A new book investigates poet Mustafa Zaidi’s death, still a subject of controversy in Pakistan

In Multan, in the southern part of the Punjab province, the journalist and writer Masood Asher learned of his old friend’s death. He wrote a remembrance of Mustafa.

He thought back to the year 1952, when Mustafa was studying for his final exams for his master’s degree in English literature. He had started his degree at Allahabad University, where he was known as Tegh Allahabadi, a rising young poet, who had adopted his hometown Allahabad’s name as his poetic pen name.

But when Mustafa moved to Lahore, in neighbouring Pakistan, a new country created for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent after the end of British colonial rule, Allahabadi was no longer the right moniker for him, and “move” did not aptly describe what had happened. In fact, Mustafa had been recovering from a suicide attempt in Allahabad, when his elder brother, Mujtaba, had come to the city and taken him to Pakistan in 1951 – yet another moving piece in the hordes of people deciding where to live on either side of the hastily drawn borders between India and Pakistan.

By 1952, Mustafa was living in Lahore, a city that was picking up the pieces after the bloody aftermath of Partition. The havelis of the city’s rich Hindus were abandoned, and divided into homes for the masses of Muslim refugees who had descended on the city from the other side of the border. Men of wealth had arrived in Lahore completely penniless, a story that was repeating itself across the subcontinent.

The city had become home to many of the new country’s writers, poets, lawyers, artists and musicians. Lahore’s intellectuals – the children of prominent citizens, students at Dyal Singh College and the Mayo School of Arts, future lawyers and revolutionary poets – met at coffee houses. For some of these young men coming of age in the 1950s, the environment was heady; they were in the company of the greats, and the greats in the making. For others, like the poet Sahir Ludhianvi, Lahore seemed to have lost its lustre in the years after Partition.

Two of the men who wandered around Lahore and its cafés then were Masood Asher and Mustafa Zaidi. Masood had first met Mustafa at a peace conference organized by the Communist Party in Lucknow, and a chance meeting in Lahore rekindled their acquaintance – and a lifelong friendship.

The two of them – in their early twenties, heads full of worldly literature, and still unencumbered by responsibilities – took to the streets of the city. Mustafa would wear his signature outfit of khaddar kurtas and Peshawari sandals. They strolled around Anarkali Bazaar, which had some of Lahore’s best bookstores that stocked English literature and magazines from around the world. Mustafa and Masood would browse, and occasionally shoplift magazines like The Atlantic.

Their favourite spot was Cheney’s Lunch Home, where Mustafa would order his favourite dish: brain masala. “The name (of the establishment) was a misnomer because it was open all day, serving hot and cold drinks and meals,” the historian KK Aziz wrote. It was “the only respectable eating place in the area where local food was available.”

Despite the distractions of Lahore, the bookstores and the demands of studying for his final exams for his master’s, for Mustafa, there was only one refrain: Saroj.

Mustafa was depressed, torn with angst over the woman he had left behind in Allahabad: a young student named Saroj Bala Saran, the daughter of a lawyer and future Allahabad High Court judge. He had met Saroj at Ewing Christian College, and fallen in love with her. Soon after, Mustafa wrote a poem titled “S”, stoking gossip on campus, although no one knew if Saroj felt the same way about him.

A potential interfaith romance in the months before Partition, when Hindu–Muslim divisions were simmering across India, seemed like a doomed prospect. But a man like Mustafa, in the heady days of first love, may not even have clocked this.

In Lahore, over a thousand kilometres and another country away from Allahabad, Mustafa was still pining for Saroj.

His friends tried to give him as much time as they could, sometimes spending the night in his room. Mustafa would sometimes call out her name with such torment that it almost felt as if he would run to the door in utter desperation. Perhaps his friends might not have understood his anguish until they saw a photograph of the woman who had been the source of Mustafa’s obsession. Masood dramatically exclaimed: “For such a beauty let Zaidi cry.”

Just when his friends were starting to think that the heartbroken Mustafa was emerging from the depths of his misery, one day, he asked Masood to come over early the next morning. It was an odd request but made so insistently that Masood arrived promptly. Mustafa had also asked the same of Dr Zawwar Hussain Zaidi, an academic and relative who lived in the city.

When the men arrived, they found Mustafa unconscious.

Few people had cars then, and Dr Zaidi was one of them, so they were able to quickly take Mustafa to a clinic, which refused to admit him since it looked like it was a medicolegal case. He had clearly consumed a large quantity of drugs in an attempt to take his own life. He had to be taken to a public hospital, where his stomach was pumped.

