COLUMN: THE TWO AESTHETES

I begin with the confession that this column is limited to being a family memory. It is about my maternal uncle and aunt who I have lost, and their excessive obsession with newspapers, poetry, wit and the game of cricket.
Still, I am completely unaware of how they could fight or coexist with so many demons possessing them at the same time. But, somehow, they managed and lived fairly long enough with these demons and the ghosts that shadowed them until the end of their lives.
The urge to write this piece comes from the recent passing away of my uncle — Muhammed Zaheer Farrukh (pen name M.Z. Farrukh) who my brother and I fondly call Mamoo Jan. My mother had lost two siblings before I was born — one in a tragic accident at home and the other in an air crash. So I grew up with an aunt, Firdaus Asma (pen name Asma), who we called Khala, and Mamoo Jan, who are now both gone.
Along with their passion for avidly reading multiple newspapers every morning, they recited poetry, keenly followed cricket — from the Caribbean to New Zealand, with Pakistan in the centre — and had a flair for writing columns laced with sharp wit and dry humour.
The last picture I saw of Mamoo Jan brought me some solace. It was taken a week before his passing on August 16, 2024. At 93, sitting on a sofa with a large blanket covering his legs and torso, he was reading The New York Times published that day, with his eyes glued to some news report or column.
Over the last few years, he had been spending more time in the US, staying at his eldest son Asad Jamal’s place. I am told that, after getting up in the morning, he would order multiple broadsheets to be delivered to him. He not only continued reading voraciously until the end but also loved to reflect on issues, ranging from Pakistan’s economy to the upcoming US presidential elections, when speaking to people around him.
It was in 1981, a few years before he took an early retirement from the revenue and taxation branch of the Pakistani civil service, that Mamoo Jan started writing regularly for two evening newspapers of yesteryear, the Daily News and the Leader. After moving to the UK, he continued writing for Pakistani publications on international and British politics, cricket, culture, the economy and Pakistan’s foreign affairs.
Some of his articles were purely humorous and some were serious commentaries. Interestingly, he was more serious when writing about cricket and cricketers — from W.G. Grace to Hanif Muhammad to Majid Khan — but would write with a stinging dry humour when discussing politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, Rajiv Gandhi or Nawaz Sharif. Two collections of his writings, titled Thursday Notes and Matters of Moment, were published by Ferozsons, Lahore.
Mamoo Jan relocated to the UK due to the treatment meted out to him by certain quarters in the last few years of his government service. His wife and children had already moved there some years earlier. He once told me, “It was a low-intensity constant warfare against me by certain people in the service. It all started from the time when I was probably posted in Rawalpindi and Sufi sahib [his father] got arrested by the police.”
Ironically, Mamoo Jan had always been very critical of the PPP and had no love lost for Z.A. Bhutto. But my maternal grandfather, Sufi Muhammed Saghir Hasan, an educationist by profession, was Bhutto’s staunch supporter. He used to write him letters and continued to send messages of solidarity when Bhutto was in prison and then in the death cell.
Therefore, on April 4, 1979, police came to fetch Sufi sahib from his residence in Karachi. He was 85 years old then. The family was informed and, of course, the son in the civil service got his father released. Things changed for Mamoo Jan in the service since that episode. Later in life, before retiring completely, he also ran some private business in the UK. His place always remained full of newspapers and stacks of files of different clippings from a varied range of publications.
In 2012, Firdaus Asma [my Khala] passed away. She stayed single and had moved to my brother’s place in the last few years of her life. Mamoo Jan and Khala shared a lot of interests in life, as mentioned above. Professionally, she worked as an educationist and served as the principal of many schools.
Khala was born with her tongue in her cheek. She had started writing humour and satire since her teenage days. However, when the late Maisoon Hussein was the editor of the women’s page in Dawn, she encouraged Khala to write a regular weekly column.
If I remember correctly, the column was titled ‘A Teacher’s Diary’. When the page stopped publishing, Khala said: “With the closure of that page, I have gone back to my cocoon, which however has to be big, considering my age and weight.” In 2002, she came out with a collection of her articles, titled I Decided To Be A Widow.
The night before she passed away, she recited some verses from Ghalib. My friend Mehmood-ul-Hasan keeps quoting Sir Donald Bradman, who once said: “Reading poetry and watching cricket were the sum of my world, and the two are not so far apart as many aesthetes might believe.”
The writer is a poet and essayist. His latest collections of verse are Hairaa’n Sar-i-Bazaar and No Fortunes to Tell
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 1st, 2024