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Come December and Madam Nur Jehan would have been gone exactly five years and yet it feels like only yesterday when the world learnt that the silver voice of the once and forever queen who had brought so much joy to millions around the world for over 50 years had been stilled forever.

But Madam lives in her music, and this is not a cliché. She does indeed live. In America and Canada, there was time when you had to look far and wide for even the basic spices that go into Pakistani and Indian cooking. And neither love nor money could buy you music from our part of the world.

It was therefore a matter of great joy and excitement for me to find a long-playing record of Madam Nur Jehan in a Connecticut Avenue record store. The year was 1970 and I was in Washington on a congressional fellowship, having been given leave of absence by The Pakistan Times. Today, her music can be had anywhere in America.

The LP I bought 35 years ago, I still have and when I played it the other day, there was Madam, without a scratch, forever young. A memoir I wrote about her some years ago has just been republished by Penguin (India) in an anthology edited by Bapsi Sidhwa, called Lahore: City of Sin and Splendour. I suppose the “sin” in the title is a gesture to the more salacious-minded.

Inder Malhotra, the distinguished Indian journalist and writer, who is a friend of mine, has mailed me a copy of the book (which Ms Sidhwa should have but didn’t). He said he had bought one for himself and it had brought back to him many memories. At my request, he wrote them down and here they are in his own words and voice.

“Dear Khalid: You knew Nur Jehan extremely well and your knowledge of her is encyclopaedic. I met her only twice. So I can add very little to what you already know. However, from the time I became aware of the Indian cinema, Nur Jehan, even more than Devika Rani and Leela Chitnis, was the heroine and heartthrob of my generation. We called her ‘Baby Nur Jehan’, although she was older than me. My first impersonal encounter with her was, in some respects, the most exciting. Zeenat was what brought it about. At the time when this film was released, I was in college in a place called Sangrur in the eastern part of Punjab. There was no cinema in that lovely garden city, the capital of the princely state of Jind. The occasional arrival of a ‘touring talkie’ there used to cause tremendous excitement.

“So my brother, three friends and I waited about four weeks in the hope that the initial rush for Zeenat would subside before travelling 150 miles to Delhi to see it. We had planned to stay a day and a half, to enjoy the movie one evening, roam around the great city the next day and catch the night train to Lahore that would drop us at Jakhal from where a branch line went to Sangrur and beyond. An agonising problem about Jakhal was how to evade detection by my father who was Station Master there. We were bunking college without his knowledge, leave alone permission. In the event, we had to stay in Delhi for a whole week. For, on arrival, we were tersely told the earliest tickets we could get were for the matinee show six days later. Our hosts on whom we were scrounging were most gracious.

“On the great day when we occupied our seats, we were most annoyed. The management of the cinema — Jagat, close to Jama Masjid — had obviously played a trick on us. The hall was more than half empty though outside the ‘House Full’ sign was on display. Two of us marched up to the manager and demanded, rather aggressively, an explanation. He smiled at us and patiently said, ‘Barkhurdar, just wait and watch.’ We went back to our seats still fretting about the empty hall. We were absorbed in the movie, missing a heartbeat whenever Nur Jehan appeared on the screen, when all of a sudden there was great tumult and a virtual horde rushed in. The strains of the superlative qawwali, Aheyn na bhareen, shikwae na kiye had begun. The song over, the latecomers noisily marched out. Thus we discovered, to our consternation, that people had bought tickets for each of the shows only for Aheyn na bhareen.

“Five years later, in the summer of 1950, I had my first glimpse of her in person. After the horrendous crisis over the plight of the minorities in the two Bengals that looked like leading to an all-out India-Pakistan war, the Nehru-Liaquat Pact was signed. It averted the war and lowered the tension. Nehru decided to send a non-official goodwill delegation to Pakistan. Bhimsen Sachar, finance minister in undivided Punjab and later chief minister of East Punjab, then out of office, led it. I had accompanied the delegation as a rookie reporter.

