Lo tum bhi gaye, hum nai tau samjha tha keh tum nai/ Bandha tha koi yarroN sai paiman-i-wafa aur/ Yeh ahd keh taa umr-i-rawaaN saath raho gai/ Rastay mai bichad jayengei jab ahl-e-safa aur

– Faiz, 1983

I met Asif soon after joining medical college in 1980, he was a few years ahead of me, but closer to my age (he may have received double promotions, brilliant that he was). I still remember being introduced to him by our mutual friend and mentor, Anwer Aqil, who was doing his house-job. Aqil was a member of a progressive student group and a number of us gravitated towards some of these seniors in those still early days of the Zia regime. Soon, Asif and I became friends and would spend our off time with each other speaking about books we had read, about films we had watched (or would have liked to), pavement booksellers we had visited or the libraries we frequented in Karachi. Our city was perhaps what fundamentally drew both of us close. Of course, I also had the selfish reason of learning from this person, who was amazingly well read in English and Urdu literature (he may have been all but 20 then), was writing short stories in Urdu, translating literary works from English and was starting to find his voice as a critic in both languages.

Looking back, and I had mentioned this to him several times, I considered myself to be a pukh, the trainee donkey that runs alongside the cart (this is Karachi humour of a certain generation, but it holds true for me). I would try to follow Asif everywhere. Whether to gatherings at the home of the writers, Azra Abbas and Anwar Sen Rai (they may not remember me coming to their Nazimabad house), where a group of young poets and writers were experimenting with form in poetry and short story, or to the home of the poet Tanveer Anjum where study circles of literary and political writings were regularly held. Asif was the qutubi sitara that determined my literary direction.

But it was Karachi and its streets that truly bound us together. In a 2019 article Shahzaday ki maut he wrote about the destruction of Karachi’s Prince cinema, (to construct another shopping mall perhaps). The essay reminded us about the Karachi he and I grew up in, when you could navigate the entire Saddar area and beyond using cinemas as guideposts. Prince (it had a sister auditorium, Princess) was especially important for Asif and I as it used to have 11am shows of old films and both of us, being aspiring movie buffs, would watch Pakistani films from the ’50s and ’60s. One memorable film, which we may have left halfway, was Devdas, with Habib and Shamimara… but such adventures were fun, skipping classes, catching a matinee, perhaps walking around the Regal area with the book vendors and getting a bite to eat in Saddar.

Although Asif was becoming a physician, and a good one at that, his focus was on writing. In 1982, at the age of 23 he published his first collection of short stories, Aatish FishaN Par Khilay Gulab (The Blooming of Roses on a Volcano) which he soon followed with the translation in Urdu of Herman Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha. This amazing debut was the beginning of a literary career like no other. In the next three decades, Asif went on to write six volumes of short stories and several collections of literary criticism. He wrote in Urdu and in English with equal facility, translated numerous stories from world literature and was a regular contributor to newspapers, writing book reviews and long essays. He edited several major anthologies, edited one of the most respected Urdu literary journals, Dunyazad and headed a highly respected publishing house in Karachi called Scheherzade. Later, along with Ameena Saiyid, he co-founded the Karachi Literary Festival and then the Adab Festival. From where he found the energy to accomplish all this (and more) is something none of us friends could fathom.

Although we never discussed it, our friendship may have had some cultural underpinnings, both of us grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in households that had migrated from India. Till our generation, despite the creation of Pakistan, this group remained somewhat socially insular. Even marriages, that institution par excellence for reproducing identity, were exclusively limited to those within the larger kin and lineage, or as my maternal grandmother, the keeper of family honour, would constantly say, hadi main (lit: in the same bone). However, the newness of the country also meant a certain kind of democratisation where age-old customs and taboos could be broken and social station could be contested. The world was indeed changing and the process produced acute anxiety in homes such as ours. These themes are captured in Asif’s early stories, one among them that I have read many times is Cheel Gari, which begins with the crash of a small airplane in rural UP in the 1930s. This unusual and spectacular event becomes a way for Asif to introduce female voices of near and distant kin in order to depict how despite migration, a familiar world was recreated in the new land. In his early work, Asif excavated these stories from, as most authors do, his own cultural background. Through the use of distinct dialects and idioms and through his portrayal of rivalries, sights, smells, tastes, mannerisms and etiquette we are made to inhabit the company of people who insisted on cultural distinctiveness while trying to reconcile with the entire experience of uprooting and resettlement. In these stories, we get an intimate understanding of what it means to be from Delhi, from UP or from the Awadh region.

