Dawn Images

Quetta is a city of obituaries. When I first began working as a journalist in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, a tragic incident took place at the city’s Civil Hospital that is still seared into my mind. After a bomb blast, bodies were brought to the hospital’s mortuary and despite searching for hours, one family couldn’t find the body of their relative. The bodies in the mortuary were charred beyond recognition.

The victim’s mother arrived in tears and went straight to a body, shrieking, “He is my ‘laal’”. Everyone was shocked, even the journalists present, because the body wasn’t identifiable at all. Except for the mother who had given birth to the boy, no other family members recognised him.

Over the decades, much like those bodies, Quetta has become unidentifiable. Violence has massacred the city’s once secular face; it was once a peaceful multicultural city made up of different ethnic groups and religions.

Like the mother of the boy killed in the bomb blast, Ali Baba Taj still saw the unblemished face of Quetta. The Hazara poet and professor, who died on November 9 in a hospital in Karachi, never stopped striving for a Quetta that belonged to all.

This was especially poignant given that he was from the Shia Hazara community, one that has long been on the receiving end of unabashed violence. Since the 1990s, hundreds of Shia Hazaras have lost their lives in sectarian violence in Quetta.

Born in Quetta in 1977, Taj was a Hazara poet known for his poetry in both Urdu and Persian. In 2007, he wrote a book of Urdu poems titled Muthi Mein Kuch Saansain. He completed his Master’s in Persian language and literature from the University of Balochistan in 2003 and chose to enter the world of teaching. A few weeks before his death, he became a full-fledged professor of Persian at the Musa Degree College in Marriabad.

Taj was known in the literary circles of Quetta, having spent his entire life contributing to the worlds of poetry and academia. He also visited India’s Kolkata in 2008 to represent Pakistan at the World Poetry Festival, when relations between the two countries still allowed for people from both sides to take part in literary exchanges.

It is interesting to note that though he was born during the dictatorship of General Ziaul Haq, he had been a progressive since his days as a student, after moving to Lahore, where one of his revolutionary comrades was Muhammad Aamir Rana, a columnist for Dawn. Rana and fellow journalist Shahzada Zulfiqar introduced me to Taj seven years ago — before that we had only known each other by name.

Taj grew up in a literary environment in Quetta, where Baloch, Pashtun, Hazara, Punjabi, and Sindhi literary figures sat together to write and discuss local literature. In the early 2000s, Taj and his friends were close to teachers Saba Dashtiari, Behram Ghouri, and Sharafat Abbas of the University of Balochistan, where he studied.

Ghouri, who taught at the journalism department of the University of Balochistan, once told me, “At the time, a Baloch would write in Balochi, a Pashtun in Pashto, Hazara in Hazaragi, and others in Brahui, Persian, Punjabi, and Sindhi while sitting together in one group. This is what defined Quetta’s literary community. However, with the deteriorating security situation, all that is gone.”

Hazaras are among many groups targeted, bombed and killed in Pakistan. Their imambargahs and markets have come under attack by banned sectarian outfit Lashar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). The community has been ghettoised into two neighbourhoods — Marriababad and Hazara town, situated on the eastern and western ends of Quetta. They are often targeted if they leave their communities.

Despite all these challenges and threats, Taj often visited his friends from the literary community in Sunni-dominated areas, much to the surprise of those friends. He eventually stopped his visits at the behest of his very worried friends who urged him to be cautious.

I once asked him how he stepped out of Marriabad when sectarian violence was at its peak. “I used to wear masks and a muffler over my face to cover my Hazara facial features, and a helmet,” he told me. “I wore the helmet not to protect my head while riding the bike, but to hide my facial features!”

Ever since I joined this newspaper, I have written about Hazara killings, and Hazara lives lost far too soon, much like Mohammed Hanif’s Baloch friends who die too young. Sometimes, I would complain to Taj that there wasn’t a single Hazara I had written about — including obituaries, who had died a natural death. Many of them are buried in the Bahist-e-Zainab cemetery in Marriabad and were killed in acts of sectarian violence.

I told him of my wish that someday, I’d be able to write about a Hazara who died a natural death, not by bullet, bomb, nor road accident. I said I was done writing over and over about deaths due to violence.

Sometimes, it felt as if he and I were only friends in the shaam (evening). We had never taken each other seriously, because most of our conversations were during the shaam time. I remember vividly when I told him this, he smiled. When he smiled wide, and later dissolved into laughter, his eyes closed in mirth.

I would realise much later that I would indeed be writing about a Hazara who died a natural death, that too a good friend, after paying my last respects at his grave.

As I sat down to write Taj’s obituary, his vivid smiling face did not appear. That is gone, like his soul, forever.