For Shahbaz Taseer hope was the biggest asset to cherish while he was in captivity for almost five years. It helped him overcome the fear that started when the kidnappers, whom he thought were robbers, told him: I am here for you Shahbaz.

The son of slain former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer shared this harrowing tale at the Karachi Literature Festival on Sunday. He had come to speak on his book ‘Lost To The World: A Memoir Of Faith, Family And Five Years In Terrorist Captivity’. The session, moderated by his aunt Ayesha Tammy Haq, ran almost an hour, and the hall was packed to the rafters.

Shahbaz, a businessman, was recovered from Balochistan’s Kuchlak on March 18, 2016 by security and intelligence forces. The book comes almost seven years after his rescue.

He said that many men confused him with the brother of Baitullah Mehsud because of his curly, slicked-back hairstyle and ducky beard when he was recovered. On Sunday, however, he sported a short boxed beard and a shorter ponytail held back by a metal hairband.

After the kidnapping, the moment Shahbaz entered Mir Ali, Waziristan, seeing the people around him was the “scariest thing” (It has a higher number of foreigners than Islamabad). He was kept in a small mud room, connected to a main area where fighters sat, and they used to keep their sheep in there. The first blow he received was for not brushing away the dirt. He was then tortured and put in chains. This was his state in captivity.

Shahbaz used two adjectives: better and worse to describe his condition, which, remained the latter for most of the time. The militants told Shahbaz that he deserved to die the way his father did for standing up for a cause.

Salmaan Taseer was assassinated in Islamabad by one of his own security guards, Mumtaz Qadri, because of the position he had taken on the Asia Noreen prosecution in a blasphemy case on January 4, 2011. He had criticized the law after she was sentenced to death. She was acquitted by the Supreme Court on October 31, 2018.

Rapping and standup comedy were some of the ways he passed time in captivity, which he described as “darkness”. The impact was such that he could not recognise his mother’s voice in a phone call after six months.

He wrote at least six diaries after he was shifted to a room. “Aren’t you writing anything bad about me,” Shahbaz quoted his kidnapper as asking when he went through it.

“We had a love and hate relationship,” Shahbaz added and shared advice from his kidnapper: “Don’t waste your prayers … that [your] mother sends the [ransom] money.”

At some point the torture was video taped and sent to his family. “The whole point of torturing me was to torture my mother. It was to release a ransom and 25 militants,” he said.

Shahbaz felt glimmers of his own humanity return when he lived with a family as he used to run with them when there was a drone strike. The Holy Quran was the only source that helped him emerge from this low point.

“You have to do the best you can. When you have left it to Allah’s hands that means now it is even more difficult because now you have to do the best you can,” he said while explaining his journey from Pakistan to Afghanistan and coming back home.

Manchester United connection

He talked about a character called Sohail and the Manchester United (Man Utd), a football team in the English Premier League, connection.

Sohail, who was involved in a petty crime and living with him in jail, liked Man Utd. They discussed football trivia but he never called him his friend as Sohail was the one who used to hand the tools to the kidnappers when he was tortured.

He heard over the radio that the team won the premier league. Shahbaz described the obsolete technology as his “only window” to the outside world. “It was a phenomenal gift.”

Later, he got a signed T-shirt from the Red Devils players and a jersey named after him.

According to Shahbaz, his only reason for writing the book was to take the reader through his isolation.

He rebuffed any impression that the abuse had been meted out for something done in the past, like payback. “If someone is torturing you or abusing you or crossing your boundaries. It’s not because of something you have done in your life. It is because of the evil this person wants to do to you.”

For Shahbaz, the lessons from his father gave him the resolve to survive the ordeal.

“I am not made from a wood that burns easily,” he said when he was asked about his grit. “This is something that my father sent to my mother on a note that he smuggled to my mother when he was in solitary confinement under General Ziaul Haq.”