The Emerald Isle remembered

by Kaleem Omar

THE NEWS

25/11/2007

Not for nothing is Ireland known as the Emerald Isle. It is one of the greenest places on earth, with lush green rolling meadows that seem at times, when the light is right, to glow like emeralds. Convivial company, of course, is an essential part of the Irish experience. As an Irish Tourist Board poster once put it, "Come to Dublin and do a slow crawl, make that a very slow crawl, through some of the friendliest watering holes in the world."

Since the early 1990s Ireland's economy has been booming, with billions of dollars a year in foreign investment and EU support funds pouring into the country. But there was a time when the Emerald Isle was known more for its leprechauns, legends and literature than for its tiger economy.

It is of that Ireland of myths and stories of which I speak, the Ireland of Molly Malone and her wheelbarrow, of Wolfe Tone and Charles Stewart Parnell, of Yeats and Maud Gonne, of rebellion and insurrection against the British, the mist-shrouded land where, during World War II, people used to say, "How can there be a world war on when Ireland's not in it?"

That's the Ireland that my late friend Sardar Yunis Khan and I often talked about when we used to foregather at his house in Karachi. A gentleman farmer from Rahim Yar Khan, and the son of a leading politician and landowner of the area, Yunis read geology at Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1960s. After taking his degree, he went into business in Karachi, eventually becoming the Pakistan representative for a Canadian company prospecting for oil in Sindh.

Yunis travelled the world in connection with his business interests, but it was to the metaphoric Ireland of his youth that he kept returning. That's where he had spent several halcyon years as a university student and that, I suspect, was where his heart lay.

And it was that Ireland of yore -- the Ireland of Yeats' poetry -- that was usually the theme of our conversations, with the talk often going on late into the night. "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone. / It's with O'Leary in the grave," wrote Yeats, in one of his poems. When I once quoted these lines to Yunis, he remarked, "You know, KO, Yeats was right." His friends all called Yunis Khan YK, and he always called me KO.

It is now nearly ten years since YK died, but I recall our conversations as if they were yesterday. He was a wonderful friend, a generous host, and a man of wit and style. Like the Irish, he loved telling stories, regaling us with accounts of his Dublin days. And if there was an element of blarney in some of those tales, well, why not? After all, he was more than a little 'Irish' himself. Above all, though, he was a gentleman.

YK's wife, Lubna, the daughter of the well-known painter Mariam Saadullah, is the author of two plays, which were performed at the PACC in Karachi -- one in the early 1980s and the other in the early 1990s. Both were comedies much appreciated by audiences.

Although my own student days were spent in England, I know Ireland quite well from my reading and from visits to the place. Like my late friend Yunis, I, too, am a fan of all things Irish, especially their whimsical sense of humour and their literature -- a canon that includes some of the twentieth century's greatest poetry, fiction and drama.

William Butler Yeats, the century's greatest poet in English, was Irish. So was James Joyce, the century's greatest novelist, and George Bernard Shaw, the century's greatest dramatist, as well as many other leading literary figures.

Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin, the son of a distinguished artist. He was educated in London, and then, when his family returned to Ireland, studied art for a three-year period beginning in 1864.

His first volume of verse, The Wanderings of Oisin, was published in 1889, and was followed by a series of prose works, published between 1889 and 1891. The Countess of Cathleen, a verse drama, appeared with other poems in 1892, and The Celtic Twilight, a collection of sketches and essays, in 1893.

Yeats was now established in the vanguard of the new Celtic movement and his position was confirmed in 1895 with his collected Poems. In 1899 he became interested in the establishment of an Irish theatre and his association with Lady Gregory led some years later to the founding of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where much of his dramatic work was produced.

In 1917, having previously proposed in vain to the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, he married Hyde-Lees, and his new wife had a profound effect on his work. In 1922 Yeats became a member of the Irish Senate, in which he sat from 1922, when it was formed, until 1928. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Maud Gonne, one of the great beauties of her day and a fiery speaker at anti-British rallies, was the love of Yeats' life. But his love remained unrequited and Maud Gonne ended up marrying someone else. Yeats' disappointment inspired some of his best poems. To students of Yeats' life and work, like me, Maud Gonne is a legendary figure of near mythic proportions.

Imagine my surprise, then, nay, indeed, my utter and total astonishment, when YK's and Lubna's daughter, Tahia, who, like her father before her, was at Trinity College, Dublin, casually told the assembled company one day at a dinner party at their house in Karachi in the early 1990s that her college roommate in Dublin was Maud Gonne's granddaughter and that she was thinking of inviting her over to Pakistan during the winter holidays.

Well, you could have bowled me over with a feather. I mean, to me, it was like somebody saying that her roommate at college was Robin Hood's granddaughter. Talk about shock and awe.