A season of bereavement

Late in the afternoon on Monday, I received a WhatsApp call from my younger daughter, who lives in Italy. She seemed audibly anxious. “Have you heard the news,” she asked. That is how I learnt about the death of Asif Farrukhi that had just plopped on Twitter. It naturally left me dumbfounded.

Since she was well aware of my long association with Asif and our shared activities, she was concerned about how I would take it. But she was emphatic in her counsel: “Abbu, you have to steel yourself for bad news in these times – and do everything you can to not become one”.

Asif’s death, veritably a bolt from the blue, was more than bad news. It suddenly left the literary world in Pakistan so diminished. Readers of this column would surely have seen and read his obituaries and tribute paid to him in the media during this week.

The fact that it happened in the time of Covid-19 has cast its shadow on the event in some strange ways. For instance, Asif was co-founder, with Ameena Saiyid, of the Karachi Literature Festival, a celebration of literature that has become a landmark in the cultural life of Pakistan.

But while the KLF would evoke rousing recollections of like-minded people engaged in discussion and debate in a lively environment, Asif’s demise is marked by a kind of silence. His friends and admirers cannot get together in real time to remember him and share their stories. They cannot hug each other in sorrow or put a consoling arm around another’s shoulders. We can only make our isolated connections in an unreal, digital realm.

As my thoughts wandered, I fantasised about some creative writer taking this up as a plot. Someone of the stature of Marquez, whose ‘Love in the time of cholera’ is now put to an idiomatic use. Or would it be a writer like Jose Saramago? Asif was one of a handful of friends with whom I could talk about Marquez and Saramago and magical realism and thrilling experiments in creative writing.

We shared our discoveries, some of which were passed on to a wider readership through our columns. Asif, of course, set the standard for literary excellence. The salient features of his life have been noted in his obituaries. He was a medical doctor and worked for long years for Unicef. He had a degree in public health from Harvard. By the way, our time in Boston in the 1980s overlapped for a while as my wife was doing her masters in another institute.

There is, thus, a long trail of memories. I had first known him as a young writer of short stories. But just as his arrival on the literary scene was being registered, he became a formidable all-rounder. I was always baffled by the amount of work he could accomplish in such a short time. I saw him doing all that and still couldn’t believe it possible.

He had been unwell in recent years and was under stress but his productivity did not suffer. He was on his way to be 61 when he died. Imagine the work that has been left undone because of this untimely and early departure. Across our literary landscape, there is no one like him.

It so happens that the last column he wrote for Dawn, published on May 10, was titled: ‘A time for death’. He wrote: “News of death, especially if unrelated to the dreaded coronavirus, seems all the more dismal”. In this piece, Asif noted the death of four individuals: Bollywood actors Irrfan Khan and Rishi Kapoor, Irish poet Eavan Boland and 24-year-old Yahya Hassan, a Danish poet of Palestinian origin. This should give you some idea of Asif’s range of interest in the vast domain of art and literature.

About coronavirus, Asif said that “these are anxious days”. With a touch of magical realism, Asif himself has gone in these “anxious days” and his friends were not able to attend his funeral. As I said, living in these times is a unique experience and, though Asif will not be one of them, many writers and critics will write about it. We should have surprising interpretations of this global calamity by poets, painters and playwrights.

Meanwhile, we must steel ourselves for more bad news and try to hang in there for a time that is indefinite. We have also to learn to process grief in isolation. Obviously, this is not a good time to be grieving. The only way we know to cope with the loss of a dear one is to be with friends and family. That is how rituals associated with death are designed in every culture.

On the day Asif died, one of our foremost writers, Mohammed Hanif, posted this message on Twitter: “For past [sic] one week every single day someone I knew closely has died. Today Asif Farrukhi. Sigh. “

Doesn’t this bear testimony to the gloom that has settled in our homes and our hearts? It is not just the virus that hovers around, unseen, waiting to pounce upon you in a careless moment. There is grief that you cannot protect yourself from when someone close to you is dead. To deal with such bereavement is becoming a challenge for so many of us.

Since considerable attention is being devoted to mental health in these times of emotional distress and personal tensions, there is also some advice on how to cope with grief and loss. But we know that these tips do not much help in the immediate context. It takes time.

Sadly, it is time that is playing its tricks. In isolation, its pace is very erratic. We do not know when this pandemic will end, particularly in Pakistan where, they say, the worst is yet to come. The task of not becoming bad news yourself is not to be taken lightly.

So don’t be distracted by the antics of political clowns and scandals that are being pulled out of some magician’s hat.

The writer is a senior journalist.

Email: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com