Imtiaz Dharker

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:35

My castaway this week is the poet and artist Imtiaz Darka. Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for her work, her life seems a perfect reflection of the interrelatedness of the Commonwealth. Born in Pakistan, she was no more than a few months old when the family packed up their belongings and flew four thousand miles to start a new life, exchanging the blistering, dusty lanes of Lahore for the blustery, rain-slicked roads of Glasgow. Her father worked hard and from scratch built a big successful business and a comfortable life for his children. But the immigrant fairy tale came undone when his restless, well educated and westernised daughter married in secret, running away to London and then Bombay.

Presenter1:18

Scandalized, her parents disowned her.

Presenter1:21

She would never see her mother again.

Presenter1:23

Her work centres on themes of freedom, cultural intolerance, everyday life, and gender politics. The poet, she says, sees the world at a different angle, perhaps always as a kind of foreigner or an outsider. I think displacement is often a good and useful thing for a writer. So welcome. And I wonder why do you think it is a useful thing?

Imtiaz Dharker1:45

I think it's quite good for poets not to be too comfortable. Poetry has to live on the dangerous edges of things where you can see life at a slant and where you're really hanging on by your fingernails so that you can write. And poets are great eavesdroppers on the world too, so after hearing things, that's a good way to come to poetry because that's what poetry does as well. It tries to interpret the heartbeat of the world.

Presenter2:10

World

Imtiaz Dharker2:11

Yeah.

Presenter2:11

And given that you've described yourself as a Muslim Calvinist hanging by your fingernails then with that description, tell me more about that. What does that encompass? What does that encourage?

Imtiaz Dharker2:21

Well, really, yes, really what I said was I am a Pakistani Scottish Calvinist Muslim adopted by India and married into Wales. And what I was really saying was don't try to put me in a box, don't try to label me as just one thing, because we're all subtle and nuanced creatures with many possibilities under the skin. What I'm really saying is I'm a cultural mongrel. Accept that.

Presenter2:46

The subtle nuance of language, then, is all what great poetry is about. And I'm wondering you returned to live full time in Britain over a decade ago. I think it was you came to London again in two thousand and three. Some people bridle at the term, at the very word, multiculturalism. As a poet, what do you make of it?

Imtiaz Dharker3:04

That's right. Yeah.

Imtiaz Dharker3:05

It's like all those labels. It's come to be an empty word and you have to remake that word. To me it's a case of being outside of labels really, being outside of boxes. I'd want to recognize that poetry takes in every kind of influence, that the family can be, the ancestors in poetry could be not just John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, but Fez and Galleb and all of those become family.

Presenter3:33

Tell me about your first choice this morning, then. What are we going to hear?

Imtiaz Dharker3:36

Well, when I was uh growing up in Glasgow, just about twelve years old.

Imtiaz Dharker3:41

A friend came to visit from London.

Imtiaz Dharker3:44

And she wanted to go out and

Imtiaz Dharker3:46

See the nightlife in Glasgow, and she wanted jazz, and she wanted something called Chris Baba. So we went out looking for this thing called jazz and went to the Plaza Ballroom on Eglinton Toll and stood outside it and looked, but it was shut and dark. And years later, I realized that what she was talking about was Chris Barber, B-A-R-B-E-R. And I was imagining Baba because of the difference in pronunciation. So recently, I heard this piece by a group of sessions musicians who were from Lahore, Sachel Studios. And for me, it was like discovering, finding Chris Baba at last in an unexpected location. Let's see this.

Presenter4:52

Uh Uh

Presenter5:24

Take five, performed by the Satchel Studios Orchestra. So Imtiaz Dakart, your poem Campsey Fells, is about your memories of your friends and your extended family going out to those beautiful areas just beyond Glasgow, you say, in their flowered frocks and wide chaloirs, making Sunday trips to the these beautiful hills. How much, I wonder, did nineteen sixties Scotland feel like a place that you and your family loved and understood, and that understood and loved you back?

Imtiaz Dharker5:52

Well, there were lots of different things happening because inside the house was one country and the moment you stepped outside it was another one altogether. But I think that's what you live with and understand and it seems normal. It seems quite natural that there are different cultures and different things going on. In fact, at school, for example, I was the first South Asian girl in the school, but I think it's the girl from Edinburgh who got the most flack.

