Saleem Sagar’s latest collection, "I Was Lost in the Storyx, is not merely a book of poems; it is, in my reading, the articulation of a distinct perceptual poetic universe. I shall not enter here into the formal question of whether these poems should be regarded as a sequence of ghazals written in a single zameen, an extended ghazal, or, in its larger perceptual unity, even as a long poem. My concern is with the deeper structure through which the collection apprehends love, memory, destiny, faith, separation, identity and the self.
The title, "I Was Lost in the Story", is the first and perhaps the most revealing threshold into this world. It is not simply a poetic phrase chosen for its melancholy resonance; it announces the governing principle of the entire collection. In these five words, "I", "story", "lost", and "was" establish a complex relationship between self and narrative, presence and disappearance, experience and memory, being and its representation. Read through the lens of the Urdu perceptual school of literary criticism, the title becomes more than a name: it becomes the first major poetic sign through which the entire book may be understood.
The opening word, "I", immediately places the self at the centre. Yet this is not the confident "I" of a poet standing outside his experience and reporting it to the reader. It is a vulnerable, searching and self-questioning consciousness. The poet enters his own story not merely as its narrator but as one of its characters. His identity is therefore not fixed prior to the narrative; it is continually shaped by the experience that the narrative contains.
Then comes the word "story". A story is never simply an event. An event becomes a story only after it has passed through memory, selection, arrangement and interpretation. Life happens in fragments; consciousness gathers those fragments and gives them form. Thus, when the poet says, "I was lost in the story", he is not merely saying that he disappeared within the events of his life. He suggests something more profound: that he became inseparable from the meaning created out of those events.
The crucial word, however, is "lost". The poet does not say that he lived in the story, nor merely that he was present in it. He was lost in it. There is a profound difference between being absent and being lost. Absence suggests non-presence; being lost suggests the presence of something whose location, identity or destination can no longer be clearly determined. A lost person may still exist, but cannot be found. In this sense, the poet’s "I" remains present within the story even as it becomes unavailable within it.
The title therefore carries a paradox at its core: the self is present precisely within the experience of its disappearance. The poet enters the story as its central consciousness, yet the story gradually absorbs him until the distinction between creator and creation, narrator and character, reality and imagination begins to dissolve. The poet creates the story, but eventually the story appears to recreate the poet.
The grammatical ending, "was", adds another dimension. It places the entire experience at a temporal distance. The poet is not speaking from the immediate moment of love or loss; he speaks from after the event. Something has already happened. The experience has crossed from the present into memory. Yet it has not necessarily ceased to live. Here lies one of the collection’s deepest perceptual tensions: grammatically, the experience belongs to the past; emotionally, it remains unfinished.
This temporal distance becomes even more significant because the collection repeatedly employs the refrain "hua tha". The past perfect tense gives each poem the quality of an aftermath, as though the poet were speaking from the ruins of an experience whose event has already occurred. He does not stand inside the instant itself; he stands on its far shore, looking back. Between what was experienced and what is now narrated there exists an inevitable interval. That interval is one of the central concerns of perceptual criticism: experience and its expression are never identical. What is felt is transformed the moment it becomes language.
The first ghazal establishes the scale of this transformation by placing personal love beside the cosmic act of creation. The beloved appears almost as a primordial figure within the poet’s story, so that private experience acquires a cosmological dimension. This is not merely rhetorical exaggeration. It reveals the extraordinary power of perception to enlarge an intimate experience until it becomes, for the perceiving consciousness, a universe in itself. The beloved is no longer merely another person; the beloved becomes a principle through which the universe acquires meaning.
This movement between the personal and the cosmic recurs through the imagery of centre and circle. In the passage on page 40, destiny is imagined through the figure of the compass of divine creation, drawing circles from a centre while the poet experiences himself as being pulled outward. An abstract metaphysical idea is thus converted into movement, bodily sensation and visual form. Destiny is not presented as an intellectual proposition; it is felt as a force. Philosophy descends from abstraction into the body.
