In Multan, in the south of the Punjab province, journalist and writer Masood Asher learned of the death of his old friend. He wrote a memory of Mustafa.

He thought back to the year 1952, when Mustafa was preparing for his final master’s exams in English literature. He had started his studies at the University of Allahabad, where he was known as Tegh Allahabadi, a young emerging poet, who had adopted the name of his hometown, Allahabad, as his poetic pen name.

But when Mustafa moved to Lahore in neighboring Pakistan, a new country created for Muslims on the Indian subcontinent after the end of British colonial rule, Allahabadi was no longer the nickname that suited him, and “moving” didn’t describe not correctly what had taken place. arrived. In fact, Mustafa was recovering from a suicide attempt in Allahabad, when his elder brother, Mujtaba, came to the city and took him to Pakistan in 1951 – another moving piece among the hordes of people deciding where to live on each side. hastily drawn borders between India and Pakistan.

In 1952, Mustafa was living in Lahore, a city picking up the pieces after the bloody aftermath of Partition. The havelis of the city’s wealthy Hindus were abandoned and divided into homes for the masses of Muslim refugees who had descended on the city from across the border. Rich men had arrived in Lahore penniless, a story that was repeated across the subcontinent.

The city had become home to many of the new country’s writers, poets, lawyers, artists and musicians. The intellectuals of Lahore – children of eminent citizens, students of Dyal Singh College and Mayo School of Arts, future lawyers and revolutionary poets – met in cafes. For some of these young men coming of age in the 1950s, the environment was heady; they were in the company of the greats, and the greats in the making. For others, like the poet Sahir Ludhianvi, Lahore seemed to have lost its luster in the years after Partition.

Two of the men who then wandered around Lahore and its cafes were Masood Asher and Mustafa Zaidi. Masood had first met Mustafa at a peace conference organized by the Communist Party in Lucknow, and a chance meeting in Lahore had rekindled their acquaintance – and a long-standing friendship.

The two of them – in their early twenties, heads full of worldly literature and still free of responsibilities – took to the city streets. Mustafa would wear his signature outfit of Khaddar kurtas and Peshawari sandals. They strolled through Anarkali Bazaar, which housed some of the best bookstores in Lahore offering English literature and magazines from around the world. Mustafa and Masood would sometimes browse and steal magazines like The Atlantic.

Their favorite place was Cheney’s Lunch Home, where Mustafa ordered his favorite dish: brain masala. “The name (of the establishment) was inappropriate as it was open all day and served hot and cold drinks and meals,” wrote historian KK Aziz. It was “the only respectable eating place in the area where local food was available.”

Despite the distractions of Lahore, the bookstores and the demands of studying for his final master’s exams, for Mustafa there was only one refrain: Saroj.

Mustafa was depressed, torn with anguish over the wife he had left behind in Allahabad: a young student named Saroj Bala Saran, daughter of a lawyer and future judge of the Allahabad High Court. He had met Saroj at Ewing Christian College and fallen in love with her. Soon after, Mustafa wrote a poem titled “S,” stirring up campus gossip, although no one knew if Saroj felt the same way about him.

A potential interfaith romance in the months before Partition, as divisions between Hindus and Muslims simmered across India, seemed a doomed prospect. But a man like Mustafa, in the heady days of his first love, may not have even managed to achieve this goal.

In Lahore, more than a thousand kilometers away and in another country far from Allahabad, Mustafa was still pining for Saroj.

His friends tried to give him as much time as possible, sometimes spending the night in his room. Mustafa sometimes cried out her name with such torment that it almost felt like he was running for the door in desperation. Perhaps his friends didn’t understand his anguish until they saw a photo of the woman who had been the source of Mustafa’s obsession. Masood exclaimed dramatically: “For such beauty, let Zaidi cry. »

Just when his friends were beginning to think that a heartbroken Mustafa was coming out of the depths of his misery, one day he asked Masood to come over early the next morning. It was a strange request but made so insistently that Masood arrived quickly. Mustafa had also requested the same from Dr Zawwar Hussain Zaidi, an academic and relative who lived in the city.

When the men arrived, they found Mustafa unconscious.

Few people had a car then, and Dr. Zaidi was one of them, so they were able to quickly take Mustafa to a clinic, which refused to admit him because it seemed like it was a medico-legal case . He had clearly taken a large quantity of drugs in order to commit suicide. He had to be taken to a public hospital, where his stomach was pumped.

