“Well, people from your part of the world spend their weekends in London watching cheap Bollywood thrillers at home and eating spicy biryani. If you fancy similar interests for this coming Saturday evening, we may postpone our meeting to some other day. Else, I have got two tickets for ‘Art’ by Yasmina Reza. See me at Foyles on Charing Cross Road at 5:30pm. We will go for a coffee before heading to the theatre.” The invitation was tempting enough to be immediately accepted. The gentleman put the phone down swiftly. The matter-of-factness in his voice unsettled me a little. Other than the fact that I like both Bollywood films and spicy biryani any day, I thought the elderly man had invited me only out of courtesy as his younger brother happened to be my friend. In my mind, it had to be a one-off meeting: an exchange of pleasantries, watch a serious play together, a drink and a meal.

I was proven wrong. It was the beginning of a comradely association that spanned over two decades and ended only with Mohammed Abdul Qavi’s death some three weeks ago on Aug 27, 2017, in Bethlehem, Palestine.

Qavi was an avid reader and a theatre buff. He indulged in all forms of South Asian classical music and art besides staying fully abreast with the most exhilarating of the Western art and cultural scene. He had a refined artistic sensibility and varied intellectual interests. However, his political views were crystal clear. He was among the few who do not see anything contradictory between appreciating higher forms of art and campaigning on the streets for the wretched of the earth. After he invited me to his place for the first time, he showed me an old church in Greenwich that he had helped restore through a campaign running over years against the municipal decision to raze it. Just a few months before his death, braving terminal illness, he visited the United Kingdom to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour party.

Qavi believed in non-violent resistance and stood for all those who were oppressed. A lifelong anti-war activist, for years he picketed outside the British parliament against the Iraq war. He also picketed against the provocation of violence in Karachi by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s London-based leader. He participated in peaceful street protests and rallies against nuclearisation, rapid climate change, subjugation of women and racism. He was particularly a friend of the Palestinian people and moved permanently to Beit Sahour (a town next to Bethlehem) after being diagnosed with a serious ailment some six years ago, but he had been working in the areas of education for Palestinian youth and Palestinian liberty and political rights for much longer. When Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, who teaches at Bethlehem University and runs the Palestine Museum of Natural History, officially announced Qavi’s death, he said: “…we mourn this loss but also celebrate a life of giving for an extraordinary human being who left his imprint on so many grateful people.”

Educating young people was Qavi’s passion. He supported initiatives in both Pakistan and Palestine and invested his own assets and savings to help create endowments for students. He would tell friends that his own childhood had not been at all comfortable and he couldn’t get admission in a good school in India. He now wanted all children, irrespective of their families’ economic background, to go to first-rate schools. He also wanted all schools to become first-rate to begin with so that the inherent class divide in the education system was eliminated.

Qavi was born in Tonk, Rajasthan, in 1936. After 1947, he spent a considerable amount of time in then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. He was ruthless in his criticism of the prejudice found among the West Pakistani elite against the Bengalis. He was in opposition to the 1971 military operation and the utter disappointment of subsequent events made him leave Pakistan forever. But he never left the needy students in this country, supporting them until his last breath.

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 17th, 2017