Mustafa Zaidi’s troubles began a year before his death. It was 1969, and Pakistan was on the cusp of change. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had fallen out with the regime of Gen Ayub Khan, had formed the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). Revolution was in the air. Student unions had helped bring down the 10-year regime of Gen Ayub Khan through mobilisation and protests.

In West Pakistan, unions like the National Students Federation, wielded considerable influence at public universities. In the East, on the other hand, young people talked about Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League party, and a vision for a classless state, one in which they did not have to kowtow to the authority of West Pakistan. It was the summer where anything was possible — a new Pakistan, a future where people had rights, where they could be a part of a truly democratic country. The social fabric, and the elite’s grip on the government and the economy, was ready to be dismantled.

Mustafa, Vera, and their children were living in Lahore, where Mustafa was posted as the secretary of Basic Democracies, under the One-Unit system set up by the regime of Gen Ayub Khan. In March 1969, after anti-regime protests, Ayub was replaced by the chief of the army, Gen Yahya Khan, and martial law was imposed.

On April 24, 1969, an engineer called Nasir M. Khan came to see Mustafa at his office. At the time, engineers could only be deputed at one location for a maximum of four years. Nasir didn’t want to leave Lahore, and met Mustafa to talk about the issue. Mustafa told him to make a representation and hand it in.

In 1970, renowned Urdu poet and former civil servant, 40-year-old Mustafa Zaidi was found dead in his Karachi bedroom while the married socialite Shahnaz Gul, with whom Zaidi had been having an affair, was lying unconscious in the next room. The ensuing scandal would become newspaper fodder for months but, despite investigations, no one was able to answer what exactly happened that led to the death of the literary star. Over 50 years later, Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan have attempted to peel back the layers of this engrossing story in their book Society Girl — A Tale of Sex, Lies and Scandal, published by Roli Books in India and Liberty Publishing in Pakistan. Eos presents exclusively an excerpt from the book….

After he finished work for the day, Mustafa went home. As he climbed up the stairs, he found Nasir there.

“I didn’t serve you in the proper way,” Nasir said, employing an Urdu euphemism. He then tried to openly offer Mustafa a bribe of several thousand rupees. The blatant attempt enraged Mustafa. He cursed out Nasir, and went inside.

In these years, corruption was a taboo, and taking a bribe was abhorrent behaviour for a civil servant, to be known as someone susceptible to corruption. That still didn’t stop people from trying — like sending over an actual briefcase filled with money to a bureaucrat, or implying strongly that they would be willing to pay for a favour.

The next day, Mustafa wrote a letter to his superior, the chief secretary.

“That was my last peaceful day,” he would reflect later.

Refusing a bribe, as it turned out, would be the beginning of the end of his career.

“I thought that during the era of martial law that such kinds of people would get a bad and exemplary punishment,” Mustafa later wrote in a letter. “But what I didn’t know is that Nasir M. Khan sahib is the brother of a brigadier (Azizuddin) and he had crores of rupees to spend away. Consequently, Nasir M. sahib used his influence and money in such a way that the martial law people instead started demanding answers from me.

“When I first sent a detailed reply in response to the complaints, the response was presented towards the governor/MLA [Martial Law Administrator] of the time Mr Attiqur Rehman, and he showed such decency that he wrote an apology letter and sent it to the chief secretary. And Nasir Khan’s obscene complaints were taken back.”

The chief secretary told Mustafa to stay quiet. Nasir, he said, was a highly connected man in West Pakistan, and Mustafa could not beat him at his game. He might have remained silent, but Nasir, according to Mustafa, came after him. Wherever Mustafa went in the Punjab province, stories circulated about his behaviour, and soon there was a storm of allegations and complaints about him. One story, that [journalist and Mustafa’s friend] Masood Asher recalled, was that Mustafa had put a district’s funds in a bank that was not sanctioned by the government, even though there was no wrongdoing.

There were rumours that Mustafa was accused of owning assets beyond his means.

“This high placed officer,” Mustafa wrote, referring to Nasir, “was so well connected with the circles of power that he didn’t lose any sleep, while my every moment became a living hell. For many months, I was harassed and scared day and night to an extent that is unbearable for any person. My only crime was that I had rejected ill-gotten money.”

