His agent tells me this the Thursday before last, the day after I had first contacted him. He tells me that Taher has suddenly had to make a lot appearances, and he’s feeling exhausted.
Here - a phone call away from speaking to Pakistan’s most spectacular internet celebrity yet. By the next day, when the interview had to be postponed again, Taher had made history by becoming the first desi meme to make it on foreign websites. First it was the Indian Express, then Kottke picked it up. The Atlantic’s health editor would later do so too.
But Taher still had his cold.
But the interview didn’t happen that Saturday, nor on Sunday. Like all timeless tales of love, redemption arrived just as I abandoned hope. On Monday night, I got a phone call – Taher was feeling better.
I called him around midnight, and began our conversation with a question a music critic, and distant-Taher-relative Safieh Shah had asked me to put forward: “Eyes are a vital part of eastern romance and grace. They are integral to the concepts of Ishq aur adaa. How do you feel about this?”
Taher felt delighted about this.
He kept exclaiming how much he enjoyed the use of these terms – Ishq and Adaa – because they resonated so deeply with the message he sought to bring out in his song. “... Eyes are the most vital part of body and culture. They can bring out many meanings, and are a complete subject. Now I’m really glad you asked this question about Ishq (Love) and Adaa (Grace) because this is very important to the eyes. Ishq is endless, it is life, it is forever – Adaa is “wow!” it is what attracts us to someone.”
He said much more than this but I couldn’t decipher it – partly because of the lack of a recorder, and partly because of Taher’s frantic eagerness for adjectives when speaking in English (a sharp contrast to his far more measured, articulate use of Urdu).
I then tried to steer the conversation towards the past, towards some banal details of education and employment that the rest of us could then use to try and make sense of who he was. Yet, Taher was masterfully evasive about his personal life. He told me later, when I asked him whether he was currently single or not, that “when someone becomes well-known, everyone wants to know details about their private matters. I will reveal these details, but at a later time.”
I knew this would disappoint many, as would his guarded admissions that he spent his life “studying in Pakistan, then spent some time abroad” without saying which schools he had attended, and where he had gone when he went abroad. I then asked him about the company he ran and he said it was “a Public limited company.” When I asked for an exact name, he demurred again, promising he’ll let his fans know when the time was right.
We decided to shift gears.
I ask him about his video – the one he had shot, directed, edited and starred in. Why had he started it with flashing bulbs and the paparazzi? Was he foretelling the perils of fame? Taher dismissed the notion. The paparazzi were there for a simple reason – they were there to cover a “person who is making a mark” (said person being Taher himself).
Fair enough – time for something with a little bit more edge. Why had he not put in other models or actors in his video? After all, a gorgeous woman is a staple of music videos. Taher responded by making it clear that “I have nothing against glamour, and as far as that is concerned I am planning to introduce people in future videos. But you see [in Eye to Eye] I am not talking about just one person, the lyrics are about all people’s eyes. Even male and female is not important because the only thing that matter is that your eyes should show love. That’s what I wanted to show in the video.”
I then asked him about a theory that I had been nursing for a while – was he dressed in black and white in the video to represent eyes themselves? Taher explained that “love can be seen through eyes. The love from eyes is simple, and it goes to the bottom of the heart. So white and black shows true love and fake love, which eyes can always tell – the white is the true love but the black is the fake love where people tell you that they love you but they don’t.”
I later felt that perhaps here Taher had been prescient about the sort of fame he might receive, and the black part of him was an intuitive, subconscious referencing of the trolls and the meanness he would encounter. It was one of several points in the interview where I wondered whether I would reach a point where I would have no choice to suspend my cynicism, and admire the clarity and strength of Taher’s self-belief.
