Syed Amjad Husain, who died in Lahore on Tuesday, was one of Pakistan’s outstanding journalists, respected equally for his professionalism and pleasant manners. He passed away as quietly as he had been living for almost a decade, ever since his knees stopped carrying him out of his modest Shadman house and journalism was taken over by raucous crooners.

Amjad Sahib belonged to that group of Lahore’s depression generation who laughed their way out of adversity and realised themselves through creative writing. Like other friends of his youth, Hameed Sheikh, Dr Aftab Ahmad and Safdar Mir, to name only a few, he started writing Urdu prose quite early even while doing small jobs in the war-inflated administration and was one of the earliest, and prominent, members of Halqa-i-Arbab-i-Zauq. He won recognition as a promising writer of light essays in the style of Addison and Steele who had developed a large following in India, many of them senior to Amjad Sahib and quite a few younger than him. Endowed with a crop of white hair before he deserved them by his age, his composition ‘Merey Safaid Bal’ became a representative piece of his writing style.

He came into journalism after independence when he was recruited into the team of the trend-setting daily ‘Imroze’ by its executive editor, Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, that great stickler for correct idiom even in journalistic offerings of very limited life. This stint was quite brief. When Hasrat stomped out of ‘Imroze’, Amjad dutifully followed him. However, he returned to journalism after a short period but this time as a reporter at the English daily, ‘The Pakistan Times’, where he became Chief Reporter and rose in profession (eventually to the post of the paper’s editor) by the dint of hard work, establishing himself as a cautious and responsible reporter, preferring authenticity of the text to the brilliance of narration. Paired with a more gregarious Abdullah Malik, his counterpart at ‘Imroze’, he chose to keep a low profile.

When Ayub Khan seized the progressive papers and started clamouring for a purge of the progressive journalists from the company’s publications (after Mazhar Ali Khan, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, Sibte Hasan and Iftikhar Ahmad had left rather than serve the dictator), friend Altaf Gauhar came to Amjad’s rescue by having him posted out at Colombo (while Abdullah Malik was banished to London). It was from Colombo that Amjad Sahib travelled to Goa to cover the Portuguese enclave’s capture by the Indian forces, perhaps the most eventful of his assignments.

Life had taught Amjad Sahib to keep his dignity while adjusting himself to hard times and demanding colleagues. A liberal at heart he could march in step with both leftists and rightists except for the bigots on either side.

A carefully ordered and cleanly defined person, he liked his hair in place and his dress tailored and pressed to suit his taste, and the number of his car had to be 747 so as to yield by the rule of numerology the lucky number: 9. Amjad Husain was incapable of deliberately causing harm to a fellow being and was always ready to share the joys of his friends. But he kept his heartaches to himself and carried himself through difficult days with a grace that can be the gift of culture alone.—I.A. Rehman