kotliloharan
"Kotli Loharan consists of two large villages of Lohars (ironsmiths) lying about .live miles {() the north-west of Sialkot. All kinds of articles for use and ornament are made, such as shields and arms, betel-nut cutters, knives, boxes, plates, inkstands, and so on. The material used is iron, and gold and silver are used in inlaying. . . . . The Lohars of these villages are now very well off (unlike what was reported by Mr. Kipling in the last Gazetteer
Sialkot
A great deal has changed in Sialkot as the years have passed. Many of the old landmarks are gone. Along with them, some eyesores have also disappeared. But there are fewer trees than there used to be and the roads are potholed, though an effort is now underway, partly with contributions from the local sports and surgical millionaires, to lay new roads, carpeted ones. After all, this is a city that earns Pakistan – or its business elite – money enough to declare war on Portugal and win it.
At first sight, the old city has not changed much, but if you look carefully, you find that it has been crumbling. The streets look narrower than they once were and given the almost vertical increase in numbers in the last twenty-five years, they are crowded at all times of day. Thanks to Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and his successors, the Fugitive Princess not excluded, the country is now beyond the point where the birth rate could be brought down, the dainty efforts of Ms Attiya Inayatullah, perennial minister for such things under all governments that come to office either by accident or design, notwithstanding.
No one has done anything about the open gutters, either. If the residents are lucky, they run but mostly they remain clogged. It is not a pretty sight; nor does it smell very nice. Last time I was in Sialkot, I went to look at Iqbal’s house, but I did not venture to climb the stairs to go up. For one thing, it was rather early in the morning. A friend who was with me and whose own home used to be in the next street recognised one of the men from the neighbourood. “You never come down from Lahore,” the man said to my friend. This being Sialkot and story-telling being one of the known local talents, he told us about a bunch of men he had come upon the other day, standing almost right where we now were. “They were looking up at the house.” Then one of them asked, “Is that Allama Iqbal’s home?’ “Why do you ask? Have you come to burn it down?” answered our friend.
There you have it. Vintage Sialkot.
The Sialkot of our boyhood is now a memory. It is a ravaged city, one of the dirtiest in the country, where few roads are whole and where dust rises from its once green earth. The hills of Jammu still glimmer in the distance on clear mornings but you would have to get out of the city to see them in their isolated beauty because the air is thick with smoke belched out by cars, factories and rickshaws. Most things have crumbled or appear to be crumbling. The feeling of decay and neglect is hard to escape. The residents no longer seem to notice. Truly has it been said that human beings would get used to anything. . Even those who are thrown into solitary confinement have spoken of having got used to the environment after some months. I suppose it is nature’s survival kit with which all of us are endowed.
Some years ago, my friend of college days Muhammad Rafiq, who has lived in England for over thirty years but travels to Sialkot more often than he cares to admit, wrote, “It is a small town of about 160,000 odd (very odd) souls and its length and breadth would give someone trying to swing a cat the biggest cramp in the neck; but it is the largest district in the country – resulting from the addition of Tehsil Shakargarh severed from the district of Gurdaspur at the time of Partition – so that the rail journey to cover its 140 kilometers end-to-end takes all of seven hours and more. It is only about 120 kilometers from the political capital but it has no direct rail link with it; one of the two circuitous routes covering the excruciating journey takes all of five hours. It is an important industrial centre and earns a sizable portion of revenue for the country’s coffers; and yet it has no airport (Zhob, of all places, has one), or a decent hotel for the visiting businessmen and cricketers. It has produced a religious scholar, Maulvi Ibrahim, who was an acknowledged world authority of Hadith, but it has no religious school or centre. Ant to crown it all, right smack in the middle of it all, squats the ugliest man-made structure one can ever witness anywhere on the face of the earth, a so-called fortress which an idiotic ruler built by scratching the earth from around this flat face of the earth … And yet incredibly, for over 2,000 years, the people of this town have walked round this atrocity.” But I am sure Rafiq does not mean all of what he has written. In the heart of his hearts, I have little doubt, back in the green English town where he lives, he must miss this “atrocity”, otherwise why would he come back as often as he does?
There is endless parroting of Iqbal’s name and how proud Sialkot is of its great son. I don’t believe a word of it, because were its people really proud of Iqbal and their city, they would do something to clean up its streets, cleanse its waters and make its air breathable again. If there is a city council, it is doing something else and if there is a health officer, he is probably in bed with one of the infections he must take some responsibility for spreading. Sialkot may never have been and wasn’t perhaps among Punjab’s most elegant cities but it was a highly livable one. It had clean and evenly paved roads where potholes were the exception rather than the rule. The roads were sprinkled with water and swept every morning around daybreak. The drains, open and uncovered though they were, and no Venetian canals by any means, were kept free of blockages. Traffic was regulated and even students took care not to ride their bikes without a light. The air was clean as was the water. Some said it was the sweetest in the Punjab and was only matched by the water of Peshawar. All that is now a memory.
But to go back to earlier times, Murray College it was where Muhammad Iqbal sat at the feet of the revered Maulvi Mir Hassan who taught Arabic and Persian. It is said that when a title was to be conferred on Iqbal, he said, “You should first honour my teacher.” Maulvi Mir Hassan was given the title of Shamsul Ulema. He indeed was the “sun of scholars”. Today, one sees all these fake, largely ignorant, unread and self-promoting Sheikhs and Maulanas and wonders where savants such as Maulvi Mir Hassan have gone. And how has the city honoured Iqbal? Just one example should suffice. The main roundabout is called Allama Iqbal Chowk but it is more popularly known as Drummaan wala Chowk because the roundabout is marked by upside down painted drums (unless they have been removed since I saw them last). In the middle stands an obelisk which used to have an eagle on top but it fell down during a dust storm which was just as well because according to Syed Nazir Hussain Shah, “It looked more like a kite than an eagle.” I am not sure if it has been put back on. One hopes not. The story is that it was supposed to be fashioned out of a precious metal but one of the deputy commissioners of the city felt that the precious metal should better remain with him rather than the bird.
There is a sign in Urdu next to the topless obelisk that warns against the sticking of handbills. However, such is the respect felt by the city dwellers for the Poet of the East that the base of the obelisk is covered by a hundred stickers. Some of them call for the “immediate implementation of Islam” (as if it was a martial law regulation), while others advocate the candidature of this or that person to this or that office. Commerce is not far behind because one finds posters recommending the magical properties of a certain soap, hair oil, herbal remedy for male inadequacy, incontinence or the “mistakes of early youth”. Iqbal lies dead eighty miles away in the city of Lahore, quite unmindful of what the city has done to itself and its residents in his name. No wonder, his son Javed Iqbal has never visited Sialkot in the last half century. One can see his point: Lahore is Lahore, but Sialkot is not what it should be.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
A story is told of a mysterious visitor who appeared on the street in front of Iqbal’s childhood home one day and when asked who he was looking for, replied, “I am looking for Iqbal.” “Well,” said the Sialkoti who had accosted him, “you should be quite clear which Iqbal you are looking for. Let me list them for you. We have, Bala Dabgar, Bala Chakkar, Bala Malkaan da, Bala Dancer, Bala Garbagewala, Bala Dabbi, Bala Attack and many others. As for Dr Muhammad Iqbal, Poet of the East, he has been dead since 1938.”
Among other things that have disappeared from Sialkot is the lovely Connley Park, renamed Jinnah Park after independence, though the famous annual tournament continued to be played under the old name: the Connley Cricket Tournament. So many clubs used to have their practice nets in the park and there were two full-size cricket grounds next to one another. That is all gone because some years ago, a mindless deputy commissioner decided to build an ugly cricket stadium on the site that is only opened when there is a major match to be played. For the rest of the time, it is kept locked and no one is allowed to play cricket there. So, it is no longer cricket’s nursery but its graveyard and the deputy commissioner, who is long gone, is its sexton-in-chief for life. And this in the city where the man who dreamt of a state called Pakistan was born.
On a clear day in Sialkot, if you stood on a rooftop, you could see some of the temples of the city of Jammu. And you always saw the mountains, including Devi’s mountain where Hindus from all over India used to come once a year for yatra. There was always something nice and reassuring about Sialkot. Those of us who had moved to other towns always looked forward to returning to Sialkot because it was home. The moment your feet touched the ground, you knew you were on your own bit of turf. It was a nice comforting feeling. Even now, when I do not live there nor do I have any friends to speak of in the city, my blood begins to course through my veins a little faster as I approach Sialkot.
