Often times one tends to hold pompous views out of a kind of self-pleasing snobbery of thought in shear disregard of practical wisdom. I used to think newspaper columns have every right to a day’s life but can be trashed with the day they were written for. Their utility is dated and their relevance limited. But I am told this is not a correct view. Newspaper columns contain social history and reflect the views and reviews of the time. They are valuable material for social and political research and their preservation in book form is useful. In developed countries this work is generally done by reference libraries and research organizations of various kinds but where no such work is done we should be thankful to the columnists who do it at their own cost.

Making books of newspaper columns gives the writer that vicarious thrill that authors get from seeing their work in a well-bound volume. You can hold it in both hands and have the unique tactile pleasure that being able to measure the weight of your own thought should give.

Of course Kishwar Naheed who has published such a collection, so poetically named waraq waraq aaeena, stands in no such need of vicarious or virtual pleasures since on her written word depends the livelihood of many a printer and the book publishing business flourishes on the ink of her pen. While still ‘young in deed’ in the words of the Bard, a list of her published work must already be of a column’s of length. She has no need for a vicarious sensation when stacks of the real thing are lined up in her bookshelf.

Kishwar Naheed is no ordinary one-dimensional columnist. A portly figure on the literary scene she is a woman of many parts. Her talents are multiple as all of us know. Poets are generally disorganised people but she has the distinction of keeping the sick body of the PNCA on its feet and while she was at its helm nobody could doubt its health as a vibrant, productive organization. It was doing so many things — theatre, painting, music, poetry, you name it. In fact she made it work so hard it collapsed when she left. What I am trying to say is that her field is not just this or that work. She is a great manager of life, a great manager of time that our nation as a whole has been wasting with remarkable efficiency.

On her recent trip to England where people take their dinner early she told me she spent the remains of her evenings in libraries working on the book she is writing for the later half of this year. That is how she makes use of her time during her frequent travelling in the country and abroad. One day when I phoned her in her office she said she was writing a poem. Another day she was doing her column or translating this or that poem by a Greek or Arab poet. This piecemeal labour keeps accumulating. At the end of the quarter a book is ready for the printer. Does she have any free time? Yes. In her free time she cooks for her friends and foes who don’t mind sharing a bite from the same platter in her apartment. It is no ordinary meal either. It is a feast, with meats and curries, fowl, fish and lentils, brinjals, bitter gourd, pumpkin and a variety of bread you don’t know which curry to eat with. Who else in this city treats so many people so often to such sumptuous culinary delights and with such a big heart, and most importantly without any motive.

Kishwar is no recluse. She is a socialite par excellence. The number of people among the literati, intellectuals, artistes, bureaucrats, politicians and other common folk like me that she personally knows, here and abroad, and with whom she remains in constant touch, should by now have emptied her brains of any grey matter, as most socialites who move around and meet people that much do.

The Yaqui Indians of Mexico who in pre-colonial days used to practice sorcery trained new sorcerers by first emptying their minds through the “I am all ears” method. Two sorcerers would take position close to the apprentice’s left and right ears and in earnest tones would simultaneously narrate a different story into each ear. This exercise emptied the apprentice’s mind of all notions of the normal world and prepared him for entry into the sorcerer’s world. When I was with the finance ministry I found our minister, Mr Sartaj Aziz, always surrounded by visitors listening to their different stories. And when the visitors left the senior secretaries came and opened their files. I could see that his mind was being emptied on a daily basis but there was no alternative magic to refill the vacuum. But such is not the case with Kishwar Naheed. She has a device of her own. She listens to the stories but at the same time keeps her own tale going. This while confounding the sorcerers helps her retain her cerebral contents in the social encyclopaedia of her hard-bound cranium.

Dashing off a column to the press is no problem therefore. She has enough fodder to keep civil society well-fed for a decade. And with her uncanny sense for the scandalous in a social milieu that gets juicier by the evening she is a virtual state bank of value added information. This huge stock of knowledge she handles with care like glass objects in a shipping consignment complete with arrows pointing in the right direction.

Kishwar Naheed has under-named her book. Her columns are not flat mirrors. They have a kaleidoscopic quality. They do not just mirror the scene of the crime but offer to the viewer a multiplicity of images in a single frame. You should not be surprised to see Faiz, Manto, Haseena Moin, Khalid Hassan, Ghinva Bhutto and Sheikh Rashid getting their share of pin pricks in a column on whatever lies under the sun. Only she has this know-how of connecting events with people and places Her all round view of things gives her this unique ability. Reading it is like slurping a steaming bowl of mulligatawny soup. Very nicely produced the costly book has a tantalising title cover.