My remarkable friend Zafar...

Zafar Agha was a colleague and a friend for many long years. He was a raw, young hand when he came to Link House at Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg sometime in the early 1980s as a desk hand with the weekly LINK News Magazine.

I remember telling him in jest when I first ran into him at the office, “Now that we have the master of Zafar Marg in our midst, we can always have a game of chess sitting on the central divider!” In those days, we often used to play chess sitting on the central divider on the road in front of our office.

Though Zafar and I sat just a few meters away from each other at the office, I never had an occasion to meet him there. I first met him at the house of the then finance minister H.N. Bahuguna in Sunahri Bagh Road in 1979. Lean as a wisp of wind and tall as a blade of elephant grass, he was so delicate of frame that one had to be careful when shaking hands with him! Actually, all his family members and relations are like that.

He was standing in a corner of the sitting room filled with morbidly obese political bigwigs, and busybodies lounging on sofas and chairs all over the room. When I entered, Bahuguna appeared from nowhere and hailed Zafar and said, “He is Zafar, Uniyal. Mere ghar ka ladka hai apne Allahabad ka hai, bhai. Iska khayal rakhna.” That was the first time I met him.

From then on, he became a close friend, though he always remained deferential as a junior colleague. Later, when I moved to the Observer of Business and Politics in Vijaya Building, I invited him to the bureau, where we were together until he decided to join India Today for a short while.

In the years to follow, he moved to a number of other publications. For some time, he lived with his elder brother and some friends close to where we did. Those were the days we would often spend our evenings together with friends fond of Urdu poetry.

He was a man of fine, delicate taste, polite and respectful, often argumentative but seldom rancorous, proud of his Shia Muslim roots and heritage, though never formalistic or orthodox.

Having grown up in the Nehruvian social environment of Allahabad, known for its communal harmony, he felt lost in recent years, even despondent and enraged over the growing communal divide in the country. Once when I remarked to him that this too would pass as had so much else before our eyes, he whispered, “But I’ll pass before that.”

B.N. Uniyal has been a journalist for over 40 years. His last permanent post was as editor of the Sunday Observer, since when he has mostly been a freelance writer