The people of Sialkot are very enterprising, perhaps the most inventive, the most versatile in the country. Wherever in the world you go, you are bound to run into a Sialkoti. I have personal experience of that, as have so many others. The sport goods industry started in Sialkot because an English sahib found himself with a broken tennis racket – or was it a cricket bat – and since an immediate replacement was not possible, he asked a local to repair it. The man did a perfect job. That at least is the myth. The Sialkot sports industry had taken birth. The Sialkotis can make anything you ask for. For example, the suburban village of Kotli Loharan, which is now part of the extended city, is full of miracle workers. It is said in Sialkot, “Give them anything, anything at all and ask them to copy it. When you get it back, you will not be able to tell the copy from the original.” Sialkot now figures among the world’s better-known surgical instrument-making centres. Most of the great surgical instrument makers have a Kotli Loharan connection.
Many of the old Sialkot haunts of our day are gone. The Amelia Hotel is still there but it only rents rooms or maybe it doesn’t even do that any longer. We used to spend much time there drinking tea and listening to music on the radio in the mornings. The four brothers who ran the place were all geniuses. Ijaz, “Jajji” the eldest was fond of music and a few drinks in the evening, sometimes afternoon. He had blue eyes; he was always smiling quietly. He died when very young of a massive heart attack. I don’t think he could have been more than thirty-five, if that. It was a terrible shock to all of us. The hotel without him was not quite the same for a long time. But we never stopped going and after some time got used to Amelia without Jajji. Of the three younger ones, Agha Murarak Ali is alive and well but I am not sure if he still plays the violin. He used to tell us, “This Mukesh that you like so much sings out of a cemented throat.” In Punjabi his words were, “Sur toon kambakht saaf tey siddha lung janda vay.” The wretch, he just walks straight over the note. And he was right, though we were all rather fond of Mukesh at the time because of the lovelorn and romantic songs he sang and the situations they were associated with in the movies. When I got to know a little more about music, I realised that Muhammad Rafi, whom we used to call a bit “bazari”, was a perfect “gayak”, even greater than K.L. Saigol.
Agha was a wonderful violinist and played at all concerts held in the city. He had tremendous passion for music and I for one attribute my lifelong addiction to music to time spent in his company. Riaz, the third brother, who was our age, was a photographer extraordinaire. He had taught himself to take pictures and the walls in every room of Amelia Hotel had Riaz’s pictures, complete with calligraphed bylines hanging. The youngest brother was Sufi who was a master angler. Every Sunday, he would get on his Quickly and go fishing. There was nothing he did not know about the art of angling. He knew where the fish were and what was the best way of baiting them. He was also a lucky man because we never heard him talk of the “one that got away”. He used to bring them right back. The really big ones would be kept in the hotel fridge for a day or so, so that they could be shown to sceptics.
Park Café – always called ‘Kay-fee’ – in the cantonment was a gathering place with a lawn where we would go in the evenings. It also had two billiards tables at which most of us could be found when we should have been doing more useful things. That place was boarded up years ago and the lovely lawn where Rahim Bux used to serve us tea and freshly made fish and chips is now a sort of dump. The great department store, Goolam Kadir and Sons, the biggest in Northern India before independence, closed down in the seventies because of property divisions and disputes between family members. The Maharaja of Kashmir used to shop there.
Among other things that have disappeared from Sialkot is the lovely Connley Park, renamed Jinnah Park after independence, though the famous annual tournament continued to be played under the old name: the Connley Cricket Tournament. So many clubs used to have their practice nets in the park and there were two full-size cricket grounds next to one another. That is all gone because some years ago, a mindless deputy commissioner decided to build an ugly cricket stadium on the site that is only opened when there is a major match to be played. For the rest of the time, it is kept locked and no one is allowed to play cricket there. So, it is no longer cricket’s nursery but its graveyard and the deputy commissioner, who is long gone, is its sexton-in-chief for life. And this in the city where the man who dreamt of a state called Pakistan was born.
On a clear day in Sialkot, if you stood on a rooftop, you could see some of the temples of the city of Jammu. And you always saw the mountains, including Devi’s mountain where Hindus from all over India used to come once a year for yatra. There was always something nice and reassuring about Sialkot. Those of us who had moved to other towns always looked forward to returning to Sialkot because it was home. The moment your feet touched the ground, you knew you were on your own bit of turf. It was a nice comforting feeling. Even now, when I do not live there nor do I have any friends to speak of in the city, my blood begins to course through my veins a little faster as I approach Sialkot.
The people of Sialkot are very enterprising, perhaps the most inventive, the most versatile in the country. Wherever in the world you go, you are bound to run into a Sialkoti. I have personal experience of that, as have so many others. The sport goods industry started in Sialkot because an English sahib found himself with a broken tennis racket – or was it a cricket bat – and since an immediate replacement was not possible, he asked a local to repair it. The man did a perfect job. That at least is the myth. The Sialkot sports industry had taken birth. The Sialkotis can make anything you ask for. For example, the suburban village of Kotli Loharan, which is now part of the extended city, is full of miracle workers. It is said in Sialkot, “Give them anything, anything at all and ask them to copy it. When you get it back, you will not be able to tell the copy from the original.” Sialkot now figures among the world’s better-known surgical instrument-making centres. Most of the great surgical instrument makers have a Kotli Loharan connection.
Many of the old Sialkot haunts of our day are gone. The Amelia Hotel is still there but it only rents rooms or maybe it doesn’t even do that any longer. We used to spend much time there drinking tea and listening to music on the radio in the mornings. The four brothers who ran the place were all geniuses. Ijaz, “Jajji” the eldest was fond of music and a few drinks in the evening, sometimes afternoon. He had blue eyes; he was always smiling quietly. He died when very young of a massive heart attack. I don’t think he could have been more than thirty-five, if that. It was a terrible shock to all of us. The hotel without him was not quite the same for a long time. But we never stopped going and after some time got used to Amelia without Jajji. Of the three younger ones, Agha Murarak Ali is alive and well but I am not sure if he still plays the violin. He used to tell us, “This Mukesh that you like so much sings out of a cemented throat.” In Punjabi his words were, “Sur toon kambakht saaf tey siddha lung janda vay.” The wretch, he just walks straight over the note. And he was right, though we were all rather fond of Mukesh at the time because of the lovelorn and romantic songs he sang and the situations they were associated with in the movies. When I got to know a little more about music, I realised that Muhammad Rafi, whom we used to call a bit “bazari”, was a perfect “gayak”, even greater than K.L. Saigol.
Agha was a wonderful violinist and played at all concerts held in the city. He had tremendous passion for music and I for one attribute my lifelong addiction to music to time spent in his company. Riaz, the third brother, who was our age, was a photographer extraordinaire. He had taught himself to take pictures and the walls in every room of Amelia Hotel had Riaz’s pictures, complete with calligraphed bylines hanging. The youngest brother was Sufi who was a master angler. Every Sunday, he would get on his Quickly and go fishing. There was nothing he did not know about the art of angling. He knew where the fish were and what was the best way of baiting them. He was also a lucky man because we never heard him talk of the “one that got away”. He used to bring them right back. The really big ones would be kept in the hotel fridge for a day or so, so that they could be shown to sceptics.
Park Café – always called ‘Kay-fee’ – in the cantonment was a gathering place with a lawn where we would go in the evenings. It also had two billiards tables at which most of us could be found when we should have been doing more useful things. That place was boarded up years ago and the lovely lawn where Rahim Bux used to serve us tea and freshly made fish and chips is now a sort of dump. The great department store, Goolam Kadir and Sons, the biggest in Northern India before independence, closed down in the seventies because of property divisions and disputes between family members. The Maharaja of Kashmir used to shop there.
Iqbal died in 1938 but he has not been forgotten. He lived in the Mohalla Kashmirian between Do Darwaza and Chowk Pasroorian. The cobbled backstreets where he played as a boy have not changed much since his days. Across the narrow road that runs in front of his home, on the other side but on a higher plane, stands the old Shivala which mercifully was spared the rampage let loose against Hindu temples under the patriotic fervour of those in power then in the aftermath of the razing of the Babri Mosque by frenzied BJP ruffians and religious fanatics in India. It was the same logic that led to the Hindu-Muslim holocaust at the time of independence. Iqbal’s poem ‘Naya Shivala’, in particular its imagery, I have always liked to think, was inspired by the one across the road. The burnished brass at its top still catches the first rays of the sun, as the young Iqbal must have seen them do. He wrote: ‘Sooni parri hooi hai muddat se dil ki basti; Aa ik naya shivala iss des main bana dain.’ (For long, my heart has been desolate: Let’s together raise a new temple in this land of ours.) Ironically, Iqbal’s dream remains even farther from fulfilment than when he wrote these lines.
