Fayaz is going home

When Fayaz told me he was leaving Germany, it hurt. Properly hurt. I still can’t quite believe it.

He’s going back to India, back to Srinagar, to build a life with the woman he loves. It’s a beautiful reason to leave, and I’m happy for him. But he’s one of the closest friends I’ve made in this country, and I don’t think I’ve fully accepted that the next time I want to see him, it won’t be a short train ride away.

So before he goes, I want to write it all down: how a stranger became a brother, and everything in between.

A flat full of strangers

I moved to Germany in April 2022, to a small town in Bavaria called Hof, to study software engineering.

I didn’t know anyone. Through one of the university groups online I found Basit, who, without really knowing me, offered me a room in his flat. That’s how I ended up living with Basit, Mati Ur Rehman, and Sanaullah, who we all call Sana. Basit and Sana had already been in Germany for more than a year. They’d studied in Aachen, then switched programmes and moved to Hof.

We didn’t know much about each other at the start. But when you share a kitchen in a foreign country, you don’t stay strangers for long. We cooked together, ate together, and figured out German life together: the paperwork, the weather, the rules nobody explains to you. Somewhere in all of that, we became friends.

Iqbal kehta hai:

ہو حلقۂ یاراں تو بریشم کی طرح نرم
رزم حق و باطل ہو تو فولاد ہے مومن

That was our flat: soft with each other, and tough enough together to survive a first German winter.

On my very first day of class I met Mushtaq, a guy from South India. Four years later we’re still friends and still visit each other. He’s one of the nicest people I know.

The boy with the bicycle

Fayaz came into my life sideways. I didn’t know him directly. He was in Basit’s course, a friend of a friend, living across town with an Egyptian flatmate. He’d drop by our flat now and then and join whatever we were doing.

And he had his bicycle. If you lived in Hof in those days, you’ve seen Fayaz: always cycling somewhere, always on that bike. Some days we’d all head out to the Untreusee, the lake on the edge of town, and there he’d be, pedalling along.

That summer, during the semester break, a few of us took jobs at the same company, and Fayaz was there too. That’s when I learned his most famous habit. Fayaz was always on the phone, always talking to his girlfriend, the woman we now call Bhabhi. You could be sitting right next to him and he’d be somewhere else entirely, laughing into his phone. It drove us mad. We called him the love bird.

Ghalib kehta hai:

عشق نے غالبؔ نکما کر دیا
ورنہ ہم بھی آدمی تھے کام کے

In Fayaz’s case, not useless, just permanently distracted.

Nine euros and a photograph

That was also the summer of the €9 ticket, when for a few months you could travel on local trains across all of Germany for nine euros a month. For a group of broke students, that was an invitation.

One of our first trips was to Dresden, a beautiful old city whose centre was largely destroyed by bombing at the end of the Second World War and then painstakingly rebuilt. We spent hours walking through it, then went out to Saxon Switzerland, the national park nearby with its strange sandstone cliffs. It’s still one of the best days I’ve had in Germany.

Another day we went to Leipzig and visited the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, the Monument to the Battle of the Nations. It’s an enormous stone monument, and inside there are huge carved warriors standing guard, like something out of a legend. We took a lot of pictures.

One of them, Fayaz took of me. It’s one of my favourite photos of myself. It’s been my Google profile picture ever since, and though it’s getting old now, I haven’t been able to replace it. It was one of the first things Fayaz ever did for me, and looking back, that photo is where our friendship really started.

Mannheim, Heidelberg, and Iqbal by the Neckar

After I finished my studies, I moved to the south-west of Germany for work. As luck would have it, Fayaz got a job in Mannheim, not far from me. Of all my friends from Hof, he was now the closest, so I visited him often.

He introduced me to his friend Faisal, from Mumbai. Faisal is funny, passionate, full of his own ideas, and unbelievably fit. The three of us went hiking in Heidelberg, up the hill above the old town, about an hour’s climb to a point where the whole city spreads out beneath you. Faisal didn’t walk it, he flew up it. He wanted to run the whole way. He absolutely destroyed Fayaz and me on that mountain.

