"That night he was made to hang upside down, that night the sky was overgrown with cactus plants. Hanging by his feet from the ceiling, only a small, triangular fragment of the sky from across the iron bars and the tilted roof could fit into his blood-shot eyes - he wanted that cactus to stop growing right into his eyes, but the surging blood wouldn't let him close his eyes. 'I must not think!' he told himself, 'otherwise blood will start oozing all over again.' And this is exactly what happened."

A triangular piece of the sky, blood in the eyes, cactus plants, pulsatile questions: can I think? What happened next? And the opening of his short story Athoon Manhoon (The Eighth Man) all crammed into my mind as I went up to talk to Siraj. I paused as a tall cactus plant stood tall at the end of the staircase. I looked at the sky and the lit-up Clifton mazar shone like a jewel in the night. With a silver mane and a soft smile, distinguished looking Siraj-ul-Haq Memon could easily be mistaken for a statesman. He sits on the edge of a sofa but his presence fills up the room. On the wall, the figure of a whirling dervish sits astride a room thermometer. Temperature and mysticism. And the writer - what about his presence? Is it different from his books? Can a fiction-writer take a look at his life and say that it is something apart from his work, I ask him. The answer is clear and straight. "I don't think so. No. The writer always casts his shadow over whatever he writes. There are at least some aspects of the person which are reflected in his writings. If I read a fiction-writer or a poet, there are always some things which we can mark out and say that they come from the writer's personal life."

If one were to write your biography, will it be different from these books? I probe a little deeper, running my hand over the spines of the set of his books which he has placed in front of me just as a bridge-player put his cards on the table. "Yes, it has to be different from all this!" he laughs. "This is my writing but there are other aspects in my life also." His eyes have a faraway look as he gets into the reflective mood. "I wouldn't call them phases, but there are at least four different aspects of my life. I was a bureaucrat in the Central Superior Services. A different aspect is my writing. Then a totally different area of work was the period I spent as a journalist. Yet another aspect is my professional life in which I am active to this day."

The details are easy to fill in. Even before his entry into the civil service, Siraj (the name by which he is known on the covers of his books) was a writer and scholar, among the most widely read fiction-writers in Sindhi. His friendship with Z.A. Bhutto led him to take up the editorship of Hilal-e-Pakistan and he made it one of the most influential papers of the day. In his chosen field, he is considered one of the top-notch income-tax lawyers in the country. All this in one person's lifetime! "These are not different persons or different personalities!" he laughs at my comment, but is characteristically modest about his own achievements. "In our part of the world, a writer cannot live on the strength of his writing alone. He has to do something for a living. So he has to do two things at least, to begin with. Then sometimes turmoil (inqilabat) take him places and this is what happened to me. My career as a bureaucrat came to an end as I was among the 303 civil servants who were removed from service by Yahya Khan. When these orders came, I did not even have the means to take my children from the government residence to a place which we could rent. It was a crisis. I practised for two years during which I earned so much that I would not have been able to do so if I had continued in civil service for 10 or 12 years. When Mr Bhutto asked me to take up Hilal, I did incur a loss of a lucrative practice."

His loss was the newspaper's gain since during his editorship it shot into greater prominence. "In spite of being called a party organ, it had its own position. At one point in time, it had a greater distribution in Sindh than Jang." After giving up the editorship, he kept on writing columns and opinion pieces for it till fairly recently.

The various facets of his personality overlap and connect. His face reflects a wistful smile as he recalls his early days. "My father was a school-teacher. Like other Memon families in Tando Jam, ours too was conservative, typically conservative. But my father was a liberal and almost a leftist. He inculcated a love of reading and writing in me."

Siraj attributes his literary bent of mind to the love of reading that he inherited from his father. His father used to subscribe to Nigar and Adab-e-Latif. Today, he counts Allama Niaz Fatehpuri, the editor of Nigar, as a major influence on his intellectual development. "Nobody in Sindh can avoid being influenced by Shah Latif," he says listing the writers who really mattered to him. He found much to admire in Ghalib and little in Iqbal, but what he really enjoyed was the zest of Nazeer Akbarabadi. Influences and reading notwithstanding, it was an uphill task many times. "I had to fight for my sisters' education. My uncles opposed it vehemently and picked up a gun. I said that if you can pick up a gun, I can do the same! I was young and my blood boiled easily. I was the first person in our village who had his sisters educated, and I could do this because of my father's support."

So what sprang from the barrel of the gun was education and it yielded results. Siraj's younger sister Prof. Fahmida Hussain is a well-known writer and scholar with several books to her credit and holds the Shah Latif Chair at the Karachi University.

