Shakeb Jalali

Jalal's brief light — a desert lonely as its poet. Shakeb Jalali (1934–1966), born Syed Hassan Rizvi on 1 October 1934 at Jalal, a small village near Aligarh, was a Pakistani Urdu poet whose brief career left a deep mark on the ghazal after Independence. He was ten when his mother died in a road accident, and his father, shaken by the loss, died a few years later. He passed his high-school examination in 1950 and crossed to Pakistan the same year, settling with his sisters at Rawalpindi; he took his intermediate examination at Sialkot and his bachelor's degree with honours at Lahore, working in literary magazines and a local newspaper along the way. He began writing poetry in 1947, at fifteen, and gave the ghazal a modern tone all his own — plain, startling images of light and desert, of stones falling where no hand can gather them. He married in 1956 and left a son and a daughter. On 12 November 1966, at thirty-two, he died by his own hand beneath a train at Sargodha. His first collection, Roshni Ae Roshni — Light, O Light — was published six years after his death, in 1972, and his complete works followed in 2004.