Months of house arrest had left the celebrated lawyer enraged over his isolation and the autocratic, military-backed regime that ordered it. His hopes of a just and tolerant nation appeared to lie in ruins, and his disillusionment bled onto the page.

We walked together singing the song of freedom

A new dawn of freedom was about to break

One push was required to demolish the old edifice

But in fact we were straying apart and losing our dreams

The poem was a private “cry against the system,” Ahsan said, one man’s lament on “the loneliness of being a dreamer in a world full of pragmatists and time-watchers and opportunists.”

But his words soon reached the ears of millions of Pakistanis. When restrictions on Ahsan’s freedom were finally eased last month, television crews besieged him in his study and, one after another, beseeched him to recite his verse for their eager viewers.

It was yet another demonstration of how seriously this land takes its poetry.