NOT long ago someone I knew was talking about a writer with a ‘terrifying intellect’. The writer in question certainly had an intellect much vaster than my own, but I started wondering why it was that other people seem to genuinely find vast intellects scary whereas I only find them a pleasure to be around. Then I realised, it’s because I grew up around Yaqub Nana.

General Sahib to some, Sahibzada to others, he was always my Yaqub Nana, a man who decided when I was very young that I should be talked to about Ideas with a capital I, even if that meant he was going to ignore all the adults in the room to discuss Shakespeare and the wonders of translation with a thirteen year old.  Hamlet, he informed me, worked better in German than in English. The first line ‘Who’s there?’ spoken by the watch is transformed, in German, into a question that is less about identifying a stranger in the darkness and more about interrogating the self.

When I started writing novels he was pleased, and made it clear he would never read them. ‘I’ve stopped reading novels,’ he said. ‘After you’ve read War and Peace in Russian everything else is a disappointment.’ But he was always interested in the ideas I was working with, in the novels. In the early days of thinking about my novel Kartography I told him about the different motifs I was juggling - the violence of Karachi in the 90’s, maps, landmarks, stories, the 1971 war. At this point I didn’t know why my brain seemed to believe there was a link to be found amidst all these disparate elements. With an intellectual elegance that still leaves me, astounded to recall, he nodded seriously, and proceeded to thread all those thoughts together to reveal the underlying connections that I hadn’t worked out in all the months I’d been puzzling over them. Remembering it now what most strikes me is the generosity with which he produced those connections as if to say he believed I had been aware of them all along, and was graciously allowing him the opportunity to enjoy making the links himself. There was never the slightest whiff of let me clarify your muddled thoughts for you. It’s more remarkable to remember the ease with which he could make sense of my ideas when I consider that politically we were miles apart - but words like ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ never entered our conversations. There were probably enough people who wanted to talk to him about contemporary politics, Pak-US relations, or military v civilian rule - so I was called on to discuss other matters, such as how Mark Twain’s line I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened might relate to goings-on in my grandmother’s drawing-room. He had the ability, unique among everyone I’ve ever met, to always see what was happening around him as illustrative of something in literature or philosophy to which he could allude, never in a boastful way, but rather in the manner of someone who understands that the life of the mind is what sustains a human being through all travails.

I came to understand this aspect of him best when reading the letters he’d written to his brother in Rampur while he was a twenty something Prisoner of War in Italy during World War II. There was rarely a tone of dissatisfaction about his situation - except for a period of deep sadness when he heard news of his father’s death. Instead he spoke to having the time to teach himself French and Russian, the inquisitiveness and self-discipline of his mind able to literally transform a prison into a haven for study. This doesn’t mean he held himself apart from the less abstract pleasures of life. When the war was ending and his release was imminent his thoughts turned to Saville Row and the new clothes he would acquire on his way back to Rampur. 

In my wardrobe, one of my favourite items of clothing is a beautiful coat made for him in Kashmir, which he decided one day would work very well on me. ‘In the old days a woman would never wear this,’ he said. ‘But the times have changed, and it would suit you.’ He was in many ways a man of tradition, but that didn’t mean he lacked the ability to look at something in a new way and decide, some change might be a good idea. And a good idea was never something he could resist.

The writer is a novelist

Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2016