Mustafa was aware that he was being targeted.

He wrote to his superior officer again, but the chief secretary was about to be transferred, and no one took notice of his complaints. Mustafa could, perhaps, not make sense of the storm, and how to emerge from it, especially given how influential the rejected engineer seemed to have been.

It was around this time that he first met Shahnaz Gul, and it is possible that their long-distance flirtation was a distraction from the drama at his workplace.

Then, seven months after he had infamously turned down the bribe, came a bombshell. On December 2, 1969, President Yahya Khan suspended over 300 government officers from service, in a move that became known as Three Naught Three (or 303). Thirty-eight of the officers were from the seemingly untouchable civil service. The much-heralded bureaucracy suddenly looked a little less impervious.

The government released a list of the officers who had been suspended. Among those 38 civil service officers, listed at number 24, was “Mr Saiyid Mustafa Hussain Zaidi, TQA, Secretary Basic Democracies and Local Government, West Pakistan.”

Suspended officers were to be given charge-sheets and statements of allegations, and they were not allowed to sell or transfer any property for a year. A special tribunal was set up to hear the charges, and the officers could make a statement in their defence. The president would then take action, based on the tribunal’s report. Punishment could include dismissal or retirement from service, and even a trial that could lead to imprisonment, a fine, or confiscation of property. Mustafa was also not allowed to leave the country.

In one move, he became a person of contention, not quite kosher, not quite guilty.

Mustafa did not appear to be optimistic. “What else is going to happen? After some days, the charge sheet will come, and a week after replying to that I will be allowed to be presented in front of the tribunal, and after that the tribunal will present its case in front of the president, where the final decision will be made,” he wrote to a friend.

While no one really believed Mustafa could be corrupt, there was a general impression among some officers that there was something dubious about him, often attributed to vague things like the ‘company he kept’, or the people he was seen with, or about his personal life, or the fact that he was a poet.

After his suspension from government service, Mustafa and Vera had to make decisions about the future. There was barely any income — suspended officers were only given a third of their salary. They lived in government allocated housing in Lahore, which they had to vacate. Even if the charges were unfounded, living in Lahore with the stigma of Mustafa’s dismissal would likely be unbearable. There was also the possibility that they might lose any property or money they had in Pakistan, given that potential punishment could include confiscation of property.

Mustafa’s immediate concern was for Vera and their kids, and the fallout, if there were a tribunal hearing.

Mustafa and Vera decided that the best thing would be to relocate to Munich, where Vera’s mother lived. Vera and the children would go first, and settle into life there. Mustafa couldn’t leave until there was some clarity on his future in the civil service; in any case, he was barred from leaving Pakistan.

Mustafa sat his children down and explained the situation to them. Mujtaba, his son, did not want to leave, and it took some convincing for him to see reason. “My brother, who was a little older and I think he understood much better than I did what was really happening, resisted for a long time. He didn’t agree to go until my father more or less begged him to do it,” [daughter] Ismat recalled at a memorial event for Mustafa Zaidi in 2018.

Vera and the children flew out to West Germany.

“I will never forget saying goodbye to him at the airfield at Lahore and my mother standing at the doorway of the aeroplane,” Ismat recalled. “Crying, waving, she sat down next to me and I said, ‘Mummy, why are you crying? We’re going to see your mother.’ And she said — ‘I think I shall never see him again.’ I was too small and too excited to really grasp what she was saying, to really understand. But unfortunately, she was right.”

After his family left, Mustafa wrote a letter to 12-year-old Mujtaba, saying how proud he was of him, reminding him how they had both been dissatisfied in Pakistan with the “unscientific and irrational behaviour of many people, the interference with individual freedom, even the freedom of thought.” He explained his decision for the family’s move abroad. “It finally convinced me of the utter hopelessness of living in a country which had very little in common with us. It is better to be poor and respectable rather than live comfortably but dishonourably.”

Mustafa said he understood his children’s difficulties — the disruption and adjustments, the challenges ahead — but he knew his children were strong and would overcome this.

