The first time I saw Ijaz Batalvi was when he came to my uncle’s house in Model Town to visit my cousin, Daud Rahbar. He was tall and lithe and dressed like Errol Flynn; a cravat instead of a tie, the shirt collar mounted firmly on the lapels of his brown serge jacket, and a matching pair of corduroy trousers.

He looked debonair. What’s more, he showed no signs of being overawed by the presence of my uncle, Daud Rahbar’s father, whose baleful look could wither any brash young man. I don’t know what my uncle’s verdict on him was but I overheard Daud Rahbar’s brother say that Ijaz Batalvi was a young man who deserved to be censured.

This was in the mid-forties. Ijaz Batalvi was doing his masters at the time. Curiously enough, Daud Rahbar who showed extreme friendliness towards me became aloof and somewhat patronizing when Ijaz Batalvi was around. Batalvi, naturally, assumed that I was Rahbar’s errand boy. He once took pity on me and gave me a ride on his bicycle all the way from Lahore to Model Town. On the long journey he recited a few lines in Persian, which, he said, were by Naziri. He asked me if I understood what they meant. I shook my head; he did not deign to explain.

We met again in Murree a year after partition. Batalvi was now a programme producer in Azad Kashmir Radio. It was on his recommendation that Noon Meem Rashed, (the boss of A K Radio) agreed to have me audition as an English newsreader. I remember doing a poor imitation of Nobby Clarke, (the legendary newsreader of All India Radio). Surprisingly, I was offered the job — 5 rupees a day — and was told that I could move to the ramshackle hostel, which housed everybody who worked in Tararkhel, the mythical name given to the locale of Azad Kashmir Radio. Lodging was free and meals only cost 3 rupees a day. I was delirious.

Ijaz Batalvi was the bon vivant of the group. He had the room with the best view and he was the one who dictated what was to be cooked. The others probably resented him but they all knew that he could crush them with his scathing wit. Also, he was Noon Meem’s favourite. I spent two months in the hostel, but remained in awe of Ijaz Batalvi.

For I had not read the books he had and had not ‘seen the world’ that he had. Noon Meem had lent me ‘Crome Yellow’ and Sinclair Lewis’s ‘Babbitt’ and I threw myself into these books and many, many other books. If it hadn’t been for the feeling of inadequacy I felt in the presence of Ijaz Batalvi in the year 1948, I would not have developed my passion for English Literature.

My first few weeks in London (in 1953) were governed totally by the whims of Mrs. Leslie-Smith, who had taken me under her wings. She lived in Bromley in Kent. I was her sole lodger, but she had not given me the keys to the front door because, “We don’t want people coming in at all sorts of hours and upsetting Timothy.” Timothy was her fat cat who had the run of her sitting room. No matter which chair you chose to sit in, Timothy would jump onto your lap and begin to growl and scratch. “Oh, he is a spoilt brat,” Mrs. Leslie-Smith would coo, “You don’t mind him, do you?” But mind him I did and I would move to another chair, until, within a few moments, Timothy decided to dislodge me from that seat as well.

I described my plight to Ijaz Batalvi, who was now at Lincoln’s Inn, ‘having dinners’. “Is she attractive?” he asked me. I told him that she looked like a younger Martita Hunt. “Get rid of her at once,” he advised, “landladies are bad enough, but cat landladies are the worst.” I mentioned that she had taken me on because of my friend Alex Elmore and that she was not charging me any rent. “Well, you’ve got to grow up sometimes,” was his answer.

Ijaz Batalvi lived in Edgerton Gardens in South Kensington opposite the Brompton Oratory. It was a posh address. 36, Edgerton Gardens was a large Victorian building that had been converted into a bed-and-breakfast establishment. He had me fixed up in a room on the same floor as he was. His room was large and spacious and he had a gas ring that you could cook a meal on. We had tea and toast most mornings in his room.

He was now a self-assured young man who no longer found it difficult to converse in English. He was about to be admitted to the bar and he had become known to writers and psychiatrists and politicians. Ladies were not allowed into rooms at 36, but they visited ‘Battle Vee’, as Betty and her sister Vera, two of the more regular visitors, called him.

