COLUMN: THE INIMITABLE ZAHID DAR.

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It is hard to analyse or theorise anything about Zahid Dar, his persona or his work. Things too intimate can only be told as anecdotes. I met him only a few times - for I spent most of my early years in Karachi and then later lived in Islamabad - but his name would appear in every other literary conversation one would have, from London to Lahore.

He was like the city he had made his home - affectionate and elusive at the same time. Perhaps that's what erudition brings you. Like a higher form of spiritual experience, you become detached from the mundane but, at the same time, you revel in detail. The contradictions are palpable. That was Zahid Dar - a voracious reader and avant-garde poet, who passed away two weeks ago at the age of 84.

It was a clear day in Lahore. A kind of interlude between the incessant haze that captures the city day in and day out during winters. There were not more than 10 people from the community of writers and artists, and an equal number of other fans and neighbours, who had gathered to pay their last respects to Dar.

I wanted to feel optimistic and thought that more people had not turned up because of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. Anyway, Dar was not a firebrand cleric who could whip up emotions and compel people to die for abstract notions or ideologies, and whose funeral would be attended by tens of thousands of disciples. Dar wanted people to read and think. He wanted them to be liberated, emotionally and intellectually. For he himself did nothing else in his life except read, write and think.

My late father was an avid reader. Growing up, I never saw him sitting idle, without a book in his hands. He hogged the written word and wouldn't even spare the candy wrappers. We would laugh when he also read the full descriptions in fine print that come with medicines. There were others like him in that generation, whose interests were diverse and thirst for knowledge was insatiable. But my father once told me that there was someone younger than him in Lahore, called Zahid Dar, whose penchant for reading was legendary and whose knowledge of literature, criticism, history and philosophy was incomparable.

On his way to the seafront, he found a bookshop. Instinctively, he entered and picked up a book by Jean Paul Sartre. 'He thought he should finish the book first before committing suicide. The suicide was postponed.'

Dar was born in Ludhiana, now Indian Punjab. He was in class six when the family migrated to...