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Remembering Hima Raza

By Arifa Noor

LAHORE: Hima was a few years junior to me at school. The majority of juniors are a large mass, unnamed and unrecognisable. But being the daughter of Mrs Raza, the English teacher, Hima had an identity, a name and a face that I remembered.

I left school and went on to university. Lahore being what it is, I kept hearing of her. She did her Masters in English Literature and took off for New South Wales in Australia for her MA in post-colonial literature. I came across her on her return from Australia when she started teaching at Lahore Grammar School and LUMS.

However, she did not stick around for long and left for Sussex University to do her MPhil. She returned to LUMS, which I too joined a little later to teach part time. We remained mere acquaintances who greeted each other briefly in the LUMS’ halls till the winter of 2001 when we became neighbours in the new social sciences wing. The university administration had decided to shift the SS department to a new wing and the first to be dumped in an empty and unprepared wing were the adjunct faculty members (fondly called the junk faculty) and Hima. She never stopped reminding us she was the only core faculty member foolish enough to pack immediately when she was told of the impending move.

We were stuck in an empty wing lacking the trappings of civilisation – coffee. The adversity brought us closer. Bleary eyed and half asleep at ten in the morning, we joined forces in the quest for coffee. Once we had fine-tuned the art of inveigling peons of other wings into getting us coffee, Hima and I enjoyed long chats interrupted by impatient students and over-worked TAs. Our conversations were wide-ranging – the travails of teaching uninterested students, working out, the vagaries of Pakistani society and the hazards of being single. I was amazed at Hima’s energy. She never seemed to flag teaching a class of 80, coping with the grading, discussing her book of poetry with the publisher.

She was having her poetry published in Pakistan and from the design of the book cover to arranging to have the book sent to various newspapers for reviews, she was involved at every step. And this was not enough. She wanted to do far more, creatively. Start a talk show on television, write the script for a film, do theatre and start writing for newspapers. One morning she bounced in and announced that she wanted to be a creative consultant (I think that was the term she used). Perplexed, I asked what that entailed and Hima explained. If memory serves me right, the job was about giving new ideas to production houses. It wasn’t easy trying to convince her that while electronic media may be growing rapidly, they were still far from the day where they would hire creative consultants. But that for me was Hima. Nothing seemed impossible to her.

Hima was so full of life that I never realised that I spent an entire quarter in a more or less empty wing. Every day, she had a new story to tell – about a wedding she had attended, her encounter with the tailor as she tried to get a sari blouse stitched, the email from a friend who was having a great time in an exotic part of the world while we coped with the Land of the Pure, poor English of the students she was trying to teach in ‘Writing and Composition’.

As I write this, innumerable incidents crowd my memory but common to them all is Hima’s irrepressible personality. She was passionate about everything and had strong opinions on everything from literature to politics. She would fume over American policies and hold forth on literature. I still wonder if she ever realised that beyond recognising the names of Edward Said, Foucoult, Aijaz Ahmed, I was a bit lost when she was talking of post-colonial lit, the diaspora and the narrative. All I could do was listen and nod (I hope) intelligently.

I took the next quarter off and lost touch with Hima, temporarily I thought. On a chance visit to LUMS, I met her and found out that she was leaving LUMS to join Beaconhouse National University. What Hima wanted to do was teach post-colonial literature and the burden of undergraduate teaching at LUMS left her with little opportunity for this. And the grading load drained her to the extent that she was unable to write poetry. Teaching post-colonial literature to small classes of post-grads, she would be able to start focusing on her poetry, she said. She had decided to take a holiday in England after finishing at LUMS and join BNU in the summers. It was during this holiday that she had the fatal accident.

All over rather too soon for a very good teacher and poet? But the poetry and teaching seems irrelevant at the moment when one is coming to terms with the loss of a vivacious individual. The world seems a little quiet today as will the LUMS’ SS wing even though it is now full of people.

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