From the memoir: Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s daughter comes to terms with his self-exile to Beirut

After Abba flew out from Islamabad to Delhi in 1978 and then on to London, it marked the start of a very nomadic life. He and my mother travelled around the world, and mostly it was due to the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association. He visited London most regularly, but he also travelled to the United States, Canada, India, Mongolia, Vietnam, the USSR, China, Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, Korea, Turkey, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Libya, Tunisia, Iran and Cyprus. Then Beirut became a sort of base because Abba was made editor-in-chief of Lotus magazine, and its publishing had shifted from Cairo to Beirut after Anwar Sadat’s rapprochement with Israel. The Afro-Asian Writers’ Association headquarters were no longer welcome under his repressive regime. That was when I finally caught up with him.

Beirut was, in many ways, fulfilling for him, but on a personal level, he missed Pakistan terribly. My mother told me that when I sent photographs of the children in a letter, my father looked at Mira’s photograph and asked who she was. When he was told it was Mira, he said, “But she’s all grown up.” Then, in 1980, I received a rather touching letter from him saying how he missed not...

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