I have yet to meet someone who earned respect so quickly. Those were the days of General Zia-ul-Haq’s nightmarish rule in Lahore and we were soon to experience an onslaught of religious bigotry on NCA in 1985 that crystallised later in the form of a devastating attack on Professor David’s home in 1990. The joke then was of the pointlessness of being young and in love, if you always imagined Zia and his self-appointed religious zealots watching over you from across the road in Punjab University where Islami Jamiat Tulba ruled with an iron hand, literally. These were the future ideologues of the Taliban in the making and The Mall running between Punjab University’s Old Campus and NCA was called the Berlin Wall, with Kim’s Gun aptly absorbing this metaphor.

The NCA itself was being slowly invaded. The first few members of the Jamiat had managed to get in and a certain kind of conservatism had begun to be hailed as the new torchbearer of the Islamic nation. I clearly remember many students gossiping about Professor David’s nude paintings, and I always had the feeling that he was aware of it. No wonder he chose to remain an extremely private person.

There are two things I will never forget about Professor David. Unlike most teachers who threw their weight around or were obsessive about students following their preferred style in art, he would suggest to pay attention to its primal language. On one such occasion in the second year, he looked at my drawing and shared a great secret (as it was for me then) about the line.

It was a drawing class of life study and I was the only student in that studio, since like a pig headed farmer, I wanted to specialise in sculpture despite the literalist influence of Islami Nizam being (en)forced around us. Among the stubborn, were Jamal Shah, two years senior to me, and later Khalil Chishti, a year junior to me who went on to produce some remarkable work in later years.

We had a model—an old retired man no longer able to earn a livelihood through menial work and so ending up at NCA to train quite a few generations of artists. I was ferociously drawing him despite my complete inability to draw well and so, as a result, there was even more ferociousness in my lines. Professor David was an un-intrusive instructor who would leave you to your own devices unless you asked for advice or unless your helplessness was too obvious to ignore and would catch his sympathetic fancy. He came in, looked at my drawing while amusingly trying to size up my anger at myself. Mortified, I gave in.

“Isn’t it extremely poor, sir?” A voice came through me absolutely despaired in its own sound.

He came close, patted me on the shoulder and asked for the B pencil instead of HB. I carefully picked it up from my disorganised mess of pencils, crayons and brushes, and handed it to him. One trait that only Mrs Hashmi shared with Professor David was never to discourage you from what you were doing. They just tried to make you squint your eyes, or devote a longer gaze at the subject and made you suddenly aware of what was beyond the obvious.

Like an expert calligraphist of medieval times writing delicately in the footnotes before the press was invented, he drew a small line at the extreme bottom of the paper and asked me gently, “What is this?”

A bit unsure I replied, “a line”.

He looked at the model and drew another line. “And this?” He asked again.

“Another line,” I ended up saying what I was guarding against.

Smilingly, he asked the next question, “What’s the difference between these two?”

I was speechless. I wanted to come up with the smartest explanation to please him.

“Don’t!” He told me. “Come up with whatever you see.”

Reluctantly I blurted, ‘Sir, one is a razor-sharp and hard-pressed line and the other is softer, at places wider.”

“Good,” he told me, “a sharp metal object cannot have the same line as a human body even if they both are the same shape. If you don’t feel it, your hand doesn’t know what it is like. Try to see with your hand, it improves your sight.”

I never pursued painting or sculpture after I left NCA but this is one of very few lessons that I will never forget. The second thing I remember was when I went to his office to ask him for advice about continuing with sculpture. I was taken a bit by surprise as Professor David was immersed in a thriller by P. G. Woodhouse or a similar writer whose name escapes my memory. Obsessed by my own naivety and reinforced by the fellow students and teachers that great painters only indulged themselves in serious works of literary masterpieces, I asked him, “Sir, do you like reading thrillers?”

“Yes, why? Is there something wrong with it?” He asked a bit pointedly.

“No Sir,” I quickly intervened to apparently save myself further embarrassment. “I thought all my teachers read Kafka, Proust and Marquez.”

He almost whispered as if revealing a secret, “I read to enjoy myself, not to show off.”

These two incidents left a remarkable impression of Colin David on me. I do not claim to be close to him, as I perfectly know that he was an extremely private person and did not easily befriend people, especially his students. This impression is all the more strengthened after reading Marjorie Hussain’s wonderful portrait of him. It’s like suddenly finding out what was going on in his life while he was teaching us calmly. He never cared for the bloated egos of the best and favoured students, which not many liked in NCA. Like one of his mentors, Shakir Ali, he was a principled man and did not believe in short cuts in art. He was kind but almost business like. As one of the finest art critic Dr Akbar Naqvi points out, “What he painted of the female body with considerable sensual restraint is not the beauty of the flesh…”

His masterly restraint was what defined him both in his art and personality. He was the last man standing before the Pakistani art scene succumbed to the gimmicks and trickery that accidental spotlight brings to bad actors.

The writer is the editor, www.dawn.com