The haves of Sialkot have left the city. Most of them have moved to the cantonment where land prices now touch the sky. There is street after street of pillared palaces, built mostly with money which should have gone into the public coffers but did not. They have abandoned the city to those who do not have the means to move out and build a home with pillars. Others who have been unable to afford the cantonment or Chhauwni’s land prices, have built houses at the city’s other extremities. If you are returning after some years of absence, you may have to ask for directions as you approach the town.
Sialkot was not always a city full of uncleared filth or blocked gutters. Before independence, it had the reputation of being one of the cleanest in the Punjab, in fact in Northern India. My earliest memories of Sialkot date back to those years. While it is quite possible that a child may not really notice dirt, I recall old, narrow cobbled streets that looked clean. We would come from Jammu every now and then to visit my mother’s family. Her uncle, Malik Fazal Elahi lived with his family in Tanchiwala Mohalla, called that because of a huge overhead water tank on stilts that may still be there. This strange structure on its criss-crossing legs of steel rose high in the air, gray and shrouded in mystery. I think I last saw it sometime in the 1970s and it did not look that massive as I remembered it.
But perception of size is relative to how old you are. To a child, who sees every object in relation to his own tiny size, everything appears big and imposing. A friend of mine who returned to Jammu thirty years after independence, went to see if his family’s old home in Mohalla Mast Garh still stood. He remembered that in front of the house, there used to be a big rock which he had always wanted to climb but never could because to him it was like a small mountain. He says he could not believe his eyes when he saw it after all those years. It was really quite small. I had the same experience when I returned to Jammu in 1983. The streets of my early childhood which I had always remembered as spacious, were so narrow at points that I had to stand aside to let a man pass.
The pre-independence Sialkot visit I remember most clearly was in early 1947, six months or so before the departure of the British and the establishment of Pakistan. There were green Muslim League flags flying everywhere and big posters on the wall with the Quaid-i-Azam’s picture. I also recall being taken to Green Café by Nazir Malik, my mother’s first cousin and uncle Fazal Elahi Malik’s son, who was a staunch Muslim nationalist and called himself a soldier of the Quaid. He worked in the government-run Ordnance Clothing Factory but he did not let that stand in the way of his convictions. That was how the Muslim youth in India was at the time. The Muslim League had fired their imagination and they dreamt of the day when they would be free citizens in a country of their own. Had they known what hard times awaited them and how their ideals would be shattered, they might not perhaps have been so enthusiastic.
Bha Nazir, as I called him, was a reader of the newly brought-out Pakistan Times which had been founded by the Quaid-i-Azam, though financed and produced by Mian Iftikharuddin with Faiz Ahmed Faiz as the first editor. I brought back from Sialkot heaps of Muslim League handbills and a tiny green Muslim League flag with a picture of the Quaid on it which I pinned to my shirt and wore all the time like a medal won in a competition.
However, it is the cantonment where “it is at” now. This is also true of Lahore and so many other of our cities. Once the exclusive home of the soldiery, the cantonments. have now been civilianised. Why don’t they make a law that anyone who decides to live in a cantonment should also furnish an undertaking that in the event of war, he would volunteer to pick up a gun and march out to meet the enemy, leaving his Honda Accord and his pillared palace behind. That seems to me to be the only way to rid these places of their present occupants. It is another matter that these are the same people who at the first rumble of a tank or the first gun report in the distance, would jump into their cars and drive at breakneck speed towards, not Wagha, but Gujranwala.
Safety first.
But to return to Sialkot, not everything is gone. A few of the old landmarks are still around as they once were. The great Gothic Cathedral in the cantonment still stands where it has always stood, and it stands intact.
Hallelujah!
On a crossroads, also stands the monument built by Col. Commandant Charles Rankin, CBC, MG, DSO, Commander of the Sialkot Brigade from 1920 to 1924. It is evident that it has been properly cared for, an accomplishment for which all Station Commanders who have served in Sialkot in recent years deserve our gratitude. A slab of white marble, framed in red brick bears the following engraved message, ‘And an highway shall be built and the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.’ An arrow points to the plains of the Punjab. And the inscription reads, ‘Yonder lie the scorching plains whence dust riseth as smoke from a furnace.’ Another arrow points towards Jammu, and beyond that, Kashmir. Jammu is less then thirty miles away, though it could as well be thirty million miles because nobody from here can go there. The text reads, ‘The land whither you go is a fair land of hills and green valleys and clear running waters.’
God bless Commandant Col. Rankin who, no doubt, is in one such land now.
How our family came to settle in Sialkot is now part of the story of millions of families who were forced to migrate from one country to the other because of the criminally ill-planned and, as subsequent evidence produced against the British has shown, ill-intentioned and maladroit division of a country which was the size of a continent. The enormity of the upheaval and trauma of partition becomes even more shattering when one lets the fact sink in that not even one leader or administrator had the vaguest forethought or inkling and, in some cases, concern for the human costs and consequences of partition. Some transfer of population was, of course, foreseen, but the colossal scale on which it actually happened came as an utter shock to everyone, including those who were presiding over the destiny of the people of the subcontinent. History offers no parallel to what happened to millions of people on either side of the dividing line drawn so arbitrarily and so treacherously, at least in the Punjab, by the British and their wonder boy Dickie Mountbatten who should have been tried on a charge of genocide. To this day, there is no exact count of how many perished during the communal upheaval on a primeval scale that preceded and followed partition.
In August 1947, our family was in Srinagar, Kashmir. My father Dr Noor Hussain, being deputy director of the Jammu and Kashmir State Medical Services, spent summers in Srinagar and moved to Jammu in winter with the Durbar, Jammu being the royal winter capital. He had also served as Maharaja Hari Singh’s personal physician for several years and was greatly liked and respected. He was a special favourite of Maharani Tara Devi, a winsome woman who came from ordinary stock but had caught the Maharaja’s fancy. I remember 14 August 1947 vividly and the green and white flag of Pakistan flying jauntily from the central post office building on Srinagar’s famous Bund that straddled the banks of the River Jhehlum. Hundreds of people stood there admiring the flag. It was an uplifting sight. The Pakistan flag had been raised since the communications of the State were now Pakistan’s responsibility. How long it flew there, I do not know but it must have been taken down when the State’s fraudulent “accession” to India was secured by Sheikh Abdullah in collusion with Jawaharlal Nehru and under the benevolent care of Dicky Mountbatten.
We always went to Jammu through the Banihal Pass, an incredibly exciting and hazardous journey. Particularly terrifying was the point where the bus passed through what was called Khooni Nullah because of the scores of accidents that had taken place there. Passengers would begin to recite prayers as the bus lurched forward over the road’s uneven surface. However, every year, this silent, baleful monster exacted its bloody toll in several human lives. I am told it has now either been bypassed or made safer with the straightening of the road. In 1983, when I went to Srinagar for the first time after 1947, I flew from New Delhi and it took no more than thirty minutes to land from one city in the other, a journey that in the past would have taken nearly three days by road. It is true that in our own lifetime, we have seen miracles happen.
In 1947, by October the Srinagar-Jammu road had been closed. It could not have been because of the weather as bad weather did not normally set in until several months later, but on account of the riots that had already broken out, of which we had had no inkling in Srinagar. There were all kinds of rumours, though. The Poonch uprising had already taken place where Muslim members of the Maharaja’s forces had revolted, aided by a large number of ex-servicemen who resided in thousands around the area. Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan was one of them and reportedly fired the first shot in what is now seen as the start of the Kashmir liberation war. The first bands of tribesmen had already entered the state with rag-tag Pakistani irregulars bringing up the rear. When one looks back, one realises what a fatal mistake that was, as it gave India the excuse it was seeking to annex Kashmir.
The haves of Sialkot have left the city. Most of them have moved to the cantonment where land prices now touch the sky. There is street after street of pillared palaces, built mostly with money which should have gone into the public coffers but did not. They have abandoned the city to those who do not have the means to move out and build a home with pillars. Others who have been unable to afford the cantonment or Chhauwni’s land prices, have built houses at the city’s other extremities. If you are returning after some years of absence, you may have to ask for directions as you approach the town.
Sialkot was not always a city full of uncleared filth or blocked gutters. Before independence, it had the reputation of being one of the cleanest in the Punjab, in fact in Northern India. My earliest memories of Sialkot date back to those years. While it is quite possible that a child may not really notice dirt, I recall old, narrow cobbled streets that looked clean. We would come from Jammu every now and then to visit my mother’s family. Her uncle, Malik Fazal Elahi lived with his family in Tanchiwala Mohalla, called that because of a huge overhead water tank on stilts that may still be there. This strange structure on its criss-crossing legs of steel rose high in the air, gray and shrouded in mystery. I think I last saw it sometime in the 1970s and it did not look that massive as I remembered it.
