We were fast asleep in the early hours of March 9, 1951 when my mother woke us up. It must have been around 4am because it was almost light outside. She said to kiss Abba because he was going away. I felt his breath on my cheek. Then I could hear my mother shouting and some sort of disturbance but I was only half awake and went back to sleep.

That day, or the next, I saw the headlines of newspapers that talked about a conspiracy being unearthed or something. There were names of people I didn’t know but my father’s name was among the conspirators.

My mother, clearly agitated, was reading the news out loud. She told us later how she had demanded to see a warrant when they came for my father. She knew her rights and she wasn’t going to let them take my father without a warrant for his arrest. It’s almost laughable in today’s context — your house can be raided and ransacked without explanation or identification — but at that time there was a semblance of law and an expectation that the law would be observed.

My parents’ immediate concern was a bottle of brandy in the house, so they poured it down the toilet before letting in the law. But my father had had an inkling they would come to arrest him; the elections were imminent, and he had written some very tough editorials. When my mother asked him what it was all about, he said it was an election stunt. He had no idea then that there were much more serious charges being levelled.

A renowned artist, curator, art historian and activist in her own right, Salima Hashmi is still perhaps best known as the elder daughter of the poet and litterateur Faiz Ahmed Faiz and his British wife Alys. In her two-volume memoirs, published recently by Vanguard Books, she recounts her life growing up under the shadow of one of Pakistan’s most famous couples and her own journey beyond them. Eos presents, with permission, excerpts from the memoirs that detail Faiz’s arrest and imprisonment in the famous Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951 and how the family coped with it…

A renowned artist, curator, art historian and activist in her own right, Salima Hashmi is still perhaps best known as the elder daughter of the poet and litterateur Faiz Ahmed Faiz and his British wife Alys. In her two-volume memoirs, published recently by Vanguard Books, she recounts her life growing up under the shadow of one of Pakistan’s most famous couples and her own journey beyond them. Eos presents, with permission, excerpts from the memoirs that detail Faiz’s arrest and imprisonment in the famous Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951 and how the family coped with it…

Someone eventually turned up with a warrant and, after he was gone and the search had ended, there was absolute silence in the house for a very long time. It was as though he had disappeared off the face of the earth. Ammi’s queries and phone calls went unanswered. The Civil Lines police station denied any knowledge of him or his whereabouts.

At the time, Abba was the only person taken from civil society; the other alleged conspirators were from the army and air force. But he was later joined by three others, [writer and Communist Party secretary general] Sajjad Zaheer, Begum Nasim — the wife of Maj Gen Akbar Khan — and [Communist Party central executive member] Muhammad Hussain Ata who was arrested a month later.

My mother tried her best to find out where he was with the help of [publisher] Mian Iftikharuddin and [journalist] Mazhar Ali Khan at The Pakistan Times. Then the phone calls started. A voice on the other end would try to intimidate my mother, saying they were torturing my father and that it would be better if she confessed to what she knew, otherwise it wouldn’t go well for him.

This was quite the wrong tactic to take with someone like my mother, of course, because she would shout at them and call them whatever few curse words she knew in Urdu. Once or twice when I answered the phone, they said, ‘We put your father on ice’ and ‘We’ll take his eyes out’, and I was very frightened. I cried, and my mother tried to make me tell what I’d heard but I wouldn’t say.

My aunt Bali [Faiz’s step-sister Iqbal] moved in with us; my mother was very fond of her and needed support. We lived upstairs and we would look down and see a plainclothes man, someone from the CID [Crime Investigation Department], standing outside the gate and sometimes outside the door downstairs, basically keeping a watch on whoever was coming and going. Of course, this discouraged anybody from coming to see us. Bali would give them a tongue-lashing whenever she passed through the front door or sarcastically ask if they were counting the bricks in the walls of the house.

Those were very uncertain times and much of it was a blur. We had a car, but Ammi didn’t know how to drive. I went to school as a very scared child. My sister [Moniza Hashmi, Mizu] didn’t really know what was going on. I was about eight and a half and she was only four years old. She just wept and hung on to Ammi, not wanting to leave her side.

It was strange for us. Our home had always seemed like the centre of activity, with a constant flow of journalists or writers or people from politics, tea being made and discussions taking place. And suddenly there was silence. As a child, the silence was very........

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