Imtiaz Dharker6:22

Is that true? Yes, I think so, yes. And we loved Scotland. My father loved Scotland. That was why he was there. He loved the lochs. We used to go out on picnics every Sunday.

Presenter6:33

And did you have Glaswegian friends that you welcomed into your home? Or was it very much a sort of split personality at home? We are this type of family, but when we're out and about, we're a Glaswegian family.

Imtiaz Dharker6:44

No, they would all come home. And my house was the kind of household where my mother had this kind of it's called barkat in her hands. It's a kind of blessing in the hands where whoever comes to the house

Presenter6:46

Mm-hmm.

Imtiaz Dharker6:57

There's always enough food. Any unexpected guest is always fed, and there's always enough for them. It was a very sociable house.

Presenter7:04

How much freedom were you given as a teenager? I know that initially and for not very long I think you lived uh in a house at the edge of the Gorbles, then a very tough part of Glasgow indeed. Then you moved to Pollock Shields, a lot more the Americans would say tony, a much more tony neighbourhood, a much nicer neighbourhood. Tell me about the freedoms you were given or not as a teenager.

Imtiaz Dharker7:19

Tony neighborhood of

Speaker 17:20

Uh

Imtiaz Dharker7:25

I was given every freedom to be educated, to look for education, to do my drawings and write as much as I wanted to, but I was not meant to go out in the night and socialize and go dancing or anything like that. So a lot of my time in Glasgow was spent at my window looking out over the city and the shining lights and feeling as if all of life was happening somewhere else, somewhere out there, somewhere where I was not. Tell me about your second piece then. What are we going to hear now? My mother and father were always listening to on Sundays they'd bring out the big Grundig spool to spool tape recorder.

Imtiaz Dharker8:07

And it's a a big buffalo of a machine.

Imtiaz Dharker8:10

And they played on it songs that were love songs from home. It was always melancholy. They were guzzles as well. And they'd always be saying lines of poetry to each other and often cry. But my mother also loved

Imtiaz Dharker8:26

a completely different side of her. She loved the Tiller girls and dancing, especially tap, and this one was one she especially loved, Moses Supposes, from Singin' in the Rain.

Presenter8:37

Mose. A rose is a rose. A toes is a toes. Hoop-dee-doo de-doodle. Moses is supposed to.

Imtiaz Dharker8:42

Moses, his toes are roses, but Moses supposes erroneously but Moses he knows is his toes aren't roses as Moses

Speaker 38:50

Supposes his tozus to be

Presenter8:53

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 38:55

Oh, there's a

Speaker 38:56

Moses supposes a ronious league Moses noses, his nose is our noses. Moses supposes his nose is to be. Roses, a roses, a rose.

Imtiaz Dharker9:01

Moses supposes

Presenter9:03

So b

Presenter9:06

Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor singing and tap dancing away there with Moses supposes his toes is a roses from singing in the rain. I wonder, was there money at home to do tap and belly classes and all that?

Imtiaz Dharker9:15

There was. There was. And I did do dance classes. I was never going to be Ginger Rogers, but it pleased my mother.

Presenter9:22

And you went to Hutchie Grammar, which is an upmarket school in Glasgow. There was you know, your father I described in the introduction, he had he'd started really with nothing. He was a door-to-door salesman and he built up his business. Is that right?

Imtiaz Dharker9:34

I think it's a very good thing.

Imtiaz Dharker9:35

Yes, well, yes, he arrived in London to study, but he went to Glasgow and to see some friends and they were actually young men who were making their way and they went up to sell door to door pinnies and nylons I expect. And he loved it, he loved the Highlands, he loved Scotland and he decided he wanted to stay and and do that. Before anyone knew it, he was importing sports goods from the Punjab, from his own factories.

Presenter10:02

Yes, so we ended up with a a big solid business. Yes. Was it a well-off household? Did you have a business?

Imtiaz Dharker10:07

By some point.

Presenter10:07

point it was yes

Imtiaz Dharker10:08

Yes, we were in In a lovely

Presenter10:09

And you said that your parents would spend I love that image, you say, this great big buffalo of a machine, the Grundig, that would be brought out on a Sunday and they would listen to music and they would quote poetry to each other.

Imtiaz Dharker10:23

That's right. It's quite a natural thing. I I grew up thinking that everyone who is Pakistani or Indian does this, and one person would say a line and the other person would answer and then they would cry.

