Her feet touch the ground. She is back in her city. It has been 14 years. For her it has mythological antecedents. “It feels like a ban-bas,” says poet Ishrat Afreen who can barely conceal her delight at returning to Karachi for a short trip. This is the city where she gained recognition as a poet, the city she hankered after and turned to in poem after poem, as if recapturing it image by image. The city she went away from but could never leave. Contacts are renewed once again. It seems that Ishrat Afreen is back in her element.

The city’s literary circles are quick to recognize the distinct voice and expression of Ishrat Afreen, now more mature if anything else. Karachi is a regular watering hole for literary figures of all sorts descending down from the States, England or Europe and programmes are manoeuvred for them. It is different with Ishrat Afreen, as if poetry aficionados were actually celebrating her homecoming. There is a series of functions and gatherings from the Arts Council to the Press Club, the Irtiqa forum to her alma mater as she is honoured and feted. Literary circles come to realize once again that the voice of poetry rings true and deep in Ishrat Afreen.

As an upcoming poet in the late ’70s, Ishrat Afreen rose like a meteor across the literary horizon. Her chiselled and elegant verses barely concealed a fiery passion for the under-priviliged and the downtrodden in our society. This slim, sari-clad girl became a regular at mushairas as she became a known name. But none of this was easily achieved.

Ishrat Afreen can today sit back and smile as she recalls her early days. “I began writing poetry even before the realization (inkishaf) that I was a poet. I wrote my first verses when I was very small.” She attributes this to the atmosphere in her home. “It felt as if poetry was in the very air. I didn’t have to think much about it.”

It was permeated with the verses of Mir Anees. Her family supported and encouraged her writing. Some of her poems were published in the Jang and somebody suggested to her that she should publish in literary journals. Sultana Mehar, the veteran journalist, introduced her work to the literary magazine Seep in 1976-77. Those were the days of intense and almost feverish literary activity in Karachi. Ishrat pays homage to Munsif Raza who organized the “Bazm-i-Ilm-o-Danish” in Malir where discussions and readings were the norm. “My thinking acquired a polish there,” she says as her poetry became known for its fiery ideological commitment. Sehba Lucknavi published her ghazal in Afkar:

and this caught the literary world’s attention.

A sense of place and a feeling of being rooted emerges from her poetry. Her background of Malir was a formative influence and she refers back to her “mohalla” in a long poem which vividly recaptured Karachi as it was only a few years ago. Baba Usman’s taazia and Bohar-wali Amman come to life in her poem. They are all fellow sufferers, involved in the struggle for existence and living in ethnic harmony. Her poetry also celebrates working women. The housewife crushed beneath the chores of running a house is eulogized in a beautiful poem which ironically refers to “the death of an unimportant person”.

Ishrat credits her mother for this understanding. Born in a traditional feudal background, she was widowed at an early age and had to face a tough life. “My mother was about 14 or 15 when I was born and it was as if a new doll had been given to a child to talk to. She made me her friend and confidante,” she says.

She had inherited this from her own mother’s circumstances and passed down her hatred of the cruel system to her young daughter. “Basically, there is no story of a single person. There is a whole chain,” Ishrat explains her ideological leanings. “It had nothing to do with slogans – it came out of my heart.”

The progressive diction and thinking dominated her poetry and this too at a time when the progressive style was on the wane and a modernistic stance was the order of the day. “Ideology points out a way,” she responds to my comment.

She was well known by the time Kunj Peelay Pholon Ka, her collection of poems appeared in 1985. It was an immediate success. It had a preface by Ali Sardar Jafri, comments by Ada Jafri and Ismat Chughtai who greeted its publication enthusiastically.

Ali Sardar Jafri’s influence soon stretched beyond the preface and modified her life when she married his nephew Pervaiz Jafri and moved to India just three days after her book was launched in Karachi. She can say in retrospect that this caused a disruption in her career as she could not see her book reaching out to readers, specially theyounger generation.

“In India, there is very serious work being done in the universities but the mushaira, where poetry is read out and heard, has become part of entertainment,” she says. A few years later she moved to the States. Although she kept writing, the demands of her growing family made her move away from literary circles. Today she states proudly that she has successfully raised her children and inculcated a love and understanding of Urdu in them.

Many people assumed that she has given up her poetry. She published sparsely. When her long poem “Jehan Zad” appeared in a magazine, it became apparent that she has been undergoing a process of maturity and development and that she was in a new terrain of experience as well as expression. Taking her cue from the brilliant “Hasan Kooza Gar” cycle of poems by N.M. Rashed, the female protagonist moves out of the shadows to acquire a life and a voice of her own.

This was a watershed in her writing life. She tells me that she actually wrote it in 1982. Jamil Naqsh heard it and was moved to paint the central figure. This painting made the cover of her book but the poem was not included in it as she felt that something was still missing. She completed it in 1994 or 1995 when she added and rewrote it, but hesitated before publishing it. This led to a new vista opening. She wrote poems touching upon themes ranging from depression and menopause, black holes in space, displacement and uprooting, pollution and the genetic code.

She wrote a ghazal with the radeef “gard hi gard” after she heard about Pakistan’s atomic explosion. Her ghazals are characterized by their unconventional vocabulary and depth of feeling.

Her recent poetry has already won accolades from Ahmed Nadeem Qasimi, Fahmida Riaz and Zaheda Hina who have all written about it. Ikram Barelvi has already published a book length study of her work. At the moment she is finalizing her second collection of poetry. How does it feel to be back? I ask her as she sits back at home, dunking papa in her tea and she says with a smile that this is one of the things she misses most.

Has she come back to a different city? “So many things looked different. We are now used to a different personal behaviour. If I had stayed on here I may not have noticed anything. But over the years, people have become harsher. They are more tense. People have lost their patience. Nobody seems to smile. They are over-confident or nervous. They are either anxious or perhaps embarrassed. I have noticed so many buildings with “mashaallah” inscribed over the walls. Are they trying to give a justification or are concealing their fear? I remember that these words were used for a child who was doing well or performing some good feat. I could never imagine people saying “mashaallah” over money and wealth. Even the Taj Mahal does not have these words written on it!”