A diplomat’s wife who never forgot her birthplace, Hyderabad Deccan, but immensely loved Peshawar

PESHAWAR: Maryam Babar was born in Hyderabad Deccan, lived for many years in different world capitals as a diplomat’s wife before settling down in the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province to spend the last 24 years of her life.
She passed away recently and was buried in the couple’s beloved city, Peshawar.
Maryam Babar did humanitarian, welfare and charity work along with her farming business. Her family members said she loved her last years in Peshawar, keeping herself busy in activities aimed at helping the needy and learning along the way all the time.
According to her daughter Zahra Romana, she really came into her own when the family returned to Peshawar after her husband’s retirement. “She married young and spent a large part of her earlier years raising a family and being the consummate diplomat’s wife, but I always felt she could have done so much more,” she opined.
Her husband, Bashir Babar, too spoke of her love for Peshawar. “She came from Hyderabad in India, took root in Peshawar and then never wanted to leave this city. I failed to persuade her to shift to Islamabad where I could have got a plot of land to build a house,” he recalled.
“My wife wasn’t just a wife. She was my companion. We were married for 58 years and what a happy marriage it was! She wanted two more years of life so that we could celebrate 60 years of our marriage. She even had a plan to celebrate the wedding anniversary in Qatar,” he added.
Bashir Babar vividly remembered how a known Brazilian writer made a mention of Maryam as the most beautiful person in the room at a dinner he had hosted as Pakistan’s ambassador to Brazil in honour of the Maharaja and Maharani of Jaipur. “A lady adjudged as Miss Brazil was also present in the room and she was upset by the comment. Subsequently, she stopped her interaction with Maryam,” he pointed out.
“Without her, it will be difficult to live,” remarked Bashir Babar as he struggled with words to convey his feelings. He said she was brave and gave him strength in times of need. He remembered that she roughed it out despite the hostility in New Delhi during the 1965 war with India when he was serving in Pakistan’s high commission as a junior officer. She gave him company during another tough assignment in India when he was posted 20 years later in 1989 as the high commissioner. He added that his posting in Iran as the ambassador from 1983-87 was also challenging as its capital, Tehran, faced rocket attacks during the war with Iraq, but Maryam was as courageous as ever.
Another difficult posting was in Beirut, Lebanon as the family lived there during the Israeli occupation and Intifada for three years and escaped assassination attempts. Lebanon was one of the four countries where Bashir Babar served as ambassador, the other three being India, Iran and Australia.
She was born on December 6, 1941 at Hyderabad Deccan and named Maryam Haqqani. Her father, Mohammed Intisaruddin Haqqani, was a landlord belonging to a well-known family with its own coins and currency, system of slavery, judiciary and postal system that were independent of the political apparatus of the government of the Hyderabad princely state. He was a cousin of Laiq Ali, the prime minister of Hyderabad Deccan at the time, and brother-in-law of physicist Raziuddin Siddiqui.
It was a Scottish-Indian family as Maryam’s mother hailed from Scotland and father from India. Her mother, Eva Matthew Watt, was a niece of Sir Robert Watson Watt, well-known for his invention of the radar during World War II.
Maryam revealed different aspects of her eventful life during a conversation with Stanford University’s Fakhra Hassan on November 18, 2015 at Peshawar. She had fond memories of her early life at the Goshamahal in Hyderabad along with an elder sister and younger brother. She remembered enjoying hearty breakfast as her favourite meal of the day, making footballs out of the lumps of sugar at the plantations near her father’s textile factories, taking evening walks and sleeping on beds covered with fragrant jasmine flowers.
She recalled that her parents met during their German language classes at the Glasgow University and decided to marry against the wishes of her mother’s family, having Church of Scotland religious background. It took the family a while to accept the marriage of their only child to a practicing Indian Sufi Muslim.
At the time of Partition, Maryam’s family survived rioters who gathered outside their house in Hyderabad and heard her parents talking about a pistol her mother was carrying with the intent to kill her children in case the mob breached the mansion as she didn’t want them to die at the hands of rioters.
Life was never the same again as Maryam and her siblings were taken to Scotland in 1947 even though they returned to Hyderabad briefly in 1949 when tension was running high as the Indian government was planning to intervene to take control of the state. In early 1950, the family managed to leave India for UK to spend the next two years there before locating to Karachi. They were now Pakistani citizens. Interestingly, the Indian government helped the family to leave for London following a request by Robert Watson Watt, the radar inventor and uncle of Maryam’s mother, to Krishna Menon, India’s high commissioner in UK, who conveyed it to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The action to get them out of Hyderabad on way to Bombay before being flown to London was personally supervised by the Indian Army chief General Chaudhry.
Maryam studied at the Saint Joseph School and College at Karachi while her father as the chairman of the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation put the country on the path of industrialization by establishing textile mills in East Pakistan, sugar mills in West Pakistan and the Karachi shipyard.
Though Maryam could never forget Hyderabad and remained nostalgic about the early years of her life spent there, Peshawar compensated her loss when she settled in the city in 1996. The family built a farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, growing flowers, especially roses, and fruit trees including bananas and mangoes. She started a farming business, learnt to speak Pashto and became involved in social work.
Maryam joined a number of organizations dedicated to different causes. She became a member of the Head Injury Society founded by Dr Tariq Hashim, a neurosurgeon, to create awareness about the issue and improve treatment facilities for patients.
She supported the SOS Children’s Village in Peshawar where orphans are lodged and educated.
In 1999, she joined the Dost Welfare Foundation (DOST) as member of its Board of Directors and remained involved in its work for drug addicts until her death. She generously donated to DOST both in cash and kind. In particular, she supported the services meant for children, including the Day Care Centre, Night Shelter and Guloona Kor residential drug addiction and treatment facility.
Since 2002, Maryam was on the Board of Directors of the Sarhad Rural Support Programme (SRSP). She regularly attended meetings and visited SRSP projects. Tall and graceful, she made her presence felt at all such gatherings.
Life isn’t without tragedies. She lost her beloved son, Rahman, who was her youngest child, in 1999. Her three highly educated daughters, though, made her proud. The eldest, Shandana, is settled in the US with her family. The second daughter, Zarmina, has worked in international humanitarian assistance and educational development. She is living in Australia with her children. The youngest, Zahra Romana, works for an American University in Qatar.
Maryam’s children were immensely proud of her. As Zahra Romana pointed out, her mother was an indomitable, independent woman with strong convictions and views. She described her as energetic and capable, warm and charming with a strong personality. “My mother used to say that worrying about what others think or say is utterly pointless,” she remarked.