ttending a funeral, where you were familiar with the deceased but nobody else can be a strange experience. Yet, at the last rites of Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali, one had a feeling as if everyone present were a fellow, a friend, a family member. Perspiring peasants, politicians, painters and people from other professions in the scorching summer of Lahore swarmed to bid farewell to one of the most genteel human beings I have known. Those offering their prayers for his soul were not keen on getting their pictures posted on social media, nor for appearing in the newspaper, neither in any channel or live streaming. The only camera for them was Sardar sahib’s eyes, now closed.

When open, these eyes had looked at the world to discover, understand, analyse and to transcribe the visible in a precise, distinct and delightful script. I recall seeing two unusual pen-and-ink drawings in 1999, rendered with remarkable observation and extraordinary skill; later several other paintings in oil by Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali. At first, I couldn’t connect these impressive art pieces with the foreign minister, whom I had once seen on the telly addressing international correspondents with an unmatchable clarity of thought, precision of words, persuasive argument and dignified manners. He was also responsible for turning the Foreign Office and our missions abroad into small museums of Pakistani art; a great service to project and preserve the cultural face of the Islamic Republic. In those years of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed’s premiership I had never imagined that one day I would have had the honour of meeting her foreign minister, and listening to his views on art, literature, history and politics.

And on education. As federal minister of education and deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of Pakistan, Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali pushed for mandatory schooling. He firmly believed in the diversity of our culture, especially its sufi (read inclusive) roots and aimed to incorporate this element in basic and general education. On his state visits to Egypt, Turkey and Central Asian countries, he tried to trace our long forgotten cultural/ spiritual links and strived to strengthen them, because he foresaw that this was the only means to cope with the problem of extremism and militancy.

He earnestly sought to deal with this cancerous segment of our society, through sufi thought and poetry. I am reminded of Mohsin Hamid, who observed that people in Lahore and Punjab ritually/ religiously visit mausoleums of poets, like Shah Hussain, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Khwaja Ghulam Farid, Mian Muhammad Bukhsh. Actually, this is not unique to the Punjab, Sindhi poets/ sufis like Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai and Sachal Sarmast, too, attract huge crowds, who sing their verses at these bards’ tombs.

Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali was also a poet. His collection, High Assembly of Sages, was published in 2009. It included a foreword by Benazir Bhutto, probably the last words she penned (December 23, 2007, Islamabad), four days before her assassination in Rawalpindi. She wrote: “He has a delightful quality of writing like a painter, and painting like a poet”.

This perpetual travel between poetry and painting was managed through a simple and ordinary device: pen. A number of his works, shown at the Artists’ Association of Punjab’s annual exhibitions were executed in pen and ink. Delicate and detailed views of nature or a section of one’s intimate space, but in spite of familiar subjects, it was his sensitive lines, and some sort of metaphysical atmosphere managed in mundane environment, that distinguished Ali from a number of other (landscape/ still life/ realist) painters.

He painted, but also ‘painted’ with a pen in the sense that his black and white drawings are rich, dense and complex like any canvas produced in oil or acrylic. Pen for him was the prime medium. It built a bridge between the poet and the painter, between the artist and the politician. His tool to express feelings, visuals, statements – regardless of genre, remained the same. Every time it affirmed his sublimity and sophistication; but despite these ‘elitist’ qualities, he remained accessible and attached to the public.

Frequently when an intellectual handles the word ‘public’, it is to describe an ‘unwanted’, ‘unseen’, ‘undesired’ horde that exists as an unbearable abstraction. It was a different situation with Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali; people were essential for him. Many a times leaving a friend’s house in the middle of night, he paused to shake hands, greet and ask about the well-being of drivers, guards and house-helps. If he communicated with people at a political gathering in his constituency, his other constituency was art, notwithstanding literature. He spoke to all of them from the depth of his heart. The heart betrayed him on the morning of May 20. One suspects that the heart was the only entity that had the power of unsettling that handsome, charming and elegant individual (who as a young man was pulled by Anna Molka Ahmed to pose in the Punjab University’s Fine Art Department – as a punishment for frequenting the premises).

One could imagine Ali in his youth, but wait, you can easily bring him back, sitting on the stage of Alhamra Art Centre, presiding a conference on art, addressing the issues of culture, reciting his poems in a soft spoken tone. He was part of his surroundings, not as a traveller glued to window, but a person who surged for the essence of reality.

Reality as witnessed in his artworks was intense, inquisitive and exquisite, like in his novel, Flight of the Pegasus. In which Alef Ali (one could guess the identity of the protagonist) “will take the readers to an amazing interplanetary adventure”, where you will meet professionals of all sorts and mystics, shamans, seers, sages, along with tribal patriarchs. The book is a biography of our times, told through multiple eras.

I remember requesting Sardar sahib to pen down his memoirs, since he shared several interesting and amazing anecdotes, uncanny ones too. Like a business deal in which Pakistani air force officers and pilots from an unnameable country flew together jets manufactured in the Zionist state from an air base in Romania; or the foreign minister of this nation meeting a counterpart from an unrecognised country in Guatemala. But he didn’t, instead he drew portraits of politicians during party meetings and assembly sessions.

In every sense of the word, Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali was a larger-than-life figure. He belonged to Kasur (the city of bard/ sage Bulleh Shah), but he may as well have hailed from Classical Greece, Renaissance Italy, enlightened Oxford, medieval Baghdad or ancient Alexandria, places where people loved books, stories, poems and paintings - works that lived long after the death of their makers.

It was perhaps a German philosopher who once claimed, “death is the only experience a human being cannot have.” Looking at the peaceful profile of Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali for the last time, one believed in it.

The author is an art critic based in Lahore