It doesn’t go away, he says. It feels like this moment has been a lifetime in the making—a tension I know all too well is one-sided. I’m 23 now, but I’ve been deeply fascinated by Gulzar’s work since I was a child, and my mother told me that ‘Mera Kuchh Samaan’ was her favourite song. I’m not an anomaly. Despite Gen Z’s penchant for fast-paced, byte-sized content, the 90-year-old maestro’s poetry and music blur the years between his generation and mine. “When I was 15, I travelled from Bengaluru to Mumbai for Gulzar Saab’s book signing. I played his songs in the taxi the entire way to the event,” says 19-year-old artist Aryan Nalway. Needhi Singh, 22, remembers her father singing “Tujhse Naraz Nahin Zindagi” to her as a child, while 20-year-old New Yorker Riya Goel uses the poet’s works to connect with her family back home. Vishruta Dholakia, a 21-year-old psychology student from London, explains: “Reading his work is like having someone older looking out for you. He expresses the most complicated emotions in the simplest and gentlest way. He doesn’t stab you with the truth, he comforts you with it.” When I tell Gulzar about it, he doesn’t try to brush me off with false modesty. He wears his experience with pride, aware that his work resonates with so many young people. “My poems are almost like prose,” he says. “It’s like I’m having a conversation. I’m just making people aware of the things they don’t see, or that they see and don’t fully process.”
The moon is one of those things. The celestial object – in all its phases – plays a recurring role in Gulzar’s writings. Singer Asha Bhosle once told him that had it not been for the moon, he would never have discovered the writer in himself. In his poem ‘Painting’, Gulzar writes, ‘The moon was placed as if it were a shining porcelain cauldron.’ In another poem, ‘Patjhad’, he imagines the ‘faint yellow moon’ fluttering down into his garden like an autumn leaf. Even in the famous ‘Mera Kuchh Samaan’, the moon appears when the heartbroken Maya counts ‘116 nights of the moon’ in her relationship with Mahinder, played by Naseeruddin Shah. When I ask Gulzar about this obsession, his words instantly turn poetic. (‘He speaks like poetry,’ I will later tell a friend.) ‘Perhaps you look up at the sky and see only the moon. “I look at it and see a behrupiya, a trickster, changing his face,” he muses, and I recognize the reference to his own poem, “Chaand Saman.” “If it is crescent-shaped, I see a boat, I see a half-closed eye. I don’t know when my obsession with it began. After all, the moon has lived much longer than I have.”