In the mid-fifties the BBC Urdu Service regularly broadcast half-hour plays. Batalvi was the leading member of a cast that had an assortment of colourful characters who had been in England for decades. They had come to study law or medicine, but had given up after a year or two and had drifted into a life of carefree vagrancy. Not many people are aware that Batalvi acted in close to a hundred radio plays ranging from Shakespeare to Priestly.

His most magnanimous gesture was to relinquish his role (as a leading man) in my favour. I had moved from Edgerton Gardens to a poky little room in Bayswater because I could not afford the exorbitant rent of 4 guineas a week. He sacrificed a fixed income because he felt that I needed the 5 guineas (my fee for appearing in a play) more than he did.

England did a lot for Ijaz Batalvi. His wit was now sharper; his intellect had matured; in his conversation he had now acquired a temperance that he had lacked. His sartorial appearance, too, had undergone a change. He now looked dapper rather than dandified. In his Burberry topcoat and his golf cap, he looked every inch a ladies’ man, which he was.

He must have gone through a tremendous strain after the execution of Z.A. Bhutto, for which many people (in my view, mistakenly,) held him personally responsible. A lesser mortal would have become cynical, but not Batalvi. He never allowed the strain to sully his intellect or affect his impish sense of humour. He was a magnificent lawyer who always caused ripples when he entered a courtroom. Judges quailed and his adversaries shivered in their boots.

But Ijaz Batalvi was not just an eminent lawyer; he was a litterateur, a thinker and a profound analyst of events. I relished his company because he was, by far, the best conversationalist in our country. We are not going to see the like of him for many seasons.

When he talked about something he loved — Iqbal, perhaps, or Meeraji — his erudition never failed to coruscate. His principal intellectual weapon was gusto. Ijaz Batalvi argued flamboyantly; he would punctuate his discourse with piquant non-sequitors, demolish premise with counter-premise and seal the subject with a flourish. He had learnt part of this technique from Mahmood Nizami, the chubby, corpulent, head of Lahore radio (in the early 50s) Nizami Sahib was a man who combined the manner of Friar Tuck with the mind of A.J.P. Taylor. He was one of the very few radio men who did not come out of the ASB school of thought. Nearly all the other luminaries in the broadcasting service, Rashid Ahmed, Rashed, Qutub, Mehra, Chibb et al, did. They had all imbibed the verve and wisdom of Ahmed Shah Bokhari. Nizami Sahib was the product of Islamia College Lahore, who had acquired his intellectual prowess in the surrounds of ‘Arab Hotel’, the famous, slip-shod caf’e, frequented by the likes of Charagh Hasan Hasrat.

Nizami Sahib spoke very fast. I don’t think I have ever come across anyone who could utter more words in one breath. Words poured out of his mouth with the rapidity of a sten gun and yet, he remained articulate. Many people who attempted to imitate him ended up jabbering, except Ijaz Batalvi, who had perfected the knack of a Nizami-esque gibberish that sounded like Esperanto.

Nizami Sahib’s house was adjacent to the radio building. Tahira, his heavily built wife was a cheerful soul. The Nizamis were an amiable couple and their geniality was infectious. Tahira welcomed all of Nizami Sahib’s guests cordially, but she had a special tenderness for Batalvi. She never failed to offer him some of her purer-than-white, home-made butter. She kept a buffalo in the house who roamed freely in her courtyard. The Nizamis cared deeply for the buffalo. Often, in the midst of an animated discussion on modern poetry, or Iqbal’s ‘reconstruction’ lectures, Nizami Sahib would suddenly pause and ask Tahira if the buffalo had been milked at the right time. It was Batalvi’s contention that Nizami Sahib (who had authored an absorbing book on Iqbal) would have written at least half a dozen searching books on Indo-Muslim history, had he not been so occupied with the affairs of the buffalo.

