It was 14 years ago, when Zia Mohyeddin summoned me to his office. It was our first meeting. And we hit it off in no time. He had read one of my reviews published in Dawn of a play penned by Agha Hashr Kashmiri and produced by the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa), which he had set up in 2005 with the support of then president Gen Pervez Musharraf. Both men left this mortal world in the span of eight days — the latter died on Feb 5 and Zia Sahib, as I fondly called him, passed away on Feb 13.

Known for his meticulousness and perfectionism in whatever he did, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he had underlined some of the phrases that I had come up with in the review — particularly those in which I was a tad critical of the drama. Thankfully, he agreed with me on most of my reservations. When I got up to leave, he invited me to his place for a casual chitchat and dinner. I nodded in the affirmative and Zia Sahib and I had become… for want of a better explanation, friends.

When it came to spoken Urdu, Zia Sahib was a stickler for correct pronunciation. This was something that had endeared him to me. Not many people in this country now care for talaffuz. If you had met up with him for the first time and you’d uttered Waalda instead of Waalida —that is, if the all-important vowel in the middle was missed — in the heart of his heart, the meeting was a non-starter. It also reflected the way he taught his students at Napa — diction was a major concern for him. Resultantly, the first few batches of the academy that completed their course put a similar emphasis on pronunciation.

However, this is common knowledge. What really impressed me about Zia Sahib was his passion for keeping abreast with the current trends in Urdu poetry, especially Urdu nazm — he loved to recite them at functions. He would often phone me up to ask about whether a new nazm or new poet had emerged on the scene, someone that I thought would be worthy of Zia Sahib reading in front of a discerning audience. I would take months to suggest one or two names because, to be honest, most of the Urdu poets in Pakistan and India indulge in ghazal writing. I remember the last nazm writer that I suggested to him, and I believe he corresponded with him as well, was Ali Mohammad Farshi. Zia Sahib liked Farshi’s poems.

Then there was something else that made me see Zia Sahib in an entirely different light. In 2020, when the pandemic paralysed the entire world, he was confined to the four walls of his home in Defence. He used to call me almost on a daily basis to invite me over — with the instruction that I follow all Covid protocols. He said he wanted to talk to me about a couple of important things. I knew one of the subjects was death. He had discussed death (and how it was dealt with by great creative individuals such as Ghalib and Shakespeare) with me on a few occasions at Napa and over the phone.

For example, it was in 2015 or 2016, Zia Sahib sent me an invite to a show taking place at the Arts Council in which he claimed he’d be reading some hitherto unread material, including essays by Ibn-i-Insha and Shanul Haq Haqqi. I couldn’t say ‘no’. Zia Sahib, who was now an octogenarian, showed some signs of fatigue. Almost an hour into the performance, as he was about to round it off, he felt dizzy and nearly collapsed. Luckily, one of his Napa colleagues got hold of him and saved him from hitting the ground.

The next morning I called Zia Sahib up to ask how he was doing. He replied, “I wanted to die with my boots on” and followed it up with Ghalib’s lines:

Gham-i-hasti ka Asad kis se ho juz marg ilaaj

Shama her rang mein jalti hai sahar honay tak

[Asad, only death can heal the grief of life

The candle keeps burning till the break of dawn]

So in Covid days, I decided to pay him a visit at his home. It was an almost three-hour session, something that will forever be etched in my memory. Zia Sahib was so generous with me that it almost baffled me because this was a man whose intellectual hubris was a much talked-about topic in literary circles. He made me listen to some of his new recordings after which he shared certain things with me that can’t be mentioned here. He also spoke at length about death, profusely quoting from Shakespeare and one of his favourite poets, Dylan Thomas. He was extremely fond of the opening three lines of the Welsh poet’s masterpiece:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

The last time I saw Zia Sahib was on Jan 31 this year at the Napa convocation where he delivered the keynote speech. His shoulders had dropped and he was lent a helping hand to get onto the stage. His speech lacked the verve representative of his salad days but not the passion… a nonagenarian raging against the dying of the light.

Published in Dawn, February 15th, 2023