“Obviously, he had done it on purpose,” Masood reflected years later. “Love is such a thing that a person is ready to give up his life.”

It was not Mustafa’s first suicide attempt.

Mustafa Zaidi grew up in Allahabad, where he was the rebel of his conservative Shi’a family. He gained early fame in Allahabad’s colleges and university as an exceptional student – and a talented poet. When he was studying for a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Allahabad University, his teacher KK Mehrotra declared him a prodigy – a “person of outstanding and extraordinary capabilities”.

Zanjeerein, his first collection of poetry, which was published in 1947 while he was a student, was prefaced by the renowned poet Firaq Gorakhpuri. He was invited to recitals, and he often socialised with poets and writers in Allahabad.

Mustafa’s second collection Roshni was published in 1949. When it was reissued, Mustafa wrote in the preface that “… these poems remind me of the days in Allahabad when happiness was really happiness, and sorrow was sorrow.”

But while the world saw his success in academics and his rise as a young poet of some renown, Mustafa appeared to have been struggling.

He attempted to kill himself. He was taken to the doctor, and his life was saved.

Mustafa’s friends cruelly assumed it was an attempt to get attention, though it might have masked something else altogether. But there was no understanding of mental health conditions and their treatment at the time. It is unknown if he ever received psychiatric care, and it is unlikely that there were developed facilities in Allahabad at the time.

After he completed his bachelor’s degree, Mustafa remained at Allahabad University, and opted to enrol in the master’s programme to major in English literature. He made another suicide attempt, this time by taking an overdose of opium. Friends went to his house to inquire after him and learned that he was taken to the Kalon Hospital in Allahabad, where he was currently hovering between life and death.

Mustafa then left university altogether. He stayed home to recover.

Then one day, people in Allahabad discovered that Mustafa had left the city and gone to Pakistan. “This was strange,” his old classmate Muhammad Aqeel mused. “A person who didn’t even talk about Pakistan, how did he go there?”

Mustafa wrote to friends that he had been forced to go, and would return to Allahabad.

It must have felt traumatic, like death, to have to leave the literary environment of Allahabad, which had nourished Mustafa and given him literary sparring partners, his introduction to communism and to progressive politics, to suddenly have nothing of that in Pakistan, to leave India altogether.

“I came to Pakistan at the end of 1951,” Mustafa would later write. “With time, everything from the past became a memory and a scar. My state was such that the passing of time had stood still for me. I was neither happy for the day to come, nor angry over the day that had just passed. If I waited for anything, it was for (cousin) Shamim’s letter from Lucknow.”

After he came to Pakistan, one of Mustafa’s poems was published in Nakhat, a magazine based in Allahabad. It was titled “Duur ki Awaz” (A Voice from Afar) and became rather popular in the city. The poem is inexorably sad, and reads like a lament from someone who has left everything behind, like these verses:

Call out to me
Does the morning dew
still remember me?
Does the moonlight still call on
the sorrowful threshold of my house?

His state of mind – and suicide – was something that Mustafa talked about for a long, long time. It was often in the background, even if it seemed at odds with his apparent success and functional home life.

As Mustafa grew older, he invoked the spectre of death so much so that it became a part of his oeuvre. In the days after his death, these frequent mentions of suicide may have seemed foreboding to outsiders. But for Mustafa’s friends and family, they were not unusual at all. Talk of death was seen by Mustafa’s friends and family as a joke, an allegory, poetic license. They were used to it because Mustafa, who could be stubborn and headstrong, often deployed suicide as a threat. He made jokes about dying, and threatened his friends that he would take his own life if they didn’t do what he said. Sometimes he would carry around vitamins and tell his friends that it was poison. One of his friends had dubbed it his takia kalam – a signature phrase. Mustafa referenced his habit in an essay about the characteristics of Urdu poetry.

“... hum logon ka haal yeh hai ke hum ne marne ki dhamkiyan de de ko [sic] logon ko bore kar diya hai. Khudkhushi ke naam par to ab koi mehboob razi nahin hota.” (... One has come to the point that people are bored by these threats to kill oneself. Now no lover acquiesces in the name of suicide.)

In letters to his friends, he mentioned periods of melancholy and despair. “I have become completely out of it for the past year; I am hiding in a dark place inside myself, no one can reach me here and I do not leave it,” he wrote in a letter to Josh Malihabadi in 1969, defending himself against Josh’s claim that he had changed.

Excerpted with permission from Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies, and Scandal, Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan, Roli Books.