In the four months, not one day did I see Kaifi irritable or impatient, but with the dawn of each day he would say, ‘Shaukat, thank goodness another day has passed.’ At times he would say, ‘How will I ever be Sagar’s pony again.’ Kaifi loved my nephew Irshad’s son, Sagar, who was three at the time. To cheer Kaifi up, I hung photographs of Sagar, Baba and Shabana on the wall opposite his bed, so that every morning on waking up he would see his children’s photographs.

To this day, I marvel at Kaifi’s resilience, because in those four months he never let on that he was in pain; in fact in that condition, he composed a poem from his bed. It was the month of Muharram and there were Shi’a–Sunni riots; dead bodies of young men from both sects were brought to the medical college. His sensitive heart could not bear the pain caused by the news that was brought to him every day by the nurse who was looking after him, and he composed a poem, ‘This is not Lucknow’. Shabana, who had taken time out from her film assignments to see her Abba, said in a sad voice, ‘Mummy, we can merely see Abba’s pain but cannot share it, or reduce it.’

Kaifi was a man of extraordinary will power, and he never despaired. Even a few days before he died, when somebody would ask how he was feeling, he would smile and say, ‘First class!’ Throughout his life, he was ‘first class’. One illness after another assailed him, but he carried on with the task in hand and never accepted defeat. He made it a point to attend every mushaira to which he was invited. In his condition he transformed the future of his tiny village Mijwan, which is thirty-five kilometres from Azamgarh. A tiny village where there was neither a school nor a road, or electricity, or telephone lines. Within fifteen to twenty years he made everything possible, to the extent that he even started a computer class. The most important thing that he did for his village was to have a road constructed connecting it to Phulpur.