"After my matriculation from Hyderabad, I came to Karachi and was enrolled in the DJ College. This was 1950. I had the first class third position from Sindh University so I got a scholarship. I used to get Rs 30 per month and then had to pay Rs 25 for the mess at Jinnah Courts. So I started working as a proof-reader at the Sindh Observer. This was my introduction to the press. But I could not continue my education and I shifted to Hyderabad. For two years I worked with Mohammed Usman Deplai, the well-known scholar, and there all I did were translations. In two years I translated four or five books. Among these the one I remember was a South Indian novel about the communist movement but I cannot recall the name of its author. There was another book about the land reforms in Mao's China. I joined the Sindhi Adabi Board in 1953 and worked there till 1957. Ibrahim Joyo was the Secretary and I was the Assistant Secretary. From proof-reading to editorial work for the Board's journal Mehran and all sorts of activities under the supervision of Joyo Sahib and then my own writing, this was a busy period for me. I joined the CSS in 1957 and continued till my name was included in the infamous list of 303 officers. The charge they had against me was that I used to hobnob with political figures. The truth of the matter was that I used to visit GM Syed almost daily since the time he was the Vice-Chairman of the Board and Mr Khuhro was the Chairman. So Joyo Sahib and I had to visit him and then I also developed a personal rapport with him. GM Syed was more than a politician, he was a well-read man and he was deeply interested in mysticism and the poetry of Shah Latif. Then around October 1957, I met Bhutto when he came to the Board seeking advice for a book that he had written, called Pakistan: a Unitary State or a Federal State? Joyo Sahib referred him to me and I worked with him on editing the book, which was later published by a students' organization. So I used to meet Bhutto. The charges against me were that I had gone against the rules and regulations. When I went to face the tribunal that had been formed, the Brigadier laughed and said: 'We have instructions to dismiss you from service but we have no solid evidence against you, so what I will do is to send you on retirement.' I am still getting my pension!"

Politician maybe not, political consciousness definitely. Siraj recounts with a chuckle how he attended an anti-One Unit rally as a student and was rounded up by the police. Although they let him go after a few hours, this reappeared in his personal dossier and when he was being interviewed for the CSS, Mr U. Karamat, who was the interviewer, bombarded him with questions until Prof. Sirajuddin (from the Punjab University) intervened, 'Karamat Sahib, I think that the boy has had enough!' And although he had topped the written exams, he was given barely passing marks in the viva. "Mr Karamat said that you are against the One Unit so you are against Pakistan. How can we take you in the civil service?"

While in the service, he spent far more time picking up new books to read from 'Thomas and Thomas' and maintaining a literary circle of friends which included Jamiluddin Aali and Dr Jamil Jalibi, developing a life-long friendship with the latter and an on-going dialogue on Pakistani culture. "He was writing his book on culture and I used to tell him that he must look beyond the one thousand hundred years of the Muslim rule and explore the liberal aspects of human civilizations!"

At Dr Jalibi's insistence he translated one of T.S. Eliot's plays in Urdu, which was later published in the prestigious magazine Naya Daur. He also wrote four long stories in Urdu, which Dr Jalibi gave to the eminent critic Dr Ahsan Farooqi for his opinion. But Dr Farooqi died and the manuscript could not be recovered, a loss which Siraj regrets to the day. He developed a friendship with a number of Urdu writers, including Faiz whom he met at the house of the film-maker J.C. Anand. "Just as the Chau-Yari from the Talpurs is well-known, so there was a group which included Jamal Abro, Shaikh Ayaz, Ghulam Rabbani, Ibrahim Joyo and Tanvir Abbasi, besides myself."

He counts the names of his close friends and literary companions who often gathered in the Adabi Sangat meetings. Among them, he felt the closest personal rapport with Ayaz. In 1964, three income tax-wallahs from Karachi - Dr Jalibi, Abdul Aziz Khalid and Siraj - won literary prizes for their books. Siraj won it for his scholarly book on the Sindhi language. "In 1957 and '58, Sindhi language was forcibly removed, so much so that even signboards were removed from railway stations. Dr Nabi Baksh Baloch wrote a book in which he tried to prove that Sindhi is a Semitic language and is derived from the Arabic in the comparatively recent past."

