“I can actually act!” is what Zara Abid told me in one of our last conversations, when she saw the first-cut of the short film that we had worked on together last year, Sikka. 

It almost feels surreal that I was able to have Zara, a leading fashion model wanting to shift gears and act, in my debut short. After countless phone calls of narrations, character developments and coordinations, I met her for the first time at her hotel room right before the make-up artist and the rest of the crew arrived.

We had very little time to get to know one another, but I would remember her just as I first saw her. She opened the door to her hotel room in an extravagant robe, smiling ear to ear — a beautiful infectious smile that she would wear whenever we would see one another — and rubbing ice cubes on her face to make her skin breathe.

Zara took care of herself and the people around her; she was generous to say the least. On the second and final day of shoot, she and I went to have breakfast at Burning Brownie in Islamabad before we made our trip across the expressway to Rawalpindi, to shoot in a bazaar which dates back to pre-Partition, Lalkurti.

She seemed distraught from the moment I picked her up, so over our cups of black coffee and grilled chicken sandwiches, we both poured our hearts out. Zara had had a difficult night, struggling with personal relationships; she talked about being numb ever since her father passed away in February last year. She didn’t believe much in human equations anymore, and pondered over the concept of permanence.

Leading fashion model Zara Abid was one of those who perished in the terrible crash of flight PK 8303 on May 22. The writer and director of the short film Sikka, in which she made her acting debut, recalls the experience of working with her and how she transformed him with her positive energy

That is perhaps the first conversation that came back to me, of the power of the temporary, when a friend called me to pay his condolences about the PK-8303 plane crash, which took Zara’s life. Death is inevitable, a fact. But can one ever be prepared for it? Perhaps not. I certainly wasn’t prepared to bid farewell to the only woman who believed a 16-year-old freelance journalist could make a short film that mirrored the cruel, unspoken realities of society, drawing parallels between two diametrically opposing worlds. 

Over the span of a month that we worked together, when we got to the screenplay, she could see herself in both the characters that she played in the short — a financially independent, educated woman; and, on the other side of the spectrum, a lower middle-class girl stepping out of her house, aspiring to love and live.

Zara spoke to me of loss and how the feeling of never being fulfilled with worldly accomplishments resonated with her. I had penned the monologue for Sikka the night I had contemplated suicide earlier last summer. I had hit rock-bottom, and there had been no evident point of going beyond the mere state of existing, and so I turned to writing. I escaped my misery by shedding light upon the misery of two fictionalised women I never knew personally, but who were birthed from within me. Having grown up in Rawalpindi, I had seen girls with a sparkle in their eyes whose circumstances never let them go beyond that. Having been raised amongst women seemingly liberal yet hollow, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities in not just two lifestyles, but within the human race at large: how we are all slaves to the rut.

And so, when struggling to survive amalgamated with art, a piece of writing that questioned one’s own hunger was ready to be filmed, albeit with no budget whatsoever. I reached out to Saba Qamar soon after and visited her at her residence in Lahore to record the monologue. She spent hours perfecting the dialect, the emotion, even the pronunciation, and lost herself to it. She told me I’m an old soul to have written what I did; I didn’t disagree. It was Qamar’s poetic delivery to an otherwise no-dialogue short which made her feel the characters in her bones.

On our way to the set on the first day of the shoot, from the hotel to a house where we had to film the climax in which she finds comfort in her son, I played the narration to Zara — the next thing I knew, Zara had become the character.

We spent the entire day filming, from one location to another, from a house to a cafe, to my father’s office to a supermarket — mind you, with no breaks, as Zara refused to eat before she had completed her work. She rehearsed on her own, constructing backstories from her own relationships, her past, her work. Saying that she was accommodating would be an understatement. We had some delays during the supermarket sequence and so we talked; she patiently waited on the sidewalk with me and my team of two — 17-year-old cinematographer and art director, Hamza Husain and Umama Shahab. As we talked, she comforted a crew of three hyperventilating teenagers, and told us stories of some of her favourite modelling campaigns. Zara said she even modelled with a tiger once but didn’t complain because that’s what was required of her.

That’s also when I realised that Zara either gives into what she does, or she doesn’t. After completing the shoot the next day, before I dropped her off at her hotel, I asked her what made her fly all the way from Karachi to Islamabad, get herself a double-breasted suit and a button-down shirt from Zara, and a printed navy blue kurta from Khaadi, stay for three days, all on her own expense, and never once complain about anything. She looked me in the eye, smiled and told me she believed in me. 

I recalled her saying that later when I decided to launch a collaborative digitalised content-producing platform, Qissa Nagri, on YouTube. And I recall it still when I get down to writing, or even when I’m unable to. How can somebody give you faith when you have lost it yourself? It’s unheard of; Zara was too good to be true.

On the second day of the Sikka shoot, once we reached Rawalpindi, we first had lemon soda at a roadside dhaaba, where we also ended up shooting at. She walked the entire bazaar with us, into the narrow, beautifully chaotic streets of Lalkurti, with its historically significant architecture, before we arrived at the house built in 1943 that we had to film in, which we suspected was haunted — but that’s a story for another time. 

Zara suffered from asthma and didn’t smoke, yet the climactic scene for this portion of the short film involved her coming back home and enjoying a cigarette as her character went over her day and meeting her forbidden love (the waiter at the dhaaba). Yet, that to her, wasn’t even a consideration. She delved so deep into her character that, as she lit the matchstick, her hands trembled on camera — nothing had been directed, or even improvised, but something that she felt and which came naturally to her.

What Zara did for me, and what she did for people around her from what I know, was extraordinary. While in Islamabad, she was ordering cakes for her friends in Karachi, and when the shoot ended, she told me she had to make up with a friend and bought a basket of chocolates. She was extraordinary to have always put others before herself. 

And while there are things she had dreamt of that have been left incomplete, her desire to be on the silver screen, for her presence to be felt larger than life, she did live fully to her last breath. Zara Abid, to me, epitomised strength. And to this day, she teaches me how to live, even when she doesn’t herself anymore.

Published in Dawn, ICON, June 14th, 2020