KARACHI, June 6: “I don’t know how my heart still beats without her,” activist, teacher and author, and the late Perween Rahman’s older sister, Aquila Ismail, quietly said when requested to speak about her sister at a programme organised by the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (Szabist) here on Thursday.

It was the first time for Ms Ismail to be talking about the sister whom she used to refer to as her “eldest daughter”. “That aura of goodness that Perween brought with her is lost from our lives. I only see darkness around me now,” she added.

“Perween was a brilliant student of architecture. But designing didn’t initially gel with her thinking, so in 1982 she started working with Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, who also became her mentor. She started sanitation work soon after in 1983 and ran the Orangi Pilot Project after Dr Hameed Khan’s death in October 1999. She gave it a direction,” she said.

“All of Perween’s work was to help the poor. She always had a pro-poor bias. She wanted the poor to have a house, to have clean water and to get good education. But then the 2010 floods became a turning point for Perween. She visited the flood-stricken areas though it wasn’t a part of her work. And the misery there, especially the misery of women, made her realise that women suffered the most in all calamities. That was when her direction changed and she started working for women by involving them in development.

“Her women’s saving group also came about after the floods. For this she institutionalised the common ‘committee’ or mutual saving that women usually put together. If a woman was able to save Rs50,000 or more, Perween would get her a grant to match the amount. It was such things that evolved from her. She spent eight hours a day to go to the people and help them better their lives. She didn’t crack the glass ceiling but cracked the earth to work upwards from the ground,” said Ms Ismail while appealing to the gathering to like the ‘Justice for Perween Rahman’ page on Facebook.

“My sister saw all the misery around her but never despaired as she always thought that she could change things. And she did, too. As a professional architect, she used her expertise to build small houses for the poor,” she said.

Explaining her sister’s personality, she said that Ms Rahman could not stand eviction. “She couldn’t stand people not having a roof over their heads. Being displaced from her home in East Pakistan as a result of the 1971 Fall of Dhaka may be the reason for it. Perween was only 13 then,” said Ms Ismail, who authored Of Martyrs and Marigold.

The evening’s moderator, writer and art critic Nilofer Farrukh, asked then if the character of ‘Munni’ in Aquila’s novel was Ms Rahman. She said that ‘Munni’ was in fact based on her sister. “The book, when I first wrote it was a memoir but then I also wanted to add to it the suffering of my friends there. That was when I converted it to fiction,” she explained.

Asked if the parents’ conversations in the book were what she saw a lot of during 1971, the novelist said that her parents had been in East Pakistan since her father, who was a government servant, had been transferred there earlier. So they were quite politically-aware. “All the four of us, two sisters and two brothers, were also born in different cities of that part of the country,” she shared. “My parents were also hopeful of things improving. But things were happening much before 1971, like after the Agartala Conspiracy Case initiated by General Ayub against Sheikh Mujib in 1968, we suddenly stood out as Urdu-speaking people. Also the Punjabi and Pushto-speaking people were labeled as ‘Urdu-speaking’ and we all became soft targets for the Mukti Bahini,” she recalled.

“I was in the first year of engineering university in 1971. As a student, I supported the Awami League students’ wing. I was also greatly disturbed over how the Pakistan Army could come to East Pakistan and start killing the people there during the unrest. Many of my class fellows were killed, too, as a result of that. They were killing their own people’s aspirations by force,” she regretted.

Asked whose fault the break-up really was, Ms Ismail said, “Sadly, as is the case with most conflicts, both sides were correct in their own right. In a conflict, it is not all black and white. There are so many shades and I have tried to show those complexities through my fiction,” she said, while adding that she is herself married to a Bengali and even after becoming busy in her life after completing her education and getting married she had to write this book as a legacy for her children to understand the conflict.

The talk was chaired by senior journalist Zubeida Mustafa. She said that Of Martyrs and Marigold also gives an understanding of democracy. “It is a process of evolutions,” she said and went on to elaborate about how what happens to some people also affects you ultimately. “A country is like a big ship, like the Titanic. Now there were rich people in the ship’s first class and not so rich, common folk in their lower cabins. But when the ship sank, it went down with all the people no matter what class they belonged to,” she explained.

Finally, giving the concluding remarks, known psychiatrist and president of Secular Forum for Pakistan, Dr Syed Haroon Ahmed, said that he read the book in two days. “It is the fastest that I have read any book to date, because one just can’t put it down,” he said.

The Urdu edition of ‘Of Martyrs and Marigold’ is expected to be launched within two weeks.

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