BATHINDA: Indian screen legend Dilip Kumar was a fanboy of Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, whose daughter, 79-year-old professor Salima Hashmi, recalls Yusuf Khan’s reciting her father’s Urdu couplets from memory whenever she rewinds a tape from Mumbai.
Speaking to the Times of India from Lahore, she recalled Dilip Kumar’s 1989 visit to Karachi with his wife, Saira Banu, and brother, Ahsan Khan, for a charity event to raise money for the patients of thalassaemia. She said: “He called my mother, Alys Faiz, to ask if he could come to our house in Lahore to do personal condolences for the demise of my father, although he had sent a message at Faiz Saab’s passing away in 1984. He requested to make it a private affair but the word got out and his admirers poured in from all over. Poet Qateel Shifai and our family doctor also queued up.”
Hashmi recalled that: “Saira and he were very gracious.” His brother, Ahsan Khan, who accompanied them, passed away in September 2020. Hashmi said: “Later in Mumbai for shooting a documentary, I went to Dilip Kumar’s house with my daughter, where he not only told me about his favourite ghazal of my father, ‘Mauzu-e-Sukhan’, but also recited it for us on camera: ‘Gul huī jaatī hai afsurda sulagtī huī shaam, Dhul ke nilegī abhī chashma-e-mahtāb se raat; Aur mushtāq nigāhoñ kī sunī jāegī, Aur un hāthoñ se mas hoñge ye tarse hue haath. (The smouldering evening is being extinguished slowly, Soon the night will arrive bathed in the fountain of the moon, And the desire of my eyes will be fulfilled, And my thirsty hands will touch those hands).’”
She said Pakistan had many more fond memories of the Peshawar-born Indian cinema legend, whom it regarded as its own and who would step across the border frequently. She said: “The Pakistanis loved his films and, many years ago, wanted to preserve his ancestral house.”
