From the memoir: Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s daughter comes to terms with his self-exile to Beirut

After Abba flew out from Islamabad to Delhi in 1978 and then on to London, it marked the start of a very nomadic life. He and my mother travelled around the world, and mostly it was due to the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association. He visited London most regularly, but he also travelled to the United States, Canada, India, Mongolia, Vietnam, the USSR, China, Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, Korea, Turkey, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Libya, Tunisia, Iran and Cyprus. Then Beirut became a sort of base because Abba was made editor-in-chief of Lotus magazine, and its publishing had shifted from Cairo to Beirut after Anwar Sadat’s rapprochement with Israel. The Afro-Asian Writers’ Association headquarters were no longer welcome under his repressive regime. That was when I finally caught up with him.

Beirut was, in many ways, fulfilling for him, but on a personal level, he missed Pakistan terribly. My mother told me that when I sent photographs of the children in a letter, my father looked at Mira’s photograph and asked who she was. When he was told it was Mira, he said, “But she’s all grown up.” Then, in 1980, I received a rather touching letter from him saying how he missed not seeing his grandchildren, and I think he felt he had missed years of his daughters’ childhood, and now it was happening all over again.

That was when I decided to take the children to Beirut because, before that, I had been told not to bring them – it was too dangerous. But I thought no, I have to take them, and of course, they had the greatest time. For years afterwards, they said that was the best holiday of their lives. Mira was five or six at the time.

Trying to get a no-objection certificate to visit my father in Beirut was an exercise in patience and persistence. I had to go through a succession of bureaucrats, minor as well as important, as I went from office to office. I came under the Ministry of Education but, as an artist, had to obtain permission from both the Ministry of Culture and Information and then the eventual authority, the interior secretary.

Fortuitously, Roedad Khan was an old friend of my father. He was a very wily bureaucrat who had served in the governments of Ayub Khan, Bhutto and now Zia-ul-Haq. He asked, “How is my friend?” “Your friend is fine. I’m going to visit him with my children,” I replied. Then he slyly asked, “So what is going on in Pakistan? What are people saying?” He was trying to draw me out. I replied, “You should know better.” He was a little bit embarrassed, though he kept smiling. Then he said, “No, this is okay,” and finally put his signature on the papers, and I left.

Communications were very bad in Beirut. I had a phone number, which was the exchange of their building, and they were on the sixth floor. You had to ask for an extension. They’d written to say my father would be coming to the airport, but it would be chaotic, and I was not to worry if he wasn’t there. There was absolute mayhem, and we couldn’t see him. We waited and waited and began to panic. Then we phoned my mother, and she said he was at the airport looking for us. Eventually, much to our relief, we caught sight of him through the crowds, standing some distance away.

There was a kind of uneasy truce in the Lebanese civil war at the time, but we had to go through constant checks all the way home. We passed ruptured roads, burnt-out tanks, and trucks, and the journey was quite intimidating. We finally got to this corner building in Raouché. The Iraqi Airline office downstairs had been bombed once. My father’s flat on the 6th floor was directly opposite the Lotus office and had two rooms – a kind of living room with a small kitchenette and a dining area and a balcony. The other room was the bedroom with a bathroom. That was it. It was a tiny space, and the office was the same, but the children were thrilled. They were going to share the bedroom with their grandparents, and I was going to sleep in the living room.

Sometimes, one can get a very tangible feeling of the essence of a society, where the enormous stress people are living under seems to generate prodigious bursts of energy. Beirut was such a place. We always went for a walk in the evening to the Commodore Hotel. This was a rather nondescript grey block of a building, but a safe haven and a favourite haunt of all the journalists in West Beirut, the Muslim side. Somehow, this hotel had survived. The proximity of the hotel district to the seafront became its nemesis when the warring militias saw it as a strategic location worth fighting over. The Holiday Inn, particularly, became a focal point, along with the adjacent Hotel Phoenicia Inter-Continental. I saw just the burnt-out, deserted shells, grass and weeds growing out of the windows. A couple of times, Abba went for a walk on his own, and there’d be an explosion and the wailing of ambulances, and we’d wait on tenterhooks until he appeared.

For the children, it was tremendously exciting. They were at the ringside of the action. They went to the beach, the swimming pools. They had ice cream every day and met all kinds of people on the street. They hung over the balcony and looked at the sea beyond and the streets below. Yasser was particularly interested in the latest models of sports cars, the Cadillacs and Jaguars, cruising by. Incongruously, people still had money to spend.

