I had met Zafaryab Ahmed during my brief stint at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute as an assistant conference co-ordinator in 1996. I was then only 17. He was in his early forties.
A loner and a bit of a recluse, I was first attracted to him by the behaviour of people around him. The peculiar silence that would follow or the hushed conversations about him. The general impression was of him having lost his sanity after undergoing torture and abuse while detained by the FIA on some mysterious charges. It had to do with child labour. I was too dumb to understand what the entire issue was and I don’t think I cared very much. I was more interested in the kind eye but the very lost expression on his face. So, I went up to his office one day, and blatantly told him that I wanted to be his friend. He was surprised. He asked me if I was sure. I told him that I felt that an adult like him could help me understand all that sustainable development was about.
I didn’t of course tell him that I wanted to be his friend because I felt sad for him, because everyone else thought he was mad and I thought it was unfair. I wanted to know the person behind the story. This was indeed the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Little did I know at that time that in the 10 years that followed, ours would prove to be a friendship that withstood time, distance and proved more beneficial for me than him in every sense of the word.
We were very different, Zafaryab and I. My passionate disillusionment with the world, his silent acceptance of its insanities — my anger at life and his sadness with reality. Yet it all converged onto one thing. Our love of writing and our willingness to accept each other as we were.
We never talked about the case. We never talked about Iqbal Masih, the murdered boy on whose account Zafaryab tried to raise his voice. I always wanted him to write about his life, about the case of the murdered Iqbal Masih, the 12-year-old bonded labourer turned human-rights activist and how it had changed Zafar’s life. How fighting and writing about continued child labour converted him into an ‘Indian agent’ trying to malign the country’s image and ruin the carpet industry and thus taken as prisoner by the FIA. I don’t know what happened after that, what happened in prison. I’ve only heard stories. Zafaryab never spoke of that time.
We did talk about his ex-wife, the divorce, his family that he loved very much and especially his mother. His mother was indeed his life, his world to him. He talked to me about Lahore, the sights and sounds of Lahore, about Bulleh Shah. He wanted to gift to me Bulleh Shah’s poetry translated in English. I think our friendship grew leaps and bounds when he found that I was related to Khwaja Khurshid Anwar, as he was in love with his music, and to Khwaja Asif, the former editor of The Pakistan Times as he was in love with the latter’s genius. I was surprised most by how Zafaryab always had kind words to say about anyone and everyone while I would find faults with those around him. I was his sister, his friend and sometimes even a mother. He was my first encounter with a person who actually drank. I couldn’t believe when I was first told that he drank, that he was an alcoholic. I lectured him against it, spoke against his friends who didn’t seem to discourage him from his habit, told him all that religion had taught me — and then I let him be. I found in him a pain, a constant struggle, the ‘lone-ranger’, as he called himself. I accepted that I could be of no help.
He hated his handwriting. He sent me letters printed out which was a relief because his handwriting was much worse than mine. He challenged me. If I took too much interest in a book, he would question me and inquire if I was becoming dependent on the philosophies of the author rather than holding my own opinions. He wanted me to be independent and to continue writing. We exchanged poetry and ideas. My poems were sad and morose and perhaps helped him relate them with his life.
Only once did he mention his case to me. He had returned from Lahore, where he was being tried. He was tired of having to go every month. He wrote: “I returned from Lahore last night to go again next month as the judge couldn’t give his verdict. The reason simply being that my detractors don’t have a case to show and preferred not to turn up.”
It hurt him still how the case had complicated his life. Making every day more and more difficult, especially for a man as sensitive as he was. “The moment my pencil started rolling on the paper I got a phone call that my poor car, my only worldly possession that I had given for repairs and whose documents are with the FIA, was taken in custody while the mechanic’s brother was having a joy ride. I was distressed at her ordeal and went out to salvage her from the monsters. But they won’t relent without the documents. The poor little thing will have to stay with the police until I receive the documents from Lahore. I have been twice to the police stations to see her.”
I would have to print the few letters I have of him to show what a splendid man he was. But they remain personal and very valuable. A friend of mine is doing her thesis on how individuals encounter the state in their every day lives and for me, this is one way. I lost my friend to it. They did not manage to hang him. He was spared, thanks to the hue and cry raised by Amnesty International who rescued him in time.
In 1998, Zafaryab won the first ever Oak Human Rights Fellowship at Colby College but was detained by the government for 6 months due to the charges against him. His initial excitement at the prospect of working at Colby and bringing more attention to human rights abuses wore away during the 6 months he spent fighting for permission to leave Pakistan. After the provisional travel permission was granted he told a friend he was too drained to accept the fellowship. It was this fellowship that rescued him from the false accusations in Pakistan and took him abroad on a fellowship where he could teach and learn. Zafaryab talked to me a lot about the problems and the reasons why the government had finally allowed him to leave. But the problem was, safe as he was now, he had never wanted to leave his country. But it was there that he missed his beloved Lahore, the food, the Punjabi language — and his mother. We talked on the phone often and he spoke of his old mother who could not manage even half way across the world, and when given hope that she may be able to, he was tired of hopelessly trying to get his passport back.
In 1999, Zafaryab Ahmed was named winner of the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) 1999 International Press Freedom Award. the award recognizes journalists around the world who “have suffered personally and professionally in their pursuit of journalism and free expression.”
Zafaryab and I never talked about his awards. I kept pushing him to write but he seemed too exhausted. We talked more of his loneliness in the US and when I was in Oxford, of my loneliness there. He responded to the news of my marriage with immense joy, very happy with my choosing the ‘boy who is always smiling’. After my marriage, he and I lost touch for a few months.
I emailed him in October 2005, troubled by his long silence where his niece replied, telling me he was back in the country but very sick. His liver had given in to the alcohol that he sought refuge in every time he felt alone. I rushed to find a mere shadow of the man who inspired me once. Sitting together that afternoon, we fought his denial of his illness. He just wanted to be back on his feet again, back to smell the air in Lahore but he’d returned to find the city different, the people alien to him — and his mother no longer there to welcome him. He had fought for years to come back and on his return could not relate to what he saw. His trips to the hospital were his only chance of getting the Lahore air, but he did not like it anymore. That is when he told me he had finally won his case. I burst into tears and hugged him. He laughed and tried to shrug it off and I hugged him again, until his eyes were moist and he said: “We won the case. They finally realized they had no evidence against me.” We both cried silently, sharing joy and the sadness of the lost years. Years where he was in an alien country that protected him when his own was trying to kill him. Although he once wrote that he was “Wanted in the land of my birth and suspect in my adopted land”. He’d lost his innocent faith in mankind, in systems — but he stood by his principles, his beliefs and his morals. He’d lost his mother to this time and he had mourned alone.
Last week, I got a call from his niece, telling me he had passed away. Only a night ago we were rejoicing at the marked improvement in him. I had seen him come out of a coma. I wondered why Zafaryab had stopped fighting. It wasn’t the liver that gave in, as anyone would suspect. It was in fact, his heart. His heart that had been broken by the tragedy that his life had become. I think he died of loneliness, of sheer tiredness. He simply got tired of fighting, his illness, the system, the loneliness and the helplessness that he felt through it all. There was no point to it. He lost time, opportunities, contacts with friends and family all the while as he sunk further into financial debt, which weighed heavily on his mind. He died of loneliness, of not having anyone or anything to live for.