How does one write the obituary for a colleague who became a lifelong friend? Is that how one is supposed to process the loss of a friend? How grossly unfair is that?

It was the evening of January 17. Friends were calling, to inform, to talk to one another into believing what they had just heard. The social media was silent. It has never been this silent for this long about a death, that too of a journalist. No one was ready to believe the news, let alone post about it. It just didn’t seem right. The first post I saw came after she was laid to rest the next afternoon.

Outside, a cold, foggy, grey Lahore was mourning with us.

Memories come in waves, some distant, some more recent. I don’t know where to start about an association that was more than two decades old. It was late 2001 when I returned from abroad to work again for this paper. I could spot a couple of new staffers amongst many familiar faces that made the place feel like home.

Of these, one petite, soft-spoken girl introduced herself to me as Fareeha Rafique, adding that she had been my sister’s student at the Textile Department of the National College of Arts. Now this was a new thing for a profession that was known to have attracted people from all backgrounds, including literature and physics graduates, engineers, even those with very little formal education. (Mass communication was a distant term and Media Studies was yet to be born). We had examples of artist/ journalists like Beena Sarwar, but here was someone who had formally studied design at one of the country’s best art institutions. A star student she was, I was told. She later informed us that she had delved into school teaching before landing at The News on Sunday.

Apparently, Fareeha liked journalism as much as journalism liked her. That is where she was to make her mark as a gifted worker over the years that followed.

She was the coordinating editor in Lahore for Instep, the avant-garde fashion/ showbiz section of TNS, which was put together in Karachi. She had perhaps the cleanest, most meticulously kept desk in our office; a separate, better-looking tea mug while the rest of us weren’t bothered; always some snack that she pulled out of her drawer to go with her tea, which she drank rather leisurely. She always wore nice clothes and carried a matching handbag every day. We were mystified as to how she managed to shift the contents of her bag every day. She replied with her characteristic smile.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when our friendship began. Maybe it was the day she took my four-year old son from our office to her welcoming family which included two younger sisters and fed him his favourite home-made sandwiches. My son has not forgotten the taste of those sandwiches, nor the overwhelming love he got in that household. The sisters clung to the belief that Ramis was the family’s “first child.”

Fareeha personified a gentle slowness that only the print medium could appreciate and endure. She was not a prolific writer but whenever she picked an assignment, it meant a whole world to her. She put her heart and soul in every piece she wrote.

Fareeha personified a gentle slowness that only the print medium could appreciate and endure. She was not a prolific writer but whenever she picked an assignment, it meant the whole world to her. She put her heart and soul in every piece she wrote. The range of subjects she could handle was wide. At one point, we joked that schools in Nigeria taught students really well, because at least three of our colleagues at TNS, Adnan Mahmood, Amber Rahim Shamsi and Fareeha Rafique, all schooled in Nigeria, had a special flair for writing.

In the early 2000s, I got a chance to teach one semester on Magazine Journalism to journalism students at Kinnaird College, Lahore. I requested Fareeha to deliver a guest lecture on how to write a restaurant review. Fareeha entered the classroom with poise, made a few points including one on whether it’s ethical to give a restaurant a bad review, and started asking the students about everything they looked for when in a restaurant. She wrote it all on the white board with coloured markers. Fifteen minutes later, the board was full of words like ‘ambience,’ ‘taste,’ ‘hygiene,’ ‘service,’ ‘sound of music’ and so on. She smiled and told the students that this was all a restaurant review needed to have. As simple as that. I stood there in shock and awe of her.

Very soon, Fareeha was not just Instep but also Encore and Shehr. We were all trying out our creative sides, especially in the Special Reports. New Year reports were really special (year-ender in our lingo). For the first issue of 2005, we decided to bring out a paper from exactly one hundred years ago, a 1905 newspaper to be exact. Fareeha got excited, sat with the designers and dug deep to find a typescript that looked a century-old and authentic. We were all so proud of the font that she finalised.

She became my go-to person for everything, including tailors, cloth markets, restaurants and travel destinations. She had a travel bug which I did not share but, on the few occasions that I wanted to travel, she was always there to guide me. She introduced me to Mukshpuri Hotel in Dunga Gali where she and her family were regulars. This practice of seeking her advice continued till a few months ago when we were in Islamabad, and I wrote her a frantic message, asking to suggest some eateries other than Loafology and Kohsar Market. Fareeha, the saviour, started sending a long list, now saved in my phone, of eating places in what we thought was a food-barren city.

In 2007, when she left TNS to join the Herald in Karachi, our friendship saw a slight tension because I was being selfish about her leaving me. But she liked the idea of an independent life in a city that she grew to appreciate and love. Our friendship resumed, and we kept meeting in Karachi and Lahore, where her home was.

She had a long list of friends who can all honestly claim to have a special bond with her. She made it a point to stay in touch. She did not message or post a status on your birthday, she called. In 2019, in her mid-forties, she decided to get married to what looked like the best man possible. Her mehndi was on the day I was to celebrate my 50th birthday. To my utter surprise, there was a special cake ready to be cut in the mehndi hangama, the DJ duly advised to play the Happy Birthday song. That was Fareeha.

Now, it seems I have lost my friend. Or have I? It is amazing that just like me, so many of her friends have likened her to a flower. Flowers don’t grow old, do they? They just die, and when they do they turn into seeds that make more flowers. Adieu, Fareeha!

The writer is a former TNS editor. She is currently the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan director