IT was Ismat Chughtai. Without an iota of doubt, how could it be anybody else but her? Chughtai was my first literary idol — not quite out of Enid Blyton and the Jennings series, I discovered her books and heard my parents talk about her. It was one of those discoveries which lasts you a lifetime. I began to look out for her books, relishing each and every story or essay as a great secret I could not share with anybody else. Chughtai was also the only author I was ever admonished for reading. I can distinctly recall keeping the copy of Terhi Lakeer stuffed in my schoolbag. My parents thought that I was too young for that fulsome novel, but having started it, no amount of restriction could make me keep away from gulping it down in large chunks, even without fully understanding many things. Each time I approach that fascinating novel I still feel a delicious shiver run down my spine.

I was still in this phase of youthful adulation when I met Chughtai for the first time in the late ’70s. She was visiting Karachi and the literary community, which was far more vibrant than one can judge from the current situation, literally lionised her. She certainly deserved all the love and affection showered on her, and one could see that she was enjoying herself. She was all that she promised to be from her writings. A sharp tongue and a ready wit marked the many literary encounters she had all over town, and like a faithful devotee I followed her to as many as I could attend.

Mirza Zafrul Hasan organised a memorable welcoming jalsa at the Ghalib Library in Karachi. Her conversation peppered with her inimitable style, she was literally beaming with pleasure and chatting away in a very relaxed manner at a dinner where I finally dared to talk to her. In a manner far from intimidating, she asked me what I was studying. I explained that I was in the process of getting admission to medical college. “You have too many doctors these days!” she said. “This has taken away all the romance from doctors. You cannot imagine what a figure the doctor used to be. He was the only male who could enter the women’s rooms and as he was supposed to take the pulse, he could actually touch their hands! That is why all my heroes in my daydream stories happened to be doctors,” she explained with a smile.

When she visited Karachi the next time in 1985, I got an assignment from no less a person than Razia Bhatti to do a long interview. She was staying with her niece near the Clifton seafront. “When a woman is widowed, her bangles are broken into pieces. But why is it that when a man becomes a widower, his glasses and wristwatch are not broken?” she asked me in the course of the conversation. I could see that she retained her acerbic wit even though something was lost, but I could not put my finger on it. The interview began smoothly and she responded to my questions, but somewhere in the course of the conversation, her answers became tangential. I asked her about Krishan Chander and she began telling me that the very concept of a father was unnecessary. But she was in no hurry, and she went on to describe, at great length, the plot of a novel she wanted to write. As her conversation rambled on, I wondered if she failed to recognise the early symptoms of the degenerative disease she must have succumbed to.

Another memorable occasion sticks out in my memory related to Chughtai, but this turned out to be a painful one. This time it was when Jeelani Bano, the distinguished fiction writer and her husband, Anwar Moazzam, a highly respectable scholar in his own right, were visiting Karachi. They had flown from Mumbai where they had visited the ailing Chughtai. “She has had a stroke and can barely recognise people,” Bano told us. We were gathered at the home of Hajra Masroor and the guests included Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi sahib and Mushfiq Khwaja sahib as well as Mohsin Khan, a younger writer visiting from Lucknow. The conversation changed after what Bano sahiba reported and we could not talk about any other topic.

Khan had some amusing stories to tell as he owned the mango orchard which served as an outdoor location for the movie Junoon and Chughtai had played a role in it. Everybody had many things to say: how much Chughtai, the writer and the person, meant to each one of us and how she had enriched our lives in many ways. We kept talking about her till late in the night without knowing that in Mumbai, on the other side of the sea, she had crossed over into the great beyond. The next morning we were shocked to read the news of her passing away in the papers. Ismat apa was gone but her books were a living testimony to her larger than life presence.

There was an immediate wave of sorrow as the literary world mourned her loss. I remember the newspapers quoted Intizar Husain’s comment that with Chughtai’s passing away, he feels like an orphan. The powerful tribute the young Gustave Flaubert paid to George Sand echoed through my mind. Later on I searched for an article or columns about her but could not find anything in his published collections. Qurratulain Hyder wrote a touching obituary. However, the sorrow was soon engulfed by the heated controversy about her last rites. I remember the great furore and the ceaseless newspaper debates. I wonder if this created a long, lasting prejudice against her because of which due recognition and credit is not given to her, especially in Pakistan. Whatever the case, we need to look beyond her death and appreciate her creative life.

She played a historical role in the development of Urdu fiction at a critical juncture, and at one point in time her name was taken in the same breath as that of Manto, her friend and rival. However, their paths split after Partition. Manto moved on to Lahore and wrote some of his best known stories focusing on the senseless violence and mayhem that prevailed. The theme is associated with him to such a degree that his is the first name that comes to mind when thinking about that tumultuous period.

Partition did not touch Chughtai in the same way. She wrote a play called Dhaani Bankain, clearly not her best, and later on ‘Jarain’, a short story with her characteristic flair. But that is about all. Another well-known contemporary, Krishan Chander, wrote profusely, taking up Partition as his theme, but these stories contributed to a decline in his reputation. Was Partition a watermark for these writers, and by not writing more about it did Chughtai miss her creative moment?

Her early story ‘Lihaaf’ was not her best work, there are other contenders like ‘Chauthi ka joda’ and ‘Nanhi ki nani’. Some of her stories seem sketchy and give the impression of restlessness and hurry, as if all the energy transmuted into speed rather than accomplishment. Yet she is like nobody else in her best work. She has a distinct, unmistakable voice and a great zest for living. This remarkable energy is evident in her best non-fiction and the portraits of both Manto — “my friend and foe” — and her elder brother, the writer Azeem Baig Chughtai, are in a class by themselves. Free of sentimentality, these are ruthless and tender at the same time in a way which only she could be.

Her enduring legacy includes the novel Terhi Lakeer, taking up the story of an independent-minded woman much before Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex gave the trumpet call for feminism. What a pity that this wonderful novel is not available in Pakistan in any decent or presentable edition. Among her other neglected books is Masooma, the story of innocence lost in tinsel town. Her memoirs Kaghazi Hai Pairahan are racy and vivid, like her conversation. These remained incomplete and were published posthumously. Who knows what she would have written about next?