There is a 19th century painting, often attributed to the Lucknow School, that is said to depict the famous Urdu poet Mir Taki ‘Mir’(1723-1810). Here is a grim looking, bespectacled poet with streaks of grey in his beard and a rather fierce looking moustache with ends turned upwards like a scorpion’s tail. The mouth is pursed in what could be either haughty disdain or a suppressed smile. This, you tell yourself, is the man with rapier sharp wit and a subtle sense of humour who wrote some of the most profound and, on occasion, profane verses. He was known as Khuda-e-Sukhan, god of poetry, and as the ‘Nawab Mir of Lucknow’ – a latter title he might have haughtily discussed as unfit for someone who looked down on Lucknow as the seat of Urdu culture. He had pioneered the celebrated Delhi school of ghazal, giving common Delhiwallas’ spoken zubaan a literary aura so far reserved for Farsee. The portrait, painted perhaps in his middle years, captures an intense loss in the eyes. These eyes were witness to the unravelling of the once grand Sultanate-e- Mughaliya convulsed by humiliating defeats, lootings and mass massacres at the hands of marauding bands of Nadir Shah and later Ahmed Shah Abdali. He is neither a protagonist nor a judge, but a poet turned witness. When bullied by the Lucknavi patrons of Urdu, he addressed them as the Eastern fellows (Poorab ke Saakino) living in the provincial Awadh of Nawab Asifuddaula: “You smirk at my poverty and ask me where I hail from? Once upon [a time] there was a place known as Delhi, known throughout the civilised world for its grandeur ruined to a haunted wasteland, that is where I come from.”It is the convoluted fate of Delhi — called through the ages by various names: Indraprastha, Qila Rai Pithora, Siri, Sher Garh, Shahjahanabad, and New Delhi — to be razed and rebuilt. And in each avatar, in its days of glory, it is marked by unbridled, proliferating words. The Delhi Mir had loved so in its heyday may have been decadent but it was also a place of endless, indefatigable, fierce, frantic, but always friendly discussions among the nobility and the intelligentsia over the hybridisation of common languages, music and religious philosophies. With statecraft and warfare having been relegated to the backyard of politics, poets like Mir and Sauda, musicologists and composers like Sadarang and painters like Ghulam Ali, Nidhamal, and Chitarmal were as famous as the politicians. The nobility fought over who would patronise them and revel in the glory of their art. The fall of Delhi and the murder of many members of the nobility led to a diaspora. One after another, artists began to leave for the provinces. Soon, Delhi became – in the immortal phrase of Mir – an Ujda Dayar, a haunted wasteland. Mir migrated to Lucknow only to return, now living in narrow lanes surrounded with poverty and hobnobbing with his beloved listeners on the steps of the Jama Masjid. This was when Mohini the cat entered his lonely life. It was for his companion Mohini that Mir, known for his tightly spun poetry full of longing, eroticism, bereavements and unrequited love, wrote a wonderful long nazm – a poem, brilliantly translated into English by the late Dr Shamsurrahman Farooqi. The verse is an outpouring of all the love, grief and joy an ageing Mir felt. In it are embedded many details of his personal, domestic and mundane life, infused with a glowing love for another lost and lonely but proud creature who roams over the ruins fearlessly, unsheathing the claws only in self defence. But to Mir, Mohini remains a symbol of unflinching loyalty and tender supplication.Cats, to great writers caught in an age of climacteric change – Mir, Ghalib, Eliot or Murakami – symbolise a certain mystery, an untamed independence of spirit and, on occasion, an erasure of boundaries between human and animal life. So Mir’s Mohini is not just an ordinary wanderer but also a gateway to a parallel world where you see an intermingling of life patterns, where self-absorption is giving way to abstract philosophical musings and new patterns of intimate communication that had all but evaporated from Delhi by early 19th century.Mir sees, through Mohini, how civilisation thrives when free communication between different communities in various languages becomes an everyday reality, mutating and giving birth to new lives.Mir records how Mohini lost two earlier litters — they thought he and Mohini were to perish without creating a next generation. But then a miracle happened when Mir and his equally impoverished neighbourhood managed to save not one, not two, but five kittens Mohini gave birth to. The poet, living hand to mouth, organised milk from a cow and a goat and sat vigil to ensure the kittens — with snouts like silk — lapped it all up. The kittens all went to good surrogate homes, barring Munni. So he, Munni, Mani and Mohini kept each other company till Mohini breathed her last and was buried somewhere behind the lanes of Billimaran.How is this relevant to today? Well, we know how the war has changed the world. Not only have stealth bombers been replaced with Spitfires, and electoral Rath Yatras with road shows; oratorially literary allusions in speeches emanating from Delhi and Washington have replaced quips from civilizational elders with startling clips from Hollywood or Dhurandhar of Bollywood. It is hard for us to explain to the ever-scrolling young captives of a meta world and our motor mouth politicians, how necessary it is to switch off the algorithms and listen to other creatures, human or animal. Mir, when addressing the sly barbs of the spoiled ‘Poorab ke Saakin’ is trying to tell them that creative richness is not just about the old, blue-blooded lot being elbowed out for the new. That towns are also places where millions come in search of work (Muntkhib-e-Rozgar). Their colourful lives and language mill around the steps of Jama Masjid and the by lanes of surrounding areas. And that is what creates a wonderfully mellifluous Hindwi or Rekhta, a language born out of crossing commoners’ Bhakha (dialects) with classical Farsee or Sanskrit. Murakami makes one of his characters J ask the young: Why does a cat wash its face?Have you ever seen a cat die of blood poisoning?.. I do have a cat though. She is getting on but still she is someone to talk to. -You talk to it?J nods..Yeah we’ve been together for so long. I can tell what she is feeling and she’s the same with me.The end of Mir’s Nazm agrees with Murakami’s J :“The upshot then is MohiniDied bringing me calamity. Endure was all I could do, thenBury her in BillimaranHappy the man with successorsWeep for him whom none remembers…” Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.