“I am not going to die,” he would say with that impish smile on his face. “I will live to be a hundred and will see all my enemies to their graves.” He had become frail and weak but the indomitable will to live remained strong. His intense dislike of all the people he loved to hate was a strong impulse but the real motivating force for Tassaduq Sohail was love. Colours, women and birds in that order.

Stories were his first vocation. When he was a student at the Islamia College in Karachi, one of his teachers was the celebrated critic Muhammad Hassan Askari, who dubbed him a “raconteur.” Before he became an artist, he was a short story writer and much later published a collection. He started painting seriously when he travelled to London and discovered that painting on the streets was a great way to get introduced to girls. “This is a trick I learnt from Ghalib,” he would say and used the famous couplet for the name of his rollicking autobiography which remained incomplete. Even the parts which were finished were unpublishable, because he wrote just as he talked.

He was a storyteller even while painting. Divided into large panels with a frenzy of activity in every corner, his canvases seemed to have an abundance of stories, expressed through strong figures and colours. Largely self-taught, he painted as he lived: with a wild abandon. The world seemed newly created in some paintings while human beings shared communal feelings with animals. It was only the world which failed to live up to his ideals.

Tassaduq Sohail’s life was a tale of revolt, desire and unrestrained originality. Largely self-taught, the artist painted as he lived — with a wild abandon

During the ’80s, he would come down from London and exhibit at Ali Imam’s gallery. It was there that I got to know him. There was something childlike and endearing about him but I found out about the other side when he would let loose the choicest barbs against those he considered his rivals or who had somehow slighted him. Our most delightful sojourns were at the small apartment he shared with parrots, cats and work in progress at the easel.

The bane of his life was gallery owners who were all out to fleece him but the best part were the girls who kept getting younger and multiplying. “You have emerged from the pages of Lolita,” I would say to him as he recounted his escapades with “mermaids and cleft-footed witches”, as he called them. “This is a city of mermaids,” he would say with a chuckle and ultimately got his revenge when he depicted me in painting as not one but manyfold old men. “This is how I see you,” he commented when designed the cover of my short stories. His bushy, unkempt, wild old men haunt and pursue my troubled dreams. Where do they go with their unheard stories?

He spent most of his waking time painting. He followed a strict schedule of getting up to paint at what he gleefully called “the witching hour.” Past mid-night he would prepare meals for feeding stray dogs and kites. “I used to feed the wild foxes in London,” he would say and pretend to put a curse on anyone who dared criticise.

Witches, demons and gargoyles fascinated him no less than well-proportioned bodies. He asked me to read the description of the Haft-Bala in the Tilism-i-Hosh Ruba so he could visualise them and then he painted Death. “This one is to your taste,” he would phone me and say to me after doing something in the grotesque mode. He was commissioned to paint postures, which could well have served The Satyricon or adorned the caves at Ajanta. He would produce naughty ditties, fill entire sketch-books and paint at a furious pace. His creativity knew no fatigue till the very end. He left behind a vast body of work and it will take long before it is listed and properly catalogued. Only then the extent of his true genius will be known.

Tassaduq Sohail passed away on October 1, 2017 in Karachi. He was 87 years old.

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 8th, 2017