What can you say about a woman who loved Urdu poetry, a cat named Jadoo, Pink Floyd, Steve Jobs and human connections? And who, in her own words, fell in love with a Macintosh Plus computer over two decades ago? The computer changed the course of her life as it helped her to shape an, “anti-establishment, anti-war, pro-freedom world view.” She often quoted her idol Steve Jobs’ wisdom, “You can only connect the dots looking backwards.”
Sabeen Mahmud, Karachi’s most-loved facilitator of protest, mentor of authors and artists looking for a space to voice their ideas, and a vociferous promoter of a liberal, inclusive life in the subcontinent, didn’t know it then. But she would be remembered one day for joining disparate dots, bringing people together to reclaim public spaces, even mosques, from fear, to protect churches and to stand up for small and big individual and collective freedoms. Learning almost 20 years ago that technology could build bridges, she taught herself programming, the essentials of graphic design, and even learnt how to solder wires, install hard drives, and motherboards, “for intellectual respite and rejuvenation.”
She had once written in a journal called Innovations, “I built websites by day and picketed by night.” With time, Sabeen emerged as a gifted graphic designer, tech consultant, civil liberties activist, and the founder of T2F (The Second Floor), a space that was created to provide solidarity and infrastructure to radical movements, musicians, artists and writers. She believed in open minds and open doors and lived and died for her beliefs.
Her concern was, “How could creative dissidents even learn of each other’s existence, let alone build and cultivate a community, without physical spaces where people could talk politics?” She wondered if she could create, “a minuscule post-modern hippie outpost, a safe haven for artists, musicians, writers, poets, activists and thinkers — essentially anyone who wanted to escape the relentless tyranny of the city for a little while. If I built it, would anyone come?”
And they did and how. Over the years, T2F became the space she had envisioned it to be. A creative hub and a centre for hate-free speech where scores of artists, believers and dreamers found their voice. A space to facilitate dialogue and register dissent against fundamentalists from every walk of life. This was also the venue of a talk that even the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), had cancelled at the last minute.
On Friday, Sabeen and T2F hosted an event titled Unsilencing Balochistan, where prominent activists Mama Qadeer, Farzana Majeed and Muhammad Ali Talpur spoke. This was a dangerous decision as she had been warned against hosting the event. But the woman, who had once seen a little hole on her forehead in a group photograph and joked if she would end up with a bullet in her head one day, feared nothing. She wanted to address the question of thousands of Balochistan’s “disappeared.” And she did. But on her way back home with her mother, in her car, Sabeen was shot dead by two unidentified men on a bike.
One of the many friends and comrades who rushed to the hospital, where she was brought dead with five bullets in her body, was Niilofur Farrukh, a prominent art critic and champion of human rights.
She spoke to us on Saturday from Karachi, a few hours after Sabeen’s funeral.
“We have had a long 24 hours. We feel drained and are in shock. During Sabeen’s funeral though, a never-ending crowd kept pouring in to say a final goodbye. I think, few of us realised fully that T2F would never receive her again. I pictured her standing behind the mic or sitting quietly in the back row. And then I saw a large number of youngsters paying their respects and I remembered that it was them she had always wanted to engage with new opportunities. I hope her murder will give them the will to retain the physical and intellectual space she worked so hard to create.”
Niilofur continued, “She was an extraordinary person who strongly connected to her calling, and she always responded to a ‘call’ from a cause or from another person. She was a very reflective person, always resonating with ideas and ideals. She would always try to understand an issue and if she believed in it, she would take it on, no matter what. What we want to do now is not to mourn her death, but to celebrate her life. Not to think that it was her courage that killed her, but to remember all the good she did because of it. Our protests over her murder, the call for justice…all that will come later.”
Niilofur and Sabeen’s friendship spanned over two decades. She said, “I saw Sabeen coming into her own. She was tech-savvy and designed a book cover for me a long time ago and knew technology could build platforms. She cared deeply about peace, about the youth of the region. She could bring people together. She was a powerhouse of energy.”
It is hard for her to talk about Sabeen in the past tense but she said, “It is a political murder and we are shaken because we have lost two other friends who also happened to be activists like Sabeen. PTI leader Zahra Shahid Hussain and Parveen Rehman, a leading social worker.”
Niilofur also paid a tribute to the other women in Sabeen’s life who mentored her and shaped her views. “Sabeen’s mother was with her at the time of the shooting. She was shot in the arm and one bullet is lodged in her back. It can’t be operated upon at this time and yet she has been a pillar of strength to all of us. Her grandmother too is an incredibly strong woman.”
Niilofur is aware that now that the power of the digital media has been used by visionary activists like Sabeen, it will be targeted next. She says, “Sabeen was a vital, democratic voice, a proactive thinker. The kind all nations need. She was supposed to leave for a cultural fest in the UK next week. It is hard to believe that she is not here. This is a tremendous loss to everyone who advocates free thought in the subcontinent. Maybe in our thoughts and through our work, she will continue to live.”
And so will T2F, where even a bathroom door features a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the silence is heavy with a thousand rebellions yet to be born.
*Pic courtesy the Mahmud family
with The New Indian Express Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.