Sabeen Mahmud’s room in her home in Karachi remains, even five years after she left it for the last time on the morning of 24 April 2015, just as she would have wanted it. The paint has been touched up, some personal effects have been moved, but when you enter this modest room, you are immediately, undeniably in her space. The first thing you see is a large photograph, framed and mounted above her small desk. On a shelf to the right are photographs of friends and family. These pictures are each no bigger than your palm. To know Sabeen, even just as a friend you engaged with only on Facebook, was to know of her enduring love for the man in that large framed photograph above her desk: Dr Gregory House. The fictional doctor at the heart of the American medical drama series House, played by Hugh Laurie, captivated Sabeen’s attention in 2014. His observations of the world and how we treat each other, his ability to distil our seemingly complex ailments into simple formulations of learned behaviour or motivations picked up the threads of discussions that Sabeen had been having with her mother Mahenaz for years. 

2014 was a transformative year for Sabeen. Something was changing, ever so slowly. She discovered Bollywood music and was thrilled by the lyrics, especially the most kitschy or melodramatic ones. She put some of the songs on the playlist at The Second Floor, a café, bookshop and community space Sabeen established in Karachi in 2007. Tu Mera Hero became a favourite. The idea of love that had guided her work and her relationships with friends, family, co-workers, and the city, the obsession with love and being loved that made friends accuse her of being dil phaink—one who gives away their heart easily—would be funnelled towards an ambitious multidisciplinary art show she was curating at London’s Southbank Centre. She talked about moving on from T2F. She had been there for eight years. She had done everything possible so that the café could practically run itself. She had become increasingly curious about what made people tick, the life experiences and circumstances that made them behave in certain ways. She enrolled in a Massive Open Online Course with Peggy Mason, a professor at the University of Chicago’s neurobiology department. As a child, she had been a distracted student who could not be bothered with something as dull as homework when there was street cricket to be played. Now, at the age of 39, she was poring over lecture notes and batting away any interruptions or queries from Mahenaz with a quick, “Amma, main parh rahi hoon! Assignment kar rahi hoon!” By the summer of 2014, she announced on Facebook that she was “desperate to observe an fMRI scan, given my latest obsession with psychopaths, mental disorders and social cognition.” She got her wish in September that year when she attended a lecture by a professor of cognitive neuroscience at King’s College, London. “I stood in a corner, thought for a minute, and then decided to just go and ask the professor if she could arrange a visit to the radiology department.” Who could deny Sabeen’s curiosity, who could say ‘no’ to her madcap ideas?

But Sabeen’s energy was never going to be contained in a lab, focused on rats or mice. For years, she had created a space at T2F where young men and women found respite, where they could approach her and  talk about whatever was on their mind. Through her own conversations with Mahenaz, Sabeen began to see the importance of these young men and women having parents who could provide them with a safe space at home to talk about whatever they were experiencing, or teachers who cared to connect and guide. She thought that access to counselling during critical adolescent years was the missing link in the education system.

By 2015, Sabeen was determined to pursue her studies further. She planned to attend an open house at an institution in London, and when she found out that it coincided with Peace Niche’s big show at the Southbank Centre that May, she was delighted. “Aik ticket mein do mazey!” she told her mother. The open house would take place on 5 May, and Sabeen was preparing to enrol in the college’s fall semester.

Sabeen’s mother was next to her in the car when she was shot and killed on 24 April  2015, just days before she was to leave for London. Even in the hospital, lying on a stretcher having her own wounds tended to, Mahenaz remembers thinking very clearly, and very firmly, that Sabeen’s show at the Southbank Centre would go on.

The work could not stop.

In the days and weeks after Sabeen’s funeral, and long after the friends and family members who mourned Sabeen had left the house, Mahenaz thought about Sabeen’s wish to study psychology and counsel young Pakistani men and women.  

That work should not stop.

The Sabeen Mahmud Foundation (SMF) has been created keeping in mind the future that Sabeen was carving out for herself, but it is also mindful of her past.  

The Foundation’s work is not driven by a wish that things were different, not does it seek to mourn the life that ended on that twenty-fourth night in April 2015 at 9.00 pm. Instead it encourages us to wonder about other possibilities, to think of what Sabeen might have gone on to do, what she might have dreamed up by 9.16 pm.

Lovingly written by: Sanam Maher |  Journalist / Author