THE SENSIBLE BALOCH

Dear Sajid,
I received the first section of your novel-in-progress and I am writing to give you feedback as I promised all those years ago.
Like most struggling novelists, you are late with this. I received it four years after your death. A friend you had shared it with, forwarded it to me. We sometimes talked about the problems of writing novels and joked that most novels die in the third chapter. You have come up with the ultimate twist: rather than letting your novel die in chapter three, you killed the author.
As we writers know, sometimes it’s easy to start a sentence but we struggle to finish it. When I say you killed the author, I don’t know whether I am talking fact or fiction or even common sense. We also know that it’s a bad writing practice to start making lists when describing a dear one’s departure from this world. But I’ll go ahead and list all the possibilities, although they all lead to the same conclusion: that you are not here anymore to take this feedback, accept it, reject it, or just laugh at it.
A. You met a tragic accident in a city called Uppsala in Sweden, you fell and drowned in a shallow river called Fyris.
B. You self-exited, as the kids say these days. You wrote yourself out of your own life’s story by drowning in a cold river in Sweden.
C. You were abducted, disappeared and killed by the very forces you ran away from, because you had reasonable doubt that these people one day might kill you. Because they had abducted and killed your uncle and then his son and many others you knew, we knew, many more we didn’t know.
Initially, some of our friends did try to treat the genre of your death as a murder mystery, but there’s been utter disbelief and such overwhelming grief that we wouldn’t speculate on the circumstances of your exit, and talk about the story that you were trying to tell, and the story you were living.
As I promised, I’ll give you some constructive feedback, although you might turn around and say that it’s a bit late, that you don’t need it anymore, because you are up there in the heavens, giving your own feedback to Allah saaien about the big bad book of our lives.
Amongst friends, when we joked that you were the most sensible Baloch young man around, we weren’t really joking. You had one clear mission in life: you didn’t want to become a missing person. You were adamant that you didn’t want to be abducted, tortured and then have your body dumped on the roadside.
You had reasons to be apprehensive. Many of your friends and relatives had gone missing, sometimes for years, and then returned as dead bodies, with little slips of paper with their names in the pockets of their tattered clothes. Their torturers and killers were human enough that they wanted these bodies to be returned to their families. A body dumped on the roadside was an act of mercy, permission to mourn and move on. “The missing haunt me more than the dead,” you often said.
Sometimes, it seemed you weren’t really scared by the prospect of being abducted and put in a dark dungeon, you were wary of the pointlessness of the whole thing. How would Baloch struggle benefit from your abduction? How would the life of a poor Baloch improve if you let them burn your body with cigarettes, like they often did with the missing persons? And, of course, you knew that if you were to end up a missing person, your abductors were not likely to give you books to read or a notebook to scribble notes for your novel.
You did the most sensible thing that any young Baloch man should do, at the first hint of trouble: you left the country abruptly, without any elaborate goodbyes, in a hurriedly packed suitcase. Being alive and homesick and sad in exile was obviously a better choice than to become a missing person in your own land.
Not becoming a missing person was your first mission in life. Another one was that you wanted to write a novel. Many of us journalists harbour the desire that one day we’ll write a book. You weren’t sure what novel, but whenever we talked, you said you were working on one, that it was difficult but it was coming together. When I repeated that joke about novels dying in the third chapter, you said you weren’t there yet, so you were safe.
Four years after your death (still not sure if to call it an accident, a suicide or a disappearance and murder, so let’s just stick to editorially neutral ‘death’) I received the opening chapters of your unnamed novel. You had emailed it to a friend with a note that if anything happened to you, he should share these chapters with your daughter.
But yaar Sajid, you were a very sensible young man and had made sure that nothing would happen to you. You had made sure that you would not go missing. That your mutilated body would not be found on the roadside. You had gone far, far away from your beloved Balochistan, where these things happened and continue to happen.
You might interrupt me here and say, ‘Stop talking about my life and death and stick to your feedback.’ But as one of your favourite writers, Vladimir Lenin, said, ‘What is to be done?’ Your novel remains unfinished, the book of your life has ‘The End’ written over it.

For feedback, the first thing I want to say is that, if you had written your last days into your novel, no reader, no editor would have believed it. You didn’t want to go missing. You did. In Sweden of all the places. You didn’t want to end up a mutilated body. You were found in a shallow river, 50 days after your disappearance. We never got a last glimpse of your face. I write to conjure up that not yet disappeared face, brooding but about to break into a half smile, sparkling eyes, not yet obliterated by the weight of an obscure European river’s water.
