If it is translated into Urdu the word gazes in two directions. It loiters, almost insouciantly, between ajiib and paagal saa. Strange, anomalous, something that provokes curiosity, marvelous, as in to marvel at, magical, pushing and shoving the edges of the everyday: these come from ajab, to wonder.
When one points out someone or something as ajiib in a passing comment, they might imply peculiar, a touch mad, foolish or silly, or just a tiny bit odd, flouting conventions slightly: as in paagal saa. Queer then is both; poised daintily, perhaps even deftly, between ajiib and paagal saa, while not lingering for very long in either. Lounging here, it stands, a little off-center, a touch terhaa, looking askance in both directions, between the Arabic root and a common word perhaps taken from Sanskrit in a lineage that has long faded from view.
Lay Miraji the poet, essayist and reader out as an odd assortment, literally, like sweets on a plate that one looks at longingly, to taste.
To offer an incitement to conversation. People often ask me what I work on. I have written about this particular mistake, a double take, a name taken in two ways, in my book on Miraji.
I bring it up again because that slip, which I first met over 20 years ago, lingers on. Just the other day, talking to a group of enthusiastic students in Delhi I found myself offering the usual synoptic C. What the entanglements with Mirabai, the bhakti poet, were, because in some important ways, the sliding across names suggests a kind of intimacy with Mirabai, an intimacy that Miraji pursued in his writing.
