I do not know which I was more, a lover or a poet. Both love and poetry consumed me. An affair of the heart brought me into disrepute; my poetry earned me a name which resounded all over Hindustan. Love brought me anguish; poetry a feeling of ecstasy. What neither love nor poetry brought me was money. Whatever I earned was by stringing garlands of words. Living amongst people who could not tell the difference between a finely cut diamond and a bead of glass, it was more the whims of my patrons than the excellence of my craftsmanship that determined what I had to eat. My father, the saintly Meer Mohammed Ali, once said to me, ‘Son, I worry over your future. A fire has been lit in your heart. I fear for what it will do to you.’ I was only nine years old and laughed at his words. He had the wisdom of age; he wept because he knew that the fire of love would both make me and destroy me.

One evening after he had said his afternoon prayer, he said to me, ‘Beta, the world changes very fast and there is very little time to catch up with it. The road of life is also very uneven; you must watch your steps. Whatever time you have, devote it to knowing yourself.’ I was only ten years old and had plenty of time to do whatever I liked. Also I did not think there was very much about myself that I did not know.

We lived in a hermitage on the outskirts of Akbarabad (Agra). Besides my father’s children from his two wives, there was Chacha Amanullah who lived with us and like my father spent most of his waking hours in prayer and meditation. When they were not praying or meditating they argued about love. My father said if you love God you love everything created by God. Chacha put it the other way round: If you love God’s creatures you love God. I could not understand how two old men could go on talking for hours on end about the same thing day after day. It was only later that I understood the kind of love which was on Chacha Amanullah’s mind. I used to wonder sometimes why when he talked so much about loving God’s creatures, he never raised his eyes from the ground when women were around. Then one evening he was taking in the air in an Agra bazaar when he happened to exchange glances with a beautiful boy and fell madly in love with him. After this incident he lost his appetite for food and his peace of mind. A few days later he died pining away for the love of that lad.