Mustafa was deeply impacted by what had transpired. His niece Saba, who was a child then, recalled that he lost a significant amount of weight in the aftermath of his suspension. While his children began a new life in Munich, Mustafa went to Karachi.

He was at a crossroads, of what was and what could be. Like Vera, he was starting out from scratch, but this was meant to be a transitionary period. He did not need to put down roots in Karachi, he just needed to wait it out. But waiting — and being at the behest of a powerful force like a military regime — can be crippling and debilitating.

Mustafa didn’t have anywhere to live. His friend Faiyaz Malik gave him free use of an annexe attached to his house in the KDA Scheme 1 neighbourhood. The annexe had a garage, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a sitting room. There was an air-conditioner installed in the bedroom. A spiral staircase ran on the outside of the house, though Mustafa used the main entrance.

There was a chowkidar named Iqbal, who lived on the grounds. He manned the gate, opened the door for visitors and showed them in, cleaned Mustafa’s car, and tended to the house. The house seemed small, but it was temporary.

Mustafa had enough money to sustain himself. He received 1,600 rupees a month as rent from a property he owned in Rawalpindi. He did contractual work for the Fancy Gramophones Export Company. He reportedly even had offers to write prose, including a script for a film. While friends asked if they could help him out financially, Mustafa politely rebuffed their offers. He had an income and, as he wrote, “My only expenses are petrol, the newspaper, and a meal once a day. I have no habits or associations.”

At first, Mustafa mostly stayed home. But then, when he started looking for work, he went out more often. He reconnected with friends. In Karachi, there were the young poets Naseer Turabi and Iftikhar Arif, his friend Shahid Abidi, a banker, and Jaffar Raza, who fancied himself as a scholar and poet, his uncle Hassan Mustafa, who worked at the State Bank, and his nephews, Shahid Raza, who worked at Karachi airport, and Qaiser Raza, an assistant vice-president at United Bank Limited.

For years, Vera had looked after him, run the house and managed meals, but now Mustafa had to fend for himself. Naseer used to take care of his dry-cleaning; and Shahid Abidi and his wife often met Mustafa, and once tended to him when he fell ill, though Mustafa could be disdainful about them. Mustafa wrote about his friends in his diary: “and whom else do I know in Karachi. Shahid, who spends all his day keeping his books for the bank, Mamoon [Hassan Mustafa], who does the same, Jaffar Rizvi, a victim of his complex, Faiaz [Faiyaz], always self-absorbed — a meagre list.”

Some days, he would meet Naseer Turabi at his office. They would call on Sibte Hasan, the prominent Marxist intellectual and Naseer’s boss.

After moving to Karachi, Mustafa used to depend on young poets for company — he felt that many people had abandoned him. He was no longer courted and asked for favours in the way he had been when he was a civil servant. While he was well-liked, there were political and intellectual differences between him and the other literati in the city. Even though Mustafa had been dismissed from the government, the fact that he had been a loyal foot-soldier of the state until quite recently made him an outsider.

And Mustafa could be thin-skinned. When the magazine Lail-o-Nahar rejected one of his poems for publication, he wrote a sarcastic poem about it titled ‘Benaam Idara Lail-o-Nahar’, mentioning its editors — and his friends — Syed Sibte Hasan and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and referencing one of Faiz’s couplets. But perhaps the underlying sentiment was that Mustafa felt as if everyone was slipping away from him.

In May 1970, he received word that he had been formally dismissed from the civil service. The career he had never aspired for was finally over. But it didn’t end on Mustafa’s terms — instead, it ended in disgrace. Mustafa wrote a note in his diary:

“14 saal ki sarkari mulaazmat ke baad bartaraf kardiya gaya,
azadi-i-ahd-i-nau mubarak.”

[Dismissed after 14 years of government service,
congratulations on the new era of freedom.]

He kept up with his correspondence. When he sent letters to people, he would type them out on the writing paper he had used when he was in government service, but he would cut out his former job title from the letterhead. He wrote to [his brother] Irtiza to send his letters to the military authorities on his behalf. He corresponded with [poet] Josh Malihabadi, and his friend Dr Umar, and sent long missives to Vera and his children, asking about their lives, trying to imagine if the decor of their flat was Pakistani or European, and if they went to libraries.