Imtiaz Dharker10:35

And saw you Who were witness? At a young age, to the power of words. It wasn't something that happened somewhere else or on a page. It was poetry that people were living by and getting emotional about and using as a kind of underscore for their own lives. And so the.

Presenter10:51

This smart, young, slightly romantic girl who would sit at the window watching all of Glasgow sparkling before her in the night time lights, when did she start writing her own poems?

Imtiaz Dharker11:01

Well, I started writing poetry because I was in love with an older man. Ah he was fourteen.

Imtiaz Dharker11:08

Who was this? It was the boy across the road, and I'd see his little pale moon face in the window across the way.

Presenter11:08

It was

Imtiaz Dharker11:16

And he he'd do exercises.

Presenter11:18

Oh, you wrote a poem about this, yeah, I did.

Imtiaz Dharker11:19

I did, Alan or David or John, because I never knew his name. I wrote these love poems to him, but we never met. I never spoke to him.

Presenter11:29

Let's have some more music, Mtas Darka. What are we going to hear now? We're on your third.

Imtiaz Dharker11:33

Well, I ran away to India with an unsuitable man. But it was a great place to be. India opened its arms to me and it was generous and adopted me in a way. But it was life at full blast. There's a daily attack on the senses there of taste and sound and languages. And it also demanded poems, so I began to write quite seriously. But the song that I'm about to ask for is like the soundtrack to Bombay, this assault that happened for me. It's a roller coaster love song. And the words are by the great Urdu poet and film lyricist Jave Dakhtar.

Imtiaz Dharker12:15

and the singer is Shankar Mahadevan.

Imtiaz Dharker12:17

They met when they were working on a film that I was making about street children and then they went on to collaborate on this song that I think is a great song.

Presenter12:27

Kohi Jo Milatomuje Esalagata Chase Medi Sari Duniya Meki Tonkirut Oregon Ki Baraka Kushabuki Kandi Hebeki Uisi Abasari Fizai Hebeki Uisi Abasari Hawaii He Kohi Uisi Abusari Dishai He Badali Uisi Abusari Adai Hajagi Omange Ha Tala Hai Del San Somedu

Imtiaz Dharker12:38

Study have I had

Imtiaz Dharker12:47

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Presenter12:54

Shankar Madhivan singing breathless there. You you have spoken in Tiaz Dharkar then about running away, but let's just find out how you you came to that point. Th this first marriage that you plunged into as a a restless young woman, it sounds on paper like a sort of coup de foudre. There was this man and you fell for him. But actually in on closer inspection I wonder if it's something more complicated than that. Rather than some great grand love affair.

Presenter13:21

It was because it opened up your world rather than it was the single person, if I'm not being unfair, to the man himself.

Imtiaz Dharker13:28

I think that's very perceptive. Yes, of course. I was young. I was looking for life. I was looking for doors to open. And of course I fell in love with him. He was on the faculty or at Glasgow University. I was a student. Together we would look at poetry and go to the theatre and

Imtiaz Dharker13:49

Talk cinema, and to me those were great things. Did your parents know about the relationship? No, I couldn't tell them anything about it. Why?

Imtiaz Dharker13:57

If I had, I think I'd have been packed up and sent away to Pakistan right away. And what happened?

Imtiaz Dharker14:04

After I had taken my final exams and was about to wind up at university, I was at the union one day, the Queen Margaret Union, when there was an announcement on the Tanoi system asking me to come downstairs. And there he was. I didn't know he was going to come. He was there and he said, Will you marry me?

Imtiaz Dharker14:24

And I said no.

Imtiaz Dharker14:25

No way. Where have you come from? But he was very persuasive and he had got a sheriff's dispensation so that we didn't actually have to wait the fifteen days that you're going to open with the bands. I was wearing black. I hadn't expected to get married that day.

Speaker 314:36

Yeah.

Presenter14:36

With your bands up and yes.

Imtiaz Dharker14:42

Finally I said yes. Were you sure you wanted to do it?

Imtiaz Dharker14:47

By that point I had decided, yes, I'm going to go along with this. And you're young, you want to go out and do things and it's all exciting and and to me I said, Yes, I'll be penniless and and run away and leave my family behind and it was a decision.