“At a film studio in Lahore — I forget which one — the delegation came face to face with the legendary lady. She spoke respectfully to Sachar Sahib and other elders in the delegation. I was so overwhelmed by her charm that I couldn’t utter a word. She patted me on the cheek and took her leave. The next time I saw her was in the early 1980s when she spent a few days in Delhi as part of a visit to various parts of India, including Bombay. Abdul Sattar, then in his first term as a very popular ambassador of Pakistan, organised at his home a small gathering in her honour.

“It was a memorable evening. Madam was full of charm and warmth. She spoke to everyone frankly and wittily. Someone asked her how many songs she had sung and now many records she had cut. Her reply, to borrow words from you, was classic Nur Jehan: ‘Ji, mein na apne ganoon ka, na apne gunahoon ka koi hisab rakhti hoon’ (I keep no count of either my songs or my sins). When I asked whether we could have the pleasure of hearing her sing at least one ghazal, she shook her head. ‘Mera sanga tuhade pyar naal aina bhar gaya aye ke idhey wichoon koi gana nahin nikal sakda’ (Given the love you have shown me, my throat is so choked with emotion that it will not let me sing).”

Madam Nur Jehan Zindabad.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Book launches are no longer confined to Pakistan. Like their authors, they now travel overseas, which is a good thing because it enables such Pakistanis as are interested in things other than earning dollars to come together and listen to what the author has to say.

The other day, four books – all by the same author – were launched in New York, the author being the enterprising journalist and television personality Sohail Warriach. Not all four books, I hasten to add, were being unveiled for the first time, since three of them were published in the last few years, but for the Borough of Queens – parts of which could be in the Gujranwala district – it was a first. The sponsor of the event was the crackling Urdu weekly Pakistan Post and its editor Afaq Khyali. All who attended, both sinner and saint, were fed to their heart’s content.

Warriach is an interviewer and those four books were made up of his transcripts. He has carried on from where Munir Ahmed Munir, of the explosive Aathish Fashan Publications, left it some years ago. If journalism is the first draft of history, question-answer interviews are its texts since the interviewee can’t say he was misquoted. Like Munir’s, Warriach’s interviews had been transcribed from tape-recordings.

I have been reading the collection devoted to our Islamic ideologues, which is what brings me to Dr Israr Ahmed, who is actually a doctor and who should be charged for having wasted his parents’ money and his teachers’ time by spending five years studying something he did not make his profession. He was one of Zia-ul-Haq’s star TV performers but appears to have lost “the most favoured status” in the General’s court in the later years of his “Islamic” rule.

Warriach first interviewed him in 1996, then a year later and the last time in 2002. In the first interview, he said nationalism is against Islam because Muslims are separate and apart from others and cannot be part of the same nation as non-Muslims. He argued that since the state has no identity of its own outside the framework of Islam and since all laws in a Muslim state should be based on the Quran and the Sunnah, non-Muslims cannot be a part of the process. He also said that the national anthem and the national flag ran counter to the spirit of Islam. He also declared that no one should stand when the national anthem is played, because you are only supposed to do so when you are at prayer in the presence of God. Asked about Quaid-i-Azam’s August 11 speech, he replied that the Quaid’s observations about all citizens being equal in Pakistan were made out of “expediency.” He also called Pakistan an “administrative unit” that its Muslim citizens should protect, but added that he had a closer relationship to a Muslim who was not a Pakistani than to a non-Muslim who was a Pakistani.

Warriach’s summing up of the principal points made by Dr Israr Ahmed in his three interviews send a chill down your spine. Here is a sample: The Kashmiri resistance is not for the sake of God but freedom, and thus of a lower order to holy war. Pakistan needs a bloody revolution, not evolutionary change. Women should hide their faces even from women strangers, the burqa being the best form of such modest covering. Islam considers music, including qawwali, haram . Painting is haram but a camera photo, if required for a passport, is permissible. Any dramatic performance violates the spirit of Islam; thus acting is forbidden. The wearing of a necktie betrays a slavish mentality. When asked in 1996 what he thought of a woman becoming prime minister, this is what he said: “As far as a lady prime minister is concerned, in my view, it is against the spirit and teachings of Islam. I am not sure if it is also haram . But under an Islamic economic system, of which I have spoken, this entire lady prime ministers business will die its own death.”

