Jahanzeb Tipu: Obituarising a Man Who Refuses to Die
Abbas Zaidi

In some cases, life and death do not exist in binary opposition because death may be a form of life and vice versa.
There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE
There was – and then no more of THEE and ME.
–Omar Khayyám

I often stay in the classroom for a while after teaching. During this time, I review the lesson, respond to emails, or make or receive calls. Over a year ago, after explaining a concept and assigning a related task, I sat back down.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I ignored it, as usual. After class, I sat in the chair. It felt like a perfect escape from the world around me, given that I had been under intense stress for some time. I thought about calling Jahanzeb Tipu. I took out my phone. The missed call was from him. I called him.
“Your phone couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. What a relief, Tipu!” He asked me if everything was okay on my side. I wanted to tell him what I had been going through. But I held back. “You called when I was thinking about you. You will live to be a hundred years old!”
He said he had something to tell me. “I hope everything is fine on your end, Tipu.” “I have been diagnosed with cancer.” He comforted me. He said I need not feel so upset. “Everyone dies. If it’s God’s will, I am fine with it. I am not afraid of death. I will be happy to be with God.”
I first saw Tipu in Old Anarkali, where we lived five minutes apart. On that day, I was walking to the bazaar with my uncle. He came riding down on his bicycle, wearing white shorts and a white T-shirt. He pulled up close to my uncle and acted as if he had saved him from being hit. He looked very excited as he greeted my uncle. He must have been eight or nine years old, perhaps less. I was around 18. After blurting out excited details about his new bicycle, he rode away. “Don’t ride too fast!” my uncle shouted after him. I remember telling my uncle, “If you put this kid in a dark room, his face will glow.” He smiled.
I had not seen him before, so I asked. “Don’t you know him? He is Biloo’s brother.” “No wonder!” I called him “Biloo Bhai” because he was my uncle’s friend and roughly his age. After meeting him, I would almost always say to whoever was present, “If Biloo Bhai visits Hollywood, they will cast him as a hero!” Occasionally, I would add, “No, he is too noble to appear in a film.”
After that, I did not think about Tipu. I should have met him several times. He lived in a large house with his extended family. One of his relatives was Khalid Mustafa, a respected local politician who was elected to the council several times. I supported him and visited his home several times. I met Biloo Bhai several times and listened obediently to his kind words and advice, but I never met Tipu.
Time passed, and I enrolled at Government College, Lahore, for an MA. One evening, after supper, as I was trying to make sense of King Lear, my uncle shouted from the street, “Tipu wants to meet you!” I walked to the street and was reminded how quickly time passes. A handsome, tall young man stood there. My uncle left.
With his eyes cast down and his voice unsure, he said, “Can you be my tutor?” I did not want to. I made several excuses. He left without a word, but two days later he returned and spoke in the same tone, this time adding, “Bhai, can you be my tutor?” It continued for some time until my uncle asked, “Will you refuse if Biloo approaches you with a request?” I said no, but I meant yes. I had no desire to teach anyone because, with my Urdu-medium background, I had been struggling to make sense of a very ordinary primer, A Short History of English Literature by Sir Ifor Evans. My classmates would discuss how interesting they found the multi-volume The Pelican History of English Literature, David Daiches’ A Critical History of English Literature (four volumes), or Legouis and Cazamian’s A History of English Literature. In contrast, the first page of Sir Ifor Evans’ little book demoralised me immensely, as most sentences were beyond my comprehension, even with a dictionary. Moreover, I had no idea what expressions like (still on page 1) “Norman Conquest,” “the Angels and Saxons and Jutes,” “Lebensraum,” and “Continental Germanic homes” meant. I thought I had made a blunder by opting for English literature.
Tipu came again, but this time I asked him to return the following day with his books. He was taking an FA (equivalent to A levels). I spent a couple of hours with him, explaining a poem and an essay. After that, I politely asked him not to return. He nodded and left.
I didn’t hear from him for several days. One evening, I heard my name called from the street. It was Biloo Bhai. He asked me to follow him to his car, parked on the road (Lodge Road). I found Tipu in the back seat. He was not in good shape. Biloo Bhai took his hand and made me hold it. “From now on, you will take care of him.”
To cut to the chase, Tipu became my student. I was never a good student myself, but I always took a multidisciplinary approach to my sudies. I shared my thoughts with him on various topics. Through me (or despite me), he gained a good measure of maturity. His manner and way of speaking changed too. Soon, he was a brother to me. We would spend evenings together in Old Anarkali cafes or just drive around, discussing every topic in the world. During this time, I introduced him to Sufism. He seemed very intrigued.
Two things happened after two years. Tipu passed his FA. I don’t remember his grade, but he and his family were very happy. He was admitted to the prestigious Government College for a BA. Around that time, I left Lahore to teach in Multan.
We stayed in touch. I would visit Lahore almost every weekend, and he would turn up at my flat. I found him increasingly insightful on several matters, especially regarding Sufism.
I left Pakistan. Tipu completed his studies, passed the civil services examination, and settled down after marrying. Whenever I visited Pakistan, meeting him was one of my top priorities. Thanks to the Internet, we often spoke and discussed matters of common interest.
After he told me about his cancer, I kept in regular touch. He told me his treatment had been going well, but that was not the case. He never told me that his pain was unbearable.
Six months ago, I sat in the chair after teaching the class. It was late evening, and a day before the end of term. Apart from a few students chatting, the campus was empty. I received a message from Dr Nauman in the UK. It said that Tipu had died.
He died a month before I intended to visit him in Lahore. In life, nothing is perfect. Tipu was a student, a friend, and a son to me, yet some issues remain unresolved. For instance, his understanding of Sufism was radically different from mine. I believe that Sufism is a form of symbolic violence; it is an ideology of the status quo that has historically supported usurpers. Second, we differed on visiting the Holy Land for pilgrimage. He was desperate for the two of us to perform the pilgrimage together. I cannot reproduce my exact objections for discretion’s sake. Tipu, however, held a different view. He argued that we should perform the pilgrimage in the name of God and His Messenger, the Noble Prophet (PBUH). We agreed to resolve the issues once and for all at our next meeting. But he died.
An obituary is a death-defying genre that refuses to offer closure. So, hasn’t this obituary offered closure? From my position, the answer is yes, but not from Tipu’s. So, where do we go from here?
Tipu was a Sufi. In Sufism, death is a term of convenience for the uninitiated. Sufis do not die. They walk to the other side, divided from ours by the Veil. If I have been thinking about him on this side, he has been thinking about me on the other. He would agree that he has undergone an attenuation of his personhood, but death? Not at all.
Look at the sentence: “He has died.” Syntactically, “He” is nominative; it serves as the subject/theme of the sentence, and “die” is intransitive. But in the Sufi worldview, the arrangement is different, where “He” is in an agentive role. How can one be an agent of one’s own death unless one were suicidal? But Sufis do not wear a grammatical straitjacket. Tipu, like the Sufis he venerated, is very much there on the other side: Dasein, being there, as Heidegger used to say. Being there and with them. And being here with us too.
So, where do I go from here?
One of Sufism’s claims is that the Veil lifts at some point. No one knows when, but it does if you seek it. That means the issues will not remain unresolved forever; the game seems very much on, and the story may not even have begun!
The writer is based in Sydney: abbas.zaidi@unsw.edu.au