Abba, who had left Mijwan in his teens, returned briefly to it when he married Mummy and had his first child Khayyam (a son who died at the age of one). Soon after Partition, his family migrated to Pakistan one by one and he felt his roots in Mijwan had been severed forever. However, in 1973, upon partially recovering from his brain haemorrhage, his left side still severely damaged, he started chanting the name ‘Mijwan’ with such persistence that my mother was forced to take him there. It turned out to be an amazing trip for him. He realized that Mijwan was and would always remain the place where he belonged. The house he was born in was occupied by various distant cousins and it would have been unfair to throw them out (the communist theory of the tiller owning the land). Kaifi wrote in anguish.

Woh mera gaon hai

Woh mere gaon ke chulhe

Ke jin mein sholay to sholay

Dhuan nahin milta

Today, Mijwan is a model village, but it has been a long and arduous journey filled with obstacles that he had to face from vested interests. It fills me with immense pride that once he committed himself to something he never wavered no matter what adversity came his way. I have grown up believing that merely good intentions are not enough, you have to translate them into action.

I once asked him, ‘Abba, don’t you get frustrated when change doesn’t happen at the pace you want it to?’

He answered with equanimity, ‘Bete, when you are working for change, you should build into that expectation the possibility that the change might not happen in your lifetime. But you must have the conviction that if you carry on working with dedication, the change is bound to occur, even if it does so after you are gone.’

His prophetic words have become my mantra in the work that I do with the weak and the dispossessed.

Postscript: 10 June 2002

I look out of the window from Abba’s room. The sky is blue, the grass green, flowers in bloom. I turn back to look inside the room. Books lined neatly on the shelves, his spectacles, writing pad, Mont Blanc lie in wait for pen to be put to paper and new verse to flow . . . everything is the way it was . . . but Abba is not there . . .

Anees Jung, in a letter of condolence to me, writes, ‘I know what the loss of a parent means, Shabana. I also know one never loses a parent. In a strange mystical way they become closer in death, for their spirit, no longer trapped in a frail frame, becomes all pervasive and surrounds us like the air we breathe.’

Comforting words no doubt but all I feel is insurmountable grief.