He was the biggest drumbeater for the Taliban in Pakistan, along with Gen Hamid Gul. When asked in 2002 about them (he had just visited Kabul) he replied: “The Taliban are very fine human beings, very religious, simple and abstemious. None of them displays any sign of being blood-thirsty, most being former Mujahideen who fought in the jihad against Russia. Mullah Omar was one of them, which is how he lost an eye.” He pronounced Mullah Omar “friendly, hospitable, quiet and a true man of God.” He said that what liberals called extremism was in fact the true way of the Sharia . Asked whether he considered the World Trade Centre attacks terrorism and if Islam sanctions the killing of innocent women and children, he answered with a question: “Who is killing innocent children in Afghanistan now?” Then he added, “In my view, what happened in New York or at the Pentagon is not the work of a Muslim. No Muslim can ever do such a thing and no Muslim group can be that organised. This is all the doing of Jews. One example of this is the Jewish attack on USS Liberty 34 years ago, when Israeli soldiers were dressed in Egyptian army uniforms so that the US could attack Egypt with full force.”

At one point, he said Pakistan is much worse than India when it comes to Islam. He fulminated against family laws (the only protection women have in Pakistan against arbitrary divorce and mistreatment). He praised Indian Muslims who had defended the Islamic law of marriage. He referred with enthusiasm to the agitation by conservative Indian Muslims against the Calcuta High Court judgment in the Shah Bano case.

Asked to make a prediction, Dr Israr Ahmed replied that soon there would be a cataclysmic war as stated in Revelations, the last book of the Bible. All the Palestinians would be wiped out by the Jews, and the Masjid-e-Aqsa would be demolished. The Jews, he added, had warned America that if it stands in their way, they will smash it into smithereens.

I recount all this because Dr Israr Ahmed remains very much in business, doling out his poisonous views that have become even more extreme. However, the one step forward and three steps back approach taken by the Musharraf government leads me to believe that one day we will wake up and find that Dr Israr Ahmed has been named the new Czar of “Enlightened Moderation,” with an office next to that of Shortcut Aziz.

One thing you have to concede about this country. No one is above the law. And there are no exceptions. If you break the law and are found out, you will have to account for your actions, no matter who you are: company president, member of Congress, governor of a state, journalistic celebrity or the president of the United States itself.

What was Nixon’s fault? Approving the use of illegal wiretaps? He had to leave the White House in disgrace. A phone repairman in Lahore asked a friend of mine what Nixon had done to be in such trouble. When he was told what, he shook his head in disbelief, “I bug half a dozen phones everyday. And I am not the president of Pakistan, just a humble lineman of the phone department.” He wanted to know what kind of a crazy country America was where a president could not bug a phone.

I am extremely doubtful if our distinguished law minister, Mr Wasi “Slapper” Zafar, would have gone very far in public life were he in the business in America in which he has been in Pakistan with such success. Assault is a very serious charge in America and even the threat of assault is serious business. Back in the home country, you can slap whom you like, where you like, and when you like. No holds barred and no questions asked.

Our establishment takes pride in the fact that the press is free. Yes, it is free to praise the government, which is taken note of and appropriately reciprocated. It is also free to be critical but not much notice is taken of the criticism. My wise and cynical friend Zafar Rathore has long maintained that the press in Pakistan is not free in the sense in which it is free in a Western democracy, where what it prints or broadcasts actually changes things, modifies policies and reverses actions taken. He is right.

