INDIAN filmmaker and poet Gulzar believes that Abida Parveen presents Sufi poetry with such exemplary devotion that the singer has herself become a Sufi. In Roohi Bano’s case — who died on Friday at 68 — the artist became art. What kind of art? The kind that reflects life in all its tragic forms — her marital life had never been stable; she lost her 24-year-old son, her only child, when she needed him the most; she fell prey to a psychological ailment that didn’t allow her to think straight for longish periods of time; and the debilitating struggle with diabetes. Ironically, she had a master’s degree in psychology. Fodder for a tear-jerking Greek tragedy.

Despite all of that, she was Roohi Bano, the actress to whose insuperable art no epithet could do justice. She was in a league of her own.

The very mention of the name Roohi Bano brings back memories of all those remarkable characters that she played with which her admirers could identify at a humane level. She did not act; she breathed life into every single part that she essayed on television and the silver screen primarily because she was a student of life. Like all top-notch actors, she used her voice to great effect. There was a hint of sadness in her voice, the sadness that exposes the bitterness of the grey areas in life to those who see the very core of their existence as black or white.

Bano was born in Karachi in 1951, but she was brought up in Lahore where she did her schooling and later MA in Psychology. It was only fair enough that Kiran Kahani, the TV serial written by Haseena Moin in 1973 that brought Bano into the limelight, was a Karachi TV presentation. It had ample evidence, despite Moin’s penchant for creating mirthful situations and happy-go-lucky characters, for critics and viewers alike to know that what they witnessed was acting that was as close to life as it could get.

Soon, everyone realised that the ability to feel the sad side of human life lay at the core of Bano’s art… and craft. In the series Aik Muhabbat Sau Afsane, directed by M. Nisar Husain, she came into her own in dramas that required her to dig deep into characters, occasionally with philosophical musings. This is where her educational background and the purity of her soul came in handy.

But there were the dramas where you could say that fiction reflected fact, though you couldn’t have felt it when those productions went on air. One of them was Darwazah that had a poignant script by Munnu Bhai. Bano played the role of girl who is faced with a lethal disease. It needed empathy and sympathy in equal measure, and if there was any actor who could play that part, it was Bano. Her trembling voice, her infirm gait and her big eyes that pierced the souls of other men and women that she had conversations with were extraordinarily engaging. It was the art of acting at its best.

Bano’s foray into film wasn’t particularly memorable, for obvious reasons. At the time she entered the industry, it was on a downward spiral. Also, films required you to be a tad more in-your-face than be subtle and explore your character quietly. Still, her performances in Goonj Uthi Shehnai and Kainat were praised. But her first love was television.

The television of the 1980s in Pakistan was inclined towards scripts that made the viewer think, and not just enjoy. So it enabled actors such as Bano to act with abandon because they could afford to push the envelope. The series Kaanch Ka Pul is an example in which she played the role of a doctor whose personal and private lives overlap in an unfavourable manner.

The common thread in all the characters that Bano did was her ability to bring out their inherent sadness. Once she stopped appearing on television, the focus of her admirers shifted to her real life. Needless to say, it wasn’t very different to what she’d been doing in front of the camera. She seldom had a prolonged moment of happiness.

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2019