Many have articulated the idea of a South Asian Union or Federation, but perhaps none so lovingly and with as much compassion as Haider Rizvi, a journalist who held all humanity and life dear

It was decades ago in Lahore, Pakistan.

By Anwar Hasan

I don’t remember the year. But I do remember that it was General Zia ul Haq’s era — before Musadiq Sanwal lost his left eye in the Punjab University Jamiat students’ attack on the National College of Arts, before Prof. Iqbal Hussain’s paintings, depicting the everyday lives of the women of Heera Mandi, Lahore’s red light area, were expelled from the state owned gallery, Alhamra.

The day – hot enough to make the idea of hell tangible for an atheist – was so draining that even the stray dogs of Krishan Nagar preferred not to leave the shade to bark at strangers. And the familiar lazy rhythm of horseshoes hitting the tarmac of Sanda Road quickened when the thirsty horses pulling the ‘tongas’ (horse-drawn taxis) smelled water while nearing the centuries-old, algae-covered troughs on the roadside.

The blinding white sunlight that punishes Lahore for being close to the Equator stayed out of the last ground-floor room in the boys’ hostel across the road from Riwaz Garden. The lush midget mango tree at the room’s balcony and the blacked out windows made the small room pleasantly dark. I knew Haider was there – his outline on one of the two beds in the room appeared and disappeared with the glow of his cigarette.

I remember that he had returned from Thar that day. It seemed that the hot sands of the Thar desert had somehow swallowed his abrupt – at times hysterical – laughter before spitting out this sandblasted skeleton of lifeless silence.

He was fine before Thar – at least his ability to express himself.

Before the Thar-induced silence he once said, ‘Jigar Hasan Kuzagar (a reference to a combination of my ceramics assignment in the art college, my surname and an Urdu poem that he liked), the old Khasras (land-holding records in the Indian sub-continent) in Bengal, Utter Pradesh, Punjab, Bacha Khan’s country (he never called it North West Frontier Province), Sindh, and Baluchistan are written in Farsi because of the Mughals. If the history of South Asia is the same then what is stopping us from making it one big country?’

I had no quick response to his relentless logic.

He continued, ‘Jigar, we are not citizens of General Zia’s Pakistan. We are citizens of the United States of Indus Valley.’

He looked at me proudly, then said, ‘There has to be a separate passport for this country, perhaps the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro embossed on every page?’

He was quite excited by now. ‘Why don’t you design it and then we both can take oath as its first citizens?’

He raised his arms up in the air ecstatically and laughed his extended hysterical belly-laughter.

As the sun set on the hazy Lahore horizon, the life that seeped out of the city with the summer heat gradually started irrigating the city’s sundried veins again. A small street connected the boys’ hostel to the vein of Sanda Road too. With the slow progress of the night, juvenile laughter and distinct languages and accents of South Asia gradually subsided in the corridor outside the room. Earlier, people came in and out, talked for hours, and left, but nothing broke Haider’s sandblasted dead silence in that dark ground-floor room.

Years later, I remember another encounter, this time in Islamabad. It was the day when the President of Pakistan, directed by the uniformed ‘protectors’ of the country’s ‘ideological boundaries’ sacked another elected Prime Minister ‘in the best interests of the nation.’

In a small first-floor flat in one of the many nameless neighbourhoods of the city, once again I found Haider sitting in silence. He was rolling an unlit cigarette between his fingers and looking at the empty wall in front of him.

Then, for no apparent reason, he started talking about Thar during General Zia’s regime. ‘In the middle of the night,’ he said, ‘uniformed soldiers came to arrest the youth next door. The crime of the boy, hardly fifteen or sixteen years of age, was that he attended one of the hunger strikes in support of the movement for the restoration of democracy.’

‘Then what happened?’ I asked.

He took a deep breath and said, ‘They took the boy with them. I don’t know what they did to him, but…’ He paused as if garnering courage to go further, ‘I still have nightmares of the boy’s eyes full of fear and his poor tenant father’s pleas at the military officer’s feet with his both hands joined from fingertips to elbows, as the ultimate sign of submission in Thar.’

Then, with a child-like embarrassment, he looked down and admitted, ‘it has been many years Jigar but I still find it difficult to sleep when those images appear in my dreams.’

I remember being embarrassed for many days for the sense of relief I felt for having resolved the decade-old riddle of his Thar-induced silence.

Midnight came and went in the small Islamabad flat in silence.

