September 21, 2003

LOOK beyond the desk. Even before you see the person behind, the cluttered desk catches your eye in the first instance. Newspapers, books, papers, print-outs, manuscripts and proofs which have piled up as work priorities shift and things just re-assemble. Some new periodicals, a volume of noha and marsiya in Persian, the political biography of a charismatic woman leader are all scrambled and stacked over each other. Only when you look past these, can you see Zahida Hina smiling and signalling you to take a chair as she concludes what must have been a long drawn telephone conversation with the utmost politeness and in her ornate style. She puts the receiver down, pulls out qalaqand from somewhere in her paraphernalia and settles down to talk.

Writer and journalist, short story writer and columnist to specify her favourite genres, broadcaster and television playwright Zahida Hina relishes the art of conversation. She can hold forth on current affairs, dictatorships, peace movements, women’s issues and women’s writing, language and the Partition, civic problems and what not. But she is in her true element when she talks of childhood days in the Karachi of a bygone, almost legendary age. The memories of cities and a city of memories. A sudden gust of wind and pages flutter in an otherwise airless apartment in Gulshan-i-Iqbal, the sound of her conversation begins to recede and in the haze of a bright afternoon in monsoon days, time begins to slide upon itself as she begins walking down a memory lane peopled by her past selves. Are times bygone really lost? History plays havoc on individual psyche, words cluster around words, images pile up and you are transported to the world of Zahida Hina’s short stories.

Karachi entered her life story even before she was born in the historic city of Sahsaram. Her father had moved to Karachi in 1946 as he had struck a partnership with a Sindhi Hindu. “Khanna sahib migrated to Delhi in 1947 and my father stayed on here, so it was a true exchange!” she says. “When my father came here, he brought his books, his collection of gramophone records and the girl given to his wife in her jahez, who was to become the family “bua”. As part of the childhood she remembers in vivid detail, she recalls the first visit to India at the age of nine. “I saw the old feudal world breaking up and became conscious of its contradictions but by that time India had soaked upto my very bones.” Her family was affluent and she recalls her first elephant ride, firing a gun on seeing the Eid moon, the tiger skin and the antelope heads hanging on the walls, mangoes soaking in buckets and the colours of holi. It was different in Karachi where her father’s business venture failed to thrive and the family started sinking into a genteel poverty.

She recalls Gidwani Street and the area around the Jubilee cinema which was home to her childhood. “It was a posh area then but is much decayed now,” she says and recalls walking down the road near Regal with her father when the local butcher said, “Mian sahib, Liaquat Ali ko mar diya.” She describes her father as “a man of contradictions who was religious and secular at the same time, who said the tahajjud prayers yet believed in reincarnation and palmistry. “He rolled up his sleeves and took it upon himself to educate me. Even the neighbours told him that he was being very unjust to the child. Yet whatever I learnt, I owe it all to him,” she says. When her father fell ill, she was sent first to a school which she remembers as a “qul aoozi madressah” — and later got admitted to a proper school. She began writing for the school magazine and somewhere around 1958 or 1959 won a prize for the best writer from the school. “The credit for my mashq in writing goes to Hamra Khalique who was my teacher. Each week, the girls were supposed to write an essay on a given theme. Once I turned in a piece 125 pages long.”

She wrote her first short story at the age of 9 years but tore it up as the main character bore the same name as her uncle although she had named him after the hero in “Shama”. Her first proper short story was called “Firdaus-i-gum shuda” and it was published in Ham Qalam in 1963. “Recently I came across it once again and it is a fore-runner of the themes which pre-occupy me today,” she says. She continued with stories but articles and essays took up more time. In 1961 she won a prize in an inter-school essay contest. She says that her father was very much against her writing stories. He wanted her to write essays. She started her journalistic career with articles for the daily Anjaam.

