Born and raised in the canal colony town of Arifwala to a middle-class family and educated at Government College Lahore and later at Harvard Kennedy School, Farasat Iqbal was another regular civil servant. What made Farasat special was certainly not that he was an efficient and honest officer which certainly he was.
He was also a gentleman, with high standards of personal dignity and honor, but so are most of the mandarins or one would expect most of them to be. When in the wee hours of 21st June 2017, at Albert Victor Hospital, we lost him to cancer, we did not lose just another public-spirited civil servant, we lost a cultivated human being, a connoisseur of all good things in life (Urdu poetry, English and Russian literature, music, good movies, savory cuisines, nicer drinks, landscape, flowerbeds, hillocks, mountains and sea breeze) and a great company.
That morning, we lost someone who had almost perfected what could be loosely termed as art of living. Farasat was one of the few people who really understood the art of drawing profound pleasure out of the ordinariness of life. He understood much better than most of us the secret of this mortal existence: enjoy all fine things regardless of how small they come. Although his share of big things did come his way, he never waited for big things to happen.
He just enjoyed the very littleness of life in the plethora of small ways it manifests itself. A good verse could make his day as much as a big-item news of a choice job. A phone call from his wife from thousands of miles away; a good school result of his daughter; a new perspective by a guest lecturer in the classroom; a good news from rural India of a new experiment in service delivery; an old buddy’s visit to our campus; a flashback of a distant whisper of a forgotten love: any of this could stimulate his imagination and make him the happiest soul around.
I had always admired his sense of belonging to his janam-bhoomi and his love of his hometown, Arifwala. I can still recall that beautiful autumn walk with him along River Charles in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We both could notice and appreciate the colours of the foliage that had just started covering the ground outside the Harvard Kennedy School in best of New England autumn foliage tradition. Once I had repeated for a few times appreciation for the autumn colors of Boston area, he could take it no more and said: “Par ooh gal naheen jehri Arifwaley dee barash dee ai” (but not quite as beautiful as Arifwala in the monsoon).
I had never been to Arifwala but I had heard so much about this town through the coldness of Cambridge winter in 2007-08 that I could almost draw a map of the neighborhood that he grew in but had never outgrown. Weren’t the Stars a bit unfair that when I finally visited his favorite town for the first time, it had lost its most ardent admirer. For me, Arifwala had never meant anything except him and so shall it always remain. When on Wednesday night, his favorite soil took him finally and eternally under its motherly wings, I could literally see his smile with that happiness of an innocent child that was so characteristic of him.
I will not complain of my personal loss but I wonder whom would I now tell my silly little tales that he had all the patience to listen to on Sunday mornings without qualms and spicing these small silly tales with beautiful verses from that treasure of Urdu poetry that no other friend of mine could recite so promptly. This beautiful planet deserved a little more of a beautiful soul like him than it actually got; with his poise, he could have put up with us a little longer.
(The writer is a senior PAS officer and author of a book)
Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2017