Years ago, I adopted the cause of a Pakistan embassy chauffeur who had been unfairly dismissed by the ambassador because he had failed to come to attention one morning to salute His Excellency as he sauntered into his chancery. I wrote about it so many times that it became a kind of joke, with which I am still occasionally teased. However, I failed to get the man reinstated. All those columns and stories fell by the wayside.

In the end, I decided to write to the foreign minister, Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, whom I knew, having once worked with him in Paris. His reply on elegant, crested official stationery remains a classic, “I would not like to stand between an ambassador and his chauffeur.” File closed. The chauffeur now owns and runs a popular Geneva restaurant serving Pakistani food. Moral: God provides.

But I am letting myself be carried away since I was planning to write about the ongoing investigation into the Valerie Plame case that has already claimed the scalp of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. It has also led to the departure from New York Times of one of its star reporters, Judy Miller. This week it engulfed one of the best-known journalists in the world, Bob Woodward, he of the Watergate scandal fame that resulted in Nixon’s resignation.

The Plame affair involves a CIA employee whose cover was blown by Bush administration officials in order apparently to discredit her husband, a former US ambassador, who had reported that Iraq had made no attempt, as suspected, to obtain yellow cake from an African country to enrich uranium. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate if any US laws had been broken: a two-year long inquiry that ensnared Libby and might claim more victims, including Karl Rove, the president’s closest confidant and adviser.

Bob Woodward made the dramatic disclosure on November 15 that a senior administration official (everyone suspects it to have been Libby) had told him about Valerie Plame being a CIA employee a month before her identity was made public, information that he should have shared, but did not. He said he had already appeared before the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The Woodward disclosure was something of a little bombshell and I think it is likely to lead before long to Woodward and the Washington Post parting ways.

Rory O’Connor writing in the online publication AfterNet sums up the Woodward thing rather neatly. “Woodward’s metamorphosis appeared to have reached its nadir last month when he appeared on the Larry King show to claim that the Plamegate scandal that has rocked the White House started ‘kind of as gossip, as chatter’, and ‘there’s a lot of innocent actions in all this.’ Woodward then went on to denounce special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald as a ‘junkyard dog’ who ‘turns over rocks, and rocks under rocks.’ This much at least is clear: Woodward’s testimony changes key elements in the chronology Fitzgerald announced when indicting Libby; Woodward’s unnamed official is now revealed to be the first government employee to disclose Plame’s CIA employment to a reporter; and Woodward is that reporter… Woodward’s previously undisclosed involvement in the Plamegate affair must also be viewed in light of his repeated public dismissals of its importance… The Larry King show was but the latest — as Woodward told National Public Radio this summer, ‘When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great.’

Woodward declined to elaborate on the statement he released… and would not answer any questions. That’s too bad, because I have at least two: What did Bob Woodward know about the leak of Valerie Plame’s secret identity? And when did he know it?”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

The self-centredness of the American press never ceases to amaze me. So obsessed and preoccupied are Americans in general and American journalists in particular with the domestic issue or scandal of the day that the rest of the world could go hang itself in the meantime for all they would care. It is not even a blip on their screen.

On Wednesday November 9 some of us were asked to be at the White House where, we were told, President George Bush would make an announcement on his country’s South Asia earthquake relief efforts. He would do so, we were given to understand, in the presence of the five private sector chief executive officers of major American corporations — Pfizer, General Electric, Citibank, Xerox and UPS — who at the president’s suggestion and with his encouragement had set up a South Asia Earthquake effort to raise public awareness and resources to help the survivors rebuild their lives and communities.

The handful of Pakistani reporters that we are, we arrived at the Northeast gate of the White House at the hour indicated, were let through after the usual drill — unlike at US airports we were not bodily searched — and led to the daily press briefing room that stands to the left of the main White House door, and from there to the tiny Roosevelt Room where three rows of classroom type chairs had been placed, facing a lectern bearing the president’s insignia.

