Intizar Husain is no more; only in a physical sense maybe. He will live on through his writings, and what a glorious legacy he has left in them.

In an age where ordinary men and literati equally strive for steady incomes and careers, he earned his living through writing. This isn’t a mean qualification. In doing so, in the words of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, he did not crave for position or money or recognition. He just wrote what he knew and learnt, and kept adding to the vastness of his oeuvre which is unbelievable, to say the least. He began with short story and moved on to novel to drama to critical essays to columns to memoirs to accounts of cities and movements, and an autobiography of sorts.

In every single thing he wrote, he set the bar higher. It would be a folly to attempt to place him above or below this writer or that. Greatness does not need to be measured in this manner -- it’s there for all to see. Some lucky ones like him experience it in their lifetime.

Husain’s detractors and critics picked on him only because he was too big to be ignored. As for him, he kept doing his work, like a lone crusader, without getting provoked and without being provocative.

His real greatness lies in his humility. It is difficult to distinguish the man from the writer. Although he was dragged too often into binaries of some sort, his canvas as a writer was way too large for small distinctions. Everything coalesced in his writing --past, present, pain, nostalgia, migration, trees, flowers, birds, symbolism, tradition, mythology, culture, civilisation and identity.

It’s a pity then that he was judged for what he did not write or what he should have written and not for what he wrote. While he was being castigated for re-living the past, he kept writing accounts of the literary epoch that found life in his city of choice -- Lahore.

In a column that he wrote in May 2015, Intizar Husain remembers this fight between the Progressive writers and all others as not something sectarian or personal but a serious ideological exchange that is worthy of being celebrated -- a shining phase (raushan baab) of our literary history, he calls it.

That’s the man called Intizar Husain.

More people across the world are now trying to read him through translation but the truth is that it is not so easy to separate his writing from his language.

He will be read and reread in the times to come while we wonder whether to mourn or celebrate this giant of a writer that lived amidst us, so quietly and gracefully.

The News on Sunday is indebted to Mehmood-ul-Hassan for all his support in putting together this Special Report.

Read next: A man called Intizar Husain