Remembering Syed Abul Hassan Jafri

By Afzal Hussain Bokhari

On entering a privately-run college in Phase II of Hayatabad, the lady lecturer in Urdu, like the rest of staff members, deposited her cell phone at the main gate as a newly introduced security measure. Hardly had she started her lecture in the class when the gate-keeper popped in with the college teacher’s intermittently ringing phone set. On line was her husband who did not give details but told her to immediately rush back home.

Rush back home she did but never even once had writer Qudsia Qudsi thought that a heart-rending tragedy lay in wait for her. In Sarhad Street of Gulberg, some unidentified men had pumped seven bullets into her brother Syed Abul Hassan Jafri and his blood-stained dead body lay in the operation theatre of the Combined Military Hospital.

For the last 30 years, Jafri had been working in the Iranian consulate. At the time of his assassination, he was the consulate’s public relations officer. On November 12, he left his Gulberg residence at 8-10am. Minutes after his departure, wife Daisy heard some gunshots outside the house. She peered out of the gate and saw the car in an unusual condition. With uncovered head and barefooted she rushed out and saw Jafri bleeding profusely on the car seat.

She told mourners that for some days a stranger in the garb of a beggar arrived exactly at 8am and crouched outside her home apparently to seek alms. While leaving for office, Jafri used to bend to one side and hand down a few coins to the ‘malang baba’ daily. On that fateful day, the ‘malang baba’ surprisingly failed to show up. On Thursday, both of them disappeared; the ‘malang baba’ temporarily and Jafri eternally. The ‘malang baba’ presumably started collecting coins outside some other home.

Jafri belonged to a known Sadaat family of Peshawar. His father Syed Ahmad Hussain served as post master. After independence he migrated to Pakistan from Anbala in the eastern Punjab now in India. Jafri’s mother Fatima Begum was from the Persian-speaking Qazalbash family of Peshawar and was known old Peshawaris as Apa Fatima. Syed Ahmad Hussain had two sons named Asad and Abul Hassan and two daughters named Nagis and Qudsia.

Jafri’s funeral prayers were offered in the Imambargah Mohalla Marviha inside Chah Shahbaz. Highly emotional scenes were witnessed when his dead body was brought to the crowded Imambargah from the CMH. His sisters and widow beat up their faces in pain and anguish. Tears welled up into the eyes of friends and relatives at the thought of Jafri’s premature death. Many of the mourners sobbed silently without talking to anyone.

Having no children of his own, Jafri had adopted the daughter (Mona) of his sister Nargis. When she grew up, Jafri got her married to the son of his brother Asad, who retired from Pakistan Air Force. After marriage, Mona flew off to Britain along with the groom. She received the sad news of Jafri’s assassination in London. In a state of shock the couple caught the first available flight to Pakistan and landed into Peshawar well in time to attend the ritual of ‘soyem’ (recitation from the holy Quran on third day of death).

As the bad luck would have it, one of Jafri’s cousins, Syed Qamar Abbas, retired audit officer of Wapda, was on his way back home from Jafri’s ‘soyem’ when he suffered a massive heart attack.

He was taken first to the Lady Reading Hospital and then to Hayatabad Medical Complex but both declined to take the case saying the government had declared emergency in the two hospitals after the Ring Road Chowk blast in Pishtakhara on Saturday evening.

All the relatives that had gathered at Jafri’s residence later converged on Qamar’s house in Hayatabad. After his funeral prayer in a park in D-5 sector of Phase I, Qamar Abbas was laid to rest in his ancestral graveyard in city. He left behind a widow, a son and four daughters.

The mourners that converged on Qamar’s home included Qudsia Qudsi, the sister of late Jafri. She has to her credit a collection of poetry and two other books of prose. She is an outspoken activist of the Women Writers’ Forum and makes it a point to attend all its functions.

Jafri’s death was widely condoled by his admirers both inside Pakistan and outside of it. Mohammad Taqi, for instance, who teaches and practises medicine in the University of Florida, USA, grew up in Jafri’s neighbourhood in Mohalla Dhakki Munawar Shah. He penned down a brief obituary note and faxed it to some of Jafri’s friends.

A local newspaper carried it on its back page as a timely tribute to the departed soul. In an email, Dr Taqi commented on Jafri’s murder: “I am not sure whether nausea is inside me or I am inside nausea”. Taqi recalled the Italian Vespa scooter with double indicators that Jafri used in the mid-1980s.

Just before Taqi, Murtaza Haider Butt, who is associated with Canada’s Ryerson University as a Ph. D. scholar, wrote a blog for Dawn.com about the moments he spent with Jafri while studying Civil Engineering in Peshawar’s University of Engineering and Technology. Here one is not forgetting the obituary note that Haroon Rashid posted on the web site of BBC Urdu. He reminisced about the days that he spent with Jafri while working for an English-language newspaper.

Jafri’s colleagues in the newspaper office marveled more at his neat and clean dress than at the hurriedly-written stories that he filed to the newsroom. The sub-editors relished the juicy background that Jafri narrated but smoked furiously while putting sense into his wordage. As a reporter he loved to do an assignment on the rapidly disappearing values of the local culture.  

With a heavy heart, one feels like winding up this piece with lines from Nisar Nasik’s poetry: “Main saazishon main ghira ik yateem shahzada; yaheen kaheen koi khanjar meri talash mai hai!”