(1 June 1982-26 November 2008)
14 March 2009, St Martin-in-the-Fields Church
Trafalgar Square
Hundreds gathered at St Martin’s this morning to celebrate Zafar’s life. The son of Ann Duncan and Akbar Noman, brother of Natasha, Zafar touched many people in his short life of 26 years. Friends and family celebrated the wonderful, fun-loving Zafar and remembered his strong sense of social justice and care for the planet. His father read extracts of the columns Zafar wrote as an 18 year old for a Pakistani newspaper when he returned home to Pakistan during his gap year between secondary and tertiary education.
Zafar wrote movingly of how he and others travelled in air conditioned comfort, songs by Oasis blaring during a drive from Lahor to a wedding in Punjab, and he saw the tired, worn barefeet of peasants with their donkey cart, poverty just the other side of the windscreen. He said his feet were too cosseted, too pampered in their shoes, they wanted to be with the peasants, happy feet. Zafar worked as a trusted colleague in the Treasury, after he had worked in the field in Ghana, Pakistan and South Africa where his grandfather had been an anti-apartheid campaigner. He brought fun everywhere he went, stirred things up, kept his eye on the big issues of social justice, poverty and ecology. At the reception afterwards in St Martin’s Hall, one of his colleagues at the Foreign Office where Zafar was on secondment from the Treasury before he died, recounted how they had been apprehensive about someone coming from the Treasury.
Zafar came in, immediately was fun, got to know everyone even though he as there for just three months. I shared an office with him, he’d come in a bit late, carrying a big bunch of bananas, spreading them around. I never ate so many bananas in my life. I wrote a tribute for Zafar to our colleagues. He made such an impact in such a short time.
The service was an outpouring of love and gratitude for Zafar’s life with an original song by his younger sister, Natasha, the one she said was Zafar’s favourite that he got to hear before he died. He said in his unmistable style: ‘I love it, it’s my favourite, I know it’s saying something deep, and I don’t understand it all. Here’s the chorus:
We can’t burn down bridges we haven’t crossed
I refuse to believe that this future of ours could be lost
I’ll sit outside with you until the sun goes down
There’s no use in promises but just say you’ll be around.
These are a brief sample of the tributes to Zafar’s life, one from a colleague of three months, the other from a sister of 23 years. We were bathed in a wave of multi-cultural tributes with songs from South Africa, music from Pakistan, ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’ (sung at the funerals of Winston Churchill and John F Kennedy), Oasis (Live Forever), Elton John (The Circle of Life) and tributes in prose.
One of Zafar’s friends, Sabine Altendorf, said that she and Zafar had read The Little Prince by Antoine de St Exupery in 2004 and she read this excerpt where the Little Prince has been bitten by a snake and is saying good-bye to his friend the pilot who had been lost in the desert:
“And at night you will look up at the stars. Where I live everything is so small that I cannot show you where my star is to be found. It is better, like that. My star will be just one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens…They will all be your friends. And besides, I am going to make you a present….”
He laughed again.
“Ah, little prince, dear little prince! I love to hear that laughter!”
“That is my present. Just that. It will be as it was when we drank the water…”
“What are you trying to say?”
“All men have stars,” he answered, “but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they are wealth. But all these stars are silent. You—you alone—will have the stars as no one else has them—“
“What are you trying to say?”
“In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night…You—only you—will have stars that can laugh!”
And he laughed again.
“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure…And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…”
And he laughed again.
“It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh…”
I have added more of the excerpt from The Little Prince than Sabine read. I added it to remember Zafar as example of the spirit of The Little Prince. His laughter, his fun for life, his taking a stand for the things that matter, his love--this is where Zafar was another ‘Little Prince’. He gave so much to the world in his short 26 years, and when I, who only met him briefly and knew about him through his mother, when I look up at the stars I know he is there laughing and he is with us.
No comments:
Post a Comment