We went back to Heidelberg many times. Someone once told me it’s called the New York of Germany. With the greatest respect to Heidelberg: no. But the old town on the river Neckar, with the castle above it and the bridge below, is genuinely one of the loveliest places I know.

Heidelberg always reminds me of Allama Iqbal. In 1907, while working on his doctorate at the University of Munich, Iqbal spent time in Heidelberg learning German. There’s a stretch of the riverbank named after him, the Iqbal-Ufer, and a plaque on the house where he stayed. We went to see both. And one evening, sitting by this same river, Iqbal wrote a poem called Ek Shaam, “An Evening.”

Iqbal kehta hai:

خاموش ہے چاندنی قمر کی
شاخیں ہیں خموش ہر شجر کی
کچھ ایسا سکوت کا فسوں ہے
نیکر کا خرام بھی سکوں ہے

A Pakistani and a Kashmiri, standing by the river where Iqbal once sat. I think about that more than I expected to.

Rice, jeans, and a lover boy

The longer you know Fayaz, the more you find out.

He can cook. I mean really cook. He’s one of the best cooks I know, and his rice, every single time, was perfect. I have no idea how he does it.

He loves shopping, and he has genuinely good taste. We drove to the outlet town of Metzingen, near Stuttgart, and of course came home with bags: a couple of pairs of jeans, and a jacket for me that I still wear.

He collects people. He introduced me to his German friends, including one who had travelled to India and gone to weddings there. He also introduced me to Mudassar, who soon became my friend too. Later the two of them came to Saarbrücken together and stayed with me, and this time I got to be the one showing them around.

And he is, and always will be, our Lover Boy. Fayaz notices beauty. All of it, everywhere, instantly. We’d be walking somewhere and he’d deliver a full report in seconds: this one beautiful, that one hässlich. I appointed myself the group’s haram police. “Fayaz, haram! Stop it!” He never once listened.

But here’s the thing about Fayaz: his eyes may have wandered, but his heart never did. It was always on the phone with Bhabhi. At heart, he’s an aashiq, a true romantic, the kind of man who falls in love completely and stays there.

His Kashmir, and mine

Fayaz is from Srinagar. And I have loved Kashmir for as long as I can remember.

My first memory of it is in patches. I was four or five years old. My father was a contractor then, and he travelled from our home in Punjab to Azad Kashmir to buy stone. He took me with him. We stayed with one of his many friends there, who served us fish. I don’t remember what kind, I was too little, but I remember the feeling of being far from home with my father, and of a place that seemed bigger and greener than anywhere I’d been.

Years later I went back with friends. We drove through Bagh and Muzaffarabad, which sits where the Neelum and Jhelum rivers meet, the city built around the water. Our car broke down there, and while it was being fixed we drank Kashmiri chai, pink and salty and completely unlike anything at home. People around us spoke a language I didn’t understand, but everyone spoke Urdu too, so we got by.

From there we went up to Naran, and took four-by-four jeeps high into the mountains to Ansoo Jheel, a lake so beautiful it doesn’t look real. Then we made one of the stupidest decisions of our lives: we decided to hike back down. There was no proper path, just loose rock above a river. I nearly slipped. If you fall there, you hit the rocks, and that’s it. Some of our group turned back halfway. The rest of us made it down, somehow.

Please: if you don’t know the way and you’re not local, don’t do what we did.

We spent a couple of days in Naran, and the road back to Islamabad was beauty after beauty. We stopped everywhere and ate fresh fish all the way home.

There’s an old Persian verse people always reach for when they talk about Kashmir, and I understand why:

اگر فردوس بر روئے زمین است
ہمین است و ہمین است و ہمین است

I’ve never seen Fayaz’s side of Kashmir. I’ve watched endless videos of the valleys around Srinagar and the Himalayas rising behind them, and it looks like the same paradise, just across a line. I wish that line didn’t exist. I wish Kashmir were simply Kashmir, a place you could travel through end to end.

