Honorary Houstonian

"The man in the long flowing kurta, a Taliban-style beard and a score of causes to sell” is how Khalid Hasan had described Pakistani artist Jimmy Engineer in the Daily Times.

Engineer, who is reckoned by Hasan to have painted 2,000 canvases and murals and done scores of charity walks for every good cause there is, was recently appointed Honorary Citizen of the City of Houston and also selected its goodwill ambassador, as notes an e-mail to Parsiana from Z. R. Birdie.

Jimmy Engineer: art as charity

Around 1974 when he was 20 years old, Engineer is said to have had a series of dreams of refugees crossing into Pakistan after abandoning their homes where overnight they had been turned into aliens. "He would dream about their great ordeal and how hundreds of thousands of them had perished on their way to what they believed was the Promised Land. He was so troubled by his dreams, which were more nightmares than dreams, that he went to consult Sufi Barkat Ali of Salarwala, truly a man of God. ‘Get it out of your system or you will remain restless all your life,’ he told Jimmy. And that is why he painted his 1947 murals. He added that he had painted them as they had come to him in his dreams,” writes Hasan.

When Engineer was six, his kidneys failed and the doctors told his parents that their son was as good as dead, he had related to Hasan. But then, inexplicably, his kidneys healed themselves. So Engineer believes that he was saved for a purpose. "Since I had been given a second life, I decided that I would live it as a servant of Pakistan and its people, which is all I am,” he told Hasan, adding that he had never exhibited in a commercial gallery and his only sales were for charity.