But perception of size is relative to how old you are. To a child, who sees every object in relation to his own tiny size, everything appears big and imposing. A friend of mine who returned to Jammu thirty years after independence, went to see if his family’s old home in Mohalla Mast Garh still stood. He remembered that in front of the house, there used to be a big rock which he had always wanted to climb but never could because to him it was like a small mountain. He says he could not believe his eyes when he saw it after all those years. It was really quite small. I had the same experience when I returned to Jammu in 1983. The streets of my early childhood which I had always remembered as spacious, were so narrow at points that I had to stand aside to let a man pass.
The pre-independence Sialkot visit I remember most clearly was in early 1947, six months or so before the departure of the British and the establishment of Pakistan. There were green Muslim League flags flying everywhere and big posters on the wall with the Quaid-i-Azam’s picture. I also recall being taken to Green Café by Nazir Malik, my mother’s first cousin and uncle Fazal Elahi Malik’s son, who was a staunch Muslim nationalist and called himself a soldier of the Quaid. He worked in the government-run Ordnance Clothing Factory but he did not let that stand in the way of his convictions. That was how the Muslim youth in India was at the time. The Muslim League had fired their imagination and they dreamt of the day when they would be free citizens in a country of their own. Had they known what hard times awaited them and how their ideals would be shattered, they might not perhaps have been so enthusiastic.
Bha Nazir, as I called him, was a reader of the newly brought-out Pakistan Times which had been founded by the Quaid-i-Azam, though financed and produced by Mian Iftikharuddin with Faiz Ahmed Faiz as the first editor. I brought back from Sialkot heaps of Muslim League handbills and a tiny green Muslim League flag with a picture of the Quaid on it which I pinned to my shirt and wore all the time like a medal won in a competition.
However, it is the cantonment where “it is at” now. This is also true of Lahore and so many other of our cities. Once the exclusive home of the soldiery, the cantonments. have now been civilianised. Why don’t they make a law that anyone who decides to live in a cantonment should also furnish an undertaking that in the event of war, he would volunteer to pick up a gun and march out to meet the enemy, leaving his Honda Accord and his pillared palace behind. That seems to me to be the only way to rid these places of their present occupants. It is another matter that these are the same people who at the first rumble of a tank or the first gun report in the distance, would jump into their cars and drive at breakneck speed towards, not Wagha, but Gujranwala.
Safety first.
But to return to Sialkot, not everything is gone. A few of the old landmarks are still around as they once were. The great Gothic Cathedral in the cantonment still stands where it has always stood, and it stands intact.
Hallelujah!
On a crossroads, also stands the monument built by Col. Commandant Charles Rankin, CBC, MG, DSO, Commander of the Sialkot Brigade from 1920 to 1924. It is evident that it has been properly cared for, an accomplishment for which all Station Commanders who have served in Sialkot in recent years deserve our gratitude. A slab of white marble, framed in red brick bears the following engraved message, ‘And an highway shall be built and the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.’ An arrow points to the plains of the Punjab. And the inscription reads, ‘Yonder lie the scorching plains whence dust riseth as smoke from a furnace.’ Another arrow points towards Jammu, and beyond that, Kashmir. Jammu is less then thirty miles away, though it could as well be thirty million miles because nobody from here can go there. The text reads, ‘The land whither you go is a fair land of hills and green valleys and clear running waters.’
God bless Commandant Col. Rankin who, no doubt, is in one such land now.
How our family came to settle in Sialkot is now part of the story of millions of families who were forced to migrate from one country to the other because of the criminally ill-planned and, as subsequent evidence produced against the British has shown, ill-intentioned and maladroit division of a country which was the size of a continent. The enormity of the upheaval and trauma of partition becomes even more shattering when one lets the fact sink in that not even one leader or administrator had the vaguest forethought or inkling and, in some cases, concern for the human costs and consequences of partition. Some transfer of population was, of course, foreseen, but the colossal scale on which it actually happened came as an utter shock to everyone, including those who were presiding over the destiny of the people of the subcontinent. History offers no parallel to what happened to millions of people on either side of the dividing line drawn so arbitrarily and so treacherously, at least in the Punjab, by the British and their wonder boy Dickie Mountbatten who should have been tried on a charge of genocide. To this day, there is no exact count of how many perished during the communal upheaval on a primeval scale that preceded and followed partition.
In August 1947, our family was in Srinagar, Kashmir. My father Dr Noor Hussain, being deputy director of the Jammu and Kashmir State Medical Services, spent summers in Srinagar and moved to Jammu in winter with the Durbar, Jammu being the royal winter capital. He had also served as Maharaja Hari Singh’s personal physician for several years and was greatly liked and respected. He was a special favourite of Maharani Tara Devi, a winsome woman who came from ordinary stock but had caught the Maharaja’s fancy. I remember 14 August 1947 vividly and the green and white flag of Pakistan flying jauntily from the central post office building on Srinagar’s famous Bund that straddled the banks of the River Jhehlum. Hundreds of people stood there admiring the flag. It was an uplifting sight. The Pakistan flag had been raised since the communications of the State were now Pakistan’s responsibility. How long it flew there, I do not know but it must have been taken down when the State’s fraudulent “accession” to India was secured by Sheikh Abdullah in collusion with Jawaharlal Nehru and under the benevolent care of Dicky Mountbatten.
We always went to Jammu through the Banihal Pass, an incredibly exciting and hazardous journey. Particularly terrifying was the point where the bus passed through what was called Khooni Nullah because of the scores of accidents that had taken place there. Passengers would begin to recite prayers as the bus lurched forward over the road’s uneven surface. However, every year, this silent, baleful monster exacted its bloody toll in several human lives. I am told it has now either been bypassed or made safer with the straightening of the road. In 1983, when I went to Srinagar for the first time after 1947, I flew from New Delhi and it took no more than thirty minutes to land from one city in the other, a journey that in the past would have taken nearly three days by road. It is true that in our own lifetime, we have seen miracles happen.
In 1947, by October the Srinagar-Jammu road had been closed. It could not have been because of the weather as bad weather did not normally set in until several months later, but on account of the riots that had already broken out, of which we had had no inkling in Srinagar. There were all kinds of rumours, though. The Poonch uprising had already taken place where Muslim members of the Maharaja’s forces had revolted, aided by a large number of ex-servicemen who resided in thousands around the area. Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan was one of them and reportedly fired the first shot in what is now seen as the start of the Kashmir liberation war. The first bands of tribesmen had already entered the state with rag-tag Pakistani irregulars bringing up the rear. When one looks back, one realises what a fatal mistake that was, as it gave India the excuse it was seeking to annex Kashmir.
However, since we could not go to Jammu via Banihal, the only other option open to us was to take the Jhehlum Valley Road via Rawalpindi, a much longer route but the only one available. One fine October morning, we left our flat off Srinagar’s Residency Road and hopped into a green Packard that my father’s close friend Col. Nicholson who had settled in the breathtakingly beautiful Lolab Valley had lent him. The Colonel died in Kashmir and, in accordance with his will, was buried in Lolab. His widow left for Britain where I visited her in Oxford when I went to England for the first time in 1968 to cover the Commonwealth Conference for the Pakistan Times that I had joined a year earlier after finally resigning from the service of the Government of Pakistan. The green Packard which my brother Bashir drove most of the way was returned to Srinagar though I have no idea how that was achieved because by the end of October, there was a civil war situation in areas along the Jhehlum Valley Road. I think there was a Kashmiri driver who had followed us who took the car back. We spent a night at Rawalpindi in the Circuit House and next morning we took a train for Sialkot. When we arrived at Gujrat, I found slain human bodies all over the platform. Non-Muslim men, women and children had been massacred for the greater glory of Islam and to celebrate, as it were, the birth of the new state of Pakistan. I also remember groups of scruffy-looking Pathan tribesmen milling around the station. They were on their way to Kashmir to wage jehad. Perhaps it was these very “liberators” who had done the killings on the train carrying those people towards Lahore.
My first impression of Sialkot when we arrived there was unsettling. It was a ravaged city and although, by the time we came, the Hindu and Sikh population had either left or been killed, their presence hung like a dark, invisible pall over the streets, homes and bazars. Most of the Hindu mohallas had been all but burnt down. Homes lay abandoned with their doors swinging forlornly on their hinges. Household articles and objects the rioters had found of no use or value lay scattered everywhere, on the street and inside the homes. There were also pictures and papers, old books, clothes, toys, images of gods and goddesses who had failed to come to the aid of their devotees. The scene was ghastly. I remember going into an abandoned Hindu home in the Dharowal mohalla which used to be almost entirely Hindu. It was scary. There was not a soul in there, only swinging doors and open windows and littered floors. The most disturbing and by far the saddest things that lay scattered everywhere were children’s toys. I do not think I have ever seen in the years since anything so desolate, anarchic and disturbing and I have no desire to see anything like it again. Freedom had come to the subcontinent but at what cost! And why had the innocent suffered? There were millions to whom freedom had brought nothing but death, ruin and dislocation.
