The blue mountain

There were no cell phones in 1976. You had to actively search for the person if the rendezvous was set to be as crowded and expansive as the mausoleum of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah. I had accompanied my father and his film unit. There were four people carrying heavy shooting equipment. They camped in the middle of the gardens on the southern side of the mausoleum.
Then my father and I started looking for the man we were supposed to meet. He was the producer of the film being made on the founder of the nation to celebrate his centenary. This man had conceptualised and commissioned the film in his capacity of being the chairman of the State Film Authority.
We had been searching for quite some time when my father decided to ask one of the staff, serving at the premises and roaming about in the gardens, if he had seen a man of such and such appearance in or around the mausoleum. He told us that there is a man sleeping on the stairs on the eastern side but it seems unlikely that he would be the one you are looking for.
We hurriedly climbed up the stairs and then climbed down from the other side. There we saw a man sleeping in a crumpled, yellow kurta shalwar. He had taken off his sandals and kept them by the side of his head and covered them in a newspaper. A precautionary measure, perhaps, so that no one nicks his ‘expensive’ footwear.
He got up, embraced my father and apologised. He said he was too tired and couldn’t help dozing off. This dervish was Ahmad Bashir, a Marxist scholar of his times, a leading journalist and an experimental filmmaker, who produced and directed Neela Parbat.
The film on Quaid-e-Azam was released in December 1976, at the fag end of Z A Bhutto’s government, to be banned in August 1977, at the beginning of General Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime. They had no other option but to scrap it because there couldn’t have been a worst possible combination put together by a wannabe progressive state of Pakistan to make a film on its founder.
Even that wannabe progressivism was destined to be short-lived. The film was produced by Ahmad Bashir, directed by my father, Khalique Ibrahim Khalique, on a script penned by no other than Safdar Mir. Of course, Jinnah was depicted in the film as he was – a modern, rational and enlightened man.
Years passed by. My father had settled in Karachi and like most of his other friends from Lahore and Mumbai days, Ahmad Bashir was also in Lahore. As they grew older, they met less and less. In the meanwhile, Ahmad Bashir’s remarkable pen portraits, Jo miley thay rastey mein, were published and widely appreciated. His autobiographical novel, Dil bhatkey gaa, appeared a few years later.
It was in early 2001 when I invited him to attend my father’s 75th birthday, meant to be a surprise from his friends and family. Ahmad Bashir, himself about 78 then, was not enjoying good health but came all the way from Lahore to Karachi just to make an old friend happy.
Ahmad Bashir passed away on December 26, 2004. He lived a full-blooded life with honour and integrity, siding with the weak and speaking out for the dispossessed. When someone haughtily declares today that the struggle between the right and the left is over, I remember people like him. Circumstances have changed and so should be the tactics. But the battle is on.

The writer is an Islamabad-based poet and author.
Email: harris.khalique@gmail. com