The chairs were for the “guests” who included Ambassador Jehangir Karamat, Moeen Qureshi, Christina Rocca and some others we did not know. The press was at the back of the bus, as usual. Raghubir Goyal, a White House fixture, who specialises in asking anti-Pakistan questions was there, but he did not get a chance to do his special thing.

The president walked in — you are always given a two minute notice of the president’s arrival — immaculate in a black suit, followed by the five executives whose companies are richer than half the membership of Group-77 put together. There was also Karen Hughes who has been assigned the task of creating a good image of America in Muslim countries. Her maiden trip to the Middle East, I should add, was dubbed Hurricane Hughes by one unimpressed Arab newspaper.

The president looked sombre. He never smiled. His brief statement had already been placed on the lectern by an aide. He read it out — without a fumble it should be conceded — turned and left the room. Just then an American correspondent did what American correspondents, to their discredit, always do. Ignoring the nature of the occasion, the special gesture the president of the United States had made to Pakistan and the survivors of the earthquake, one American correspondent shouted after the president, “Are you going to meet Chalabi?” If ever I have felt like flooring a fellow human being with a Muhammad Ali left hook, that was the moment.

The president, it had been made clear, was not going to take questions. And he did not. But what I smarted under was the fact that the man who had fired that question about the controversial Iraqi politician was oblivious to the Pakistani tragedy, did not give a damn if over 76,000 people had died — half of them children — and three million were homeless. The president had in fact read out several of those ghastly statistics. The question was a slap in the face of common decency as in the face of good journalism.

But then this is standard practice with the American press. When Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Bush made an appearance before the press after having signed a nuclear treaty with grave worldwide implications, the American correspondents completely ignored both the Indian leader and the treaty. Their questions to the president were all related to whatever was itching them on the home front that day. I recall Benazir Bhutto at the White House with President Bill Clinton by her side. The American correspondents behaved as if she did not exist, firing all their questions at Clinton. The same thing has happened when General Pervez Musharraf has come here on a state visit.

Such occasions are so embarrassing that anyone with any sense of decency or even basic good manners can only begin to squirm. I should add that when a foreign leader comes to Pakistan or India, he is not ignored as the American press ignores visiting heads of state and government. I recall that when American correspondents were throwing questions at Bush, Manmohan Singh just stood there feeling utterly irrelevant. It was an insult.

I asked Iftikhar Ali, who has served the longest as a correspondent in the US, what he recalled of the behaviour of the American press when foreign leaders came visiting. He said when General Ziaul Haq came to Washington on an official visit, the same thing happened at a joint appearance he made with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. It was the height of the Afghan war and yet all the questions to Reagan related to some domestic concern. Ziaul Haq might as well not have been there.

Iftikhar Ali also told me a priceless Zulfikar Ali Bhutto story. He said when ZAB paid an official visit to Washington in 1973, he addressed a press conference at the National Press Club. The Watergate scandal had recently surfaced. The first question he was asked was, “What do you think of the Watergate cover-up?” ZAB’s reply was classic, “I can tell you about waterlogging because Pakistan has a very serious waterlogging problem.”

When it became apparent that the questioner had never heard of waterlogging, Mr Bhutto explained to him with precision what waterlogging was. He rounded his short lecture off with another classic, “While I was talking to you, Pakistan has lost another five acres of land to waterlogging.”

But this has to end with a Bushism. Throughout his speech he kept referring to South Asia as Southeast Asia.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

So many books on Islam have appeared since 9/11 that it has been difficult to keep count. Most of them have been potboilers, others made up of either open or thinly-veiled attacks on the religion and its practices. There haven’t been many on Islamic countries, how they are run and what life is like there. It is obvious why that is so. To write a book of that kind, the author will need to have known some of those countries at first hand. This few do. Foreign correspondents who travel and write never have enough time to make a serious study of the people they write about in their newspapers or report on for other media outlets. As it is, the majority of the bureaus of Western newspapers are concentrated in Western countries. It takes a major disaster – an earthquake, a tsunami, an assassination, a coup or a major terrorist attack in which some of the victims are white – to attract journalists to Third World countries, which include Muslim countries, despite the oil that some of them have.

