The finest diplomat and the passionate rebel

“I’ve lived my life. I have so much to be grateful for and I have no regrets,” said Abbas Haider Zaidi a few weeks back when my family and I visited him at his home in Islamabad. Abbas was terminally ill with cancer and he knew that the end was near. Though the illness had sapped his energy and he had become a wizened semblance of his former self, his sense of humour never left him. We reminisced, laughed and talked of old times. This was to be our last conversation.
As we left Abbas that evening, a thought that stealthily came into my mind was a saying by Allama Iqbal that the sign of a true believer is that he wears a smile as death approaches in the knowledge that the yearning of the soul to be reunited with its beloved Creator is about to be fulfilled. It was about this yearning that the great sufi poet of the 13th century, Jalaluddin Rumi, wrote in his Mathnavi: “‘Tis the flame of love that fired me; ‘Tis the wine of love that inspired me; Wouldst thou hear how lovers bleed? Hearken, hearken to the reed.”
Abbas succumbed to his illness on June 6. At his funeral one of the many mourners, barely able to stifle his overpowering grief, mumbled incoherently to me that Pakistan had lost a formidable ambassador and perhaps its only diplomat who truly savoured and appreciated the country’s imperishable inheritance of Urdu prose and poetry, its majestic classical music and above all the works of its painters. The relationship between Abbas and the ‘passionate rebel’, Sadequain, who art critics have described as the ‘Picasso of the East,’ is particularly instructive.

The poet, Harris Khalique, whose fascinating columns in this newspaper unfailingly provoke thought, wrote an exhaustive piece about Abbas and Sadequain in The Friday Times a few months back. The article touches upon the equation between the two kindred souls. Both moved in different orbits but were rebels in their own way. One was a world famous painter and a bohemian for whom the be-all and end-all of life was the truth; the other, an urbane diplomat, was no less a disciple of truth. Both believed that beauty and truth were synonymous and that a single hour spent in the quest of knowledge gives an individual more than a score of shameful years spent in the pursuit of power and ill-gotten wealth.
Sadequain was blunt and Abbas was cultured and refined. Yet they both worshipped at the temple of truth, convinced that no fencing, no barricade could ever obstruct “a right of entry into its free franchise”, as a respected chief justice of the Dacca (Dhaka) High Court once said. It was in the 1970s that our small circle of friends became close to Sadequain. But the great artist was particularly drawn towards Abbas. It was only Abbas who had a restraining, but limited, influence on Sadequain.

Many years later, I visited Sadequain who was living, at the time, in a small decrepit hut atop a hillock at the Lawrence Gardens in Lahore. The only piece of furniture was a wobbly wooden chair and a mattress. The maestro, who had obviously been imbibing, was seated, as always, cross-legged on the floor. He handed me a soiled cushion and beckoned me to sit on the cold, dank and unswept space in front of him.

Sadequain looked me in the eye and then in his typical, barely intelligible, drawl murmured, “You know Abbas Haider Zaidi Sahib is a far more profound man than you are or, for that matter, anyone in your foreign office. You people are only capable of writing compendious briefs, talking points or rather thinking points for your stupid bosses and sending nonsensical coded cables. Yet you expect the world to applaud. But Abbas Sahib is different. As a critic, he is a poet without having written any verse; he is an artist never having painted and he understands the magic of classical music. He is the finest diplomat that Pakistan has but you will never understand this. You don’t even know that some of the most outstanding ambassadors and public officials in history have been painters, philosophers, art critics and poets.”
The unvarnished truth can at times be bitter, but Sadequain was right. The only regret I have is that Abbas was posted abroad and I never had the opportunity to tell him about this unforgettable meeting. Sadequain, like Abbas, did not believe in concealing what he thought but always sought to propagate and ventilate his innermost feelings. Both of them were convinced that the unrestrained flow of expression and opinion, like a fragrant breeze from a rose garden, was the birthright of man.

A few nights back as I was leafing through The Works of Oscar Wilde, I was struck by the opening paragraph of his essay ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ which reads: “…Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell. Sophocles held civic office in his own city…” Sadequain had died several years back but I could visualise him, as usual sitting on the floor in front of me as though to ask whether I now understood what he meant when we met that cold winter’s evening in Lahore.

The 1970s, when Abbas joined the foreign office, were years of hope and despair. The decade began with the disaster of the breakup of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh; it ended in tragedy with the hanging of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto by the military dictator, General Ziaul Haq. The crowning glory of those years was the promulgation of the 1973 Constitution but by 1977, when Bhutto was ousted by Zia, it had already been amended seven times.

However, it was the second amendment under which the Ahmadis were excommunicated that Bhutto yielded ground to the religious right and the forces of bigotry became increasingly ascendant. Abbas seldom talked about religion but he told me at the time: “A serpent has entered the Garden of Eden. It is the Ahmadis today but tomorrow Shias like me will also be declared non-Muslims and killed by the same fanatics who don’t even understand Islam.” His fears were well founded.

As a diplomat, Abbas never sought to acquire fame and glory but success came to him open and unencumbered. During my assignment in Moscow from 2000 to 2005, my initial Indian counterpart, Satish Lambah, who recently visited Pakistan as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s special envoy, told me: “In New Delhi we have a lot of respect for your diplomats and I am not just talking about your high commissioners in India. Somehow, Pakistani diplomats have the ability to make an impact. Take the example of Abbas Zaidi, he is still remembered in New Delhi.”

Again, while in Moscow, I received a phone call from far away Tunis where Abbas was posted as the ambassador of Pakistan. The caller was Brahim Khalil, my colleague in Seoul in the early 1990s. Brahim’s family was one of the most influential in Tunisia. We talked about our days in South Korea and then suddenly Brahim said, “In history there have been many diplomat-poets. These include: Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney in English from the sixteenth century; Paul Claudel, Saint-John Perse and Octavio Paz in French and Spanish from the twentieth and now we, in Tunisia, have ambassador Zaidi from Pakistan. Your diplomats are among the finest in the world.”

As Abbas’s body was lowered into its final resting place, I looked around among the hundreds of mourners. Senior officials from the foreign office were not there. They were all busy churning out third-rate briefs and position papers for the new government. Sadequain’s words on that cold and clammy evening at the Lawrence Gardens in Lahore proved depressingly accurate.
The writer is the publisher ofCriterion Quarterly.
Email: iftimurshed@gmail.com