Hoshang Merchant remembers friend, Terry Mirza

y friend Terry died on X’mas Day. He was still young. His full name was Terry Taimur Murtuza Nayyar Mirza. He had four given names. His father called him Murtuza, his Irish maternal grandmother, Terry; his paternal grandmother called him Taimur; his paternal aunt called him Nayyar, a name he hated and never used.

He was born in England but hated the British (his father was an FRCS). His Irish grandmother spoke perfect Urdu. ‘Tanabi kholo; baoli utaro’, for example, in her speech meant ‘Bring the doll out of the cupboard’! As a young girl she had become the bride of a corporal in the Nizam Hyderabad’s army. Her house, where Terry’s corpse was laid out resembled the sets of Umrao Jaan. The scene resembled Chugtai’s Death of a Youth with lovely boys in mourning.

 Terry lay under a black shroud. Black is the colour of mourning among Shias, it is white in Hinduism, Zoroastrianism. Shia Islam teaches sacrifice. This world is only shadows; the only reality is death and what comes after it. Terry took this metaphor literally. He was child-like. He died young. A sacrifice to the Bitah Goddess.

 Terry’s father was a famous surgeon. He too died young. He was so charitable that all his patients who were treated free donated a granite slab for his grave extolling his charity. Terry’s mother also died young. She was laid out beside her husband in the family plot in the graveyard. Terry expended his inheritance, trying to cure his mother’s heart-ailment. Terry was broke. He wished to die like Hasan and Husein, the Prophets’ grandsons who died at Karbala.
Terry was a five-star cook. They worked him from Diwali this October to X’mas, without a break. A three-month stint for a diabetic is fatal. The stress level would not let the blood sugar-levels come down though Terry was on insulin.

 Only forty days ago, Terry’s young lover had come back in a coffin from Jeddah where he was sent to be separated from Terry. The boy’s old father died of a broken heart two days after the son. I saw Terry weep then; only the second time I had seen him weep in a 20-year friendship (the first time he wept before me was at his brother’s deaIth).

 Terry had reserved a plot for himself besides his parents. The Friday before his death, Terry cleaned that plot of weeds and prayed long at the family grave. Two days later he died.
 I had met Terry in 1989 through an ad in the NRI paper Trikone (San Jose). ‘I love to cook and garden in Hyderabad. Will you be my man?’ ran Terry’s ad. I responded. We met. I did not stack up in Terry’s eyes. We were too similar to become lovers! But we became inseparable for twenty-two years. We were mirror-images of each other.

 Everything that happened to me, happened to him around the same time. We both lost a parent within two years of each other; we both buried a young lover; we both went abroad to make money in the same year and both returned empty-handed within the year. Terry was not meant to succeed on earth, though we both came from successful families. We both also loved the same 1950’s stars, Meena and Madhubala, who died young.

 He was extremely camera-shy and would not speak about me to any of the documentary film-makers who made films on me. But Terry obliged the film-maker who is currently documenting my work two days before his own death. ‘I am Hoshang’s best friend. Of course, I like his poetry. It is sometimes sad, sometimes funny and sometimes very deep. I love him, respect him and admire him, very much’ Terry said of me.

 Last month when my autobiography came out Terry read it in two hours, at a single sitting. A sentence I had written for my Iran lover (then 24) in 1982 echoed for him in 2012, Hyderabad. I
had written:

 You think yourself a failure because you are different from others. Love does not satisfy you. Their politics you find repulsive, so you make your own. Your times have failed you: refusing you love, freedom or knowledge. Your people have failed you: refusing you freedom from their old ideas, refusing to see the validity of your new ideas… Your reality as a loving being capable of thinking broadly will find satisfaction in creation or will turn to (death).—from The Man Who Would be Queen

Six months before his death Terry came out to his family under my tutelage. They ostracised both of us. The day before his death we both prayed at a dargah for Love. When a Sufi dies he is called Death’s Bridegroom. When Terry died, his family allowed me to go to his funeral. I did not weep. I honoured my friend’s bravery by burying him bravely.

Hoshang Merchant is a writer and a gay activist