My father was absolutely certain that these riots and upheavals would not last long and we would all be moving to Jammu any day. It took him a long time to come to terms with the fact that we were now refugees and we were never going to get back to Jammu or Srinagar. Some days after our arrival, those who had managed to escape their killers in Jammu began to arrive in Sialkot. They told harrowing stories. Most of the Muslims of Jammu had been brought out in batches on military trucks but instead of being taken to Pakistan, they had been driven towards Samba where armed men were waiting for them. Thousands had been massacred in cold blood, including old men and women, and even children. One of the qaflas or convoys that had left Jammu on a Thursday had been entirely annihilated. I do not think any people from that one survived except those who were left for dead or who hid themselves under piles of bodies. The only happy event of those days that I remember is that Dilawar Khan who had been with our family for nearly twenty years – he came from Kishtwar where my father was medical officer and where he had taken him in as a helper around the house – had survived. Most of his travelling companions had been killed but he had made it because of his youth, physical strength, courage and, in the end, luck.
In those days, refugees simply moved into homes they found without an occupant, and there were plenty of those. We did not want to do that, mainly because my father still thought of Sialkot as a temporary stop which we would leave once things had “settled down”. We had kipped in with Chacha Miran Bux, my father’s uncle who lived in Mohalla Islamabad. He was one of the most immaculately dressed men I have ever seen. He had spent most of his working life in Rangoon where he ran a smart tailoring and outfitting business. He was never to be seen in anything but a sharp suit, wearing highly polished leather shoes, an expensive silk tie and a fez on his head. He cut a dashing figure. He lost one of his sons in the 1947 holocaust. His name was Nazir. His wife and children lived with Chacha Miran Bux.
My father was finally persuaded by my mother to get ourselves a house. The one we found and where we lived for many, many years – it still stands but is in someone else’s possession after our entire family moved out of Sialkot one by one – was on Paris Road, a fashionable area where rich and fashionable Hindus once lived. It was a good road then, tree-lined and broad enough for what traffic there was. In the early years of independence, there were not many cars in Sialkot and we more or less knew which car belonged to whom. Right in front of our house which had three storeys and a very nice garden at the back, stood a Hindu millionaire’s folly which was called ‘Pillar Palace’. It was a huge place with hundreds of pillars and it always reminded me of an elaborate wedding cake. It was all white and in moonlight it was a splendid sight. When I saw it recently, it looked weather-beaten and a little sad. The various families that lived there had done little to preserve or repair it. The magnificent front lawn had been ravaged and divided among the various owners of the property. We are not preservers but despoilers and destroyers. Another magnificent place owned by Sardar Ganda Singh that was entirely made of red brick, was turned over to the rehabilitation department which did to it what it did to the refugees it was supposed to help. The most wonderful home on Paris Road belonged to the famous barrister C. Roy. It became the official residence of the sessions judge. Next to it stood a two-storey home where lived an old gentleman by the name of M.A. Khan who drove an old pre-World War II car and who had a lovely daughter we all used to long to catch a glimpse of. There was a belief among some that Khawar Malik who rode a maganificent Harley Davidson motorcycle had something going with her. Maybe he took her on secret rides on his great machine on moonlit nights.
Another beautiful pink-orange mansion became the residence of Chaudhri Ghulam Abbas, the Muslim Conference leader and a great fighter for the rights of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The only property on Paris Road which belonged to a Muslim was the one that stood next to the Abbas house. In it lived my friend Khwaja Mahmood Anwar, son of Khwaja Hakim Din, one of the sport goods manufacturing geniuses of the city who ran the great Oberoi sports factory after independence. In the end, that fine place fell a victim to litigation which utterly destroyed it. Further down the road, going towards Bhed Bridge, built over the seasonal stream called Bhed, if you took a left turn, you came upon two enormous homes, both owned by Hindus. The government took them over and turned them into the official residences of the deputy commissioner and the superintendent of police. And now that we have no deputy commissioners – thanks to Gen. “Gorbachev” Naqvi’s “reforms” – I suppose it is in the possession of the District Nazim. Another very nice home close to the bridge had been turned into the city’s employment exchange. There was a large sign outside saying ‘Daftar-e-Roozgar’ which we always wanted to rewrite as ‘Daftar Gham-e-Roozgar’ which proved at least one thing. We had recently read Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Naqsh-i-Faryadi - Tujh se bhi dilfareb hain gham roozgar ke. (Even more enticing than you, beloved, is the business of day-to-day life.)
Puran Nagar was where many of my friends and I lived. Kalim and Nasim Akhtar lived at the back of our house. Salim Ahmed Malik who was called Salim “Scott” after Sir Walter Scott because of the novel he was going to write (instead he went into geology and moved to England in the 1960s where he still lives) also lived in Puran Nagar, as did Abdul Waheed “Parwana”, Dr Aziz Kash, Fazlur Rehman Malik “Maana”, Waheed Ahmed known as Waheed “Kailash” and several others. The Hazir clan also lived in Puran Nagar and Paris Road at the same time as the large home had an entrance on each side.
One of our inseparable friends from those days was Syed Talib Hussain Jaffrey, universally called Talib “Bhaiyya”. The family came from Shahjahanpur and ran the city’s leading stationery store called Shahsons. There were many Jaffrey brothers, at least two of whom worked for the Ordnance Clothing Factory. They all later moved to Wah near Rawalpindi when the cantonment was established there and with it a major ordnance facility. One of the brothers, older to Talib, was Shuja Bhai who always had a paan tucked in a corner of his mouth. It was rumoured that one of the toughest fighters in the city by the name of Mohammad Amin “Meena” (who originally came, like us, from Jammu) was under Shuja Bhai’s orders and could be deployed if and when the need arose. Talib loved to play cards and often lost. He was madly in love with the actress Geeta Bali and I remember that when the movie Albela came to Sialkot, Talib Bhaiyya went to see it at least a hundred times. On one occasion when he forced me to go with him, the gatekeeper said to me, “Can’t you keep him home?” He knew everything about Geeta Bali whom he called Miss Bali. It was strange that he married a girl called Iqbal who was called Bali. Talib Bahaiyya’s other passion was international affairs. He had an amazing memory for facts and could rattle off dates and names from history without getting one of them wrong. After we left Sialkot, I lost contact with him but he kept in touch with my elder brother Bashir. He had become a lecturer in political science and served many years in Sindh and parts of the Frontier province. He is no longer around but time spent with him all those years ago I have never forgotten.
When we left Srinagar I was in the ninth class. In Sialkot, I joined the famous Government School which stood next to Murray College. I sat for my matriculation examination as a private student and passed with a second division, the only examination in which I scored a second division. I think the first person I met in Murray College was Irshad Hussain Kazmi, who became the finest Urdu debater of his or any other generation. He took me under his wing, already a senior, being in second year, and filled my admission form for me. Another boy who joined the same day as I did was Nawaz Shahid or "Nawaja Teela" or Bertie Wooster. His family made music instruments. In the column that required the applicant to list his caste (I hope they have done away with that nonsense now, but unlikely as caste consciousness has had a big comeback in Pakistan since Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s days), Nawaz wrote ‘music’.
My first impression of Sialkot when we arrived there was unsettling. It was a ravaged city and although, by the time we came, the Hindu and Sikh population had either left or been killed, their presence hung like a dark, invisible pall over the streets, homes and bazars. Most of the Hindu mohallas had been all but burnt down. Homes lay abandoned with their doors swinging forlornly on their hinges. Household articles and objects the rioters had found of no use or value lay scattered everywhere, on the street and inside the homes. There were also pictures and papers, old books, clothes, toys, images of gods and goddesses who had failed to come to the aid of their devotees. The scene was ghastly. I remember going into an abandoned Hindu home in the Dharowal mohalla which used to be almost entirely Hindu. It was scary. There was not a soul in there, only swinging doors and open windows and littered floors. The most disturbing and by far the saddest things that lay scattered everywhere were children’s toys. I do not think I have ever seen in the years since anything so desolate, anarchic and disturbing and I have no desire to see anything like it again. Freedom had come to the subcontinent but at what cost! And why had the innocent suffered? There were millions to whom freedom had brought nothing but death, ruin and dislocation.
