because fear had fossilised them. Ignorance had insulated them. Inherited suspicion had imprisoned their imagination.

I could have recoiled. Retreated. Reinforced my own walls.

Instead, I remained.

Is liye raat ko rukhsat karoon…

So that I may bid the night farewell gently.

I chose presence over paranoia. Proximity over prejudice. I cooked. I conversed. I confronted without cruelty. It was awkward. It was anxious. But absence would have affirmed their assumptions. Closeness complicated them.

Faiz presses further:

Is liye subah ko seenay se laga kar rakh loon…

So that I may hold the morning close to my chest.

Morning is not automatic. It must be embraced.

At the exhibition, almost 200 artists stood like stitched seams in a shared story. Abstraction beside antiquity. Rage beside reverence. Paresh Maity’s cape was not couture; it was credo. Fragments honoured. Threads visible. Difference deliberate.

Allama Iqbal reminded us — gently but firmly — that a society that ceases to question its course forfeits its relevance. Reflection is not rebellion. It is responsibility.

Art is Ain-i-Haq — mirror of truth.

It does not flatter the powerful. It reveals the present.

In Jaipur, I saw India not as utopia but as undertaking. A proposition that plurality is power. That aspiration need not amputate ancestry. That fragments can flourish without fragmentation.

Still, grief glimmered.

Grief for conversations curdled. For friendships fractured by ideology. For the way volume overwhelms value. For how love is sometimes sidelined by spectacle.

And so Faiz returns:

Tum mere paas raho…

Stay close.

Stay close — even when it unsettles.
Stay close — even when it unsettles you.
Stay close — because vanishing is a vaster violence than vulnerability.

There must be hope. Hard-won. Honest. Unhysterical.

Certainties remain. Hate hollows. Division diminishes. Power without accountability corrodes.

But proximity transforms.

Paresh Maity did not rise in isolation. He emerged from exchange — village to metropolis, textile to technology, memory to modernity. His cape was covenant.

India at her best has always been such a cape — imperfect seams, visible stitches, deliberate design.

As winter withdraws and summer sharpens, Basant stands stubborn and splendid between extremes. Yellow without permission. Bloom without border.

Perhaps that is our burden and our blessing.

To remain close enough for colour to carry.
To remain critical enough to correct course.
To remain courageous enough to converse.

Is liye din ko bhi maqtal mein saja kar rakh loon…

So that even the battlefield may be adorned.

Even discord can be dignified if we refuse to dehumanise.

In Jaipur, amid almost 200 artists, with only a handful of us present, I felt ache and assurance braided together. Ache for a world strained by smallness. Assurance that creativity, courage, and conversation continue.

Tum mere paas raho, mere qaatil, mere dildar…

Stay close — not because it is comfortable, but because it is crucial.
Stay close — not because we are identical, but because we are intertwined.
Stay close — because civilisation is stitched, not severed.

Spring returns each year without seeking sanction.

Yellow spills across dargah and temple alike.

And that stubborn, sacred spread — that insistence on colour in the face of cold — is perhaps the most radical hope of all.