This said, this was not the only way people like us, born in a new country, were engaging with our history. As we grew older the world was changing around us and with the rise of identity-based chauvinistic politics that engulfed Karachi, some from our generation started to seriously rethink our pasts and reflect on the distance we had travelled from our parents’ generation. Undoubtedly we retained deep and enduring ties with our genealogies, yet Karachi was part of Sindh and our own social commitments needed to be expressed in our writings and actions, at least for Asif this was an important imperative. After witnessing the violence of the early 1990s in Karachi, while Asif worked as a public health physician he travelled extensively in Sindh and Balochistan, learnt Sindhi and started collaborating with writers who primarily wrote in the language. He worked on an anthology of Sheik Ayaz’s poetry and encouraged the Sindhi feminist poet Atiyya Dawood to publish her translations in Urdu and English. Similarly, his engagement with scholars of other national languages of Pakistan opened up a space for dialogue and critical discussion. In a trenchantly incisive epilogue for a book of Urdu translations of Balochi short stories, he describes how Balochistan had continued to burn despite being “na deeda aur na shuneeda” (unseen and unheard, perhaps unrecognised), not that the embers had ever cooled down from earlier conflicts and oppression. Similarly, among many others, he encouraged the Punjabi novelist, Zahid Hussain in his own creative journey. His understanding of the fissures in Pakistan’s national history made it possible for him to co-edit the volume, Fault Lines with a Bangladeshi scholar Niaz Zaman, bringing together short stories from both countries that engaged with the traumatic accounts surrounding the events of 1971 (his own story in the volume is one of the most sensitive renditions from a child’s perspective).

Asif’s passion was the story. For him stories were not merely about passing information, rather they gave meaning to experience and helped in shaping events. 

Let me return to the city we called our own, Karachi. Both of us grew up, as mentioned above, in families that were aspirant of middle-class success through the pursuit of education. We also witnessed the growth of a city that along with its history of working-class politics, had a deep sedimentation of diverse languages, cultures, accents, religious beliefs, sectarian practices, culinary choices and lifestyles. Despite the rise of random violence and religious bigotry in the past few decades, Karachi remains a multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan city… and Asif’s literary voice strongly embraced this reality. Rather than emphasise a hierarchy of cultures his more recent writings depict, in the linguist Mikhail Bakhtin’s words, a heteroglossia, a multiplicity, a bouquet of equally-valued life experiences, cultural histories, languages and literary traditions.

In one of his more famous short stories, Samandar Ki Chori, he laments the theft of the sea, alluding to how the city is being sold to speculators and real-estate developers. Yet the story is also an ode to the diversity of the city, we are introduced to multiple speech patterns, to voices of different classes, reminded of the various pleasures the city offers us as Asif also sensitises us to the history of the poor and the working class. It is a polyphonic text, (again in Bakhtian terms) with its regional dialects, the speech of different age groups and interventions by various subcultures that guide the reader along... a commitment to the carnivalesque arena... while the authorial voice itself is humbly suppressed. There is surely the horrific (perhaps grotesque) depiction of the vanishing sea, yet Asif in his own subtle voice also enables us to remember through our various senses… sight, smell, sound... triggering forgotten moments, events, times, pleasures and sorrows. In constructing this argument, the story enters a much broader canvas, the sight of the receding sea reminds us of what is worth salvaging and struggling for. By using the metaphor of nature, Asif helps us reconsider ecology’s intimate and intertwined relationship to humans. In such stories, Asif gave voice to a generation, to those of us who made this journey with him, from our circumscribed households to the larger world of co-existence and commitment to a shared humanity (the distance perhaps from Cheel Gari to Samandar ki Chori). To be clear, through the use of multiple voices (polyphony), his stories continue to guide us towards creating a future that is embedded in varied cultural and literary traditions.

Asif’s passion was the story. For him stories were not merely about passing information, rather they gave meaning to experience and helped in shaping events. Using a metaphorical style, he once wrote that there was a time when stories had not been divided, they were available to all living creatures, humans, birds, animals, trees, and all were part of these stories. In the same essay, he then shared his desire to recollect stories from all parts of the earth so that we could again learn from their varied experiences, their imaginations and from their humanity. For Asif, the written word and stories were an invitation into a conversation, into an experience that perhaps is individual, yet also universal. In such encounters, especially with those stories that are different from our own, we challenge ourselves to a deeper and more engaged dialogue. This is who Asif was, a person committed to collecting stories. Through his efforts in translation, he sought to deepen and enrich our encounters with those whom we recognise and also those who may be strangers.

We were close friends and shared the mood or spirit of our times, the ziet-geist. A lot of our personal communication  was in innuendos, inferences, allusions and in ambiguous speech. Many a time a lot was said non-verbally, through moods and gestures. There was the comfort of being in each other’s company. Deep and enduring friendships are at times maintained by the unsaid and do not need the crutch of praise. Yet, let me end by sharing what I regret not saying to my dear, dear friend (at the risk of embarrassing him). You are amazing and brilliant. You love books, artwork, movies, flowers, sharing a joke and a hearty laugh. And you love your two daughters the most.

Asif Aslam Farrukhi left us too soon on June 1, 2020.

Bas ek motī sī chhab dikhā kar, bas ek mīthī sī dhun sunā kar

Sitara-i-sham ban kay aayā ba-rañg-i-ḳhwāb-i-sahar gayā voh.

– Nasir Kazmi

The writer teaches anthropology at the  University of Texas, Austin