Mustafa Zaidi was the kind of man who didn’t have hobbies. He had passions. He went through a phase with photography, which he took very seriously, and had even built a darkroom in one of the houses he had lived in during his time in the civil service. He loved to fly, and became an amateur aviator. In Lahore, he used the city’s Flying Club. But in 1969, he crashed a plane near the border between India and Pakistan, having lost contact with the airport. He only had minor injuries but the plane was completely destroyed, and that was the end of his aviating days.

There must have been days when he might have been lonely and lost. His friends had jobs and lives, and Mustafa was adrift. But in Karachi, there was something to occupy his thoughts and days: Shahnaz Gul, whose house was just a short drive from Mustafa’s residence.

Mustafa’s young friends were fairly dismissive of Shahnaz. They thought she was just a pretty woman; charming, sure, but not Mustafa’s intellectual equal. This seemed like a relationship borne out of lust, not literature. Mustafa would even joke about the physical part of their relationship, telling people that he needed an ‘outlet’ while Vera wasn’t around.

“She probably liked him as a man, [he] probably excited her. She was a fun loving girl… I don’t think either of them wanted to marry each other,” the poet Iftikhar Arif said. He thought Mustafa needed a distraction. “She was a pretty woman. Didn’t have any clue of Urdu or poetry. So it was all physical. Bimbos. But charming. [Vera] Bhabhi left and went to Germany. He was alone. He was lonely. So there was this streak in him… and then he went bonkers.”

Naseer Turabi thought she was well-dressed, in the manner of a glamorous air hostess, but didn’t think much of her. If they were at a recital together and Mustafa was reciting a couplet, she would turn to Naseer and ask, ‘Have you not heard this couplet?’ or ask why he had not recited a particular verse. Naseer thought of himself as an expert in Mustafa’s poetry, and he knew everything Mustafa had written.

But Mustafa found her interest endearing. ‘Pyaray sahib… see brother, see?’ he would say to Naseer. ‘My good couplet, this was a good seed, she picked it.’

“If he had gone to Germany, it would have been good… and I don’t know where Shahnaz got involved in all this,” Masood Asher said. “He was so capable, so good, his literary sense was very good.”

Mustafa could be defensive of Shahnaz. When Shahid Abidi and his wife said something about her, Mustafa stopped speaking to them for a week. Shahid used to deal with Mustafa’s financial affairs but, in a fit of pique, Mustafa took his banking and insurance papers from him and put his nephew in charge instead. Mustafa and Shahid later made up, after they talked things through.

He continued to see Shahnaz.

They met often, and in public. “Sometimes he would come to the Press Club, then there used to be the Guild Anjuman-i-Taraqqi-i-Urdu, a very large book house,” the writer Sahar Ansari recalled. “I used to sometimes see him and Shahnaz buying books there in the evening occasionally… They would be very composed and serious, as if they’ve come to look at books. Or even if they met at some event — like if there was a literary event at the Pearl Continental – they’d sit on the chairs in the middle or the back. They wouldn’t show that they are VIPs.”

Their relationship grew into something much deeper in Karachi. Mustafa alluded to their relationship in a couplet in a poem titled ‘Hisar’, dated May 18, 1970:

Main humnasheen-i-khalwat Shahnaz-i-Lala Rukh
Main garmi paseena ahl-i-hunar mein hun

[The rosy cheeked Shahnaz!
I, the playmate of her solitude
I, the artisan’s heat and sweat]

Meanwhile, the slow implosion of his life continued in the background.

Excerpted with permission from Society Girl — A Tale of Sex, Lies, and Scandal by Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood-Khan, published by Roli Books in India and Liberty Publishing in Pakistan

Saba Imtiaz is a writer and independent journalist. Tooba Masood-Khan is a communications specialist and freelance journalist

Translations of Mustafa Zaidi’s poetry have been done by Sadia Khatri

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 22nd, 2024