THATTA, May 23: Poet and political activist Habibullah ‘Sangi” Sujawali, the son of progressive nationalist poet of Laar (lower Sindh) Sarwech Sujawali, died at his home in Sarwech Nagar near Sujawal on Tuesday night after protracted illness. He was 49.

Habibullah leaves behind wife, six sons and three daughters.

He was laid to rest at Jalal Shah Bukhari graveyard in Sujawal town on Wednesday. Moving scenes were witnessed as relatives and friends found it hard to console the septuagenarian father for whom Habibulah’s death has revived bitter memories of the accidental death of another son a few years ago.

The burial was attended by a large number of people, including PPP leader Ghulam Qadir Palijo and Thatta District Nazim Shafqat Shah Shirazi, who announced that the district government would publish an anthology of the deceased.

Besides weaving his dreams in verses, Habibullah had also made attempts to make them come true. As a PPP activist, he had enthusiastically participated in political movements of his times and had been jailed during the historic Movement for Restoration of Democracy in 1980s.

Ironically, the disillusionment caused by changes in People’s Party Parliamentarians policy and its leadership’s lukewarm attitude to old and ideological workers made the Sarwech family join the Shirazi camp.

Habibullah, who earned a livelihood through jobs in sugar mills, had a decade ago fallen prey to kidney disease which culminated in extraction of a malfunctioning kidney. Recently his other kidney also stopped working. Besides, he had also contracted ulcer.

After several journeys to Karachi where he remained hospitalized for a long time, he was finally declared untreatable and brought home, to die a painful death.