At Haider Rizvi’s memorial in New York: A diverse group brought together by a ‘United States of Indus Valley’ citizen

Within an hour after sending the English language daily the Muslim’s copy to press, our journalist friends Samina Nazir, Nabila Aslam, Mubarak Virk, and Ishaq Chaudhry, were climbing the impossibly steep stairs to the small flat.

Today they were all relatively silent as well. The increase in the number of individuals in the small room did not help lift the somber mood.

‘Let’s get out,’ Samina Nazir couldn’t take it anymore.

Usually, a suggestion of this kind could have initiated a lengthy and illogical debate, after which, in most cases at least, the person proposing such a solution would either change their mind or bring something different to the table. But, on this occasion, we all agreed with Samina Nazir without any argument whatsoever – surprising indeed.

One by one we climbed down the steep stairs, careful not to wake the landlord’s annoying toddler downstairs. Then we all squeezed into Mubarak Virk’s small Suzuki FX800 parked a few houses down the deserted residential street.

The perennial lengthy delays in the salaries of The Muslim staff were the main culprit in keeping the fuel gage needle of Mubarak’s car shivering with fear at the bottom most times.  This fear, however, often replaced with self-confidence with an investment of two to four litres of fuel bought by whoever had money that day. I don’t remember who invested on that night but with the first sip, the permanently thirsty FX800 crossed Zero Point towards Aabpara with a renewed energy.

As we passed the office of the Muslim on the left, none of them abused its owner Agha Murtuza Poya as they usually did each time they passed the building.

Samina Nazir, sharing the front seat with someone, whispered something in Mubarak’s ear that he acknowledged with his head as he always does whether he agrees or not.

By then, the car had passed MNA hostel, turned left on Constitution Avenue, and after passing the Foreign Office and the under-construction Supreme Court building, we stopped in front of Parliament House.

Following the local custom, the occasional passing vehicles slowed down assuming we needed help, then sped away realizing it wasn’t the case.

It was Samina Nazir who finally broke what seemed like an hours-long silence: she came out of the car, faced Parliament House, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted at the top of her voice: ‘Ghulam Ishaq Khannnnnnn. You…’

The rest of the Suzuki FX800’s occupants emerged and started competing with her in denouncing President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and the military generals in the dead of night for sacking a democratically elected Prime Minister.

The group, representing identities including Ahmadi, Shia, Sunni, Punjabi, Sindhi, Saraiki, and Indian migrant, used its right of expression. In the process, as I distinctly remember, the reference to the animal known for its loyalty to humanity was mentioned several times, but in a completely different context.

The night and scant traffic on Constitution Avenue continued into the wee hours. Eventually, we were all exhausted after a combination of the daily grind of journalism and the cathartic shouting. But Haider’s anger expressed in Sindhi, despite losing his voice to deep rumbling sobs, continued resounding from his slight body and echoed back from the walls of the Parliament House.

In his incomprehensible sobbing and swearing, I heard the fear in the Thari boy’s eyes and the helplessness of the poor father pleading for the life of his son on the military officer’s feet more than a decade ago. I wanted to say something reassuring and soothing to calm him down but I didn’t.

Many more years passed.

This time it was New York, on Sunday, 29 November 2015. A month after he had left us. The venue was a bright basement of a South Asian restaurant in Coney Island, Brooklyn.

On the one end stood a table with his smiling, framed photograph. The rest of the basement was full of men and women representing a variety of identities — Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Punjabi, Bengali, Sindhi, Bloch, Pashtun, American, and British, Pakistani, Indian. Among the things we talked about was Aman ki Asha, the need for peace between India and Pakistan, a cause that he held dear to his heart.

The participants also represented varied professional backgrounds — university professors, academics, media experts, journalists, diplomats, filmmakers, human rights activists, artists, community leaders, and suspicious-of-prosperity leftwing romantic revolutionaries. Most of us had never met before, but felt like old friends as we lovingly shared memories of him with each other.

As I felt the basement gradually filling up with transparent streams of beautiful memories emerging from all directions, I heard a soft whisper inside me: ‘Jigar, meet the other citizens of the United States of Indus Valley.’

Not sure if I heard the hysterical laughter afterwards or not but I definitely felt the texture of all the vibrant spring colours of Indus Valley – as if Holi, Eid, Vaisakhi, and Christmas came early to Brooklyn.

Dedicated to Haider Rizvi

Born October 3, 1963. Died October 29, 2015.

Anwar Hasan is a London-based South Asia media expert and former journalist with the BBC World Service. A graduate of the National College of Arts, Lahore, he has a Masters Degree in International Security and Global Governance from Birkbeck College, University of London. Email: [email protected]