Her own life took a different turn when she started working. She remembers that she was 15 years old at that time and it was just before her matric result was announced. She started working as cashier in a school and worked two shifts. She started working early and had a first hand experience of the problems women face in the outside world. “I had seen my aunts struggle and numerous other women,” and she goes on to speak of the women who put dora in lihafs, made achars and chutneys. “I always took pride in these women,” she says and describes with relish “Sheerini Wali Dadi” of Patna in the 20s or 30s who made sweetmeats at home and moving in a rickshaw fitted with a purdah, she supplied these to mithai-walas all over town in order to pay for her granddaughter’s education.

She left a comfortable, cushy job in the bank and plunged headlong in the world of journalism and became the assistant editor in Akhbar-i-Khwateen”. In April 1967, she moved on to Mashriq and started a daily column “Aik Khatoon Ki Diary” which was well-received. Later she became politically controversial and was asked to pack up and leave.

She started working as a producer for Voice of America. Those were the Vietnam war days and the air itself seemed charged with anti-American feelings. When her employers heard that she had participated in an anti-US demonstration, she was asked to choose. Once again she packed up and left. She had started writing for Insha since 1962 and joined the same team in Aalami Digest in 1969. It was a sort of family and home enterprise, an amalgam of popular taste with a touch of sophistication and proved very popular with the public. She was married to the poet Jaun Elia and their three children are all named with a poetic relish — — Fainaana, Sohaina and Zeriyoun. The two were separated for a number of years before Jaun Elia’s recent death.

Zahida Hina joined BBC’s Urdu Service in 1987. It was a difficult time for her. She kept on hankering after Karachi all the time she was in London. I remember meeting her in the BBCs Bush House office and found her to be restless and nostalgic about Karachi. She worked there for about 14 months and then resigned her job to come back to the Karachi she could not leave behind. She started a regular column for the Jang in June 1988 and her by-line is familiar to millions of readers who enjoy her political and social comments written in an ornate style.

At the beginning of her career, a well-known writer for whom she had great respect advised her to stop writing fiction as she did not know how to go about it. She was very much shaken by this. After her initial few stories, Zahida Hina took this advice to heart. She describes how Obaidullah Aleem was sitting in her home and while looking for something, came across the bundled up, yellowing manuscript of a story called “Zaitoon ki shakh”. He insisted on sending it for publication in Seep. She came back to writing stories in the 1970s and published her first collection Qaidi Sans Laita Hai in 1983. Her second collection Rah Main Ajal Hai appeared in 1993 and it includes a longish tale “Na junoon raha na puri rahi.”

An ardent admirer of her fiction was Faiz Ahmed Faiz who translated one of her stories, probably one of the last things he completed just before his death. A number of her stories have been translated into other languages. The third collection of her fiction is under preparation. Notable among her recent stories is “Raqs-i-Maqabir”, which compresses many years of Afghan history with contemporary conflicts which ruffled many feathers here. A small collection of articles on peace entitled Zameer Ki Aawaz has just been published and a collection called Aurat Zindagi Ka Zindan is announced for publication later this year and it will be the most comprehensive book of its kind in Urdu. In 2001 she won the SAARC literary award in Delhi. She is among the only six writers from Pakistan to be included in Who’s Who in Contemporary Women’s Writing, edited by Jane Eldridge Miller and published from London in 2001.

She has met and worked with a number of distinguished figures. “I cannot say that anybody was a role model, meray mizaj main butparisty nahin hai.” She speaks fondly of Qaiser Ibne Hasan, who was the Chief Librarian at the Liaquat National Library, Sibte Hasan and Kaifi Azmi, on whom she regrets not having written an article while he was still alive. She delves in the past and says that she has few regrets. “No regrets in my writing. I did not compromise on any issue. I never minced words, kabhi dandi nahin mari, and never made any mistakes deliberately,” she says. “I just want to write and do nothing else. I was late in accepting the fact that I am a writer after all.” For a writer, the struggle is the most important part and there is no end, only beginnings.

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)