My father was absolutely certain that these riots and upheavals would not last long and we would all be moving to Jammu any day. It took him a long time to come to terms with the fact that we were now refugees and we were never going to get back to Jammu or Srinagar. Some days after our arrival, those who had managed to escape their killers in Jammu began to arrive in Sialkot. They told harrowing stories. Most of the Muslims of Jammu had been brought out in batches on military trucks but instead of being taken to Pakistan, they had been driven towards Samba where armed men were waiting for them. Thousands had been massacred in cold blood, including old men and women, and even children. One of the qaflas or convoys that had left Jammu on a Thursday had been entirely annihilated. I do not think any people from that one survived except those who were left for dead or who hid themselves under piles of bodies. The only happy event of those days that I remember is that Dilawar Khan who had been with our family for nearly twenty years – he came from Kishtwar where my father was medical officer and where he had taken him in as a helper around the house – had survived. Most of his travelling companions had been killed but he had made it because of his youth, physical strength, courage and, in the end, luck.
In those days, refugees simply moved into homes they found without an occupant, and there were plenty of those. We did not want to do that, mainly because my father still thought of Sialkot as a temporary stop which we would leave once things had “settled down”. We had kipped in with Chacha Miran Bux, my father’s uncle who lived in Mohalla Islamabad. He was one of the most immaculately dressed men I have ever seen. He had spent most of his working life in Rangoon where he ran a smart tailoring and outfitting business. He was never to be seen in anything but a sharp suit, wearing highly polished leather shoes, an expensive silk tie and a fez on his head. He cut a dashing figure. He lost one of his sons in the 1947 holocaust. His name was Nazir. His wife and children lived with Chacha Miran Bux.
My father was finally persuaded by my mother to get ourselves a house. The one we found and where we lived for many, many years – it still stands but is in someone else’s possession after our entire family moved out of Sialkot one by one – was on Paris Road, a fashionable area where rich and fashionable Hindus once lived. It was a good road then, tree-lined and broad enough for what traffic there was. In the early years of independence, there were not many cars in Sialkot and we more or less knew which car belonged to whom. Right in front of our house which had three storeys and a very nice garden at the back, stood a Hindu millionaire’s folly which was called ‘Pillar Palace’. It was a huge place with hundreds of pillars and it always reminded me of an elaborate wedding cake. It was all white and in moonlight it was a splendid sight. When I saw it recently, it looked weather-beaten and a little sad. The various families that lived there had done little to preserve or repair it. The magnificent front lawn had been ravaged and divided among the various owners of the property. We are not preservers but despoilers and destroyers. Another magnificent place owned by Sardar Ganda Singh that was entirely made of red brick, was turned over to the rehabilitation department which did to it what it did to the refugees it was supposed to help. The most wonderful home on Paris Road belonged to the famous barrister C. Roy. It became the official residence of the sessions judge. Next to it stood a two-storey home where lived an old gentleman by the name of M.A. Khan who drove an old pre-World War II car and who had a lovely daughter we all used to long to catch a glimpse of. There was a belief among some that Khawar Malik who rode a maganificent Harley Davidson motorcycle had something going with her. Maybe he took her on secret rides on his great machine on moonlit nights.
Another beautiful pink-orange mansion became the residence of Chaudhri Ghulam Abbas, the Muslim Conference leader and a great fighter for the rights of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The only property on Paris Road which belonged to a Muslim was the one that stood next to the Abbas house. In it lived my friend Khwaja Mahmood Anwar, son of Khwaja Hakim Din, one of the sport goods manufacturing geniuses of the city who ran the great Oberoi sports factory after independence. In the end, that fine place fell a victim to litigation which utterly destroyed it. Further down the road, going towards Bhed Bridge, built over the seasonal stream called Bhed, if you took a left turn, you came upon two enormous homes, both owned by Hindus. The government took them over and turned them into the official residences of the deputy commissioner and the superintendent of police. And now that we have no deputy commissioners – thanks to Gen. “Gorbachev” Naqvi’s “reforms” – I suppose it is in the possession of the District Nazim. Another very nice home close to the bridge had been turned into the city’s employment exchange. There was a large sign outside saying ‘Daftar-e-Roozgar’ which we always wanted to rewrite as ‘Daftar Gham-e-Roozgar’ which proved at least one thing. We had recently read Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Naqsh-i-Faryadi - Tujh se bhi dilfareb hain gham roozgar ke. (Even more enticing than you, beloved, is the business of day-to-day life.)
Puran Nagar was where many of my friends and I lived. Kalim and Nasim Akhtar lived at the back of our house. Salim Ahmed Malik who was called Salim “Scott” after Sir Walter Scott because of the novel he was going to write (instead he went into geology and moved to England in the 1960s where he still lives) also lived in Puran Nagar, as did Abdul Waheed “Parwana”, Dr Aziz Kash, Fazlur Rehman Malik “Maana”, Waheed Ahmed known as Waheed “Kailash” and several others. The Hazir clan also lived in Puran Nagar and Paris Road at the same time as the large home had an entrance on each side.
One of our inseparable friends from those days was Syed Talib Hussain Jaffrey, universally called Talib “Bhaiyya”. The family came from Shahjahanpur and ran the city’s leading stationery store called Shahsons. There were many Jaffrey brothers, at least two of whom worked for the Ordnance Clothing Factory. They all later moved to Wah near Rawalpindi when the cantonment was established there and with it a major ordnance facility. One of the brothers, older to Talib, was Shuja Bhai who always had a paan tucked in a corner of his mouth. It was rumoured that one of the toughest fighters in the city by the name of Mohammad Amin “Meena” (who originally came, like us, from Jammu) was under Shuja Bhai’s orders and could be deployed if and when the need arose. Talib loved to play cards and often lost. He was madly in love with the actress Geeta Bali and I remember that when the movie Albela came to Sialkot, Talib Bhaiyya went to see it at least a hundred times. On one occasion when he forced me to go with him, the gatekeeper said to me, “Can’t you keep him home?” He knew everything about Geeta Bali whom he called Miss Bali. It was strange that he married a girl called Iqbal who was called Bali. Talib Bahaiyya’s other passion was international affairs. He had an amazing memory for facts and could rattle off dates and names from history without getting one of them wrong. After we left Sialkot, I lost contact with him but he kept in touch with my elder brother Bashir. He had become a lecturer in political science and served many years in Sindh and parts of the Frontier province. He is no longer around but time spent with him all those years ago I have never forgotten.
When we left Srinagar I was in the ninth class. In Sialkot, I joined the famous Government School which stood next to Murray College. I sat for my matriculation examination as a private student and passed with a second division, the only examination in which I scored a second division. I think the first person I met in Murray College was Irshad Hussain Kazmi, who became the finest Urdu debater of his or any other generation. He took me under his wing, already a senior, being in second year, and filled my admission form for me. Another boy who joined the same day as I did was Nawaz Shahid or "Nawaja Teela" or Bertie Wooster. His family made music instruments. In the column that required the applicant to list his caste (I hope they have done away with that nonsense now, but unlikely as caste consciousness has had a big comeback in Pakistan since Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s days), Nawaz wrote ‘music’.
However, since we could not go to Jammu via Banihal, the only other option open to us was to take the Jhehlum Valley Road via Rawalpindi, a much longer route but the only one available. One fine October morning, we left our flat off Srinagar’s Residency Road and hopped into a green Packard that my father’s close friend Col. Nicholson who had settled in the breathtakingly beautiful Lolab Valley had lent him. The Colonel died in Kashmir and, in accordance with his will, was buried in Lolab. His widow left for Britain where I visited her in Oxford when I went to England for the first time in 1968 to cover the Commonwealth Conference for the Pakistan Times that I had joined a year earlier after finally resigning from the service of the Government of Pakistan. The green Packard which my brother Bashir drove most of the way was returned to Srinagar though I have no idea how that was achieved because by the end of October, there was a civil war situation in areas along the Jhehlum Valley Road. I think there was a Kashmiri driver who had followed us who took the car back. We spent a night at Rawalpindi in the Circuit House and next morning we took a train for Sialkot. When we arrived at Gujrat, I found slain human bodies all over the platform. Non-Muslim men, women and children had been massacred for the greater glory of Islam and to celebrate, as it were, the birth of the new state of Pakistan. I also remember groups of scruffy-looking Pathan tribesmen milling around the station. They were on their way to Kashmir to wage jehad. Perhaps it was these very “liberators” who had done the killings on the train carrying those people towards Lahore.