It was incredible to see all the conflicts in the Middle East being played out in Lebanon – all the parties, militias, and intelligence agencies. There was the Iranian SAVAK, the radical (Nasserist) nationalist movement Al-Mourabitoun, the militia funded by Egypt, and the left and the right. I certainly couldn’t make head nor tail of it, though my parents were by this time quite well-informed. The PLO was still finding its way and trying to survive, always under threat. It was a significant presence in the Arab University. When I was there, they had invited Yasser Arafat to speak, and “Abba Ammar”, as they used to call him, was absolutely adored by the audience. The exiles from the other countries, Kuwaiti and Egyptian intellectuals, were all there.

I couldn’t go to the American University in Beirut because that was too difficult. But I did go into the mountains with my father’s trilingual secretary, Rita, a very friendly young woman. She was Christian, so we crossed the green line and went into the Christian half of Beirut and then up into the mountains to spend the day with her family.

My father’s Palestinian chauffeur, Moussa, adored him, and he loved having the children there. His family lived in a Palestinian refugee camp, and my mother had often been to those camps and spoken with the women and children. We went to visit Moussa’s family and got a sense of the Palestinian population and the terrible conditions they endured. His place was just a small shack. They had put up a full photograph of Abba Ammar and another little picture, which appeared to be a photograph of a garden. It was the orange grove they had to leave behind when they, and over 7,00,000 other Palestinians, were thrown out of their ancestral lands in what is known as the great Nakba or catastrophe. They were forced to take refuge in neighbouring countries, living in camps that still exist today. They were never allowed to return, and it remains one of the greatest crimes against a defenceless population – the great lie being that Israel was established on uninhabited lands. The mother had kept the photograph and said they were going to go back to it one day. She had five children, and my mother was teasing her about having such a big family. She replied very seriously, “We have to have children for the revolution, you know.”

We went with my mother to the ancient Phoenician city of Sidon, Saida, as it’s called. Tourism, of course, was completely dead, but according to our guidebook, the Temple of Eshmun was one of the important sites. We asked Moussa to take us there, and we had to walk some distance down a hillside. The temple was spread over quite a large area, but it was all overgrown and sadly neglected. There was a crumbling plan of the site. Apparently, excavations were still underway when the war started. But we came across some of the mosaic floor of this temple, covered with a protective plastic sheet. We lifted the plastic, and the mosaic was stunning in its detail. I took photographs and then carefully replaced the plastic, with the silent hope that one day this amazing place could be lovingly revealed. As we were making our way back, four boys sitting on a fence called out to us that we should watch out for the snakes. We thought they had decided we were idiot tourists, fair game for a joke. But according to Moussa, this area was known for its snake nests, so our steps were a bit hurried after that.

I had planned a two-week trip to London while the children stayed with my mother. Abba was supposed to travel with me, but he started complaining of extreme vertigo, and it turned out to be some infection of the inner ear. We spoke to the doctors, who said he should go to Moscow for treatment, after which he could go on to London. I flew alone to London, and we met up later.

Back in Beirut, a well-known Swedish journalist, Barbara, I can’t recollect her surname, had befriended my father. She was going up into the hills with an Egyptian journalist to interview an Egyptian professor of sculpture from the School of Alexandria. She asked if I wanted to go with them, and of course, I said I did. We met this wonderful couple; the husband was apparently quite renowned in Alexandria, and because he was one of those who didn’t agree with Sadat’s Israeli policy, he’d been targeted and harassed. The PLO had given him protection in Beirut, and he and his wife – their son was an artist working in Beirut – had a small patch of olive and lemon trees. He showed us photographs of the commemorative plaques and shields commissioned by the Palestinians.

He told us he’d gone to Beirut to visit his son’s exhibition in a shared taxi, and on the way back, they were stopped by some militia. He was blindfolded and taken away. When the taxi arrived back in their village, his wife was informed. She got through to her son, who contacted the PLO, and apparently, this militia wanted to exchange the professor for some of their own people being held by the PLO or their allies. Eventually, the exchange was made, very much like in a Hollywood movie. He said that when he was teaching in Alexandria, he never thought he would have such an exciting life, but it was rather tragic how the lives of this brilliant, principled man and his wife had been affected by the Sadat regime.

Excerpted with permission from Enter Stage Left, Salima Hashmi with Maryam Hasan, Penguin India.