Rizwanullah: Coming back to life

Post-divorce and rehab, Rizwanullah is staring straight into the shining sun.

KARACHI:

Please tell me — have I put on weight?” is the first thing Syed Mohammad Rizwanullah  asks as he greets me at Jheel Park on a particularly warm evening. I had lost my way looking for his house, but he is polite enough to come and get me in the sweltering heat.

He is definitely a few kilos heavier. But the once scrawny designer looks fresh. His cheeks are less gaunt, and as he settles down in his living room after playing Madonna’s Bittersweet on his laptop, I notice how serious he has become. For the first time, the once animated and unruly 28-year-old seems composed. The hair is still wild but the blonde has given in to black. He is burnt, but slowly coming back to life.

We talk about upheavals and new beginnings — the end of his marriage with model Fayezah Ansari and the subsequent spell in rehab. The last we met was at Fashion Pakistan Week 5, where he showed his collection titled ‘Love, Separation and Devotion’ and was still very much with Fayezah. Today, freshly out of the Apna Recovery Center, Rizwanullah is hopeful, but not ashamed of his journey of self-loathing. “Drugs are not a form of addiction. They are a decision,” he says about his dangerous and irresistible past-time. “A path you take to ‘pacify’ yourself and live in denial. They make you a lying, deceitful person.”



The rehab centre nourished him. “Just the name of the place warms my heart,” he goes on to say. “I thought I was destroyed; I was constantly looking for someone to blame, but time healed me.”

There is no cure for addiction, he says. Just will power. “When we take such chemicals, they destroy the factory within our body,” he says, as he sips some green tea. “I had a life, but no value for it. Now I have become more sensitive — I care more.”

Seeds of life and change

One would think that his divorce has made him bitter and angry, but Rizwan speaks fondly of Fayezah, with a respect so profound he tears up at some instances. He calls their time together a “beautiful phase”.

“She makes me so proud,” he says. “I wish her all the happiness in the world. She is a good, kind soul and a strange kind of sadness mixed with joy creeps into my when I think of her.”

But while he says he will always stand by her, he realises the marriage had to come to an end. “We are definitely better off as friends. Fayezah and I were like two black swans in a pond,” he says quietly. “Divorce was not an easy step; it’s like you are the last one standing and family is all you have. People fake it when they say, ‘We are falling in love’ — love is the most calculated move we make in life. At the end, I have my dreams, God and myself.”

He refuses time and again to go into the nitty gritty reasons that led to their split, but does say that his tryst with drugs made matters worse. “Let’s just say that if one and half years back the drugs were not in my life, things would be perfect.”



When he says he was in a dark place after their break, I wonder how badly he may have spiraled out of control to have voluntarily gone to rehab soon after. “Earlier, I was not concerned about my future at all,” he says vaguely. But one can only deal with so much of something,” he says vaguely. “The present is great… the future will be greater.”

His confidence is admirable. He is all set to make a comeback. “I can’t wait to be out there!” he exclaims. “I am designing a collection on paper for now which is very close to my heart, he discloses. “The day I show it, things will be set right.”

The designer finds peace in his work and says his creativity saves him. “Creativity is like a guest, but sometimes God doesn’t send this guest to your home,” he says. “Luckily, this guest has always been there with me in my good and bad times. When this guest is around, you feel you are at peace.”

While rich in drama and creativity, his collections have been criticised for being weak in terms of execution and finish. Rizwan wants to polish his skills and shares plans to enroll for courses in psychology and fashion, the latter specifically from New York.

“I hope there are more dreamers in this world who can pursue their dreams; people who can understand that reality is a sham,” he says. “A true artist never sees things just as they are.”

It has been a tumultuous year for the young man, but things seem to be looking up. He is back in Karachi and adjusting around once again living with the family. With a heart full of expectations, he is looking forward to another adventure. “I now have the chance to travel and be with my family. I am capable of thinking positively and for that I am grateful.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 6^th, 2013.

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