And once the buffalo got lost. The story was that the young lad who was responsible for walking the buffalo along the narrow path that ran immediately behind the Governor House, had taken a devious route and had absconded. Tahira was frantic with distress. Word reached the radio station and Batalvi and a young sound effects man got on their bikes in search of the buffalo. The sound effects man knew a milk-seller who kept a herd of buffaloes. The milk-seller told them that gujjars from out of town were ever on the look-out for stray buffaloes and that by now they had probably whisked the poor animal away to their haunts. Batalvi was not going to give up easily. He decided to go and see his brother who was, at the time, the Inspector General of police.

He said good-bye to the sound effects man and made his way towards his brother’s office. On the way, along the canal bank, a fortune-teller beckoned him to learn all about his fate for only one rupee. Batalvi felt that there was something so compelling about the man that he got off his bike and approached him. “You won’t be riding a bike for very long,” said the man, “soon you will be going seven seas across.” Batalvi ignored the sooth-sayer’s familiar patter. “I’m on a mission,” he told the man, “I have to find a buffalo which has wandered away. Will I have any luck?” “You will,” said the sooth-sayer, looking at the eight anna coin that Batalvi had placed on the palm of his hand, “Go to Mughalpura.” “Mughalpura is a big district,” Batalvi said. The sooth-sayer returned the coin to Batalvi. “Go to the railway line,” he said, and, realising, that he had lost a customer turned his face away.

As he recounted the tale, years later, in London, Ijaz Batalvi told me that he was nearing his brother’s office when under one of those impulses which are inexplicable, he rode his bike to Mughalpura railway station. The station was deserted, but he saw in the distance a buffalo walking along the railway track. He was so excited that he raced towards the animal. He might have been motivated by his sense of theatrics, but he did say to me that when he drew level with the buffalo, he pronounced, “Stop, if you belong to Nizami Sahib.” The buffalo stopped.

It may be a shaggy dog story but it is pure Batalvi. Anyway, the Nizamis got their buffalo back. And the sooth-sayer’s prophecy came true, for within a few months, Ijaz Batalvi was in London. He was not riding his bike any more.

When he returned from London, a qualified barrister, he joined Manzur Qadir’s chambers. He was fortunate. Manzur Qadir was a superb jurist but he was also an exceedingly humble man. I was once invited to his cottage in Nathiagali. He had that rare quality of listening to you as though your opinions really mattered to him. It’s a quality you only find in a truly civilised man. I asked him about Ijaz Batalvi and he had no hesitation in telling me that, in his view, Batalvi would become a magnificent lawyer.

Which he did. His wit stood him in excellent stead. He once locked horns with a pre-eminent criminal lawyer in a case involving a group of people who had been accused of marauding a village. Batalvi was defending the group. “My lord,” said the great criminal lawyer in his concluding remarks, “these men cannot be condoned; they are deperadoes.” Batalvi sprang to his feet, “Melud, I quite agree with my learned friend. They are deperadoes from El Dorado.”

He brought the same celerity to the meetings of the literary organisation known as the Halqa-i-Arbab-i-zauq. I was present when Akhtar Razi, a young writer, read out an abstract play during a session. Batalvi was presiding. When, finally, he was asked to wind up the discussion that had ensued, he said that a playwright’s job was to scan life, select from it, and organise his findings with dialogue. But he should also be the one to sieve away the trivialities and redundancies of the script so that he can offer the audience the essence.

He was a polymath conversationalist. His talk was a pleasure ride on an intellectual roundabout. It is difficult to explain his influence to anyone who has not felt the impact of his personality. Mediocre thinking struck him as several degrees worse than no thinking. Any one who spent an evening with him came back dazzled by the range of his learning.

When I think of Ijaz Batalvi I am reminded of Orson Welles, that centrifugal talent, that unique individual who never compromised with the norms of society. Welles arrived in a provincial town in the mid-west to deliver a lecture and found out that there were only a handful of listeners — and no one to introduce him. Bravely, he set forth, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I will tell you about myself. I am an actor in the legitimate stage. I write, direct and act in the motion pictures. I am also a magician, a violinist and a pianist.” Here he paused and surveying the sparse congregation said, quizzically, “Isn’t it strange that there are so many of me and so few of you?”

It shudders me to think that compared to Ijaz Batalvi, we are less than a few..