My earliest memory of Khaled Ahmed is from 1986 when I landed at The Nation's reporting room. The newspaper had just been launched; I was still at Punjab University pursuing a masters, and a few hours of work after classes got me a sorely needed Rs1,500 per month.
The office floor was partitioned with cardboard walls with glass windows. The reporting room was adjacent to the editorial room, which had smaller cabins. Every day, I would see this tall, good-looking man in his forties wearing a khaddar shalwar-kameez stride in and occupy the cabin right next to the reporting room. We could see him through the glass, his chair facing away from the reporter's den.
We used typewriters at the time. He didn't. He used a fountain pen to write the editorial, which would then be typed up by a secretary. He would check for any typos or make any final changes, and the final copy would be typed. The entire first week I spent at the paper, I didn't know his name. I did notice, however, that he generally kept to himself and, while working, was almost oblivious to everything else.
He smoked Princeton cigarettes in a strange kind of way, lighting one and stubbing it out after a few puffs, almost like he considered smoking a delinquency and disliked the fact that he smoked. His ashtray was invariably full of crumpled, barely smoked cigarettes. Come the oranges season, he would walk into the office holding a polythene bag full of kinoos, which he would eat intermittently with great relish. But I get ahead of myself. First, the name.
I don't remember whether I asked or just overheard his name. He was the paper's Joint Editor and his name was Khaled Ahmed, Khaled with an "e", not "i" and Ahmed with an "e", not "a". He was particular, and I understood that sensitivity, because I also can't stand someone writing my name with an "I" instead of an "E". But I have again digressed.
He did speed-read what I had written and told me to go and clear my mental cobwebs before thinking of writing. Lose the flourish, I remember him telling me. Be clear
Back in The Nation's reporting room, I had almost no interaction with K for the first two, three months. He rarely, if ever, came to the reporting room and we, or at least I, almost never went to the editorial room. One day though, in the flush of youth and having done well at university, I got it in my head that I should write columns.
Humility doesn't come easy at that age and I just walked into K's office and (horror of horrors!) while he was still busy writing his editorial in long pen strokes. He didn't even notice me, and I beat a hasty retreat. Later the same day, after I saw that he was done and would leave on the dot as he always did, I hurried back to his office. I am not sure how I began the conversation but somehow muttered barely legible sentences that were supposed to convey my desire to write columns and share my wisdom with the rest of the world.
He listened to me with some evident degree of amusement. I wasn't even sure if he would respond. But if I recall correctly, he asked me if I had anything meaningful to say, something along the lines of "And what would you like to write about?" I didn't have a readymade answer to that query, my sense of importance dissipating rapidly.
Subsequently, I did write something involving Ben Jonson's Volpone as a metaphor for Darwin knows what social aspect of our life. Whatever tawdry treatment I meted out to Jonson must have made K shudder. But he did speed-read it and told me to go and clear my mental cobwebs before thinking of writing. Lose the flourish, I remember him telling me. Be clear.
A stream of intellectuals would come to visit Khaled Ahmed, of which I remember the late Shoaib Hashmi, Abdullah Hussain, Ahmed Bashir, Munoo Bhai, Intizar Hussain, Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, Hamza Alavi, K K Aziz, Dr Mubarik Ali and many others. K K Aziz brought his essays to K which he published in The Frontier Post
Full of large doses of literature at the time, I filed K away as a man who didn't think much of literature and wanted me to write banal stuff. Little did I know that K was a literature man! As I write these lines, I shiver at my youthful stupidity even though, in fairness to myself, later in life I would often laugh with K about the rubbish I had presented to him!
I left The Nation after about a year. That was also the end of my "journalism" at the time. Fast forward to 1990. Having first tried teaching English at a college in Sialkot and then realising that teaching wasn't for me, I was floating around like a speck in our dusty metropolis when I met Mohammad Malick, an old colleague and friend from The Nation days. Malick was working as Chief Reporter at the Lahore edition of The Frontier Post. "How about you come and work at FP," Malick asked me. I said, "Of course!"
K had moved to FP by then where the late Zafar Samdani was the editor and K led the op-ed section. I started working at FP, first with the reporting team and later at the features section before being asked by K to join him on the editorial team. Samdani Sahib had left FP by then and K was running the paper. The two years he was there were the years that I got to know him.
