It has been one of the hardest years of my life, counting each day and every minute since we laid you down to eternal rest on this day, 365 days ago. It is not possible to express the grief of losing you because prior to your departure, death was something that happened to other people. The consolation that time heals the pain is not entirely true, it’s just a distraction.
You were an exceptional father and I have lost count of how many times you have cheated death over the 50 years of my life, but on September 4, 2013, when we crowded around your bed in the CCU at 2am, I knew my desperate pleas to the attending doctors wasn’t going to bring you back. I tried to call God on his direct line but intentionally God didn’t answer, it was his way of saying “son, it is his time.”
You could move mountains, walk on fire, you could part the seas, that was the kind of father you were. I still vaguely remember as a toddler in Mauripur Air Base, Karachi, you wearing your flight overalls and helmet in hand leaving for the airfield to fly your B-57 bomber on missions in Pathankot, Halwara, and Adampur during the Indo-Pak war of 1965.
I had no idea that each mission meant the chance of you not coming back, but you returned every morning with a smile on your face upon seeing me.
Do you remember just a few years ago, I asked you what it was like to fly low and bomb enemy territory, how does a hero feel? And you said “Shammu, there are no heroes in war, it’s just ordinary men following the call of duty and doing their job well enough to just come back alive to live another day.”
You gave us a lifetime of thrills and adventure, as Amma says: “53 years on a roller coaster,” laughter, tears, side by side with fear and uncertainty but a life of full satisfaction and no regrets. Your duty towards the Air Force was always first and foremost. Not many kids grew up like Joy and I, wrapped around events which were shaping history.
It was only last year before you passed away, that I got to know so much about those episodes in our lives, such as how Shaheed Flight Lieutenant Matiur Rahman smuggled Amma, Joy, and I onto a waiting Royal Saudi Arabian C-130 transport plane destined for Riyadh, and that too without passports during the ’71 war.
Or how we managed to leave New Delhi before the start of the Liberation war on an IAF plane in exchange for the repatriation of the ailing Indian High Commissioner in Rawalpindi.
You had cheated death in a war, as an ISI intelligence officer assigned in a diplomatic post in India, you jumped from a fifth floor window and hung onto a sewage pipe in Tejgoan Airport to avoid being shot by rebel soldiers in the 1977 Japan Airlines Hijacking and two years later you were a hostage in a Biman plane hijacking yourself.
It’s like you ran the gauntlet all your life, you were my superhero and superheroes don’t die, so it was that much harder to believe that a brain hemorrhage would end the innings.
You have left behind a wife, who for most of her life knew of nothing else but her husband, two daughters-in-law who doted on you, a grandson who sleeps with a large portrait of you with him in your arms, and two sons who are struggling to fill your shoes even with socks stuffed in them.
Rest in peace, Abbu.
