Gulzar’s nature poetry draws inspiration from things we’ve all seen but perhaps never really observed. With Aab’o-Hawaa, to be presented at the NCPA this month, he wants to share his mighty imagination with us by reintroducing us to our living, breathing world.

By Vipasha Aloukik Pai

For scientists, trees are modular organisms, in which a primary unit produces more units like itself. But ask the beloved poet and lyricist Gulzar about trees, and he will usher you, Ratatouille-style, to your childhood, where you were safe and loved and somehow knew things before you fully understood them. “In pedon ne humko jhoolaya hoga zaroor, the way we do to our children,” he says, describing his reverence for trees on a weekday afternoon at his home in Bandra. “Trees are the original inhabitants of this earth. We came later.” He quotes one of his nazms. Jab main jungle se guzarta hoon to lagta hai mere purkhe khade hain. (When I pass through the forest, it seems as though my ancestors are standing around me.)

In his poetry, these ancestors cradle us, watch over us, question our follies and miss us when we grow distant. One river remembers the face of the little girl who once offered flowers to it in order to find a good husband. Another grumpy, elderly, river worries about a girl called Lachho falling pregnant with the child of a liar. The river, like the tree, likes to nap in the middle of the day. Trees, if they are silent, sometimes meditate with the intensity of a Sufi. Snowfall can be masoom or shaatir. Clouds can sometimes behave like gangsters. Sunlight is the elderly matriarch that kisses your forehead in the morning.

How can one explain this world in which the aab’o-hawaa, the environment, is a life-affirming entity, constantly conversing with us mere mortals? In the 1980s, Japan developed the research-backed therapeutic practice of forest bathing, which involves immersing oneself physically in a forest, not to trek or hike or climb but to simply bask in the air and smell of the forest. The practice, often medically prescribed as an antidote to stress, is rehabilitative at a cellular level. To spend time with Gulzar’s nature poetry, elemental in language but strangely restorative for the mind, is the armchair version of forest bathing.

“If you personify nature,” says Gulzar, “you will realise it’s talking to you all the time. You only have to know its language.” I think of how he observed a stream running down a mountain. It must have the longest legs, he suggests in one his poems, because the coming down never ends. “Have you seen eagles flying?” he continues. “They don’t seem to flap their wings. Like ballerinas, they float in the air. It’s so beautiful. It’s like us, when we float in a pond. Only, they look much more graceful than us. Compare yourself to them. And the next time an eagle comes on your parapet, you will feel a friendship with it. And your attitude will be different.” This is Gulzar the poet, a missionary of the mind, sharing his point of view of the natural world. I tell him about my aversion to harsh sunlight, which has been a migraine-causing nemesis all my life and yet, after listening to how Gulzar sees ‘her’ as a sweet old dai doing chores around the house, it now makes me smile. “Your attitude has changed. And so has changed the attitude of sunlight towards you,” he assures me.

His own attitude has also changed over the decades. He never used to talk to trees or plants, for instance. “This I learnt from my wife,” he shares. Pointing to a bakul tree in his garden, he says, “It wasn’t growing.

Rakheeji asked me if I had spoken to it. What could I say to a tree? She then started sitting with it and talking to it.” The tree has grown beautifully since. “I’ve also seen Basuda [film director Basu Bhattacharya] doing it. He would have his morning tea with his plants and he would talk to them and whistle to them,” he recalls.

The people in his life have also inspired his poetry. When a mention of his poem on a river that asks an existential question is made, he immediately points out that ‘Ek Nadi ki Baat Suni’ was inspired by Rekha Bhardwaj, who once asked him if we can ever experience the nothingness that a poem experiences once it’s been recited. Gulzar wrote: Kya aisa ho sakta hai jab kuchh bhi na ho…jaise kavita keh lene ke baad padi reh jaati hai, main padi rahu… The nazm, which is part of a collection of Gulzar’s reflections on the natural world, is dedicated to Bhardwaj. “I have replied to many people through poems,” he says.

Salim Arif, curator of Aab’o-Hawaa, in a separate phone conversation, explains the concept of the show. “There will be poems set to music by Sandesh Shandilya, and a conversation around Gulzar saab’s concerns about the environment and nature.” A creative collaborator who has worked with Gulzar for almost 40 years, from the television series Mirza Ghalib to movies like Maachis, and later in theatre, Arif says, “Nature, for Gulzar saab, is a living companion. He looks at the trees in his garden, the sun and the sunlight as his own family.” Arif, much like most of us, finds the poet’s way of looking at things remarkable. “Gulzar saab has a very interesting way of using metaphors in unusual ways. And, he has been an extensive traveller. He understands how an evening in Jorhat [Assam] with the same sun is different from an evening in Mumbai.”

Gulzar remembers these sojourns with great fondness. “I went to witness the white nights in Leningrad, where the sun doesn’t set. I went to Samarkand to understand where Timur had come from. Someone told me his tomb was nearby, so I went, not so much to meet the man but to meet the history of my country,” he says. “There are elements in nature that you have not seen, but if you’ve read about something, then go and meet it too,” he urges this writer. Interesting how he chooses to use ‘meet’ instead of ‘see’.

What do we think about grief? It is something hard that we must all go through, yes. A jolt for the limbic system, definitely. But grief also has a purpose. It wakes us up to the fact that change needs to come in and we therefore need to unlock our doors. The last few weeks have been devastating across the world. The news has been full of stories of deadly avalanches and floods that have wiped out entire villages. Glaciers in the Himalayas and the Alps are melting at dangerous speeds. Wildfires are destroying natural ecosystems across Europe, Indonesia and the US. Warnings are rife about rising sea levels around the world. Meanwhile, in some places, trees are being destroyed with a determination that seems unstoppable. We must deal with our current environmental problems using science, technology, policy and common sense. But in those quiet moments, when grief and fear hover over us like an insurmountable force, it helps to have poetic faith. To think like Gulzar. To learn to respect nature. For us, that now goes hand in hand with survival. “There are people who love nature. They want to talk about it,” he says. “Unko sirf gudgudaane ki baat hai.” They just need to be tickled, given a soft nudge. Something he hopes to do this October.

Gulzar is not trying to teach us I-told-you-so lessons. There is no doomsaying and fear-mongering in his poetry or, indeed, his way of thinking. He simply believes that we have forgotten how to be happy and play with nature. “We should get emotional about these things. That’s what I mean to do. Just look at nature with your emotions, and then I will not have to tell you to not cut trees,” he says. “I’m not doing this to talk negatively. I’m not saying that we have destroyed everything. Our aab’o-hawaa is too gracious and too magnanimous.”

At one point during our conversation, when I asked Gulzar a banal question from my list of prepared ones, he, very gently, put his hand on my head. Didn’t say a word but perhaps he knew he didn’t have to. We had been reading his poetry for so long now, we understood. He was asking me to let go of my pre-conceived notions and try to understand his way of looking at the world. Be present. Go with the flow. Amend the agenda. With Aab’o-Hawaa, I reckon he wants to do the same thing with his audience. This gentle giant of lyric and poetry wants us to acknowledge the environment as something we belong to, instead of something that belongs to us.

This article was originally published in the October 2026 issue of ON Stage.