Imtiaz Dharker15:01

Yes, a decision taken in in an afternoon.

Presenter15:04

I don't want to get too mired in the tiny details, but I'm interested as to whether actually you then went home and collected your belongings and headed off, or did you leave with nothing?

Imtiaz Dharker15:13

A very sore point. I I did have to go home and the regret I have is not that I left because I think for my own reasons I needed to leave, but my regret is the way I left.

Imtiaz Dharker15:28

And it's something that I will always be sorry about. I never saw my mother again. Having.

Presenter15:33

Having last seen her when, when you waved as you left out the door to go to studies that morning?

Presenter15:39

Yes.

Presenter15:42

It's easy when we're young to think in these broad brush strokes, isn't it, that I want to go out and I want to paint the world all the colours of the rainbow and at the age and stage you are at now

Presenter15:53

How do you view that that decision that changed the path of your life?

Imtiaz Dharker15:58

I have no regrets about doing it. I think that everything that happened to me and the way that I grew were were all things that needed to happen. But I wish that I could have taken my family with me. I wish that I could have carried them along and that I could have spoken to them.

Presenter16:17

What's your last image of the of the family home as you left? What do you remember?

Imtiaz Dharker16:23

It was leaving with a very tiny, tiny white case, and in it were the sayings of Chairman Mao and a pair of shoes and running out in the dark.

Imtiaz Dharker16:38

and going to a neighbour's house not far away and waiting to be picked up in a taxi by

Imtiaz Dharker16:44

Um

Imtiaz Dharker16:45

Your new husband.

Presenter16:45

Your new husband.

Presenter16:48

Let's have some more music then, MTS Darker.

Presenter16:51

We're on your fourth. Tell me about this. This is your daughter singing here, actually.

Imtiaz Dharker16:56

Yes, uh arriving in India I got involved with making film and every new film I made, usually for non-government organizations about health and education and shelter was like going to university again. And one of the things I did was an audiovisual on the architecture of India with a great architect called Charles Corea.

Imtiaz Dharker17:19

And on the soundtrack of that is a Gujarati folk song sung in a child's voice. And the child is actually my daughter. She was very little at the time.

Speaker 118:10

Chaka chu chi chi, chaka chu chi chi chale ajeru ukada ne udharakale. Ho ho la la fetta wala o soma bhaina sala. Oka sarka ka kala ne bhuri bandi war.

Speaker 118:28

Uh

Presenter18:28

Charara Charara Maro Chakrochali, I hope I said that properly. A Gujarati folk song sung by your daughter, Aisha Darka. How how old would she have been when you recorded that?

Speaker 118:32

Yeah, it's good.

Imtiaz Dharker18:36

She must have been she must have been about five at the time. Uh

Presenter18:40

How utterly beautiful that was. So you developed a career then as as you say, making short documentary films for NGOs. What do you think, I wonder, can be communicated through poetry that can't more effectively?

Presenter18:54

be communicated through the more modern things like like film and music and so on.

Imtiaz Dharker18:59

But poetry uses language in a different way. I think it it uses language to say things that go beyond the actual meaning of the words. When it speaks well it can say what is really unsayable.

Presenter19:13

Let me ask you so so many of your books are woven through I introduced you as a poet and artist, and I did that very deliberately because your artwork is a huge part of your artistic offering to people. These very, very close and detailed line drawings. Is it important for the understanding of your words that the pictures are also there?

Imtiaz Dharker19:33

When I begin to put a line on a page, sometimes I don't know whether the line is going to become a poem or a drawing. I work on A4 paper and it could be either. They're not illustrations of the poems, but they do happen. When I'm thinking around a theme, the drawings work around that theme as well. And for me, it's just a different extension of the same things that are going on in my mind.

Presenter19:58

You lived for almost would it be about thirty years then, at Bombay as it then was, Mumbai as it now is. Um what was it that made you return to the UK?

Imtiaz Dharker20:02

Is it necessary?

Imtiaz Dharker20:06

I had married.

Imtiaz Dharker20:09

an Indian and gone to to Bombay and that was wonderful. And I have a beautiful daughter to show for it. But there was a point where we began to grow apart. Maybe I just grew up.

Imtiaz Dharker20:21

So we had separated.

