An icebreaker
An Urdu poet carried the loss of his hometown across a border for decades before he let a single collection into print, writing of longing and rootlessness in a voice readers still call unmistakable and restless.
In interviews and his own essays, he described himself as a nihilist and an anarchist, questioning inherited meaning directly and treating the loss of his childhood home as a wound that never fully closed.
After his death, he gathered scattered notebooks, journal pieces, and magazine columns into most of the poet's later published collections, work compared by some readers to preserving a major writer's unfinished archive.
A novelist and columnist in her own right, she met him through the literary journal he edited in Karachi, and the two were married for over a decade before their later separation.