But Shun was not about to go quietly into the dark labyrinth of the apartheid regime's prison systems. Just after dusk one evening his wife, Fazila, a doctor, headed for the Botswanan border in her car, with an unusual cargo in her trunk. It was Shun, with only a blanket to cover him — yet more than Biko had been given on his last ride in a police van. Near the Botswanan border, Shun got out and Fazila, the daughter of a prominent Indian businessman, drove through the checkpoint while he swam across a river. She picked him up on the other side, and Shun Chetty soon arrived, still dripping, at the home of the British High Commissioner in Gaborone, where he claimed asylum. Though a dinner party was going on, he was expected, and welcomed with relief. South Africa's most celebrated solicitor was now a refugee.
I met him soon after that, when he decided to put his legal skills to good use helping other refugees and joined the organization for which I was then working, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Shun and Fazila were a warm and popular couple, gregarious and generous to a fault. Their marriage had crossed several of the fault lines in South Africa's notoriously stratified society: he was a Hindu and she was Muslim; he was an anti-government lawyer and she came from a family that had prospered under white rule (her father, Rashid Varachia, was the country's principal distributor of Coca-Cola, and a prominent cricket administrator). But they were united by something else South Africa had evoked in them, in reaction to the system in which they had been born and raised — their shared sense of a common humanity. It was this that endeared them to a wide circle of friends and sustained Shun in his passionate devotion to justice.
Though he worked for refugees in places as far afield as Sudan, Thailand, and Australia, it is in South Africa that his abiding legacy lies. Fazila sent me a sheaf of obituaries by black South Africans, and they brought tears to my eyes. One wrote of Shun's gentle demeanor, which “hid beneath it the steely resolve of a man determined not to bow to abuse.” The defense minister, M. Lekota, recalled how Shun had managed to get him married in prison and served as best man. The chairman of the Human Rights Commission, Barney Pityana, another former political prisoner, recalled Shun as “a counselor, a lawyer and caregiver all wrapped in one…. We trusted him without any reserve.” One columnist began his tribute with the words: “There were lawyers, and then there was Shun Chetty.” A letter writer to a Pretoria daily perhaps put it best: “Shun Chetty articulated an ethical doctrine that social justice and racial equality were achievable in our society through successful appeal to the conscience of the individual.”
That, of course, is a principle that holds true for all countries, especially ours.
There is so much I have not mentioned about Shun the man, from his passion about nature and wildlife to his obsession with cricket (which we indulged in every one of our international phone calls). But it would take more than a single column to introduce Shun Chetty to Indian readers, and this elegy will have to do.
It is true, of course, that Shun Chetty wasn't Indian; he never carried an Indian passport, though during his years of statelessness under apartheid he explored the possibility of acquiring one. (You need at least one grandparent born in India as defined in the Government of India Act, 1935, to qualify, and Shun's forebears had been South African for too long. But Shun did make one fruitless attempt to find the village in Tamil Nadu from which his ancestors had left a century or more ago.) Born a South African, he died an Australian in his beloved homeland. But a look in the mirror told him what, at heart, he really was: one of us. India had lost a distinguished son, and I have lost a friend.
*
While Shun Chetty was struggling for his life in a Pretoria hospital, I was unaware that another good friend, just fifty-one years old, also lay dying. Nina Sibal, diplomat and novelist, was a friend whose writing I had praised in print, suggesting her memoirs would be worth looking forward to. Those will never be written: breast cancer carried her away in her prime. It was less than a year since I wrote her a recommendation for a fellowship that would have allowed her to take time off from her job to work on a new novel. Now she had run out of time too soon.
Nina Sibal was an extraordinary woman: she had studied literature and law, taught at college, published two well-received novels (Yatra and The Dogs of Justice) and enjoyed a series of challenging diplomatic assignments, including as India's ambassador to UNESCO in Paris. She was a striking presence at the United Nations in New York, where she served as UNESCO's representative, an elegant sari-clad figure with a shock of black hair falling across her face, energetically pursuing such issues as the promotion of an international “culture of peace.” Nina was married to the Indian Supreme Court advocate and Congress Party parliamentarian Kapil Sibal, with whom she maintained a transcontinental relationship in which both spouses were able to pursue exacting careers.
As a writer, Nina Sibal told me, “I'm concerned with the terrors of attachment and how it destroys not only the person herself but everyone around her.” The novel she was intending to write would, she said, “probably involve a greater inwardness.”
A greater inwardness — no male writer would have said that. Nina Sibal's were books that only a woman could have written. An unusual and remarkable woman, she was a warm and generous — as well as gifted — human being.
Her death came at the end of a grisly six months in which I lost no fewer than seven friends and found myself becoming somewhat morbidly obsessed by the capricious cruelty of death. Nina battled cancer with courage and optimism, as well as remarkable dignity, but she knew the end was coming. In Shun's case there was no reason to anticipate the worst: after mild chest pains, he had gone to the hospital for a routine angiogram. The test revealed there was nothing wrong with him — no blocked arteries — but when the doctors removed their probe, they ruptured his heart. A freak accident, perhaps, but this was in the best hospital in Pretoria, capital of the country that gave us the world's first heart transplant. Massive internal bleeding followed, Shun lapsed into a coma and died without recovering consciousness.
Two of the other deaths I mourned the same year were equally unexpected and inexplicable. I had long known Ansar Husain Khan, author of the polemical The Rediscovery of India, which received excellent reviews when Orient Longman published it in 1988. Ansarbhai's was an exceptional story. One of the first Pakistani officials of the United Nations, he fought for years to obtain an Indian passport because of his rejection of the two-nation theory. When he finally obtained his Indian citizenship, it was at a high price in human terms; he was ostracized by his former compatriots, who refused him a visa even to visit his parents’ graves. A man of wide reading and great erudition, this secular Muslim offered me one of the best definitions I know of the Hindu concept of dharma: “That by which we should live.” He was living in retirement in Geneva, Switzerland, with his gentle Swiss wife, Anita — whom I often thought of as a better Indian wife than many of the Indian wives I knew — when he pulled out a gun one morning and shot her dead. He called the police, turned himself in, and succumbed to a heart attack in the police station — on, I am told, the very same day.