ABSTRACT
My good friend, Jafar Kareem, died suddenly and unexpectedly last year—and too soon: it is too bad there is no one to blame for deaths which we consider clumsily handled and badly mistimed. Jafar had the energy and ideas to pour into his life and work for another twenty years: why on earth snatch away him, of all people, when there are unhappy, ill old people longing for the Great Reaper to come and scythe them down? Of course, the big mistake Jafar made was to choose to be born with certain genes which were going to dictate the particular shape he ended up with—a typically merry, endomorphic, pyknic individual; if he had been a bus, he would have had “Coronary” written up on his front notice board. And that was what happened. His gallant frame succumbed—mercifully quickly—to a massive coronary thrombosis and, instead of a hateful life condemned to cardiac invalidism, Jafar was with us no more. And what an enormous gap he left, this short, stocky, jokey man, a great crater which covers a huge area of North London—to say the very least. For all 344I know, there are equivalent craters in Pakistan, Israel, Austria—all places where the indefatigable Jafar made his mark, won friends and influenced people.
