At 92, the Bard of Bollywood Is Still Writing About Love

The poet and lyricist Gulzar has profoundly shaped the idea of tender romance in India through his verse and songs in more than 150 musicals.

Gulzar at his home in Mumbai in July. He maintains the wonder that has fueled his work. Credit... Atul Loke for The New York Times

The reporter, who grew up humming Gulzar’s songs, visited the legendary Indian lyricist at his Mumbai home.

In one of the most beloved songs written by the Indian poet known as Gulzar, two lovers conspire to capture time, to steal it away for themselves.

The voices that render his words in the Bollywood musical inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello are melancholic, playful. But the song, “ O Saathi Re ,” has an urgency: the lovers’s plan involves entrapping the tired sun on a day’s end before it slips down into a river.

Over his six decades in Mumbai, the seaside metropolis where he found shelter as a teenage refugee, Gulzar has had an outsized hand in shaping the idea of tender romance in India.

He has put his imagination to children’s books, short stories, and volumes of poetry that have only grown in ambition. Through it all, he has maintained a wonder at the beauty in the mundane.

In late June, I went to see him at his home. As I waited in his driveway to be let in, the steady thumping of the monsoon showers was the only thing that disturbed the quiet in his sloped lane.

“The whole city is wet, isn’t that a very interesting feeling?” he asked me, with a joyful grin. “I think it’s very interesting — something falling from above your head in the clouds. They’re playing with you.”

Gulzar’s poetic outlook made his mark on India’s popular film industry. And Bollywood gave him a livelihood, and the visual and musical wings to travel across the divides of a region of nearly two billion people.

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