With Fayaz, that line never existed. In our little group in Germany, nobody ever felt like a foreigner to anybody. He wasn’t “the guy from India.” He was just Fayaz, one of us.

So here’s my wish. One day, I want to show him my side. Islamabad. Punjab, the land of pahalwans. The valleys of Azad Kashmir. And one day, whatever it takes, I’m going to Srinagar. It’s one of the places I’ve always wanted to be. Let’s see how fate plays it.

Ghalib kehta hai:

ہزاروں خواہشیں ایسی کہ ہر خواہش پہ دم نکلے
بہت نکلے مرے ارمان لیکن پھر بھی کم نکلے

Srinagar is still on my list.

Going home for love

Fayaz worked and studied at the same time, and now he’s finished his degree. He could stay. Instead, he’s decided his German dream has run its course. He’s going home to be with the woman he loves, to start a family, and to build their life together in India.

He’s giving up everything he built here for love. I really admire that. It might be the bravest, most beautiful thing a person can do.

All those phone calls I used to complain about: on the other end, someone has been waiting for him. Faiz could have written this for her.

Faiz kehta hai:

گلوں میں رنگ بھرے باد نو بہار چلے
چلے بھی آؤ کہ گلشن کا کاروبار چلے

And now he’s going.

Jigar Moradabadi kehta hai:

یہ عشق نہیں آساں بس اتنا سمجھ لیجے
اک آگ کا دریا ہے اور ڈوب کے جانا ہے

Fayaz is jumping in anyway. Maybe one day I’ll do the same. We’ll wait and see.

But I won’t pretend this is easy for me. Basit has already gone. Mudassar is moving away too. I’ve made a lot of good friends here in Saarbrücken, and I’m grateful for every one of them, but no one can replace Fayaz. With him gone, this corner of Germany is going to feel a lot emptier.

Ahmad Faraz kehta hai:

اب کے ہم بچھڑے تو شاید کبھی خوابوں میں ملیں
جس طرح سوکھے ہوئے پھول کتابوں میں ملیں

I hope not. I hope we meet in much more than dreams.

And on the evenings when this corner of Germany feels too quiet, I’ll hold on to Faiz.

Faiz kehta hai:

دل ناامید تو نہیں ناکام ہی تو ہے
لمبی ہے غم کی شام مگر شام ہی تو ہے

Khuda hafiz, Fayaz

Fayaz, thank you. For the photo I still use, the rice I still think about, the jacket I still wear, the trips, the hikes, the shopping, the late-night talks, and every time you made a foreign country feel a little more like home.

To you and to Bhabhi: I wish you a peaceful life. I hope you grow together, build something beautiful, and succeed at everything you set out to do. Whatever your plans are, I hope you achieve every one of them.

We’ll meet again, maybe in Germany, maybe somewhere in Europe, and inshallah in Pakistan. The invitation is open, always. I’d love to host you both.

Iqbal had a name for the young people he believed in: shaheen, the falcon. It never builds its nest on palace domes, it lives among mountain rocks, and it’s always ready for a higher sky. Fayaz, you’re going home to the mountains to build your own nest. So I’ll leave you with Iqbal’s wish for his shaheens.

Iqbal kehta hai:

محبت مجھے ان جوانوں سے ہے
ستاروں پہ جو ڈالتے ہیں کمند

نہیں تیرا نشیمن قصر سلطانی کے گنبد پر
تو شاہیں ہے بسیرا کر پہاڑوں کی چٹانوں میں

ستاروں سے آگے جہاں اور بھی ہیں
ابھی عشق کے امتحاں اور بھی ہیں
تو شاہیں ہے پرواز ہے کام تیرا
ترے سامنے آسماں اور بھی ہیں

Fly well, shaheen. There are other skies ahead of you.

Assalamu alaikum, and goodbye for now.