The reason9 He had helped found the postal workers union They were his people They knew where to find him anytime So this is where Faiz came from when we met in Honolulu in the winter of 1979 We had both been invited to an international literary conference sponsored by the East-West Center I have an official photograph taken of all the participants We are fourteen in the photograph, but according to my memory the conference sessions were much more crowded than that The countries represented were Australia, New Zealand. FIJI, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India. Pakistan, a concentration of Pacific basin countries, and. of course, the United States Across the bottom of the photograph the following legend is printed Workshop on the Interaction of Cultures in Modern Literature We are a casual but unsmiling group, standing in a double line on the lawn, dressed in our summer shirts and pants Faiz is in the front row He has a serious expresion on his face, almost a frown the effect of the sun which paid us a rare visit that afternoon His shirt is not tucked in A pen is clipped to his shirt pocket His forehead is high and gleaming What the photograph doesn't show lives in my memory, a series of scenes, vignettes, tableaux, the entire montage of those weeks in Honolulu Memory Faiz at the big conference table smoking cigarette after cigarette, prefacing his remarks with choked laughter No one was immune to his charm Very quickly he was established as the spiritual leader of the group Who was this man whose observations and humor struck such a chord of response in my spirit9 When he spoke in his particular variety of English, fluent and cultivated, accented in the most astonishing places. I listened with all my heart We got to know each other quickly in the limbo, the never never land produced by a forced stay on a desert island We were a couple of shipwrecks along with all the others in the swirling sea, clinging to each other for companionship, for continuity for warmth From the first day, the clouds burst over our heads The trade winds went crazy that winter bringing tempests, downpours, driving rains, sudden showers The rains came again and again At the same time the automated sprinkler system of the East-West Center turned itself on at its appointed intervals The conference rolled on and we picked our way mostly through mud and sheets of rain, to the next session, the next meal, the evening activity We tried not to get caught in the wide swath cut by the swish of water from the sprinklers, but we were often slapped with that water as well as we sloshed across the grass with sodden feet I appointed myself guardian to Faiz He needed one We had been given rooms in a dormitary building, and while I walked up three flights of stairs to get to mine, Faiz could hardly make it up the two flights to his His breathing frightened me Sometimes he had to stop and rest at every tread I demanded that he be given a ground floor room That evening we celebrated this victory by leaving the East- West compound for dinner We sat in a booth eating pasta that was certainly not a/ dente and during the course of that meal decided to begin the project of translating his poetry It was, we noted, a most natural thing to do After all. weren't we present at a conference being held in honor of the interaction of cultures7 I knew by this time that Faiz was one of the great Annual of Urdu Studies, ^5 104