![]() Mahenaz Mahmud knew her only child would not stop speaking out against whatever she felt was wrong. There is a strong ring of prescience about these words. “Over the years, I had said to her and I don’t know why I had thought this but I had told her that, ‘One of these days you’re going to get a bullet in your back.’ I had told her this at least four or five times over the last five, six years,” Mahenaz Mahmud recalls. It seems ironic, then, that 2015, the year she was ready to move on from those descriptions of her, saw her get associated with those forever. She hated labels.Īlso read: Sabeen Mahmud - The unquiet one She was all of this and she was none of this. If she wanted to make friends, she would open The Second Floor (T2F) and, in the process, give Pakistan’s creative and artistic lot – actors and singers, comedians and qawwals – a space to unleash their talents on to a truly unsuspecting world. She was a designer and a curator, an artist, a doer who saw a problem and found a solution. ![]() She became genuinely creative, someone who brought a finely honed design aesthetic to everything she used or did. Mahmud would grow up to lead the kind of life that few can emulate. It is the first of many steps and journeys that Mahmud, the daughter, makes, as she begins to discover the world – and herself – with a perpetual sense of childlike wonder. Mahenaz Mahmud, her mother, lets go of her daughter’s hand so she can cross a road by herself. Or perhaps it is a day much before all of this. It is the night she discovers her love for going all out, for really hanging out, dancing madly and singing out loud. On that most overrated of nights, she has a great time. A friend calls to convince her to go out on New Year’s Eve. ![]() One private conversation later, she decides to stay home. One evening, she accompanies her mentor Zaheer Alam Kidvai and his wife to meet their friend Dr Eqbal Ahmed, the famed scholar and anti-war activist, who has just returned to Pakistan from the United States. She is considering several offers to move abroad. She discovers a Macintosh computer or – as a friend of hers put it – she “intellectually fell in love with the idea of computing”.
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