Imtiaz Dharker20:24

And one day I had a fax from an organization called Poetry Live saying, come and read at these 40 events. And when I came to read, I met this incredible man called Simon Powell, whose idea it was to start Poetry Live. Everyone loved him. It took me a

Imtiaz Dharker20:47

a few minutes to realize I was actually in love with her.

Presenter20:50

Well, we'll talk a little bit more about Simon and your relationship and marriage in a moment, but for now we must hear some music. Tell me about this, your fifth disc.

Imtiaz Dharker20:57

Well, we're going to hear the Bach to Kata and Fugue in D minor. And the reason for this is at school, it was a kind of school where we were supposed to be quite proper. We had hats and hat pins and thirty denier crep stockings. There was this great music teacher who was trying very hard to teach us green sleeves and we were mauling it. So when she gave up, she decided to play us this piece of Bach. And suddenly, this class of wild beasts were tamed. I was struck by the mystery of it, and that never left me. It turned my brain inside out.

Imtiaz Dharker21:33

And years later this was the music that was played when I married Simon, and when I hear it I still see him turning around to look at me and his silvery Welsh eyes sparkling.

Speaker 121:49

Uh

Presenter22:42

Part of the toccata from Bach's Toccata and fugue in D minor for the organ performed by Clemann's Schnoor.

Presenter22:48

So this great love affair landed in your life and you got married to Simon Powell, and I'm wondering how that love and how that difference in location and circumstance affected your work.

Imtiaz Dharker23:00

I think what it did was, strangely enough, in spite of the circumstances, it made me see how important it was to laugh in the work as well. I'd come from a background where poetry was very often melancholy. And suddenly, with this wonderful man, Simon, I've never laughed so much in my life as I did when I was with him. Uh we were together seven years, but seventy wouldn't have been enough.

Imtiaz Dharker23:26

And he had an incurable cancer, but the Royal Marsden gave him time and life.

Imtiaz Dharker23:33

He used that life to enjoy as much as he could, and I think that laughter found its way into the poetry.

Presenter23:41

And what about he had uh begun this uh poetry live movement where poets are invited to come and talk in front of a couple of thousand people at a time, young people, read their poetry. Are you somebody who enjoys performing, or do you have to steal yourself to do it?

Imtiaz Dharker23:57

I do enjoy it, because what's happening is the word is coming off the page. Simon's idea was a simple idea.

Imtiaz Dharker24:04

The word is taken off the page and what these young people, this audience hears is the voice and the breath and the accent.

Presenter24:13

Yeah.

Imtiaz Dharker24:14

of the poet.

Presenter24:14

And you mentioned when we began talking today about you you know, you said hanging by your finger tips on the side of life, and often it can be at those moments o of death, actually, to be frank, that poetry comes into its own. People often who never ever read poetry will find themselves not simply just going through the practical motions of maybe picking a verse to be read at somebody's commemoration or burial or funeral, but actually themselves for the first time begin to properly read poetry.

Imtiaz Dharker24:47

Even though perhaps your rational mind can say one thing, that this person is gone.

Imtiaz Dharker24:52

Poetry is able to recreate, bring back. It's almost like looping time and letting time coexist in a poem. It does speak to people. I've had.

Imtiaz Dharker25:04

People write to me after seeing a poem on the underground and say I was moved to tears on the train. And I know how I feel when I read Auden, for example. It makes it possible to live.

Presenter25:19

Let's have some music, Ben Mtaz. We're going to listen to your sixth. Tell me about this and why you've chosen it.

Imtiaz Dharker25:25

This is a Leonard Cohen, but it's a version of Leonard Cohen sung by Anthony Hagerty.

Imtiaz Dharker25:29

We used to listen to this kind of music Leonard Cohen of obviously on many car journeys, driving up to Wales to the family or to Scotland, and one day Simon came in very excited and he said, Listen to this version, and it's a version that I think is very beautiful.

Imtiaz Dharker25:57

If it be your will

Imtiaz Dharker26:01

That I speak no more.

Imtiaz Dharker26:07

And my voice be still.

Imtiaz Dharker26:12

As it was before.

Presenter26:17

If It Be Your Will, written by Leonard Cohen and sung there by Anthony Hegarty, you mentioned in introducing that piece of music, M. T. As Darker, that you often would listen to it travelling home to Simon's family in Wales to visit them, or indeed going up to Scotland to visit your own family. And I'm wondering.

