A LIFE BEYOND LIFE
Published in The Daily Times, 4th January 2012
An accounting firm is not the sort of eyrie one would have associated with such eagle-eyed highflyers. And yet from that first floor of the Karachi office of A.F. Ferguson & Co. in Ralli Square flew a chatter of young chartered accountants, notably Zia Mahmud who excelled as an international bridge player, Humayun Mufti whose name became synonymous with automotive manufacturing, and Khurshid Hadi and Salmaan Taseer who in precarious partnership established their own firm that today ranks at par with the firm they quit in the early 1970s.
The fledgling firm that Salmaan set up was a vehicle; his true destination was something else. He wanted to become a politician and in time a national figure. But for that he needed a constituency. As the only son of a widowed English mother who chose to live in her adopted country, Salmaan had no capital except brains and good looks. As a salaried Chartered Accountant, the only numbers he could count upon were in corporate Balance Sheets, not electoral rolls.
In 1970, pessimists who could not see beyond the end of their noses saw no future for Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s fledgling Pakistan People’s Party. Optimists who could look into the future saw an opportunity in the political turmoil that swirled around the 1970 elections, and more so in its aftermath. Salmaan joined the PPP and offered Mr Bhutto all that he possessed – his professional acumen. He became the Treasurer of the Karachi/Sindh chapter of the PPP.
Gradually, he moved closer to the epicentre of power, but never reached close enough to be considered at par with those second-stringers chosen by Mr Bhutto to become PPP leaders in their home provinces – Ch Aitzaz Ahsan in the Punjab, Kamal Azfar in Sindh, Hayat M. Sherpao in the then NWFP.
Salmaan then deployed his formidable skill as a writer (the legacy of his father Dr M.D. Taseer) and in 1980 published a belated homage to Mr Z.A. Bhutto. Salmaan described it as a ‘political biography’. It was the sort of book that Mr Bhutto might have written about himself, had he not been so absorbed being himself.
Salmaan felt closer in age and intellect with the next generation of Bhuttos and perhaps it was predictable that when he did finally gain prominence in politics it would be through fealty to Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto. On her account, he suffered solitary confinement during Zia’s time in the infamous catacombs near the Alamgiri gate of the Lahore Fort. He remained for months in a window-less trap that had a hole in the ground to remind its occupant that he was a human captive, a notch above being an animal. When at last Salmaan emerged, he recounted how as he took his first bath after months of privation, the dirt had become so caked around his body that it came away in his hands, ‘like a suit of armour’.
Salmaan made his political career the flagpole of his life. Once he had taken that decision, every act of his - whether in public as Leader of the Opposition in the Punjab Assembly or later as Governor of the Punjab, or in private through his multifarious business interests - became like a pennant, visible to the world. His public persona and his private identity became fused, intertwined, almost indistinguishable, until both were slain simultaneously on 4th January 2011.
In the fifty years since we first met in the 1960s in that accounting office in Karachi, I found myself weaving in and out of Salmaan’s life, witnessing if not attending every significant event in his life – his marriage, the establishment of his firm in collaboration with KPMG, the birth of children, the publication of his book, his release from incarceration, his swearing-in as Governor of the Punjab, and in the end his funeral. At times, I felt I was a sherpa to his Tenzing. I encouraged him on his way to the top and consoled him on his way down, but I never made it with him to the summit.
As I stood by his coffin as it lay in state in the Durbar Hall of Governor’s House that doleful January morning, I could not help wondering how anything - however solid the wood – could contain such a vibrant being.
For those of us who knew him, Salmaan has left behind a volume of memories, witty quotes enough to fill a handbook, wads of material that would occupy a Gibbon to complete all those books that he had planned one day to write himself. Our history would be the poorer were they were to die prematurely, like him.
It is a truism that we must all die. But the goal in life, as someone said, is not to live forever. The true goal is to create, as Salmaan did every day of his cruelly shortened life, something that will live forever. |
