| How does one write an obituary for part of one’s own life? And that is in essence what one would be doing if one was to attempt an elegy on Baji Kishwar, for in more ways than one can recall at short notice, she was an integral part of my life as she was of those whose lives she touched with her self-effacing kindness and instinctive understanding. |
| My relationship with Baji Kishwar grew like a tendril, rooted in a blood kinship but one which over the years secured itself and blossomed at different levels. As her nephew ( my father Col. Waheeduddin was her elder first cousin), I was the recipient of such scant attention as busy aunts spare for distant nephews. My recollections of her when I was still a child and she was in her prime are of a fragrant, ineffably well-groomed presence at family congregations, wafting in and out of one’s immature consciousness.[EXTRACT] |
Read at Al Hamra Arts Com,plex 28 April 1998, and printed in THE BARK OF A PEN (2001). |
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