There were four of us, I (the chhota), K, Abbas Rashid and Imtiaz Alam. We would have the editorial meeting at 1100. K would assign the topics to us and we would start working. By then we had proceeded to computers, as had K. The fountain pen was gone as were his longhand drafts. As a typist, K had mastered the single-finger stroke using his right index finger. And believe me, he was fast!
I realised how humble Khaled Ahmed was. Don't get me wrong. He was no pushover. He had the courage of his convictions and for the most part he was always in a different lane when it came to issues of nationalism and the Pakistani predilection for "selective amnesia" to use Ernest Renan's phrase
Abbas bhai, an absolute gem and a fabulous thinker in his own right, was the slowest of us. I actually managed to work both index fingers and developed some speed and the ability to not look at the qwerty. Imtiaz sahib was okay. A stream of intellectuals would come to visit K, of which I remember the late Shoaib Hashmi, Abdullah Hussain, Ahmed Bashir, Munoo Bhai, Intizar Hussain, Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, Hamza Alavi, K K Aziz, Dr Mubarik Ali and many others. K K Aziz brought his essays to K which he published in FP. That compilation was later published by Najam Sethi under the title Murder of History. Years later, it was one of the books I found on the table of the librarian at the main library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I was working with the late Stephen Cohen as a Ford Scholar.
When I actually got to know K, I realised how humble he was. Don't get me wrong. He was no pushover. He had the courage of his convictions and for the most part he was always in a different lane when it came to issues of nationalism and the Pakistani predilection for "selective amnesia" to use Ernest Renan's phrase. During the first Gulf War, K fell afoul of most Left intellectuals because he argued that Saddam Hussain had played a disastrous hand. That argument was reflected in his editorials. I remember having many discussions with him at the time. He stood firm and he was right.
We got together again in 1995, this time at The Friday Times where K was also running the Urdu weekly, Aajkal. This association would last until 2009, even when I was travelling and doing fellowships in the United States. These were also the years that I got another mentor, Najam Sethi, one of the best editors I have worked with, but more than that an elder and a friend who has continued to indulge me even when I have brazenly picked up books from his library in acts of daylight robbery!
I can go on about K. There are just too many memories. At Daily Times, K and I shared office space, our desks diagonally across. The only time he was NEVER to be disturbed was when he was writing. He would knock off a leader in half-hour flat, the magic coordination between his single index finger that roamed the entire keyboard and his structured thoughts on the topic. In my life I have never seen a more prolific writer who could so consistently produce such high-quality work.
At TFT, K used to write a column Word about Words. It was fascinating, a mix of philology and etymology. At DT, I said to NS that K should write a similar column for DT and he did. I remember going to Washington DC for a conference and, as usual, went to Kramer Books where I found HL Mencken's The American Language and picked it up for K. He loved it.
Khaled Ahmed was a rare polymath in a world given to specialisation, to knowing more and more about less and less. He was a prolific reader and wrote on a vast range of topics. But he was also very human, and I had many opportunities to see that side of him, especially when he talked about his daughter and his son
K was also my reason to get to know the '69 Batch of Foreign Service, K's batch when he joined the service. That's how I got to know brilliant diplomats like Aziz Khan, Riaz Mohammad Khan, Tariq Fatemi, Shafqat Kakakhel. Over the years, they have all been compassionate elders, guides and friends. Another foreign service officer, though senior to K, was the late Basit Haqqani, clear-headed intellectual, writer and diplomat.
K was a rare polymath in a world given to specialisation, to knowing more and more about less and less. He was a prolific reader and wrote on a vast range of topics. But he was also very human, and I had many opportunities to see that side of him, especially when he talked about his daughter and his son. I remember how agonised he was when he went to the Wilson Centre as a Pakistan fellow. His worry: his ailing mother. He kept saying to me that he dreaded being away from her for 10 months.
While away from Pakistan, he wrote the book, "Sectarian War: Pakistan's Sunni-Shia Violence and its links to the Middle East." Here's his dedication: To Najam, who 'sent' me to the Woodrow Wilson Center, to Maryam-Eman and Taimur, who gave me emotional sustenance, and to my mother, who gave me her word that she won't die before my return, and kept it.
Nothing encompasses the big man better than this dedication. My dearest Mentor, rest in peace. You will be sorely missed.