COULD this space be better used than to pen a requiem to a fellow writer and columnist? Khaled Ahmed passed away last Sunday, in Lahore, just as the suffocating smog lifted, making life for those who have survived him livable.
Inevitably, any memoir of a friend must begin with one’s first encounter. I met Khaled in the winter of 1966. I had returned from London after qualifying as a chartered accountant. Khaled was still studying at Government College, Lahore. We were both invited by Farrukhnigar Aziz to perform in Anton Chekhov’s heavy drama The Seagull.
Nawab Kalabagh (then governor West Pakistan) had banned plays being performed by men with women. Mixed students in Government College could not act together but the GC stage was available to host amateur actors. Farrukhnigar cobbled together a small group which christened itself the Alpha Players (the first of hopefully many).
Shamim Ahmed (later Mrs Zafar Hilaly) played the lead role of Nina. Agha Ghazanfar (later Khaled’s colleague in the Civil Service) played her love sick swain Konstantin. Khaled had a lesser role as the village doctor Dorn. With more ambition than talent, I played the lead role of the amorous novelist Trigorin. I also volunteered to design the Russian costumes and the sets.
Khaled Ahmed chose to live in his own world.
The challenge came in finding a dead seagull in upcountry Lahore. I fabricated a facsimile in cloth. It should have worked, except that when Konstantin tossed the bird at Nina’s feet, it bounced, and bounced, and bounced.
After graduating but before joining our Foreign Service, Khaled worked with Sohail Iftikhar (son of the Congress politician Mian Iftikharuddin). Sohail had established Nigarishat, with the aim of publishing Urdu translations of historical classics. Khaled’s bilingual talents were evident in its first publication — a translation into Urdu of Niccolao Manucci’s Storia Do Mogor, Vol. 1: Or Mogul India; 1653-1708, an account of Mughal history under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.
Khaled often recalled Nigarishat’s teething problems, of Sohail’s oversize desk that got wedged on the staircase, forcing every visitor to clamber up or slide down.
Khaled’s facility with languages enabled him to master Russian. He served in Moscow under ambassador Jamsheed Marker. Khaled recalled Marker and himself being summoned to the Kremlin in the early hours one wintry morning. The Russians wanted to express their displeasure over the Indo-Pak conflict in December 1971. Ambassador Marker and Khaled were made to wait for some time. Then they heard feet stride purposefully along a very long corridor. The sound reached the door of the waiting room. A senior Russian diplomat entered, looked at them, and said: “You will regret this.” He then left as abruptly and slammed the door behind him. His footsteps resounded as he retraced his heavy tread along the cavernous corridor.
In time, Khaled left diplomacy to its own devices. He rejoined an earlier love — philology. He consorted with a harem of words. He chose to live in his own world, one in which suits and ties and personal ambition had no place. He preferred a motorcycle to a motor car. He wore shalwar-kameez long before and after Mr Z.A. Bhutto and Gen Ziaul Haq had made it mandatory.
He helped an upwardly mobile Pathan entrepreneur Rehmat Shah Afridi establish an English newspaper The Frontier Post, here in Lahore. Despite Khaled’s editorial skills, the newspaper lost money by the bagful. Once, Rehmat Shah admitted that when he asked his co-Pathan sponsors in Peshawar whether they should not cut their losses, he was told: “Your job is to run the paper. Our job is to find the money for it.” He added candidly: “We see it as an admission fee. How else can we penetrate the Punjabi upper class?”
During his long career, Khaled jumped from one journalistic ice-floe to another — writing for whichever paper or journal could sustain his intellectual weight. He wrote inimitable articles and editorials, ending his career as consulting editor with the Pakistani edition of Newsweek.
On a personal level, Khaled mentored my wife Shahnaz during her early days as a writer. He became a kind and perceptive reviewer of my books as and when they came out. We exchanged our publications as politicians trade un-pointed barbs, more out of professional respect rather than a venal rivalry.
Khaled’s only son lives abroad. Khaled’s lineal descendants though are his writings. His genealogy is traceable in his kinship with words.
Khaled Ahmed has gone. He has left behind 20 books and a plethora of informed, often provocative, always thoughtful opinions. His enduring legacy though is that special aura, what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard described as “a special kind of beauty … born in language, of language, and for language”.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2024
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