bit by bit the splintered day has ended

Meena Kumari  Naaz  born on 1932 and died on 1972 (Bit by Bit)

Meena Kumari became a legend as an actress in her lifetime and has remained one even after her death. At the height of her career, there was no other name in the film world that sprang more joyfully to the lips of millions of fans across the country who watched all her films, followed each incident in her tragic life, and Mourned her death. An exceptionally beautiful and talented actress always dressed in white, she was, and remains, to quote the critic Afeefa Banu, “an object of fantasy and a motif of melancholy.

Meena Kumari was born and reared in Bombay. her mother Iqbal Begum, was also an actress, and her father, Ali Bakhsh, a music director, Soon after Meena Kumari was born, her father fell seriously ill and her mother had no support the family and manage the home. The child shared her mother’s burden, and grew up with adult responsibilities in an at Mosphere of sadness. At the age of 4, she acted in her first film, and earned what in those times would have been considered a handsome some 25 rupees. “Baby Meena” (so Christened by the director Vijaya Bhatt) worked in several films before graduating to adult rolls. Her films became box office hits and she in turn rich and famous. Among her classic are Baiju-Bawra ([The Legendary Love Story of] Baiju-Bawra), 1952, Parinita, 1953 and Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam (The Master, His wife, and the Slave), 1962. She won the National “best actress” award for role in each of the. Pakeeza, 1971, a popular film based on the story of a court singer who fell in love with a nobleman was released posthumously.

Though Mina Kumari did not have a formal education, she loved literature, and when she had time, read widely in poetry, taking careful notes in her diary. 

People are often surprised to discover that this distinguished actress and singer was also a poet who wrote under the pen name Naz. Many of the lyrics from the popular album she released are her own compositions, Their startling images and intimate tone speak of her sensitivity, her warmth, her philosophic disposition.  Sahir Ludhianvi, a well known writer of lyrics for Hindi films, said in a singular tribute on her death in 1972 , “She was an artist with a rare talent, a soft spoken women in white with the soul of a poet which she had to sacrifice to start work. Her youth was spent depicting various tragediesthat befall Indian women, with no time to think of her  personal tragedy. Her whole life was a sacrifice of her own emotions.”

 Mina Kumari's personal life like that a Hamsa Wadkar( an excerpt of whose autobiography is reprinted in this volume)a decade earlier, moved from tragedy to tragedy. According to Ram Aurangabadkar, a film journalist, “She helped several actors to become stars but most of them left her without a backward glance once they took off ….. Love was the predominant emotion in her life, and she was a hopeless romantic. She loved two easily and let her love destroy her.”  Of herself she wrote in her diary, extracts from with which were published in Film fare in 1969, “I feel as if I am suspended in a vacuum, a dark void in which my whole being is so cold and desensitized that when thoughts and feelings come to me, they seem to come to someone else, and I watch the inner world of that other person as though I stand at a distance …. “

A collection of her poem Tanha Chand( the solitary moon) from which the poem here is taken was completed by SS Gulzar and published posthumously.

Poem

Bit by bit the splintered day has ended

 

Bit by bit the splintered day has ended,

The night is all in shreds.

To each of us is given just as much

As we can carry. 

 

The spattering, singing drops of rain

 Hold poison and immorality too.

 My eyes laugh, my heart Rains tears, 

 Such is the monsoon I’ve been granted.

 

 Whenever I’ve strained to know myself

 I’ve heard a chuckle,

 As if someone within me spoke and said,

 In this game you’ll be foiled again.

 

 What does defeat mean, or waiting,

 When an endless trek is my allotted fate?

 When my heart was gifted to me, as companion,

 An unrest walked alongside.