Presenter26:35

You know, you you spoke very poignantly of never seeing your mother again after walking out with your little white suitcase and your pair of shoes and your uh Chairman Mau book. How did you repair relationships with the rest of your family? When did you do that?

Imtiaz Dharker26:49

I think it happens when

Imtiaz Dharker26:51

You have children of your own. Everyone had children and and they were so beautiful and they were beyond any rifts. Children take you to a place where you have to open your arms again and begin to speak again.

Imtiaz Dharker27:04

and begin to say, Oh, I recognize that that's just like my mother would have done.

Presenter27:08

And what did your siblings tell you about those days and weeks and months after you had gone? You know a beloved daughter that they had so much hope and expectation for, and there then was this

Presenter27:20

Imtiaz shaped hole in the family. You weren't there any longer. Have you spoken to your siblings about that? We don't speak But that. Tor

Imtiaz Dharker27:29

too painful.

Imtiaz Dharker27:30

Even now.

Presenter27:34

Are you able to write about it?

Imtiaz Dharker27:36

In your poetry?

Imtiaz Dharker27:38

I haven't got to that yet.

Imtiaz Dharker27:41

I can see it coming. Uh, there is there are things to say about my father and my mother which I never did say and uh maybe, yes, I I

Imtiaz Dharker27:51

I am thinking in that direction.

Presenter27:53

I understand that it

Imtiaz Dharker27:54

Uh

Presenter27:54

The sort of Slightly confusing and odd circumstances. You you did once or twice meet your father just fleetingly. In fact, I think it was at so it seems such an unlikely location. It was at Heathrow Airport, is that right?

Imtiaz Dharker28:09

Yes, my sister told me that my father was coming through Heathrow, and I went to see him, to waylay him, really, and I hadn't seen him for ten years.

Imtiaz Dharker28:18

And so I saw him coming through and I went up to him and I said hello and he said hello and carried on walking as if I were an acquaintance. He said, How are you? And I realized that he hadn't quite registered, so I said, I'm Imthiaz, I'm your daughter.

Imtiaz Dharker28:34

And he didn't recognize me, but it I think it it's possibly because I had green hair at that point with spikes.

Presenter28:39

Spikes.

Imtiaz Dharker28:40

Uh

Imtiaz Dharker28:41

But uh

Imtiaz Dharker28:42

He carried on walking through very politely and he went on through, but he did come back. He said, I'm sorry, and I didn't realize, and give me a hug.

Imtiaz Dharker28:51

and went on into the domestic transit.

Imtiaz Dharker28:55

What do you tell your own daughter about her Grandparents. She really wants to know. You know, I had in some ways I'd closed the book and put it away.

Imtiaz Dharker29:04

Because when you leave like that, you've really said, Well, I'm gone now and and for me It's done. It's done. So in many ways I had shut that part of

Presenter29:10

And it's

Imtiaz Dharker29:15

what happened out of my mind. But my daughter wants to know. She wants to know about my mother's green fingers because she has them too. Things that I've forgotten. Family history that actually I never knew because I didn't know them when I'd grown up.

Presenter29:30

Let's have some more music. We're going to listen to your your seventh choice. Um indeed it's not really music. Well some people might say it is. Um tell us about this. What are we going to hear?

Imtiaz Dharker29:38

I've always loved the sound of trains, wet platforms, and the terrible waiting rooms and the cafes and the country rolling past, and all those journeys rocking up through England to Wales and Scotland. So this is Nightmare, the poem by WH Hawden for the the film with the Benjamin Britton score.

Presenter29:57

Letters of thanks, letters from banks, letters of joy from the girl and the boy, receipted bills and invitations to expect new stuff or visit relations, but applications for situations and timid lovers, declarations, and gossip, gossip from all the nations, news circumstantial, news, financial, letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in, letters with faces scrolled in the margin, letters from uncles, cousins and aunts, letters to scarlet from the south of France, letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands, notes from overseas to Hebrides, written on paper of every hue, the pink, the barnet, the white and the blue, the chatty, the catty, the boy.

Presenter30:26

Filmmaker John Grierson was narrating there and the voice we heard reading WH Orden's Nightmail was Stuart Legg, and indeed WH Orden was one of the recipients of uh the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, as indeed you were um yourself in Tiaz Darker last uh was it last year?

