INTIZAR Husain’s fears were for the most part misplaced, as it turned out. Sitting in his Lahore house a decade or so ago, he said his greatest fear was his family history of people living “unnecessarily long lives”. The ambience had a touch of melancholy about it — it was around sunset with twilight across the horizon, and his wife had died not long before that — but his expression, as usual, was anything but melancholic. He was at peace with himself.

He lived long alright, but, contrary to his fears, there was life in his years till the very last. The number of times he travelled abroad — mostly, but not exclusively, to India — in his 80s was surely more often than he did, say, in his 60s, or even 40s. He continued to write and was the leading draw when the trend of literary festivals started taking root in the country. And when the inevitable end came, it was swift rather than protracted.

Much maligned by various lobbies active in the domain of Urdu literary circles for his fascination with the past and for his lack of ideological grounding in the days of a rigid Left-Right divide, Husain had little time to waste on such comments. “I am a storyteller; not a reformer,” he would often tell anyone who would refer to such criticism.

“After a long time, a quiver ran through me. “How long will you sit here like a stone?” I admonished myself. A friend is out looking for him. Truly who knows if … Life has become cheap but it is also sturdy. And then miracles are also known to happen in this very life. So why have I assumed the worst so soon? I too should go out in search. Again. A quiver ran through me; it coursed through my body like an electric current. I immediately got to my feet.

I had just about set foot across the threshold when I paused. Which city is this? The same city. Then I am not the same person. I had suddenly become a stranger in this known and familiar city. ”

—

Excerpt from The Sea Lies Ahead (Agay Samandar Hai) by Intizar Husain. Translated from Urdu by Rakhshanda Jalil.

He was absolutely clear in his head about the role of literature in society. His books Nazriyay se Aagay and Sheherzad ke Naam clearly present his thoughts in unambiguous tones. The storytelling ability of Alif Laila’s Sheherzad in the context of the threat looming large on her head and her success in turning things around after one thousand and one nights was a metaphor Husain used with great aplomb, conviction and literary force.

However, one would be massively mistaken in assuming that Husain left his pen to do the talking for him. Far from it. He loved to talk and loved even more to argue and what he loved to do the most was to argue loudly. In his life and, perhaps more critically, in his approach to life, Husain was more progressive than most of the Progressives, and he loved to say that openly and loudly. It is fair to say that the frankness of his interactions at Pak Tea House and the severity of his frictions at Halqa-i-Arbab-i-Zouq — which he captured in his own captivating style in Chiraghon ka Dhuwan — never quite left the man completely.

At a recent Urdu conference in Karachi, Husain had to listen to a lengthy paper on Urdu fiction from someone he thought did not have the credentials to do that. Husain had to listen because he was chairing the session. But once the session was over, he was fuming. At the lunch that followed, the gentleman came to pay his respects, but he got rebuffed with a retort that was characteristic Husain; frank and honest: “I have had enough of you for the day. Just leave me alone!”

Sitting with him in a public place when he was in his element, which was often, one would quickly turn around to see if people had noticed what had just been said. Husain loved to voice his opinion on just about anything — from history to religion to social fads to literary trends — and anyone. And his views, to put it mildly, were offbeat on most things and took some digesting for lesser mortals.

There was one thing though which he never talked about; the thought behind his stories and books. Husain’s basic claim to fame, acknowledged at home and abroad, was, and would remain, his contribution to Urdu fiction in the shape of short stories and novels. His journalistic writings in the shape of literary columns and his autobiography — highly readable though they are — remained on the periphery of his universe. Add to it Chekhov and John Dewey translations and a couple of travelogues, and one would think his literary life has been summed up — but not quite. With dozens of titles to his credit, Husain chose a new genre of writing with Dilli tha Jis ka Naam and Ajmal-i-Azam late in his life. The former was a narrative in the mould of ‘people’s history’ while the latter was a biography of Hakim Ajmal Khan. For someone who had never done research-based writing for the better part of his life, they were remarkable in terms of lucidity and nar-rative. It seemed like he was cut out just for that. But Husain just moved on self-deprecatingly, saying he was simply trying to explore another field of writing.

Whenever one passed a remark about his creative output, he would just take the discussion into some other direction, insisting that there was no point in it. “I am a storyteller, you see. It is up to the readers and the critics to find a meaning if they want,” one can still hear him say. “It is not rare for me to be told by one critic or the other what they think was passing through my mind — consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously — while I penned a story. I can only have a laugh. In fact, I do,” he would add for good measure. Never interested in discussing his own work and always interested in even the minutiae of literary debates, Husain was a phenomenon unto himself. Critics will write about his craft and its execution for a long time to come — as they should — but Husain was beyond them in his life; in his death he is beyond it all.

The writer is a Dawn staff member.