February 23, 2002

I knew her as a mother whose life and literary pursuits were an open book for me to read. Today Zahina Tahir, as she was known to the world, rests among the flowers in a Lahore graveyard, where she was buried after her death on January 28. Even before she departed she had seemed to be longing for life in the hereafter, for this world was an alienating experience and there was something restless and perennially sad in her soul. This restlessness found expression in the hundreds of short stories, essays and verses that she has left behind.

According to Dr Ebadat Brelvi, “Nature endowed her with a heart that oozed with pain and whose many reflections can be seen in her verse and prose.”

Writing the preface to her collection of selected prose and poetry Pat jhar ke saaye (Maktaba-i-Dastan, Lahore, 1988), Habib Jalib commented: “Both her nazm and prose are directed at inequality and injustices that we see around us... some of her poems express deep-felt pain, which inspire resistance against the age-old order.”

Born at Nagpur, India, in 1944, to Asghar Ali Nizami, a British Army contractor and poet in his own right, my mother’s early years were scarred by her father’s slaying by the family’s Sikh driver while driving them to the Saharanpur airbase for flying to Pakistan, soon after Partition. Back in her ancestral Lahore, the trauma left an indelible mark on her immediate family. Their fortunes dwindled and her mother had to be hospitalized for treatment.

Perhaps the most sensitive child among her four siblings, the earliest proof of her poetic inclinations came when she was in class five. One day her uncle and songwriter, Tanvir Naqvi, was busy writing the famous rim-jhim rim-jhim parre phuwar, with Khursheed Anwar and Noorjehan by his side in the family’s Model Town home. Zahina innocuously gave the song its last stanza and finished it off in a jiffy, as if it was a song she had already known. The lines were: Aa bachpan ke bichhrre saathi kyun mujh ko tarrpaye,/ umr guzari ro ro mein ne kaahe der lagaye;/ saamne aaja phir ik baar...

Her better known poems include an anthem she wrote during the ‘65 war, an ode to the natural beauty of Switzerland, and her only poem in Punjabi titled “Taangan”. Her short stories, which appeared regularly in Urdu journals and newspapers, had feminism and exposure of the oppressive mechanisms of society as their basic themes.

A poem titled “Chehre” (faces) runs thus (translated):

The house of mirrors reflects the faces that are all our own/ Some twisted and distorted; some upright, some upside down/ The laughing and the crying, the dark and the blackened/ They may appear strange; but they are all our own.

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