Before you did the sensible thing and left Pakistan, you were mostly like us, the crucial difference being that you were Baloch. Your career path was similar to many Baloch young men of your generation. You got involved in nationalist politics as a student, joined BSO [Baloch Students Organisation]-Azad, became its information secretary for a while, and started a magazine.
You were a misfit in nationalist circles, as you refused to follow blindly, you questioned everything. The leadership sometimes described you as a fifth columnist when you disagreed with them publicly. On Baloch militancy, you often angered your comrades when you said, “Yeh ghareebon ke bachay marwaayein gey [They’ll get the children of the poor killed.]”
Then you disentangled yourself from politics and became a journalist, first an assistant editor and reporter with The News and then with the international wire agency Reuters. You were amongst that endangered species of Baloch men who, if educated and had some kind of compulsion for plainspeaking, were likely to get abducted, go missing for years and for their body to be found on the roadside.
You had lived their stories. You had covered these stories and you were determined that you wouldn’t become one such story. You were generous while sharing your knowledge about Balochistan. You betrayed no grand passion, there was no bitterness, and you had hard facts and cold analysis.
When you became a reporter, you left your nationalist politics outside the newsroom and dazzled us with an occasional scoop. I remember that Karachi morning when we woke up to your byline on the front page, with a cracker of a story. Gwadar Deputy Commissioner Abdul Rehman Dashti goes for dinner at a friend’s house. An argument happens, the host shoots the deputy commissioner, calmly walks off and disappears into thin air.
You named the man as Imam Bheel, a drug baron whose name appeared on the American FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list. You managed to tell his story in the most matter-of-fact way. Two old friends. A dinner. A shooting. And here’s the name of the man you can’t catch. At that time, not many journalists knew who Imam Bheel was. The readers can Google away and find who Bheel is because this really is not his story. It’s yours.
You also had that other uncommon disease amongst journalists. You had the book bug, one of those rare journalists who are found hunched over a book during their newsroom breaks. In conversations, you quoted Franz Kafka and Frantz Fanon and many Baloch writers we had never heard of.
Much later, you wrote in an essay from exile that you started drinking too much tea to get ulcers, because you read somewhere that Kafka had ulcers. You harboured the desire to go into exile because your literary hero Gabriel Garcia Marquez had. But you really didn’t want to go into exile, you were happy dreaming of exile. Then they came looking for you. And you didn’t hesitate. As we used to joke, you had seen this film too many times. You left.
There’s no point recounting the years of exile in Oman, UAE and Uganda where, for a while, you worked for a trucking company. You had said it’s a good job for a writer: between counting trucks and inspecting their tyres, you can read and write.
You called up one day and asked for Asma Jahangir’s phone number. Someone close to you had been abducted. I was surprised you didn’t have Asma Jahangir’s number, as she was the first port of call for the families of the missing. You said you were not interested in chasing missing people and you wanted to study and teach the Balochi language.
Your exile dreams finally came true. You got asylum in Sweden, were about to start a Masters degree on the Balochi language, got a side gig as the director of a Balochi dictionary, reunions with your wife and children only months away.

And then you disappeared.
You’ll agree that not many writers can pull off a twist like that and get away with it.
You had one purpose in life, not to become a missing person. And now you were on the list of Swedish Missing Persons. How do people go missing in Sweden? Voluntarily, we found out. People get bored with their lives, throw away their phones and credit cards and disappear into the mountains.
If you had gone missing in Pakistan, we would know where to look. We wouldn’t find you, but we would make Panaflexes with your pictures, petition the high courts, a group of family and friends would gather outside the press club, there would be candles, press statements, protests. But what do we do when someone goes missing in Sweden?
We prayed and made lists. Here’s a list of possible scenarios that we drew up after your disappearance:
Fifty days after our wishful speculations and prayers, when your body was found, we had nothing but bewildered tears. In their grief, your family and friends were responsible citizens of Pakistan — they didn’t even once accuse Pakistan’s establishment. Some of your friends speculated, but the family was asked to and gave it in writing that all they wanted was to bring their boy back home and bury him in his village.
