19 November 1984, Lahore.
It was a mild November day in Lahore. The next day Faiz would be dead but no one knew that yet. Faiz’s younger daughter Moneeza was celebrating her seventeenth wedding anniversary and, luckily for her, Faiz was in Lahore. Moneeza, and her elder sister Salima, were used to not having their famous father around for important occasions. Faiz had always made an effort to be involved in their lives but he was a man of the people. When they were younger, he would often be the ‘guest’ of military dictators in various prisons around Pakistan, starting with his arrest and imprisonment in the infamous ‘Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case’, in which he served four years in several different prisons under the threat of a death sentence for treason. He had since spent briefer periods in jail under other governments as well and had remained closely watched whenever he was in Pakistan. More often than
not, he was not in Pakistan, travelling all over the world for conferences on literature, peace, workers’ issues and the like. This year, though, he was in Lahore.

In fact, he had just returned from visiting his two ancestral villages. The better known was Kala Qader near the small town of Narowal, a little over 100 km to the north-east of Lahore. Kala Qader was where he was born and had grown up; it was the home of his ancestors and he retained a strong link to the village. Not too far from Kala Qader is the village of Jessar, the birthplace of his mother Sultan Fatima, known affectionately to all and sundry as ‘Bebe-ji’ (respected mother). Bebe-ji had been the youngest wife of Faiz’s dashing adventurer father; the young girl he married upon his return from England. Faiz had been visiting both villages in the last couple of days and had been given a royal welcome, one befitting a prodigal son. Hundreds of people from surrounding villages had turned up for a glimpse of Pakistan’s most famous poet. Faiz had charmed and humbled everyone who came to see him by declaring that he was not a guest; he was one of the hosts since he too belonged to the villages. And in fact, he was related to dozens of the villagers through birth or marriage. They were all his extended family—cousins, uncles, nieces, nephews—descendants of his father, Sultan Mohammad Khan.

Faiz, the man who had travelled to every corner of the world and lived in three continents wistfully asked the villagers to build him a room or two overlooking the lush sugarcane and mustard fields so he could live out the rest of his life there, where the spirits of his ancestors rested in peace. At the villagers’ insistence, Faiz led the prayers at the local mosque. It had been built by Faiz’s father and at the entrance to the mosque on a simple white marble slab was engraved Faiz’s only Persian ‘Na’at’ or ‘Ode to the Prophet’:

Every grieved heart is indeed your abode;
I bring you yet another to lodge in now.
The king on his throne worries only [about] his riches;
On this dust sits your beggar and is his envy.

His older daughter Salima recalls that he was very cheerful upon his return, although in retrospect, the fact that he had gone and met everyone there and spent time with them seemed as though ‘maybe he knew, somehow that the end was near’. When he came back though, he was very happy. He came straight here [to Salima’s house]. He told me he had been to Jessar and this was his first visit after forty years. He was laughing and joking. He said there had been a woman who used to be the village beauty and now she was this old crone! And then he laughed and said, ‘I wonder what I looked like to her?!’ But he was very happy; there was not a hint of being unwell; he was full of joie de vivre. He kept saying, ‘You should go back to the village, keep visiting.’ He kept insisting that city people have no idea of the lives people lead in villages, of what it means to have to live in a rural area of Pakistan.

Faiz had made more of an effort in recent months to stay in Lahore, close to his family and grandchildren. He had remarked to some of his family that he was tired of travelling. He had not been keeping very good health. A history of chain-smoking since his youth, non-stop travelling and a generally unhealthy lifestyle had taken their toll. In addition, the last five years had been tough for Pakistan and Pakistanis. General Zia-ul-Haq’s harsh military dictatorship had strengthened its grip on the country after arresting and eventually executing the country’s first elected prime minister, the charismatic and mercurial Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. After the few years of relative political freedom under the Bhutto government, the Zia dictatorship seemed even more oppressive. Even though Faiz had returned to Pakistan at the personal insistence of the general who had promised that he would not be harassed, he could not help but be affected by the gloom and misery besetting the nation and its people. This was especially so since he had long been their most eloquent dissident, someone whose voice had carried to far corners of the globe; because of this, in spite of the general’s assurances, Faiz was still trailed everywhere he went by the police and intelligence agencies.

Faiz’s younger son-in-law, Humair Hashmi, spent a lot of time with Faiz in the last months since they lived next to each other and would see each other in passing almost every day. They shared a love of beautiful women and good drinks:

We used to talk of everything under the sun—how to make homemade wine, poetry, the Zia government, politics, everything. The one thing he never talked about was his female friends and he never liked to talk about the ‘Conspiracy case’. He would say ‘Choro yaar’ [Leave it]. First of all none of them [the accused] was supposed to talk about it because of the statutes about the case and, of course, he did not like to think about it. As everyone now knows, there was no ‘conspiracy’; it was an excuse to ban the [Communist] Party and prosecute all who were in disagreement with the government. Back then we had just two newspapers, Pakistan Times and Nawai Waqt, and the latter perpetually referred to Faiz as ‘the convicted Faiz Ahmed Faiz’. Even when he was given the Lenin Peace Prize, it would always refer to him as the ‘formerly imprisoned Faiz Ahmed Faiz’ or something like that. That’s not easy for anyone to tolerate especially for someone as sensitive as Faiz. It would happen whenever he was in Pakistan or when he was in the news—it would say, ‘the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case convict Faiz’.

That last year, he knew he did not have long. Look at the pictures of him; you can tell it in his eyes, that faraway look as if the curtains are being drawn. When one would talk to him, he seemed to be detached, as if he wasn’t really there listening to you. And he spent all of that last year going around seeing old friends. That’s why he went to the village. Before that he had been there maybe ten years ago at my insistence.”

Faiz’s physical health had also declined in that last year. ‘He would say to me, “Take me to a doctor.” I would say, “Okay,” so I took him to a doctor but there was not much he could do. He had smoked all his life and he had such a dislike of physical activity, he would say exercise, no, that is for the laborers, we won’t do that,’ says Hashmi with a laugh. ‘He wouldn’t walk from here to the post office (about 400 yards away).’