Dawn Images

We whiled away the hours chatting well past midnight, Farooq Qaiser and I, on the bus from Isfahan to Tehran.

It was almost the last leg of the National College of Arts tour of Iran, with Afghanistan still to come. Farooq was among the 30 students who made the fascinating journey in that fateful March of 1971, all of us quite unaware of the horrifying saga unfolding in East Pakistan.

He was studying textile design and had caught my eye with the hilarious skits he and his pal Shahid Nadeem performed at the college campfire. He listened avidly as I described the satire on British television and the humour of Jacques Tati. His ability to understand human frailties and the vulnerability of the underdog, later exemplified through his skits on stage, was evident even then.

A year later, when Pakistan Television’s slate had been wiped clean after 1971, Aslam Azhar as Managing Director gave my husband Shoaib [Hashmi] and I carte blanche to do any programme we cared to take on. He chuckled when we said we wanted to do a children’s programme, but we knew it was time to think afresh and focus on a new generation, untainted by recent events and PTV’s propaganda machine.

Humourist, underrated poet and Pakistan’s pioneering puppeteer, Farooq Qaiser passed away on May 14. Salima Hashmi remembers the young man she picked to become part of the team of Pakistan Television’s first programme for children, a team that included a veritable galaxy of stars. The young man would soon be a star himself

Farooq Qaiser immediately came to mind and I accosted him the very next day in the corridors of NCA. He was taken aback when I invited him to join the Akkarr Bakkarr team on television, and even more so when I asked if he knew anything about puppets. His interest grew when I told him it was something to do with children, and he would be paid!

So off we went to watch a screening of Sesame Street — we had already decided we wanted a desi version of Big Bird who would be named Bee-Batakh. Shoaib did not, at first, share my confidence in Farooq’s potential, doubting his ability to produce a life-sized puppet when he knew absolutely nothing of the craft. But I knew him to be ingenious, having seen his textile thesis show. And when he turned up with Bee-Batakh in a rickshaw at our house in Model Town, Shoaib was smitten.

Bee-Batakh’s personality evolved with Shoaib’s voice and aphorisms. Farooq was born to embody that bird. It was a physically challenging role — one arm raised high inside Batakh’s head, the other at hip level, gesticulating and picking up objects — but performed with aplomb.

The trio — Shoaib, Farooq and Bee-Batakh — was a riot, doing song and dance numbers based on the Urdu alphabet, and its occasionally problematic issues, such as why tota (parrot) was written with the letter toay, and not with te. The song ‘tota te se hota hai, ya toay se hota hai?’ [‘Is tota with a te or a toay?’] had everyone in fits of laughter. Then of course there was the memorable occasion when Farooq almost fainted inside the puppet, which had air circulation issues not envisaged by its maker!

Pretty soon another puppet joined Bee-Batakh, the Bhaloo or teddy bear. Farooq and Shoaib decided that Bhaloo was destined to be an aspiring poet, and so Farooq’s poetic talent came to the fore. Shahid Nadeem had worked on Bhaloo and donned the puppet costume, the voice was Shoaib, the poetry was all Farooq Qaiser.

It was the beginning of his nonsensical limericks, his mimicking of the pompous poets at mushairas always presented with a flourish. By now it was apparent that Farooq had well and truly imbibed the essence of the art of the puppeteer. The puppet assumed an identity of its own, quite independent of its creator.

My sister Moneeza [Hashmi], as the producer of Akkarr Bakkarr, was keen to bring on board Irfan Khoosat, son of the great comedian Sultan Khoosat, so another character came into being, a glove puppet this time. Farooq was now experimenting with materials for puppet building. He discovered that plastic water mugs covered with cloth were ideal for the face, and ping-pong balls provided a wide-eyed gaze, or a half-closed lazy look.

Thus Chachawal Khan was born. Shoaib and Farooq went into a huddle and decided he would be a naïve yet knowledgeable Northerner who, paired with the young and pretty Samina Ahmed, could be in a semi-flirtatious relationship. The puddle of rubber cement on the new carpet in our study became a lasting reminder of the crafting of Chachawal Khan in the house.

As the cast of characters grew, each embodying the traits and whimsicalities of our lives, and those of our children, Farooq’s songwriting career began. Arshad Mahmud and Shahid Toosy composed the music for his lyrics, and Nayyara Noor soon joined the team. The songs became so popular that EMI brought out a long-playing, 12-inch vinyl record, now a coveted vintage item.

Farooq and Arshad became best buddies, permanently ensconced in our home as they worked on the scripts, and invoking the ire of Shoaib as they devoured his beloved pateesa from Amritsari Sweets on Beadon Road. The energy was phenomenal as was the hilarity Akkarr Bakkarr introduced to PTV, small chunks of independent content linked together by a thematic context. After six months of airing, Akkarr Bakkarr won Pakistan Television’s first international award — the Japan Prize for Children’s Television.

Farooq thrived in this ‘magazine’ format, his diverse talents given the space to work with Shoaib and Arshad in a variety of experimental ideas. In some ways, he continued to explore this style of working for most of his professional career.

When my father Faiz Ahmed Faiz embarked on setting up the Pakistan National Council of Arts and the Institute of Folk Heritage (later re-named Lok Virsa), he desperately needed a solid, creative team. Farooq Qaiser was the first to be commandeered.

They already knew one another and their mutual respect flourished as Farooq proved his mettle time and again. His design for the logo for PNCA was inspired by a silver taweez [amulet] picked up from Haripur by my mother Alys Faiz for the Craft Museum collection.

By this time, we were already on air with Such Gup and Farooq’s lyrics were again sung by Nayyara. He remained a member of that same creative family, and they made up a part of his baraat [wedding procession] when he married.

Though Shoaib and the team were banned for the 11 years of Gen Zia’s tenure, we were delighted that Farooq and Kaliyaan evaded the censor with guile and humour, and kept the nation laughing amid the darkness.

Farooq Qaiser’s genius saw us through many humourless decades and provided us with the lungs to breathe and the spirit to simply carry on. He was unstoppable and it was a glorious innings.

Originally published in Dawn, ICON, May 23rd, 2021