KARACHI: You never realise the veracity of the phrase ‘time is a cruel tyrant’ until time plays a trick or two on you. It’s been exactly a year when we, at Dawn, lost a very unassuming and efficient colleague, Humair Akhtar Baloch.

He worked in the page-making section and was one of those individuals who never disappoint their co-workers, in his case, subeditors. Add to this the rare quality of being contented with whatever means he had. We seldom heard him grouse about his financially challenged state or his position at the workplace.

Humair was barely in his late thirties. He was fit as a fiddle. We still haven’t the foggiest idea what aggravated his leg injury and took his life within a few days.

Humair was from Lyari. People from that part of the city are a convivial lot. They don’t shy away from making friends or striking up a conversation. Talk to them about football or boxing and they will tell you the most absorbing of stories. Humair was a bit reserved. Generally he spoke when he was spoken to. What he liked to talk about, though, was the political turmoil that Lyari has been undergoing for the past many years. He was genuinely concerned about the well-being of Lyari residents.

Lyari is at a fair distance from Dr Ziauddin Ahmed Road where the Dawn offices are situated. I had seen Humair many a time walk all the way to the office from his neighbourhood. He would argue that it’s safer to walk than to travel by a rickshaw. Not that he was afraid of anything. It’s just that he avoided confrontation, another quality that most of us lack.

At work Humair was close to one person, photojournalist Fahim Siddiqi. The day Humair died, on Nov 20, Fahim and this writer were on assignment. We were supposed to cover a music concert at the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa). Fahim was to take pictures of the performers (there were two Italian opera singers if memory serves me right) and I was supposed to report on the event. Fahim had just entered the Napa premises when he received a call informing him of Humair’s death. He walked up to my seat, teary-eyed, and shared the news with me. I was stunned into silence. We didn’t look at each other for a few moments; then Fahim walked back to his position. He took pictures, with his camera as close to his face as it was manageable so that others couldn’t see his distraught, troubled face. I took notes with trembling hands and listened to the songs as attentively as I could. The concert ended in an hour or so. I came back to the office and filed the story. Fahim filed his pictures.

This is the life of journalists, photographers and page-makers.

Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2014