Salima Hashmi on her father Faiz Ahmed Faiz

It was love at first socks for poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Writer Mulk Raj Anand played the matchmaker. He helped Alys, whom he knew very well, choose a pair of socks for a friend who was preparing to go to England. She carried them with her to Amritsar. The friend turned out to be Faiz. The rest, as they say, is history. In this case, life-long mohabbat with arguably the most famous modern poet of the subcontinent who wrote passionately, memorably and tenderly about love, and not just revolution.

“She had come to look after her sister, who had been sick after confinement with the second baby,” says Salima Hashmi, daughter of Faiz and Alys, from her home in Lahore over Zoom. A yellow kilim hangs behind her; the bookcase is crammed with paints and brushes, her hand is stacked with bangles and her bright red watch adds a dash of colour.

“My father [was] teaching at the same institution where my uncle Taseer was the principal,” she says. “But Uncle didn’t approve because he thought my father was a bit of a loser — he was this sort of quiet dreamer, very self-effacing. His sister-in-law was this very vivacious, very pretty, very self-confident person. He thought it’d be a terrible match.”

Storyteller, torchbearer as an artist as well as memory-keeper, Salima’s two-volume memoir — ‘Waiting in the Wings’ and ‘Enter Stage Left’ — hit bookshops last month. A love letter to her parents, she explores her own life through the prism of art. “As my mother would say, it was love of Shakespeare and love of revolution that drew them together,” she says.

Alys had joined the Communist Party in London when she was 16. She passionately believed in India’s freedom and she was “no second fiddle”. She was fearless, never held her tongue and was a nurturer of rebellion in the family — especially for young women. Alys used to catch the train from Amritsar, Faiz from Lahore and they met in Jammu. Their courtship was in secret. Their decision to get married was met with opposition by Faiz’s mother, who lined up eligible cousins for him to marry instead. “They had to wait two years,” she says. The wedding took place in Srinagar, where there was a mushaira with several well-known poets in attendance, including Josh Malihabadi, and the nikah was performed by Sheikh Abdullah.

Salima with husband Shoaib Hashmi in ‘Balila’, a show that was taken off air by President Zia-ul-Haq himself for being too political, 1979.

The books alternate between being an intimate family memoir as well as the musings of an artist who was instrumental in shaping some of the brightest names from this region. The first part is dominated by her parents, and the second is her journey into adulthood, motherhood, art and being a teacher. It is no surprise that the cover art of both the books is by the talented Faiza Butt, who was her student.

Salima’s earliest memory is that of Partition. She was four-and-a-half; her English grandparents stayed for a year with them during this tumultuous time. “I heard a roar of the crowd, and climbed up to the windowsill. It was a warm afternoon. My mother was trying to get me to sleep,” she says. They had moved back to Lahore. Faiz had taken up the editorship of Pakistan Times sensing what was to come. They lived in flats that overlooked the Punjab Assembly.

“I saw this great crowd of people run down the Assembly steps, and the leader was waving a kirpan. Much later, I was told I had actually witnessed a very momentous event; Master Tara Singh had declared in the Punjab Assembly that they did not approve of the idea of Pakistan. He had led his followers out of the Assembly. It’s a kind of defining visual moment, if you like.”

It was the year she attended her first protest march, sitting at the back of a donkey, waving a white flag against the massacre of Sikhs in Murree. “No one really foresaw, from what I gathered then and later, that there would be ‘trouble’. It was supposed to be an amicable agreement between leaders. With the drawing of lines across a map, people would stay where they were. But what happened, of course, was totally different.”

This was the beginning of a journey where the white flag acquired significance in her life — whether it was advocating for peace between India and Pakistan or for Gaza. She writes evocatively of taking her students to India for a trip — a journey that changed the way they saw themselves and art.

Salima was born in Delhi, and read Premchand and Rajinder Singh Bedi. Yasser Arafat was her father’s friend and Faiz was deeply involved with the Palestine cause.

Is peace just a word, slightly quaint, and hopelessly out of date? “The real test comes when the times are bad,” she says. “Then you know whether what you truly believe in, [whether] you can stand up for it or not? Do you bend with that moment in the wind or do you stand firm? This is exactly the moment when things look very dark, when even cricketers forget that it’s a game and there’s something called sportsmanship… That is a time when you draw attention to the fact that this is not the day and that we have to work towards the day.”

