Somehow a Canadian film team which was working on a documentary about Pakistan heard of the story and came to interview my great-uncle. Too sickened by the whole thing to talk about it without exploding in rage, my great-uncle sent my mother to meet the film team instead. On camera, she was ablaze with beauty — and with a sense of justice so newly minted it shone through her eyes. The student revolutions of 1968 had found her on their fringes in her final weeks in the UK, listening, sympathizing, Occasionally even marching, but it took the village woman’s bloodied end to draw all those political ideals away from the abstract margins of her life and place them front-and-centre.

The Canadian film team must have scarcely been able to believe their luck that day — everything about her cried out, ‘I’m ready for my close up!’ She was wearing a plain white kurta, a thick karra on her wrist — silver inlaid with lapis lazuli — and had her hair tied back with a scarf. And she could speak with passion and intelligence and flashing grey-green eyes. ‘Pakistan’s Gypsy Feminist’ was born. One of the members of the film crew was also a freelance journalist and he wrote a besotted piece about my mother for a hugely popular magazine with a global circulation. Even so, her newly discovered fame would not have penetrated below the upper echelons of Pakistani society — those households that subscribed to foreign magazines — had the Poet not seen the article and expressed an interest in meeting her when one of her cousins was in earshot.

It was Something at First Sight. Something heady and consuming.

It can’t be an easy thing for a fiercely independent woman to become a muse. But before she knew how to react against what was happening, my mother found herself being defined by what the Poet wrote about her. He even changed the year of her birth in his poems, made her two years younger than she was so that she was the same age as Pakistan — in many of the poems of this time when he writes about the Beloved his poems have both the intimate resonance of a man speaking to his lover and the grand sweep of a poet declaiming about the nation. What twenty-three-year old could retain her sense of self amidst all this?

Oh yes, at first she enjoyed it — when he made her a figure of rebellion, of salvation, she played into it. That’s when her initial incarnation as Activist came to pass, though at this point the term was wholly inappropriate — she was still little more than the dogsbody at her uncle’s office, but people all over the country read the Poet’s verse, all dedicated to her, and soon she was being invited to speak at girls’ colleges, to join panels on Women’s Upliftment, to cut ribbons, to pose for pictures. It helped that the poems placed her on such a high pedestal that is was possible to ignore the sexualized imagery and believe that it was the impossibility of ever winning the love of this young, beautiful creature that fuelled the Poet to write about her so insistently.

But by the time 1970 was exiting the monsoon season, with civil war beginning to loom and the absurdity of panels and ribbons and pictures asserting itself in my mother’s mind, she walked out of the Poet’s life and went in search of an identity that wasn’t caught up in his shadow. At the outset of her search she found my father, plucked him up by the collar and, weeks later, married him.

The Poet responded by writing Laila. My mother remained unmoved, and proved this by becoming pregnant just a couple of months after her marriage. When the Poet heard of her pregnancy, he came to see her. (‘He was wearing that grey shawl I loved — it was a hot, hot day, he must have been incredibly uncomfortable. But that didn’t stop him from wearing the grey shawl,’ she told me once when I asked her for details of their reunion. That was as much as I ever got out of her about it.)

They didn’t move in together, of course — not then, not ever, at least not in Karachi. But her father had already died and left her the two adjoining houses in Bath Island, so she and the Poet became neighbours. Everyone expected a wedding to take place after her divorce with my father came through, but the Poet didn’t believe in marriage — the illegitimate child of a rich landowner and a woman who worked on the lands, he grew up with a fierce dislike for the very institution which would have saved his mother from her outcast status, with only a widowed aunt willing to take her in and help raise her son. And in any case, my mother said, she and the Poet weren’t temperamentally suited to co-habitation and much preferred adjoining houses so there was no need for a formal contract which couched the terms of marriage in monetary terms and demanded a declaration of religious beliefs. She came to see the idiocy of this view when he died, but by then it was too late.

For a good part of the first twelve years of my life the Poet was either in prison or self-imposed exile; and wherever he was, she wasn’t far behind. I think the government moved him to jails in remote parts of the country just to make life difficult for my mother who would shuttle back and forth from Karachi to visit him whenever prison rules or bribery allowed. On the occasions he was allowed daily visitors she would find somewhere to live near the jail — he had admirers in every part of the country who offered her places to stay — which sometimes meant being away from home, and me, for weeks at a stretch. The times when he was jailed in Karachi rather than anywhere else owed themselves entirely to Beema, who had relatives in the military and bureaucracy, and who was the only person who seemed to see how much I needed my mother around.

Most of Karachi society disapproved of her, of course. Running around the country after some man she wasn’t even married to, leaving her daughter behind. But they also said that letting Beema raise me was the best thing she could do for me, not that that excused her behaviour in any way. From 1972 on, however, the whispers about the ‘coffee-party feminist’ began to subside. This was the second phase of ‘Samina Akram, Activist’, and she inaugurated it by speaking out vocally against the false imprisonment of the Poet, who was in jail again, allegedly for the indecency of poems he’d written five years earlier, though everyone knew that the real reason for his imprisonment was his poem ‘Ufuq’ which condemned the generals and politicians he held responsible for the tragedy of the 1971 civil war. My mother’s attempts to have him freed brought her into contact with other women who were engaged in similar fights for husbands or brothers or sons. Even after the Poet was released she continued to seek out, and later to be sought out by, women in search of justice. She offered them whatever help she could by pointing them in the direction of sympathetic lawyers and journalists or explaining their legal rights to them — the research she had done for the unwritten book about women and jurisprudence in Pakistan served her well over the years. But the fame she acquired was greater than the sum of everything she did — it had something to do with that grazia that Shehnaz Saeed spoke of.

And what of me in all this? I was just a few months old when the Poet was imprisoned in 1972, and my mother knew the ability of a smiling infant to cut through bureaucracy. I could instantly reduce both uniformed and inky-fingered men into cooing creatures — and though they tried to snap back into positions of authority, the damage had been done as soon as they started addressing me in baby-talk. The landscape of my first few months in this world was one of courtrooms, prisons, lawyer’s offices. ‘I would not allow them to tell me there was a choice to be made between motherhood and standing up for justice,’ my mother used to say, and I never asked, ‘But what about the choice to be made between motherhood and romantic love?’