He researched for nearly a year and wrote a book arguing to the contrary. While researching the book, he delved deep into history which later shaped his series of novels dealing with the Sindh's historical past. One Unit intensified a sense of deprivation in Sindh. Siraj wrote his series of novels, giving a fictional expression to the sorrows of Sindh, but Siraj travelled back in history to define and describe these sorrows. "I saw a strange phenomenon recurring. After every 15 or 20 years, a resistance movement takes place which may be in an organized fashion or not. And this struggle comes from the lower classes. I felt there was a parallel with the point that Engels has made that the German resistance started from the peasants. This was the origin of these two novels," Siraj points out towards his best-known books.

The novel Parado Soe Sudd, which takes its name from the verses of Bhittai, was written while the enquiry against the author was running. He finished the novel the day he was given the orders for retirement (April 3, 1970). The novel was published in November 1970. The author's preface states that like the history of every oppressed nation (mazloom qaum), Sindh's history is filled with accounts of terror and cruelty (zulm ji dastaan) but the Turkhan period was the worst. Its sequel Maran Mon Seen Au came out in 1988. These novels were an instant hit and according to the author's estimate, they have been reprinted 20 or 22 times. Saleh and Bilal, the two characters in these novels, are products of the religious madaris but are painted as forward-looking nationalists. These characters have been ingrained so strongly on the people's imagination that they are sometimes referred to as historical figures. Their creator sits back in Karachi and chuckles while recounting that some people have traced out their village in Thatta and are trying to build their mausoleum. "Palijo Sahib once became angry with me because some people were observing the death anniversary of one of these characters! Next time this happens you must go there and tell everybody that these are fictitious characters," Siraj laughs.

Not everybody in Thatta will believe him when he says that these two have no existence outside his imagination. Characters and stories become people's property as Garcia Marquez discovered when he read an incident from one of his stories repeated as an authentic history in a school text-book.

Siraj's most ambitious undertaking is his trilogy. In the preface to the first novel Munhinji Duniya Haikal Viyakal, he describes an informal get-together of friends in which Shaikh Ayaz, Rashid Bhatti, Ibrahim Joyo, Palijo, Rabbani Agro and Tanvir Abbasi were present when poet Niaz recited a song and one of its couplets provided names for the series as well as the three novels. The first novel was published in 1988, the second titled Tunhinji Duniya Sub Rang Sanwal came out in September 1989 and the third novel called Munhinji Duniya Mirgh Trishna, appeared in 1990. The trilogy is called Piyasi Dharti Ramanda Badal. "I was very impressed when I read Qurratulain Hyder's Aag Ka Dariya, but it describes a continuity in time. I wanted to focus on a particular period and describe the changes, such as the role of religion, its effects on ordinary people's lives, social and moral values etc." As the first novel reaches its end, there is a single character who takes the sequence further. Similarly, the third novel picks up the thread from the second.

His first two novels remain Siraj's best work, by which he is best-known. His success has its critics too. "There are occasions when the novels become loud. He talks of Sindh as an entity and his characters are soaked in Sindhi nationalism even in the Mughal Court as if the Jeay Sindh movement had started in that period," comments a Sindhi poet belonging to a younger generation. "Perhaps it may be a voice of its time, but I read these novels for the purity of language!" As always it is language which is the saving grace.

These days he is working on some short stories. An autobiography is also on the cards. "I have earned well from my practice, my children are also settled. They wanted me to retire. Two years ago, they prevailed upon me to sit back at home and take up writing full time. But I felt such an emptiness in my time that I came back to professional work," he confesses and reassures everybody that once he has more time, he will write more. "There have been other things in my life, no less important than writing. I have given a lot of time for the upbringing of my children, almost like a mission. The other thing is that, here in Sindh, one doesn't find amongst the Muslims the tradition of philanthropy that the Hindus used to have."

Siraj has established the Sindh Education Trust in Hyderabad and donated large amounts as well as property to it. The trust is working currently to provide English language skills for students. "People who work in a profession sometimes remain confined within a circle. I am embarrassed that I have this limitation too," he says.

It is hard to think that anybody who has lived such a rich and multi-faceted life should talk of limitations. Does he have any regrets, I ask him. The only regret he can think of is the painful memory of the night before he was supposed to appear for his CSS interview, he received a telegram that his first-born had expired two hours after birth. His friends urged him to appear for the interview. The next day he got an offer from London School of Oriental Studies as a Research Fellow with a five-year contract, which he turned down. Sometimes he thinks of the road not taken, but not often.

"If I had my life all over again, I would live it exactly as I have lived it," he says calmly. For him life is a debt which he has to repay to his land and people. Writing is his way of paying this life-debt. "The pleasure that I have received from writing, that is my profit!"