In memory

Professor Malik Hussain Mubbashar, 1947-2020. Death is often such a personal loss. We’re unsure what to say to a bereaved. What do you say to someone who has lost a loved one? You straddle the line between hope and callousness, grief and providence, the before and after. Inevitably, all our words fall short.

Bohat afsos hua.

But it is also a collective loss. Grief shared is halved, as they say. And so since last month, as I mourned the loss of a teacher, a mentor, and a friend, I have been wondering how many others like me must privately be grieving over what all we lost when Dr Malik Hussain Mubbashar decided to very quietly leave us for his eternal abode earlier in August. I will always begrudge his Irish goodbye because I never got the chance to express my gratitude and admiration for him. For he left us with so many reasons to say thank you. A life truly lived for the benefit of others.

Dr Mubbashar was a giant of psychiatry, behavioural sciences and forensic mental health, a teacher par excellence, a relentless voice for the downtrodden, and a tireless advocate of the mentally ill. Quintessentially he was much more than what met the eye.

Bohat achay admi thay.

Born just after Partition, Dr Mubbashar grew up in Lahore, Pakistan. His lifelong commitment to the mysteries of mental health was borne out of an incident from his childhood. It was one of his favourite stories which he often recounted with great interest.

He was a schoolboy when his father took him to the Hyderabad Sindh asylum where mentally ill patients were “animals kept in a zoo”. The visitors brought tickets to see them and jeer at and taunt the mentally ill. The scenes would haunt his impressionable mind for the rest of his life.

The young Mubbashar decided there and then to change the plight of the mentally ill. He did precisely that for the rest of the seven decades of his life, relentlessly.

He joined Central Model School Lahore, Government College Lahore, and then King Edward Medical College, Lahore to become a doctor with distinctions, gold medals and awards galore. He then proceeded to the United Kingdom where he continued to excel but opted to be a psychiatrist instead of a physician much to the dismay of his father and surprise of his contemporaries.

Dr Mubbashar then trained at the Guy’s Hospital London under the mentorship of Dr Stafford Clarke, a teacher he would continue to admire and quote for the rest of his professional life. He returned to Pakistan in the early 1970s to, in his own words, “dedicate his life towards creating awareness about mental health issues and training psychiatrists”. Under his tutelage, countless students of psychology and psychiatry have gone on to become eminent professionals in the field. His former students describe him as not only a visionary but a ‘soul immersed in ishq’ who taught not just psychiatry but also the subject of life.

Last year in June, Justice Project Pakistan, a non-profit legal action firm, received news from Adiala Jail, Rawalpindi that the execution warrant for a severely mentally ill man had been issued. Two days later, on a late Sunday morning, Dr Mubbashar was standing outside the jail’s gate with a government doctor demanding that he be allowed to evaluate the prisoner. In the sweltering June heat, this septuagenarian stood steadfast by his belief that a man not fit to be executed must not be hanged. Not on his watch.

He was not allowed inside that day. But failure never put him off. He always did what he thought he ought to. He testified in courts for cases involving the mentally ill, using his unparalleled knowledge to defend and protect the victims of a skewed criminal justice system. He attended countless seminars and gave countless lectures to lawyers, judges, doctors, and whoever was willing to learn.

Unn ke jaisa aur koi nahin.

Dr Mubbashar’s accomplishments are too many to list here. But if awards and national recognition are any indication of his service to this country, he has been the recipient of the most prestigious accolades. Dr Mubbashar received the Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 1986 and the Hilal-e-Imtiaz in 2002 as well as the Companion of Honour from the United Kingdom as part of the Queen’s Anniversary Prizes in 1999. He was also a gifted poet and writer, appearing in more than a hundred publications in national and international journals. His autobiography titled ‘Meem Bashar’ came out in 2017.

At a judicial conference organised by JPP in February this year, while we were still unrestrained by the social distancing brought about by Covid-19, Dr Mubbashar quoted Emily Dickinson’s ‘The brain is wider than the sky’ during his address to the judges of the Lahore High Court.

‘The brain is just the weight of God,’ he echoed her words. Dr Mubbashar was His gift to us.

Dr Mowadat Hussain Rana is a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences.

Ali Haider Habib works for Justice Project Pakistan.