South Asia

Akhtar Sherani and Abdul Hameed Adam were poets whose verses shimmered with longing, whose biographies bore the same marks of indulgence and vulnerability that their couplets hinted at, and whose reputations rose to extraordinary heights only to recede in the collective memory of our language. They were, each in his way, emblems of an Urdu literary culture that treasured both aesthetic refinement and personal candour, and that was never entirely sure whether to admire them for their luminous art or to pity them for the shadows it cast over their private lives.