But there are always exceptions, one being a book published this year by Yaroslav Trofimov, who lives in Rome, speaks Arabic and has been the Wall Street Journal’s roving foreign correspondent since 1999. His book Faith at War is the account of a “journey on the frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu.” His account of Saudi Arabia is perceptive. As long as the Kingdom was getting wealthier, he writes, its tradition of religious bigotry and violent zeal remained contained, but as the economic safety valve broke, “a resentment that is natural in any society undergoing hard times melded with radical religion into a lethal combination.” He notes that while the Kingdom is crammed with American cars, American fast food outlets and American retailers, the ideas that made the West what it is, are rejected without appeal. “In the Saudi system not even lip service is paid to the humanistic ideals that have shaped the modern world since, say, the 18th century.”

Trofimov points out that few societies in history have been as tolerant as the Ottoman Empire, “but this heritage had little to do with the kind of Islam that emerged in the Saudi desert in the late 1700s.” Hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims work in Saudi Arabia but when any of them dies, his body has to be flown home for the final rites. The Kingdom permits no religion except Islam to be practised in any form and burial to non-Muslims is denied because it would involve certain religious rites that are un-Islamic. Whether a man is alive or dead, he needs an exit visa to depart the Kingdom. Akhtaruddin, an Indian consular officer told him: “We’re very keen on dead bodies. At least in death they should get the respect they didn’t have when alive.” A Saudi professor told the journalist who had asked him about the ban on women driving: “By keeping a woman away from driving, we’re keeping her away from trouble. It’s best for her this way.” A princess of the royal house who spoke some months ago at a Washington event at which I was present, said that Saudi women drive when they are in the desert.

Perhaps the country that other Muslim states need in some ways to emulate is Tunisia. Mohammed Mahjoub, who oversees the running of Zeitouna, an institute of Islamic learning founded in the 8th century, told Trofimov: “We need to reinvent Islam. It is necessary to be receptive to the spirit of other religions, to foster tolerance. We need to inject scepticism, to teach people that what they think is the truth isn’t necessarily so.” He said the challenge of reconciling Islam with modernity could be met. “If we marginalise the religion, it will breed fanaticism and extremism. But what we can do is to re-understand our religion, to bring it alive.” Mohammed Toumi, a Tunisian professor of Islam who was fired from a teaching post in Qatar for being “insufficiently anti-Semitic” told the journalist: “The Quran has 125 verses that insist on religious freedom and that ask Muslims to respect others.” Gen Musharraf would do well to consult the Tunisians on “enlightened moderation.”

In Yemen, armed with a permit from the Information Ministry to visit Amran, Trofimov was pounced upon by an intelligence man brandishing a Kalashnikov and chewing qat. He snatched the permit and tore it up. Trofimov writes: “With a permit personally issued by the minister, I didn’t worry. What could go wrong? But that’s not how things work in the Middle East, where the secret police often outrank ministers, prime ministers, and various officials with important sounding titles.” True indeed, and that goes for Pakistan too.

The fashionable term in Pakistan these days being enlightened moderation, if there is one Muslim country where this is practised – not on paper but in reality – it is Mali, believe it or not. In 2004, of the 49 nations that Freedom House in Washington designated “not free,” half were Muslim. Only two Muslims states – Mali and Senegal – were seen as giving their citizens the broadest political and social freedoms. Much intrigued by this, Trofimov travelled to Mali to find out for himself what it was like. Mali’s society, he writes, is based on the tradition of “cousinage,” which places a taboo on violence within an interlocking network of tribes and castes. Mali is 99 per cent Muslim and one of the most revered figures in the country is a man by the name of Ousmane Madani Haidara, who told the journalist after some politicians who had come to receive his blessings had left: “Ah, all these politicians, they all come here, asking me for my blessing. I bless them, of course, but in my role I can’t support one against the other. I myself, I don’t know much about politics, but Islam and politics are two very distinct things.”