You probably didn’t know this, we definitely didn’t know, that you were so important that the family needed security clearance before bringing your body back. Pledges were given, good records as good citizens were presented but, for a whole month, you were not allowed to come back.
Never have we felt more helpless than when we left your body in a cold storage at an airport in Sweden and waited for someone in Islamabad to sign a paper. First, you were in a watery grave for 50 days and then in a makeshift morgue for more than a month. In Karachi’s sweltering heat, we shuddered with shame at one of our own lying in an airport cold storage.
As we have already established, you were a sensible man. You would have laughed at our shame: I am dead now so what does it matter what the temperature in the airport’s cold storage is? Who cares how many days have passed?
Sometimes, when a novel manages to survive the third chapter death, writers use flashbacks, again not a recommended device, but you, Sajid, haven’t left us much choice. Your life is one long flashback.
Before you became a stranded body at Stockholm Arlanda Airport’s cold storage facility, you reported on other Baloch bodies, their journeys. One of these stories was about Haji Razaq Sarbazi. You called it ‘Evolution of a Dead Body.’ Like you, like me, Sarbazi was also a journalist who wanted to write books. He worked for the Baloch daily Tawar and was abducted one day.
This was a good time for families of the missing, because they were allowed to speak up at press clubs, at the Karachi Arts Council, and at an occasional literature festival. There was a seminar going on about and by the families of missing people at Karachi Arts Council. Razzak’s family, five or six women, including two young girls, stood outside the hall, with folded-up banners. They were new to the role of being the family of a missing person, but they had learnt fast. They had got Panaflexes with Razzak’s picture, but they weren’t sure what to do with them — how to put them up, how to unfold them.
They had gone to the Karachi Press Club, the home of all the missing persons’ families, and someone had sent them to this seminar. They were invited in. They sat and listened for a while. Then they got up and said this is all very well for you to have seminars, but Razzak has been gone for three days. They were probably thinking what families of missing persons think in the first few days: that their man is not a missing person.
“Razzak just went to work and didn’t come back, there must have been some mistake, can we stop all these discussions and do something to bring him back?” his sister shouted at the people in the hall.
Surprisingly, it didn’t take Razzak long to come back. Three months later, a body was found in a sewerage near Surjani Town. The family was contacted, the family saw the body and declared that it wasn’t him. His face was so mutilated that they didn’t recognise him. While reporting the story for Reuters, you contacted the family and were relieved that it wasn’t our colleague Razzak.
Going back and forth on the story, you remembered that you had spent an evening with him, laughing your head off as he read you his Balochi translation of The Evolution of Mankind, as Razzak had invented his own Balochi expressions for complex anthropological terms.
One day you are laughing at someone’s bad translation, choking on smoke in a Lyari room, and on another, you are making calls to his family, to check if they have identified his body. There was confusion because two Haji Abdul Razzaks had been missing. Razzak’s family finally identified him from the few clothes left on his body. This is what you wrote in ‘Evolution of a Dead Body’:
“But I still think that Razzak’s sister and family must have had their moments of suspicion that the body they buried was really that of Haji Abdul Razzak Sarbazi or Haji Abdul Razzak Marri.” You said that those who abduct them “are kind enough to leave a note on the dumped bodies bearing the name of the victim, making it easy for the relatives to identify their loved ones and stop searching for them. This kindness worked for many years.” But now that more than one person of the same name are missing, the abductors “should also leave a photo of the victim along with the note bearing the name.”
It’s not surprising that your novel is set in Balochistan. As they say, you can take the boy out of Balochistan but…
In the beginning of your novel, in a hospital in Turbat, an angry crowd is gathering, trying to identify the bodies of the missing and dumped. The about-to-retire Medical Superintendent (MS) of the hospital is thinking of a business plan to set up an ice factory, to supply ice to the hospital’s overflowing morgue. Other workers at the hospital are hatching their business plans for using hospital ambulances as taxis for the dead and to buy donkeys. Maybe you didn’t have to write more of this novel because not much has changed.
Inside the hospital, mutilated bodies and business plans. Outside, an angry crowd wanting their dead back with some dignity. Only if we knew how this terrible, tragic story will end. Only if you, the master of deadly twists, were around to give a happy ending to this haunting story.g
The writer is the author of five novels, including the upcoming Rebel English Academy.
X: @mohammedhanif
Published in Dawn, EOS, November 10th, 2024