Stay blessed, Zain

Death inevitable as it is, bears the mark of finality. When someone leaves us unexpectedly or prematurely, it leaves an even more indelible mark. Zainul Abedin’s transition is our great loss, a void left by someone who was extremely good at what he did.

Having been a contributor to these pages, my first email to Zain requesting publication of an article was sent at 2158 hrs on 21 Feb 2010; the article was published three days later. This started a decade-long relationship which culminated in his surreal demise.

During these years, I never had the chance to put a face to his name or talk to Zain. Intensely passionate about his work, he was a man of few words. However, the mails we exchanged spoke of an extremely well read, intelligently informed and above all a humane individual.

The op-ed pages being Zain’s domain, they bore no room for error; he could be terse to ensure the same. Once having erred in quoting Marx he wrote to me starting with: “A problem that was detected yesterday was the Marx quote. You must be careful with them dear Adnan”. An ardent reader of Marx and Trotsky, his ire was all too evident albeit in soft words. He expected the best from his contributors. Editors are teachers; he was mine.

Somehow, I think Zain’s spirit remains epitomized in his Dec 2007 article ‘Thus spake Gramsci’. Writing about the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci who was arrested under Mussolini’s emergency laws Zain wrote: “He was sentenced to more than 20 years of imprisonment through different trials. At one such trial, Gramsci’s prosecutor stated ‘for twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning’. But to the immense benefit of humanity, it wasn’t a fly that turned and turned in that cell, but a mighty brain that worked and worked under constant physical and psychic pain”.

“By the time he died, at the age of 46 and having suffered ten long years in prison he had written more than 30 notebooks and 3000 pages of history and analysis. In 1947, two years after Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave, these writings known as the Prison Notebooks saw the light of day and became a fountain of critical thinking where many a mind has drunk insight and inspiration. No serious discourse on sociology, politics, state and civil society remains uninformed by Gramsci”.

Faceless and voiceless that Zain remains for me, I never thought of him being aloof but someone always relatable, someone always there to extend a helping hand. He was as devoted to his work and task as I am sure he would have been to those who had the privilege to be his colleagues, his friends. I thanked him, writing: “Without your support these words would have been, if written at all, not more than a personal diary. You have my gratitude”. Not given to voicing emotions, at other times he would advise something like “reading Trotsky’s ‘Their morals and ours’ when you have the time”.

Never having been in Zain’s newsroom or even having met him, he proved that coming to know someone transcends proximity. His departure, sudden and irreplaceable that it is, leaves a void. My last email to Zain was at 1829 hrs on January 26. Little did I know that he was treading towards the hereafter at that time. The last two words that I wrote were ‘Stay blessed’. I repeat the same again with all my heart – Stay blessed, Zain.