“Clearly he did it on purpose,” Masood reflected years later. “Love is such a thing that a person is willing to give up his life.”

This was not Mustafa’s first suicide attempt.

Mustafa Zaidi grew up in Allahabad, where he was the rebel in his conservative Shiite family. He gained fame early in the colleges and universities of Allahabad as an outstanding student and a talented poet. While studying for a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Allahabad University, his teacher KK Mehrotra declared him a prodigy – a “person of exceptional and extraordinary abilities”.

Zanjeereinhis first collection of poetry, published in 1947 while he was a student, was prefaced by the famous poet Firaq Gorakhpuri. He was invited to recitals and often frequented poets and writers in Allahabad.

Mustafa’s second collection Roshni was published in 1949. When it was reissued, Mustafa wrote in the preface that “…these poems remind me of the days in Allahabad when happiness was truly happiness and sorrow was sorrow.”

But as the world saw his academic success and his rise as a young poet of some renown, Mustafa seemed to be struggling.

He attempted suicide. He was taken to the doctor and his life was saved.

Mustafa’s friends cruelly thought it was an attempt to attract attention, although it could have masked something else. But at the time, there was a lack of understanding about mental health problems and their treatment. It is unclear whether he ever received psychiatric care, and it is unlikely that there were any developed facilities in Allahabad at the time.

After completing his bachelor’s degree, Mustafa stayed at the University of Allahabad and chose to enroll in the master’s program to specialize in English literature. He made another suicide attempt, this time by taking an overdose of opium. Friends visited his house to inquire about him and learned that he had been taken to Kalon Hospital in Allahabad, where he was currently between life and death.

Mustafa then left university altogether. He stayed home to recover.

Then one day, the people of Allahabad discovered that Mustafa had left the city and gone to Pakistan. “It was strange,” mused his former classmate Muhammad Aqeel. “A person who didn’t even talk about Pakistan, how did he get there?

Mustafa wrote to friends that he had been forced to leave and would return to Allahabad.

It must have been traumatic, like death, to have to leave the literary milieu of Allahabad, which had nurtured Mustafa and given him literary partners, his introduction to communism and progressive politics, only to suddenly have nothing left. from all this to Pakistan, to leave India as a whole.

“I arrived in Pakistan at the end of 1951,” Mustafa later wrote. “Over time, everything that had passed became a memory and a scar. My state was such that time had stopped for me. I was neither happy about the day to come nor angry about the day that had just passed. If I was waiting for anything, it was the letter from (cousin) Shamim of Lucknow.

After arriving in Pakistan, one of Mustafa’s poems was published in Nakhata magazine based in Allahabad. It was titled “Duur ki Awaz” (A Voice from Far Away) and became very popular in the city. The poem is inexorably sad and reads like a lament of someone who has left everything behind, like these lines:

Call me
Will the morning dew
do you still remember me?
Does the moonlight always call
the painful threshold of my house?

His state of mind – and his suicide – is something Mustafa has talked about for a long, long time. It was often in the background, even though it seemed at odds with his apparent success and functional home life.

As Mustafa grew up, he invoked the specter of death to such an extent that it became part of his work. In the days following his death, these frequent mentions of suicide may have seemed disturbing to outsiders. But for Mustafa’s friends and family, this was not at all unusual. Talking about death was seen by Mustafa’s friends and family as a joke, an allegory and poetic license. They were used to it because Mustafa, who could be stubborn and stubborn, often used suicide as a threat. He made jokes about death and threatened his friends with suicide if they didn’t do what he said. Sometimes he carried vitamins and told his friends they were poison. One of his friends had nicknamed him his takia kalam – a signature phrase. Mustafa referred to his habit in an essay on the characteristics of Urdu poetry.

“…hum logon ka haal yeh hai ke hum ne marne ki dhamkiyan de de ko (sic) logon ko bore kar diya hai. Khudkhushi ke naam par ab koi mehboob razi nahin hota. (…It has reached the point that people are bored with these threats of suicide. Now, no lover acquiesces in the name of suicide.)

In letters to his friends, he recalls periods of melancholy and despair. “I have been completely beside myself over the past year; I am hiding in a dark place inside myself, no one can reach me here and I am not leaving it,” he wrote in a letter to Josh Malihabadi in 1969, defending himself against the claim of Josh that he had changed.

Excerpted with permission from Society Girl: A story of sex, lies and scandals, Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan, Roli Books.