Haidara told Trofimov that “the shari’a cuts off the hands of thieves. But if you preach the right way, the thief will not steal. Here it is a secular country. If you like to drink, you can drink. It doesn’t matter to me. Women do not have to wear the veil . . . You have to be worthy – do not steal, do not kill, do not commit adultery. It doesn’t matter what you wear.” Of the Saudi-funded Wahabis in the country, he said: “Our relations with them are very bad. Wahabis say that all those who wear gris-gris charms (traditional magical charms) are infidels. And this is clearly false.” Mahmoud Dicko, who presides over Mali’s main Muslim body, told the visiting journalist that “Mali was always a particular place. It is for everyone’s advantage for the country to stay secular. This is our tradition. The religions have always coexisted here. When the ancient emperors of Mali held court, they had a Muslim marabout on one hand, and a fetish doctor on the other.” He added: “If Mali today changes and starts to respect the norms of Islam, this will make me happy. But I am not imposing my vision.” Referring to Nigeria where much bloodshed occurred after shari’a was introduced in some states, he said: “We have no interest in plunging our country into something like this.”

I suggest that Gen Musharraf’s next trip should be to Mali at the head of a delegation of Pakistan’s leading mullahs so that both he and they can see what “enlightened moderation” really looks like.

When a count is taken of great Pakistani novels, Ahmed Bashir’s Dil Bhatkay Ga , published near the end of his restless and turbulent life, will stand on its own, right next to Qurratulain Hyder’s Aag ka Darya , Abdullah Hussain’s Udas Naslain and Shoukat Siddiqui’s Khuda ki Basti . There is always a great deal of an author’s life in his fiction: that goes without saying, but what is remarkable about Ahmed Bashir’s 890-page book is that it is both a novel and an autobiography. I would go so far as to say that it is the story of Pakistan and of the decade preceding independence. No one has produced a more graphic, more chilling account of the savage killings, arson and looting that took place in Lahore in 1947 than this impeccable reporter with a gift for storytelling that few can match.

Ahmed Bashir being the iconoclast that he was, makes little, in fact no attempt to hide the identity of those who appear in this panoramic, picaresque work. Mumtaz Mufti, to whom he was also related, is Mufti, Meeraji is Meeraji, Krishen Chander is Krishen Chander, Abul Asar Hafeez Jullandhari is Abul Asar, Maulana Kausar Niazi is Maulana Niaz Ali Kausar, Qudratullah Shahab is Qudratullah, Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat is Maulana Charagh Hasan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

It is a pity and a shame that Pakistani journalism has never acknowledged that it was Ahmed Bashir who invented feature writing in Urdu and the interactive interview. His imitators came later but no one could quite match the bite and slash that were characteristic of both the man and his style. To read through Dil Bhatkay Ga is like walking through a portrait gallery. Every face painted is vivid. The contours are clear and no one has been airbrushed. If anyone comes close to Saadat Hasan Manto – and excels him at times – in what has come to be known in Urdu writing as khaka naveesi or character sketches, it is Ahmed Bashir and no one else. There are several delightful and unforgettable portraits in this riveting novel, but none more so than that of Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat, the founding editor of Imroze , the finest Urdu newspaper ever to have appeared in Pakistan or elsewhere.