This is an important characteristic of Sagar’s poetic perception. Ideas do not remain ideas. They become images, gestures, textures and movements. The invisible is rendered visible; the abstract becomes tactile. A philosophical conception is made available to consciousness through sensation.
The same perceptual fusion appears in the collection’s treatment of sacred and romantic experience. In the verse concerning the desire to touch the Black Stone and the transformation of the heart into stone, religious devotion and the language of love inhabit the same emotional field. The distinction between sacred attachment and romantic longing becomes deliberately porous. Similarly, the relationship between Madinah and Lahore, and between heart and body, turns geography into an emotional and spiritual vocabulary. Places cease to be merely places; they become states of belonging.
Memory forms another major axis of the collection. In the passage on page 90, existence is associated with dust and earth, while the self is imagined as being constituted through the beloved’s memory. This distinction is philosophically significant. Matter returns to matter, but memory resists such finality. The body belongs to the earth; memory belongs to a different order of persistence. Through memory, the absent becomes present and the past continues to participate in the formation of the self.
The recurrence of this passage, with variation, toward the later pages creates a circular architecture within the collection. The poetic journey does not simply move forward from beginning to end; it returns to its own originating emotional centre. This circularity is deeply compatible with the title. A story may proceed linearly, but consciousness does not. Memory continually brings the mind back to the point from which meaning first emerged.
The final appearance of the poet as "Prince Saleem", separated from the princess within the story, brings this architecture to completion. At this point the title ceases to be a metaphor and becomes the structural destiny of the book. The poet who began by saying "I" ultimately becomes a character within his own narrative and disappears into it. The creator enters his creation so completely that the boundary between the two is no longer secure.
The refrain "hua tha" intensifies this final paradox. It insists that everything has already happened, while the unresolved separation insists that nothing has truly ended. The grammar announces completion; the narrative continues to resist it. Love has become past tense, yet it remains alive as memory. Separation has occurred, yet it has not produced closure. The story is complete as language but incomplete as experience.
This tension between grammatical completion and existential incompletion may well be the deepest perceptual principle of the collection. The poet repeatedly speaks of what "was", while his consciousness remains inhabited by what still is. The past is therefore not dead time; it is a living interior presence.
The visual construction of the book strengthens this perceptual experience. Its poems and sections are accompanied by richly conceived visual backgrounds: galaxies, doors, circular forms, stones, crowns and other symbolic images. These should not be dismissed as mere decoration. They establish a second perceptual channel alongside language. What the word suggests, the image allows the eye to encounter. The reader therefore receives the poem simultaneously through verbal and visual perception.
The collection consequently becomes more than a printed sequence of poems. It becomes a composite aesthetic experience in which verbal metaphor and visual form participate in the same act of meaning. The circle, the door, the cosmic expanse, the stone and the crown do not merely accompany the poems; they extend their perceptual field.
From the standpoint of the Urdu perceptual school of literary criticism, the achievement of I Was Lost in the Story lies therefore not simply in what it says about love, separation, faith or memory, but in the manner in which these realities are perceived and transformed into poetic meaning. Love becomes a way of seeing. Memory becomes a substance of identity. Destiny becomes a physical pull. Geography becomes emotional belonging. The past becomes an active presence. And the "I" becomes both the centre of the story and the figure who ultimately disappears within it.
The title gathers all these movements into a single poetic proposition. "I" is the self; "story" is the world shaped by memory and imagination; "lost" is the transformation of presence into mystery; and "was" places the entire experience within the distance of recollection. Yet the paradox remains: the poet disappears from the story, but his disappearance becomes the story’s most enduring presence.
That is perhaps the most profound achievement of Saleem Sagar’s collection. He does not simply tell a story of love. He allows love, memory, faith, destiny and loss to transform the very position from which the story is told. The poet enters his narrative as its witness, becomes its lover and character, and finally vanishes into its symbolic world.
In that sense, I Was Lost in the Story is ultimately a meditation on the fate of the self within its own creation. The poet writes the story, yet the story writes him back. He seeks to preserve himself through language, only to discover that language has another destiny for him: to turn the self into memory, the experience into symbol, and the poet into a presence that survives precisely through his disappearance.
