Rehana Anvery – a friend across borders
It's not easy to find someone like Rehana; she is one in a million. I went to visit her and her husband Rahat – a hospitable couple – after a long time. We reminisced and talked about the years that had passed and when it was almost time to leave, I could not hold back my tears.
As I was visiting them, Rehana took the effort to locate and invite all of our mutual friends and the whole lot greeted me at the Karachi Gym Club. It had been a while since I last visited the place.
This was fascinating, with the stag heads and photographs of the past few years framed in gilt and labelled carefully, so one could read them years later. I tried the food - an egg meal, chicken roast, vegetables, and sweets of various types, including pudding and cake. And it tasted just the same.
Some of my other friends invited me for dinner later on, and I got to meet my friends, and heard stories of their families and friends, in turn. One of them grew flowers and exhibited them on an international level. She was called Tanvir and her husband, who had studied medicine with one of my older brothers, took photographs of us. Thus we were preserved in time.
Rehana had travelled the world and come back finally to Karachi to rest, with Rahat's early retirement. Her brother, also a friend, asked me to have dinner with the family one evening. There were photographs and paintings and what have you, and Rehana's brother was skilled at commenting on them in detail. He even talked about the carvings on the table. He had paintings of various sizes to adorn the rooms. They were green gilt-edged ones, like our own, back in the Maldives Island, where my husband and I once stayed before departing for Melbourne.
Rehana had a splendid collection of books and there were stacks of them in every room. She loved reading, as I did too. I remembered the golden days when we often gathered together in the veranda to watch TV, but most often we went through her family albums and had a lot to comment on.
We spoke about her son, who used to visit me in his childhood, with his nanny, in white clothes. There was her light-eyed brilliant girl, Nigar, who was not as shy as her brother Murad, who had dimples and won over every female who saw him. As we turned the pages of her various family albums, she fashioned her story, which was gripping, to say the least.
As I sat admiring the pictures, many episodes of our lives spilt over. And seeing her after such a long time brought all those special moments back.
By Fayza Haq
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