ALMOST exactly in the middle of Freedom at Midnight a detailed history of the Partition of India, Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins relate an incident that took place days,even hours before Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah left Bombay for Karachi in August 1947.

In those final hours, Jinnah visited a cemetery reserved for Bombay`s Muslims, where he stopped at a grave. Here, the man who stood at the cusp of founding a nation, laid a bouquet of flowers and wept.

The woman he mourned was Maryam Ruttibai Jinnah, the love of his life, the wife who had left him a year before her death in 1928.

To me this story was touching in a way that his distant gaze in portraits and currency notes never was.

Like so many of the children ofthe country befounded, born long after Partition, after military coups and doses of dictatorship, I grew up in the echoes of his sayings piped into commercial breaks and atop government buildings. His legacy was a misty backdrop to the pressing political dramas of ethnicity and sectarianism playing out around me in Karachi.

On the drive to school, we passed his white-domed mausoleum; each morning drive prompted a vision of the man buried within earshot of the sins and sighs of those to whom he had bequeathed a country.

When I was six or seven years old, a school trip finally took me inside the mysterious mausoleum where when I was even younger, I had believed the Quaid still lived. As my classmates and I cupped our hands in prayer, Inow added details to my earlier ambiguous imaginings. I imagined a wise, pure Quaid lying beneath the pink and white marble work.

Later, we weretaken to a room where we saw some of the objects he had owned his inkwell, a monocle, some books, and a furry cap, pieces of a hero`s life. For months afterwards, I dreamed of the mazar and the Quaid sitting at his desk, perhaps a bit irked at the kids troopingin and out taking for granted the country he had given them.

By the time I was a teenager, I had no more such visions. The Quaid was a subject to be mastered and learned by rote, along with Allama Iqbal and the Indus River delta, all crucial portions of the Pakistan Studies curriculum.

As instructed by the Sindh Textbook Board, I memorised salient details, his education at Lincoln`s Inn, his meteoric rise as a politician in united India, his famous speeches at iconic moments, and finally his untimely death when Pakistan was still a baby.

Living through the bloody ethnic confusions of Karachi in the 1990s, these facts I learned and regurgitated in long hand on lined exam sheets like so many students then and now adrift on the vast ocean between history on the page and the reality of the polity.

So when I fell upon this story of Jinnah`s last goodbye at the Bombay cemetery,one whose pathos unites Pakistan`s founder with the grief of millions who left lives and loves behind during that muggy August of 1947, I could not help but wonder why it was not so much a part of the narrative about Jinnah in Pakistan.

There are the obvious explanations not unique to Pakistan; the requirements of historical hagiography that paint leaders as formidable, superhuman instead of simply human. They are viewed as beyond petty emotionalism, above the fray of feelings. They are raised up and anointed, their edges smoothed and their contradictions ironed out.

Those schooled in the architecture of legacy would point out that Mohammad Ali Jinnah himself would have wanted this; after all he did not write an autobiography, hardly wrote personal letters and painstakingly guarded his private life.

After giving his whole life to a country, he could understandably have wished to keep some small part of it for himself.

All these conjectures are valid; produced from the school of thought that belleves that heroes cannot be and should not be human. In the narrative of a barely born country, myth must supersede man and his humanity. However, if that was true and the newborn fragility of Pakistan the reason for an elusive hero then the same premise can be offered a different conclusion now.

The grown-up Pakistan in which we encounter the Quaid`s legacy today is not the hopeful nascent nation that required an object of worship. The massive doses of reality Pakistanis must digest daily civil war, hunger, floods, the interference of superpowers, political infighting etc do not require an unreachable hero,but a human being familiar with the harangues of fate and fortune.

Much has been and will be written this week about the legacy of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, its appropriation and misappropriation, many measurements made of the reality of Pakistan against the vision of its founder. All are worthy exercises whose import would be better served by a slight redirection.

Assessing the legacy and the story of the man who envisioned Pakistan from the vantage point of a country that is no longer young, no longer a dream and no longer as malleable as it was at birth requires a human hero, one whose mistakes and regrets make him not less adored but more so.

Just as the real Pakistan requires affection born not of the cleverly concealed blemish, the edited story, the airbrushed landscape so does the legacy of its founder. If such a pursuit could be available to Pakistanis, they may finally admit the truth already that sits deep within their hearts; that neither a country nor a hero must be perfect to be loved.m The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com