Salima had a ringside view of Faiz’s politics, poetry and Pakistan. She writes heartbreakingly of her father’s arrest in 1951. It was “as if we had some disease that people were afraid to catch” and they were ostracised. “All of a sudden, it became a test of loyalty, of friendship.” She was eight. Her parents’ first concern, she writes, was the bottle of brandy, which they poured down the toilet before they let the police in. She describes visiting him. He was in solitary confinement in Lyallpur jail without a pencil or paper and trying to memorise his poems. She writes of the life-term prisoner who cooked and brought him his food — Faiz’s only conversation of the day. He used to make him tell stories and ate slowly so as to delay him from leaving and being alone again.

Life came full circle in 1981 when her husband Shoaib Hashmi was arrested. It was the Zia regime. She was told by her brother-in-law that they wanted to arrest her, but decided to punish both by arresting him. The administration had rounded up 400 of the important journalists and writers. It was the longest haul since the time of Ayub Khan. However, poet Habib Jalib hadn’t been arrested. It was bad for his reputation, she writes. So, he turned up at the police station to present himself. The police officer was busy on the phone, so Jalib jokingly asked him, “Do you know Zia has been removed?” That did the trick — he was promptly arrested.

While the experience of being isolated was the same, Salima writes about the period with lightness — of smuggling out an editorial for a friend in a coat, of learning how to drive from a student and of “escaping” the reality of their lives. Their phones were tapped. So, they devised a code for “liquid refreshments” — “Aa jao, shalgam gosht bana hai” [Come over today, we are having meat and turnips]. Years later, when it was her turn to be in the “family business” when the state of emergency was declared under General Musharraf, she used the same code to get liquid refreshments under house arrest. It came wrapped in Dawn, which they wanted too.

It is her irrepressible sense of humour that leaps off the screen, hums through the book — defiant, determined, a defence against oppression that is unmatched, laughter that shines through like hope. If Alys and Faiz were well matched with fire and passion, Salima writes tenderly of her own love story — of contentment with Shoaib, who shared this ability to find light, even if it wasn’t easy.

There are stories by the sack full — of Faiz getting his minder reinstated because he told him that he would be in bed by nine. He was whisked away to a midnight mushaira where the head of the police was in attendance. So, the next morning when he saw the note that Faiz was in bed by nine, he fired the guard. Faiz insisted it was unfair and that he must be reinstated. He was. Of ‘Madam’ Noor Jahan, with her golden voice and ada, who famously threatened to walk off stage as they said she couldn’t sing Faiz, of her generosity and her “voracious appetite for men”.

She once told her with a “naughty look”: “I like Hashmi sahib very much.” She repeated it. “I like Hashmi sahib very much, but I also like you very much.” It was clear, says Salima, that what she meant was: “I can have him if I want to, but I am not making a move on your husband because of you.” But she did it with such an air and such wonderful style, writes Salima, that she couldn’t take offence.

She writes of the time when Zia-ul-Haq’s grandson was doing a dissertation at an American university and wanted to examine the impact of Zia on artists. His family were great admirers of Faiz, he told her, and that his mother used to play him ‘Hum Dekhenge’ as a child because she liked it. This anthem for resistance is believed to have been written against Zia. Salima told him it wasn’t. It was composed for the Iranian revolution — something most people don’t know. They are told as qissas — the ones that are repeated each time — with a sense of impishness that anyone who has met Salima Apa, as she is known universally, will vouch for.

Her memoirs paint the cultural landscape of her country — as she writes about the politics of the National College of Arts (NCA), working for PTV, where they poked fun of everything and everyone. Of living through the Zia regime — of being an artist where Roshanara Begum could not sing in public because she was “too Hindu”, of the infiltration of the NCA by Jamaat-e-Islami to put teachers in place, of the mistrust of people, of lectures being monitored and friends turning informers, when intimate gatherings in their homes were no longer safe, the public hanging in Lahore, of being baited by students so that she could be reported on.

“You had to watch what you were saying and still had to teach the principles of artistic freedoms, encouraging students to examine, to explore, to be fearless, all the time when you were deeply worried,” she writes. It is in finding space to be free, and still be brave and true enough to smuggle in resistance, of finding hope — that makes her second book a manual for survival during authoritarianism, and essential reading.

Read her memoirs for Faiz and remember it for an artist who has resisted, refused to bend and always found hope. As his friend Munnu Bhai told her, “Maine Faiz sahib se poocha ki saans bhi nahin liya ja raha. Is haalat main hum kya kar sakte hain [It is difficult to even breathe. What can we do in these circumstances].” He said: “Ishq kar sakte hain… ishq karo.”

Or in Salima’s words: “This is the moment for art. This is the moment for music. This is the moment for film… we remind people that they are human. That is what our job is.”