/ | Celebrating a meaningful life /

I wasn't online Tuesday for the digital funeral of Husain Bhayat, the former Sheet Harbour teacher, the tireless volunteer, stalwart member of the Halifax Muslim community, and the man who helped bring the tastes and smells of India to this city.

But Shireen Ahmed, who knew him, with utmost respect and affection, as Babu Uncle, was. So she told me all about it.

The heartbreaking strangeness of a funeral held on Zoom, so that 100 or so people from as far away as India and the United States could pay their respects to a beloved elder who died from complications from COVID-19.

But also how grief transcends distance and technology.

Ahmed, a Toronto-based writer, speaker and sports activist, told me about the pain on every face, many of whom she knows well, visible on the screen.

She explained how the tears flowed when his son Muhammad — who could get no closer than the parking lot outside the hospital where his father died — spoke of how Bhayat immigrated to Nova Scotia “for not just a better life for his family, but for an opportunity to create a better world,” how he possessed “an infectious smile, a curious mind, and a heart of gold,” how he was “a gentleman in the truest sense of the word.”

For Ahmed, he was her parents' great friend, a generous host at sumptuous dinner parties at the family's home in the north end of Halifax, and later the city's south end.

The Halifax Muslim community was small in the 1970s when Ahmed was kicking a soccer ball down the field for St. Patrick's High School. Bhayat, who was born in 1937 in a small village in western India, was right at the centre of it.

“When you come from a small immigrant community, these elders are all your parents,” Ahmed tweeted soon after the online funeral. “They are pillars of your life. They float in your memories, and stay embedded in your lived experience. And you miss them so much it hurts.”

She, too, misses his smile that remained even when Bhayat strongly disagreed with someone. She also told me about his quiet dignity and his generosity that, as much as anywhere, was on display in the Indian grocery store on Robie Street that, when his day in the classroom was over, he and his wife, Zubeida, operated.

In her Twitter feed, with the funeral still fresh in her mind, Ahmed told of how one day her CBC executive dad came sprinting out of the store, Bhayat in hot pursuit, waving some cash for a purchase that he refused to accept.

But Wednesday she told me so many other memories of that store, now the site of The Coastal Café, which she and her psychiatrist mom often visited on Saturday mornings.

“Stores like that are so critical to immigrant communities,” she said, before proceeding to explain.

Ahmed saw okra and fresh coriander there for the first time. She remembers the jars of mango pickles by the door, the halal meats, the imported biscuits, jams and jellies that gave homesick immigrants like her grandfather a taste of the old country.

The Bhayats' store, she recalls, was the only place where turmeric was available in all of Halifax. A person could get chickpea flour there.

They could buy newspapers and glossy magazines from India and Pakistan that allowed readers to keep track of Bollywood gossip, and news that mattered.

“It was never a run-in-and-run-out place,” she told me.

She and her mom would linger, as would other customers, just happy to be in such a place.

After he retired from teaching, the couple sold the store and moved to Mississauga where their daughter Zarina was making her life. From the looks of it, the father continued to make his mark in his new home.

His son told the funeral that he had been “stunned” to learn of all the causes that Bhayat tirelessly worked to support, by his count 72 of them, including hospitals in Mississauga, schools in India, Haiti, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and clean water projects in India, Africa and the Caribbean.

Maybe that helps explain something.

After Bhayat entered the ICU the hospital had to implement a “communication tree” to disseminate information about his condition. Who can really blame them?

Not long after he arrived, the call nurse checked the phone at the nursing station. There were 92 missed calls from people who just had to know if he was OK.

Husain Bhayat