IN the summer of 1990, Nawab Sahab (officially Sayeed Hasan Khan), took a young journalist to a breakfast of halwa puri at a Bengali shop in the famous Brick Lane of London. One extremely absorbing part of the tour was a visit to a mosque which was once a church and before that a synagogue. It signified movement in sync with changing realities, a transition out of the box, away from dogma and typecasting which can imprison so many souls. It also signalled continuity and oneness of purpose.

Across the Seas: An Incorrigible Drift is a testament to the free soul of Sayeed Hasan Khan who has chased one ideal after the other, without losing purpose. He has been associated with many causes and has yet managed to retain his independence with the honourable title of a left-leaning, pro-people crusader. Whenever the need arose, he wrote in newspapers and assisted in the making of documentary films, but never submitting to the humdrum of routine. He has no regrets.

By the summer of 1990, when Khan was living in a hostel not far from the Bengali neighbourhood of Brick Lane, it had been a while since he had been addressed as Sayeed Jinnah. He had left Lahore, where he first appears to have learnt his ‘open-house’ manners, long behind.

Born in Bareilly, he went to the Government College Lahore as a 17-year-old in 1947. It was in Lahore that, according to his journal, he perfected the fine art of making friends and the more difficult one of keeping them for life.

Across the Seas is an autobiographic sketch of a globetrotter written from memory, each paragraph populated by ‘friends’ of one description or another. There are politicians ranging from the Pakistani brands, especially the ones which were fashionable in the 1950s, to the progressive names in British and European politics. The Labour members of parliament in Britain are the more prominent ones, and Khan has an obvious liking for Olof Palme, the assassinated Swedish prime minister who brings out the more emotional tone in him.

The book is by and large a matter-of-fact outline of a life, to the jealous onlooker, lived as close to the full as possible. It is not an exhaustive autobiography, for given the scope of the adventures listed that would have required a book many times more voluminous than this. It is a very restrained effort, and many of the momentous events and relationships Khan could have detailed to make the book our standard spicy fare have only been discussed in passing.

Khan is a man with a distinct ability to reach out to the hearts of those he comes across and he is lucky to have found reciprocation in his ‘quest’ for friendship. But apart from Palme’s mention, the only other occasion where his emotions get the better of his generally off-hand approach to narrating his story is when he is affected by the concerns of his family. It is the family which ultimately brought him back to Pakistan to settle in Karachi.

Khan’s association with the youth leaders of the world, which began in the 1960s, set him on a journey that was to take him around the globe. They include, apart from politicians, a number of journalists, writers and intellectuals of international standing. Not only this, he has been fortunate to have in his circle of friends Pakistani bureaucrats ready to honour his references and ensure that he has a house to live in just in case the irrepressible wanderer in him wants a break from the run and needs a place to rest.

These proud relationships are what have sustained Khan — a captive man’s free-flowing ideal who couldn’t be pegged down to a job or to a mundane life. These relationships are cherished and they are the encouragement which keeps sending Khan onto his discovery tours. When the moment comes, the Karachi house built upon the sincere wishes of a bureaucrat friend is sold without much inquiry about the going rates and the resources thus generated are used to finance another trip across the seas.

Khan takes extra care to live up to his ‘nawabi’ reputation in his understated retelling of his encounters, nay gentle mingling, with women. In simple parlance, they were his girlfriends, and there were quite a few of them. It seems he is able — with suppressed pride — to work magical charms on beautiful women without too great an effort. So much so that help in getting a young doctor through customs in Lahore leads to a long-blooming, and presumably passionate, affair that defied international boundaries as well as the writer’s occasional — accidental — straying into a rival’s camp.

These encounters are narrated without much ado as evenings spent well in good company. Thus, a potentially sensational sight of a foreign war journalist sitting topless and having a beer with Khan on a summer day in Lahore is spoken of matter-of-factly. This was too interesting an incident probably to not narrate and Khan reports it objectively, adding that the journalist was in her middle-age.

Across the Seas is most definitely a personal book and focuses on the personal aspects of some of the public events Khan lived through. The image that shines through is that of an anti-imperialist, anti-war campaigner who has steadfastly walked the route parallel to the capitalist path towards liberty, undaunted by the numbers on his side, so long as they could be trusted upon.

Despite his mild tone, there are certain favourites and not-so-favourites that Khan reveals. Just as his resolve against the usurpers of liberties on the international stage is firm, closer to home, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is unable to catch his fancy and this fact is clear at various points in the book. By contrast, the MQM does get some kind of a nod from the writer for its ability to consistently contribute middle-class faces to politics.

These political likes and dislikes may set Khan apart from many of the contemporaries he shared causes and evenings with. He says: “I, like Edith Piaf, regret nothing. I often re-read the great Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib’s couplet which says that after his death people will find only letters from his beautiful friends and some pictures of damsels in his tattered baggage.”

These are the words of a veteran who overcame his initial inhibitions to find a home away from home and eventually his destination in the incorrigible drift. But riding the roller-coaster is a soul that is always at peace with itself. That is a source of not only awe and respect; it generates envy.

The reviewer is Dawn’s resident editor, Lahore

Across the Seas: An Incorrigible Drift

(Autobiography)

By Sayeed Hasan Khan

Ushba Publishing, Pakistan

ISBN 9789698588410

320pp.