Here is Ahmed Bashir’s first encounter with Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat. Imroze is going to publish its first issue after three days when Bashir – the novel’s Jamal – walks into Maulana’s room. He writes: “Had Maulana had a taste for drinking alone or for listening to music by himself, he would have immediately turned Jamal out of his room because he neither had any experience of journalism, nor could he come up with an example of his writing. That apart, he had walked into the room without an introduction. He had never seen a teleprinter in his life. Maulana raised his head and said, “Yes, sir?” With rustic simplicity, Jamal replied, “Sir, I hear you are going to bring out a newspaper.” “Yes, that we are,” he replied. “I’m here for a job.” “You are late,” Maulana said. “That cigarette is about to burn your fingers,” Jamal said. Maulana flicked off the ash, looked at Jamal with some curiosity and asked, “What kind of a job would you like? We have a clerk’s vacancy.” “I am not fit to be a clerk,” Jamal replied. “What are you fit for? Have you ever written anything?” Maulana asked. “Yes, but I do not write well.” “And what have you read? Or haven’t you read anything?” “Nothing really,” Jamal answered. “The Kok Shastra when I was in class eight but I could make nothing of the 84 methods of sexual congress shown in the illustrations. I have read the entire output of the Progressive writers and some English fiction, but most of my time has been spent playing cricket. What it all boils down to is the fact that I cannot be counted among the well-read, but a bum I certainly am.”

Maulana was intrigued. Taking a long drag at his cigarette, he said: “Journalism’s raw material you do appear to be, but have you any experience of working in a newspaper?” “No.” “That’s good, we don’t need experience.” “Then what sort of person do you need?” Jamal asked.

Maulana was lost in thought for a while before he spoke. “We need young men who have an enlightened temperament and good taste, who are fond of bumming around, who work hard and who want to learn. We need young men who are not for sale, who don’t bow from the waist, and who believe in social change.” Jamal perked up. “Then you are in urgent need of me and if I am in amiable company, I also like to drink. What else do you need, Maulana!” After more questions about what he had or hadn’t read and what sort of cricket he had played, Maulana said: “All posts stand filled. Had you come earlier, perhaps something could have been worked out. I think you have the makings of a journalist.” Jamal rose to leave and when Maulana asked where he was going, Jamal replied “home.” “The evening is falling and that is not the time to go home. Spend an hour with us at Volga Hotel (a Lahore bar of those days) and if you like our company, perhaps you could down a drink or two. You are an interesting person,” Maulana said. In Volga,Maulana drank to his gills. At about 10pm he said: “It is time to find out what is going on in the other part of town. Do you like the raga Malkauns? I like it immensely.” Their next stop was Billo Bai’s kotha in Heera Mandi, whose stairs Maulana climbed with alacrity, followed by garland sellers and beggars. When around midnight, they left Billo Bai’s kotha , Maulana said, “Maulvi, we better get going. Office hours are from 10 in the morning. Your salary will be Rs 210 a month. I do not tolerate latecomers.” That was the beginning of an association that lasted until Charagh Hasan Hasrat’s death. He was in his early fifties.

Ahmed Bashir was one of the first to join the PPP party paper Musawaat but did not last long because of his mistaken belief that the party was serious about socialism. His constant sniping at the compromises and betrayals that were made every day finally cost him his job, which was when Qudratullah (Shahab) called him to Islamabad where he was asked to write a report on a new film policy. It was another matter that there was never going to be a new film policy, only Shahab wanted the perennially out-of-work Ahmed Bashir to earn a bit of money. Shahab gave him sensible advice, which was of course lost on the rebel that his bohemian friend was. Shahab told him: “The bureaucracy’s one aim in life is to maintain the status quo and to block fundamental change.”

Ahmed Bashir lived in Islamabad for some years but hated it. This is how he describes it in his book. “Islamabad is a barren city. When people leave their offices, they shut themselves into their homes. You don’t call on anyone unless you have phoned first. Before you light a cigarette, you look for an ashtray. Coffee is preferred over tea as that’s the American way. The expression on your face must remain harsh and the treatment of people of no consequence such that they feel humiliated. All colleagues are suspect. You say little and keep your conversation vague. Pakistani officers avoid taking decisions. Their proposals are ambivalent and files are passed on to other officers to escape the responsibility of decision-making.” Shahab was right, Mumtaz Mufti tells Jamal/Ahmed Bashir: “There is only one principle to follow when in government: what can be put off until tomorrow, should never be done today.”

Dil Bhatkay Ga is not a book: it is a tour de force and a mirror in which we will see our faces as we have never seen them before.

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