My first impression of Sialkot when we arrived there was unsettling. It was a ravaged city and although, by the time we came, the Hindu and Sikh population had either left or been killed, their presence hung like a dark, invisible pall over the streets, homes and bazars. Most of the Hindu mohallas had been all but burnt down. Homes lay abandoned with their doors swinging forlornly on their hinges. Household articles and objects the rioters had found of no use or value lay scattered everywhere, on the street and inside the homes. There were also pictures and papers, old books, clothes, toys, images of gods and goddesses who had failed to come to the aid of their devotees. The scene was ghastly. I remember going into an abandoned Hindu home in the Dharowal mohalla which used to be almost entirely Hindu. It was scary. There was not a soul in there, only swinging doors and open windows and littered floors. The most disturbing and by far the saddest things that lay scattered everywhere were children’s toys. I do not think I have ever seen in the years since anything so desolate, anarchic and disturbing and I have no desire to see anything like it again. Freedom had come to the subcontinent but at what cost! And why had the innocent suffered? There were millions to whom freedom had brought nothing but death, ruin and dislocation.
My father was absolutely certain that these riots and upheavals would not last long and we would all be moving to Jammu any day. It took him a long time to come to terms with the fact that we were now refugees and we were never going to get back to Jammu or Srinagar. Some days after our arrival, those who had managed to escape their killers in Jammu began to arrive in Sialkot. They told harrowing stories. Most of the Muslims of Jammu had been brought out in batches on military trucks but instead of being taken to Pakistan, they had been driven towards Samba where armed men were waiting for them. Thousands had been massacred in cold blood, including old men and women, and even children. One of the qaflas or convoys that had left Jammu on a Thursday had been entirely annihilated. I do not think any people from that one survived except those who were left for dead or who hid themselves under piles of bodies. The only happy event of those days that I remember is that Dilawar Khan who had been with our family for nearly twenty years – he came from Kishtwar where my father was medical officer and where he had taken him in as a helper around the house – had survived. Most of his travelling companions had been killed but he had made it because of his youth, physical strength, courage and, in the end, luck.
In those days, refugees simply moved into homes they found without an occupant, and there were plenty of those. We did not want to do that, mainly because my father still thought of Sialkot as a temporary stop which we would leave once things had “settled down”. We had kipped in with Chacha Miran Bux, my father’s uncle who lived in Mohalla Islamabad. He was one of the most immaculately dressed men I have ever seen. He had spent most of his working life in Rangoon where he ran a smart tailoring and outfitting business. He was never to be seen in anything but a sharp suit, wearing highly polished leather shoes, an expensive silk tie and a fez on his head. He cut a dashing figure. He lost one of his sons in the 1947 holocaust. His name was Nazir. His wife and children lived with Chacha Miran Bux.
My father was finally persuaded by my mother to get ourselves a house. The one we found and where we lived for many, many years – it still stands but is in someone else’s possession after our entire family moved out of Sialkot one by one – was on Paris Road, a fashionable area where rich and fashionable Hindus once lived. It was a good road then, tree-lined and broad enough for what traffic there was. In the early years of independence, there were not many cars in Sialkot and we more or less knew which car belonged to whom. Right in front of our house which had three storeys and a very nice garden at the back, stood a Hindu millionaire’s folly which was called ‘Pillar Palace’. It was a huge place with hundreds of pillars and it always reminded me of an elaborate wedding cake. It was all white and in moonlight it was a splendid sight. When I saw it recently, it looked weather-beaten and a little sad. The various families that lived there had done little to preserve or repair it. The magnificent front lawn had been ravaged and divided among the various owners of the property. We are not preservers but despoilers and destroyers. Another magnificent place owned by Sardar Ganda Singh that was entirely made of red brick, was turned over to the rehabilitation department which did to it what it did to the refugees it was supposed to help. The most wonderful home on Paris Road belonged to the famous barrister C. Roy. It became the official residence of the sessions judge. Next to it stood a two-storey home where lived an old gentleman by the name of M.A. Khan who drove an old pre-World War II car and who had a lovely daughter we all used to long to catch a glimpse of. There was a belief among some that Khawar Malik who rode a maganificent Harley Davidson motorcycle had something going with her. Maybe he took her on secret rides on his great machine on moonlit nights.
Another beautiful pink-orange mansion became the residence of Chaudhri Ghulam Abbas, the Muslim Conference leader and a great fighter for the rights of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The only property on Paris Road which belonged to a Muslim was the one that stood next to the Abbas house. In it lived my friend Khwaja Mahmood Anwar, son of Khwaja Hakim Din, one of the sport goods manufacturing geniuses of the city who ran the great Oberoi sports factory after independence. In the end, that fine place fell a victim to litigation which utterly destroyed it. Further down the road, going towards Bhed Bridge, built over the seasonal stream called Bhed, if you took a left turn, you came upon two enormous homes, both owned by Hindus. The government took them over and turned them into the official residences of the deputy commissioner and the superintendent of police. And now that we have no deputy commissioners – thanks to Gen. “Gorbachev” Naqvi’s “reforms” – I suppose it is in the possession of the District Nazim. Another very nice home close to the bridge had been turned into the city’s employment exchange. There was a large sign outside saying ‘Daftar-e-Roozgar’ which we always wanted to rewrite as ‘Daftar Gham-e-Roozgar’ which proved at least one thing. We had recently read Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Naqsh-i-Faryadi - Tujh se bhi dilfareb hain gham roozgar ke. (Even more enticing than you, beloved, is the business of day-to-day life.)
Puran Nagar was where many of my friends and I lived. Kalim and Nasim Akhtar lived at the back of our house. Salim Ahmed Malik who was called Salim “Scott” after Sir Walter Scott because of the novel he was going to write (instead he went into geology and moved to England in the 1960s where he still lives) also lived in Puran Nagar, as did Abdul Waheed “Parwana”, Dr Aziz Kash, Fazlur Rehman Malik “Maana”, Waheed Ahmed known as Waheed “Kailash” and several others. The Hazir clan also lived in Puran Nagar and Paris Road at the same time as the large home had an entrance on each side.
One of our inseparable friends from those days was Syed Talib Hussain Jaffrey, universally called Talib “Bhaiyya”. The family came from Shahjahanpur and ran the city’s leading stationery store called Shahsons. There were many Jaffrey brothers, at least two of whom worked for the Ordnance Clothing Factory. They all later moved to Wah near Rawalpindi when the cantonment was established there and with it a major ordnance facility. One of the brothers, older to Talib, was Shuja Bhai who always had a paan tucked in a corner of his mouth. It was rumoured that one of the toughest fighters in the city by the name of Mohammad Amin “Meena” (who originally came, like us, from Jammu) was under Shuja Bhai’s orders and could be deployed if and when the need arose. Talib loved to play cards and often lost. He was madly in love with the actress Geeta Bali and I remember that when the movie Albela came to Sialkot, Talib Bhaiyya went to see it at least a hundred times. On one occasion when he forced me to go with him, the gatekeeper said to me, “Can’t you keep him home?” He knew everything about Geeta Bali whom he called Miss Bali. It was strange that he married a girl called Iqbal who was called Bali. Talib Bahaiyya’s other passion was international affairs. He had an amazing memory for facts and could rattle off dates and names from history without getting one of them wrong. After we left Sialkot, I lost contact with him but he kept in touch with my elder brother Bashir. He had become a lecturer in political science and served many years in Sindh and parts of the Frontier province. He is no longer around but time spent with him all those years ago I have never forgotten.
When we left Srinagar I was in the ninth class. In Sialkot, I joined the famous Government School which stood next to Murray College. I sat for my matriculation examination as a private student and passed with a second division, the only examination in which I scored a second division. I think the first person I met in Murray College was Irshad Hussain Kazmi, who became the finest Urdu debater of his or any other generation. He took me under his wing, already a senior, being in second year, and filled my admission form for me. Another boy who joined the same day as I did was Nawaz Shahid or "Nawaja Teela" or Bertie Wooster. His family made music instruments. In the column that required the applicant to list his caste (I hope they have done away with that nonsense now, but unlikely as caste consciousness has had a big comeback in Pakistan since Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s days), Nawaz wrote ‘music’.
My first impression of Sialkot when we arrived there was unsettling. It was a ravaged city and although, by the time we came, the Hindu and Sikh population had either left or been killed, their presence hung like a dark, invisible pall over the streets, homes and bazars. Most of the Hindu mohallas had been all but burnt down. Homes lay abandoned with their doors swinging forlornly on their hinges. Household articles and objects the rioters had found of no use or value lay scattered everywhere, on the street and inside the homes. There were also pictures and papers, old books, clothes, toys, images of gods and goddesses who had failed to come to the aid of their devotees. The scene was ghastly. I remember going into an abandoned Hindu home in the Dharowal mohalla which used to be almost entirely Hindu. It was scary. There was not a soul in there, only swinging doors and open windows and littered floors. The most disturbing and by far the saddest things that lay scattered everywhere were children’s toys. I do not think I have ever seen in the years since anything so desolate, anarchic and disturbing and I have no desire to see anything like it again. Freedom had come to the subcontinent but at what cost! And why had the innocent suffered? There were millions to whom freedom had brought nothing but death, ruin and dislocation.
