Mansoor Rahi springs a surprise when someone sees him after three decades. He is just as zestful as he was in the 1980s. He may have lost his hair but certainly not his vigour, thanks to sessions of yoga and light exercise. What is more, he paints with the same passion as he did when he surfaced on the art scene of what was then West Pakistan in the late 1960s.

Born in Malda (West Bengal) in 1939, Abul Mansoor Ahmed moved with his family to Rajshahi after partition, where his father was posted as a district judge. He had his schooling in Rajshahi but after matriculation, the teenager shifted to Dhaka where he got admitted to the Government College of Arts and Crafts. He had the privilege of having two eminent art teachers, Mohammed Kibria, a noted artist, and Abdul Razaq. But it was the principal of the institution, the world renowned artist Zainul Abedin, who proved to be a lifelong source of inspiration to Rahi in all these decades.

Abedin had achieved recognition with his sketches depicting the miseries cast by the famine in Bengal way back in 1944. In 1971 the destruction caused by the Indian Air Force’s bombing of the civilian population in West Pakistan moved Rahi in no small measure and found expression in the same kind of sketches. These were shown on PTV and won him critical acclaim.

In the mid-’60s when he decided to settle down in Karachi, he ran into the Zuberi sisters — Rabia, the sculptress, and Hajra, the water colourist. They had graduated in fine arts from Lucknow and joined their parents in Karachi. They were trying to establish the Karachi School of Art in Nazimabad and needed not just a good teacher but also someone who could take over as the principal. Rahi was an answer to their prayers.

The rising violence has tormented the artist so much that it finds expressions in all his paintings

However, Cupid had something else in his arsenal. Mansoor fell in love with Hajra, who reciprocated but her parents laid down three conditions for their marriage. He should take up a regular job, which he did when he joined an ad agency. Secondly, he was to build a house, which he did and thirdly, what was quite unfair, was to shift his dependent parents from Dhaka to Karachi.

How did Abul Mansoor Ahmed become Mansoor Rahi? “Travelling has always been a great passion for him. I began to call him Rahi and the name stuck. That also differentiated him from another Karachi-based artist Mansur Aye,” says Hajra.

Mansoor Rahi, Photos: Sanniya Gul

It was his love for mountains and the desire to be close to them that he decided to move from Karachi. First, he took up a teaching assignment at the fine art department of the University of Peshawar, which was coincidentally set up by Zainul Abedin but 18 months later moved to Islamabad.

“Every weekend when we are in Islamabad, he drives me to the hills. Sometimes I feel his passion for mountain transcends his love for me,” says Hajra, as Rahi smiles, making no effort to contradict his wife. Their children have migrated to the US, a country they visit regularly.

They start painting in their corners of the three-level house right after breakfast. Lunch break and a brief afternoon nap follows. A cup of tea and they are back to their easels. In between, art enthusiasts and Rahi’s students drop in.

While Rahi’s daily schedule may not have changed, his subject has. The growing terrorism has tormented him to such an extent that it finds expressions in all his paintings. His series called ‘The Raging Bull’, done in oil on canvas, last year, has yielded place to a yet more sinister series — ‘The Black Terror’. Both the series have been appreciated by critics and art lovers alike.

Rahi’s fascination for cubism hasn’t changed in all these years. However, to use his own words, “There is a more pronounced interplay of light and shade in my recent works.”

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 13th, 2014