Imtiaz Dharker30:41

It was 2014. I couldn't believe I was standing in this line of poets.

Presenter30:41

It was

Presenter30:45

Yes, with with Stevie Smith and Ted Hughes behind you and so on and so on. Um when you first hear heard the news, what was your immediate visceral reaction?

Imtiaz Dharker30:54

It was, first of all, I didn't believe it. I didn't know how I could dare to be standing in this company.

Imtiaz Dharker30:59

But of course I was delighted. Then when my father died he was almost a hundred years old.

Imtiaz Dharker31:04

But in the last few weeks occasionally family names would slip out of his head.

Imtiaz Dharker31:09

But the person he remembered

Imtiaz Dharker31:12

Was the queen?

Imtiaz Dharker31:13

And he spoke of her right up to the end with great admiration and affection. So I know that he'd be delighted. He'd have forgiven me something if he'd known about this.

Presenter31:22

The cruelty of this exchange, of course, is that I'm about to cast you away to a desert island. It's easy, probably, to work out what it is you'll you'll miss, n not least, I'm guessing, your daughter and your extended family. But what do you think you might quite enjoy?

Imtiaz Dharker31:26

Desert Islands

Speaker 131:27

Uh

Presenter31:35

about being on this island.

Imtiaz Dharker31:37

you know, looking on the good side of it, of course I'd miss people, but uh looking on the the better side of it, I think I'd enjoy the the time to think and

Imtiaz Dharker31:47

Just be with my own imagination.

Imtiaz Dharker31:50

It would be a fantasy island for me.

Presenter31:53

Let's have your final piece then. Tell me about your uh eighth choice of the morning.

Imtiaz Dharker31:58

Well, I work late in the night and wherever I am in the night, I come at 12.45 to hear Sailing By and the shipping forecast because in the face of all the terrible things that go on in the world, it's like a little old-fashioned reassurance. And the shipping forecast for me is like that secular prayer of Caroline Duffy's, which I always remember, darkness outside, inside the radio's prayer, Rockhall, Mallon, Dogger, Finisterre. And for me, there's also the idea that something continues, that sailors and all the lost souls in the world will be safe because someone is there guiding them.

Speaker 333:01

Now on Radio 4 time for the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency at 0015 on today, Tuesday the 5th of May.

Speaker 333:11

There are warnings of gales.

Presenter33:11

Um no, you're not hearing things. That was sailing by in the shipping forecast read by Radio Four's very own Luke Tuddenham there, and it's been chosen as our eighth disc of the morning. Mtias Darker, I want to now, of course, give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take another book along with you. What will your book be?

Imtiaz Dharker33:30

First of all, with the Bible, I'd like to make sure it's the King James Version for the language. Yes. Now my book, I'd like it to be an Atlas of all the world. Oh. A sort of created one as well. The theatrum or bisterarum.

Presenter33:33

For the language.

Imtiaz Dharker33:43

But with A to Z's of every city and every village and every country lane and every coastline so that I can make up my own stories in my own theatre of the world. I love novels and books and stories that locate things. I love the locations of things and I'd be able to use my imagination on all those and have the whole world with me on the desert island.

Presenter34:06

Well, we must hope that such a book exists, because you're almost straying into your luxury territory as well, and that almost sounds like a luxury, but I I will just about allow it. So tell me what your luxury is.

Imtiaz Dharker34:17

Well, my luxury is even bigger. I could I have the whole V and A?

Presenter34:21

Oh, yes. You can have the whole Victoria and Albert Museum in London, then. It's yours.

Imtiaz Dharker34:26

I'm very glad because I thought maybe it would be a bit presumptuous at all.

Presenter34:29

Presumptuous evidence.

Imtiaz Dharker34:31

The only thing is that maybe I'd be depriving other people of this beautiful thing.

Presenter34:36

It's your desert island discs and you get to choose it. Other people will simply have to deal with the consequences. I get to be greedy. Yes. So that is yours. And finally, if you had to choose only one of these eight discs, which one would it be?

Imtiaz Dharker34:50

It would be sailing by in the shipping forecast. Because until I have that, I don't really feel at rest in the night.

Presenter34:56

It's yours, Mtiaz Darka. Thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.

Presenter35:43

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.