To the man who inspired me

A bottle green Fiat 124s whizzed across the highway between Karachi and Hyderabad for the second time in the day. The handsome young man in the speedy Fiat had come back to Hyderabad for a very important reason.

He stopped before a shanty little bakery and as he walked inside, the shop assistant behind the counter took one look at him and cowered. “I’m sorry I got angry,” the young man said quietly. The shop assistant looked abashed, flustered and deeply pleased, all at the same time.

The two men embraced, the young man handed the shop assistant a beautiful black leather diary and matching pen, and all was forgotten. He could always say sorry, that was one of the things that I truly admired about him. The young man in the Fiat was my father.

The feeling of emptiness and grief after his moving on from this world is indescribable. I will take this opportunity to celebrate a life that was extraordinarily well-lived, to hail a man who taught me everything I know.

My father was a jovial, happy person, full of wit, humour and gratitude, and dapper to the tee. He was extremely well read and his library at home contained everything from Allama Iqbal to Shakespeare to encyclopedias and volumes of religious literature too, plus the self-help best sellers of those days.

I remember him reading well into the night with his bedside lamp on and telling us about the book the next morning. Papa read his first Freud book when he was just 14; he was a genius with a photographic memory.

To me Papa was much more than a father, he was a friend, a mentor, and even a partner in crime. If I ever needed someone to applaud my amateurish writing, culinary or cricketing skills, he did it and if my math results were atrocious he told me it was fine.

When I was dejected he provided the necessary cuddles and if I ever needed to laugh, a story or two from him could make me chuckle. He could always relate an adventure from his many travels all around the world. How I wish I had written those stories down — what a great book his memoirs would make!

A poet and a gentleman

Being the youngest in the house, hardly anyone ever took me seriously, but my father spoke to me like an adult; he would take my opinion on important decisions. He would sit me down and make me understand complex poetry from Ghalib, Faiz and Iqbal (and so many more) and he’d repeat the lines from his favourite classic movies, and make us watch them too.

Art, music and literature were an important part of our lives, and I remember him calming me down so many times with the Blue Danube — his mouth was like a boom box and he could replicate the symphonies of Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss to perfection.

Papa’s command on language was extraordinary — he spoke six languages fluently (English, Urdu and French among them) and he wanted to learn German and Japanese. Once in his younger days, he had gone to meet the great Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and he had nervously shown Faiz Saheb his writing. Faiz Saheb read my father’s poetry and promptly declared it was rubbish. Heart-broken, my father went off to England to study Chartered Accountancy.

Years later, Faiz Saheb confessed that he had been dismissive of the poetry not because my father wasn’t talented — but because he knew a little encouragement would make a good-for-nothing poet out of a perfectly capable young man. Later on his life, the poet in him got revived and I still have some of his pieces that I treasure deeply.

Love, wisdom and support

Since his passing I have been receiving messages from people around the world telling me how my father had inspired and mentored them. He always saw the good in people — his perspective on people and on life in general was overwhelmingly positive and he strengthened people with his love, wisdom and support. He also had an unmistakable aura, a charisma about him — you couldn’t not notice him.

Possibly the most striking thing about my father was the depth of his personality and his innate spirituality. He helped me understand the concepts of love, worship, tolerance and empathy and why our intentions are so important. He taught me to not judge people, to hate the sin, not the sinner. He had the courage to ask difficult questions and make unconventional decisions if he needed to. He was an upright man, his love for God and His Messenger (PBUH) was evident in everything he did and said.

As Papa’s perfectly coiffed hair (the sideburns always had to be silver and the hair black) gradually turned white, the thobe took the place of the suits, and the beard replaced the lemony aftershave lotion, a new side of him emerged. His partner of over 30 years, my beloved mother moved on from the world and the man I had known to be the ultimate alpha male slowly began to recede. The full manifestation of the Alzheimer’s and dementia was a gradual process and extremely painful for me to witness. Then pain and suffering became his companions and he the perfect picture of patience.

Friend, philosopher and guide

Out of all his children I feel like I have been the luckiest — I spent the greatest amount of quality time with him and I was a willing, curious student, and he, ever the wise teacher. I did not know him merely as a father, in fact, I knew him as a person, as a friend, and vice versa. Sometimes I feel no one in the world understands me as well as him, and every time I write a piece I imagine myself reading it out to him and him nodding as though to say — oh yes, I do understand this, without me having to explain why I wrote it.

I realise just how lucky I have been to be brought up by this beautiful man who actually lived the principals of excellence and charity, and did not just speak about them. My father will forever be an example for me to follow, a man to love and respect, a person to cherish and a presence to dearly miss. It will still take a while for me to fully process the gravity of what has transpired, to understand that he has indeed moved on and the regrets of not having served him as was his due will linger forever.

But the love, the time, the attention and most importantly the confidence he had in me will always stay with me. And we don’t really lose the ones we love, do we? Don’t we just wait a little bit till we see them again? Rest in peace Papa, it’s been an honour. I don’t think any piece of writing could do justice to the life you lived, to the man you were, to what you meant to me. Words do fail me today, Papa. Till death reunites us.

— Mehmudah Rehman is a Dubai-based freelance writer