My father was absolutely certain that these riots and upheavals would not last long and we would all be moving to Jammu any day. It took him a long time to come to terms with the fact that we were now refugees and we were never going to get back to Jammu or Srinagar. Some days after our arrival, those who had managed to escape their killers in Jammu began to arrive in Sialkot. They told harrowing stories. Most of the Muslims of Jammu had been brought out in batches on military trucks but instead of being taken to Pakistan, they had been driven towards Samba where armed men were waiting for them. Thousands had been massacred in cold blood, including old men and women, and even children. One of the qaflas or convoys that had left Jammu on a Thursday had been entirely annihilated. I do not think any people from that one survived except those who were left for dead or who hid themselves under piles of bodies. The only happy event of those days that I remember is that Dilawar Khan who had been with our family for nearly twenty years – he came from Kishtwar where my father was medical officer and where he had taken him in as a helper around the house – had survived. Most of his travelling companions had been killed but he had made it because of his youth, physical strength, courage and, in the end, luck.
In those days, refugees simply moved into homes they found without an occupant, and there were plenty of those. We did not want to do that, mainly because my father still thought of Sialkot as a temporary stop which we would leave once things had “settled down”. We had kipped in with Chacha Miran Bux, my father’s uncle who lived in Mohalla Islamabad. He was one of the most immaculately dressed men I have ever seen. He had spent most of his working life in Rangoon where he ran a smart tailoring and outfitting business. He was never to be seen in anything but a sharp suit, wearing highly polished leather shoes, an expensive silk tie and a fez on his head. He cut a dashing figure. He lost one of his sons in the 1947 holocaust. His name was Nazir. His wife and children lived with Chacha Miran Bux.
My father was finally persuaded by my mother to get ourselves a house. The one we found and where we lived for many, many years – it still stands but is in someone else’s possession after our entire family moved out of Sialkot one by one – was on Paris Road, a fashionable area where rich and fashionable Hindus once lived. It was a good road then, tree-lined and broad enough for what traffic there was. In the early years of independence, there were not many cars in Sialkot and we more or less knew which car belonged to whom. Right in front of our house which had three storeys and a very nice garden at the back, stood a Hindu millionaire’s folly which was called ‘Pillar Palace’. It was a huge place with hundreds of pillars and it always reminded me of an elaborate wedding cake. It was all white and in moonlight it was a splendid sight. When I saw it recently, it looked weather-beaten and a little sad. The various families that lived there had done little to preserve or repair it. The magnificent front lawn had been ravaged and divided among the various owners of the property. We are not preservers but despoilers and destroyers. Another magnificent place owned by Sardar Ganda Singh that was entirely made of red brick, was turned over to the rehabilitation department which did to it what it did to the refugees it was supposed to help. The most wonderful home on Paris Road belonged to the famous barrister C. Roy. It became the official residence of the sessions judge. Next to it stood a two-storey home where lived an old gentleman by the name of M.A. Khan who drove an old pre-World War II car and who had a lovely daughter we all used to long to catch a glimpse of. There was a belief among some that Khawar Malik who rode a maganificent Harley Davidson motorcycle had something going with her. Maybe he took her on secret rides on his great machine on moonlit nights.
Another beautiful pink-orange mansion became the residence of Chaudhri Ghulam Abbas, the Muslim Conference leader and a great fighter for the rights of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The only property on Paris Road which belonged to a Muslim was the one that stood next to the Abbas house. In it lived my friend Khwaja Mahmood Anwar, son of Khwaja Hakim Din, one of the sport goods manufacturing geniuses of the city who ran the great Oberoi sports factory after independence. In the end, that fine place fell a victim to litigation which utterly destroyed it. Further down the road, going towards Bhed Bridge, built over the seasonal stream called Bhed, if you took a left turn, you came upon two enormous homes, both owned by Hindus. The government took them over and turned them into the official residences of the deputy commissioner and the superintendent of police. And now that we have no deputy commissioners – thanks to Gen. “Gorbachev” Naqvi’s “reforms” – I suppose it is in the possession of the District Nazim. Another very nice home close to the bridge had been turned into the city’s employment exchange. There was a large sign outside saying ‘Daftar-e-Roozgar’ which we always wanted to rewrite as ‘Daftar Gham-e-Roozgar’ which proved at least one thing. We had recently read Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Naqsh-i-Faryadi - Tujh se bhi dilfareb hain gham roozgar ke. (Even more enticing than you, beloved, is the business of day-to-day life.)
Puran Nagar was where many of my friends and I lived. Kalim and Nasim Akhtar lived at the back of our house. Salim Ahmed Malik who was called Salim “Scott” after Sir Walter Scott because of the novel he was going to write (instead he went into geology and moved to England in the 1960s where he still lives) also lived in Puran Nagar, as did Abdul Waheed “Parwana”, Dr Aziz Kash, Fazlur Rehman Malik “Maana”, Waheed Ahmed known as Waheed “Kailash” and several others. The Hazir clan also lived in Puran Nagar and Paris Road at the same time as the large home had an entrance on each side.
One of our inseparable friends from those days was Syed Talib Hussain Jaffrey, universally called Talib “Bhaiyya”. The family came from Shahjahanpur and ran the city’s leading stationery store called Shahsons. There were many Jaffrey brothers, at least two of whom worked for the Ordnance Clothing Factory. They all later moved to Wah near Rawalpindi when the cantonment was established there and with it a major ordnance facility. One of the brothers, older to Talib, was Shuja Bhai who always had a paan tucked in a corner of his mouth. It was rumoured that one of the toughest fighters in the city by the name of Mohammad Amin “Meena” (who originally came, like us, from Jammu) was under Shuja Bhai’s orders and could be deployed if and when the need arose. Talib loved to play cards and often lost. He was madly in love with the actress Geeta Bali and I remember that when the movie Albela came to Sialkot, Talib Bhaiyya went to see it at least a hundred times. On one occasion when he forced me to go with him, the gatekeeper said to me, “Can’t you keep him home?” He knew everything about Geeta Bali whom he called Miss Bali. It was strange that he married a girl called Iqbal who was called Bali. Talib Bahaiyya’s other passion was international affairs. He had an amazing memory for facts and could rattle off dates and names from history without getting one of them wrong. After we left Sialkot, I lost contact with him but he kept in touch with my elder brother Bashir. He had become a lecturer in political science and served many years in Sindh and parts of the Frontier province. He is no longer around but time spent with him all those years ago I have never forgotten.
When we left Srinagar I was in the ninth class. In Sialkot, I joined the famous Government School which stood next to Murray College. I sat for my matriculation examination as a private student and passed with a second division, the only examination in which I scored a second division. I think the first person I met in Murray College was Irshad Hussain Kazmi, who became the finest Urdu debater of his or any other generation. He took me under his wing, already a senior, being in second year, and filled my admission form for me. Another boy who joined the same day as I did was Nawaz Shahid or "Nawaja Teela" or Bertie Wooster. His family made music instruments. In the column that required the applicant to list his caste (I hope they have done away with that nonsense now, but unlikely as caste consciousness has had a big comeback in Pakistan since Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s days), Nawaz wrote ‘music’.
Irshad Kazmi died in 1995 in Sialkot, without fanfare, quietly. That was the city where he was born and where he spent his early years and to which, in the end, he returned. Of all things, he died of a snakebite, not immediately on being bitten, but many months after. The venom had caused fatal damage to his system. Back in the Murray College days, if someone had suggested that Kazmi had been bitten by a snake, everyone would have asked if the snake had died immediately or some time later. Kazmi was a fine poet. The Sialkot of those days had quite a crop of poets. There was Taab Aslam, Asim Sehbai, Asghar Saudai and Munir Roomani who was with us in college but I never heard of him after we passed out. I never even read anything by him except what he would publish in the college magazine. He just seems to have disappeared. I remember a poem of his about going to the train station to see off his beloved. As the train starts to move out, his heart begins to beat faster, in rhythm with the engine. That part of the poem went like this: ‘chuk, chuk, chuk (that is the train); dhuk, dhuk, dhuk (that is Munir’s heart)’ then as the train gathers speed, ‘chuk, chuk … dhuk, dhuk’ and then ‘chuk, dhak, chuk, dhuk, chuk, dhuk). And then it is gone and there is silence.
One of Kazmi’s friends –older and colourful – was the poet and journalist Manzoor Anwar Qureshi who later moved to Lahore and worked several years for the Jang newspaper. Kazmi lived in a winding street off Beriwala Chowk – where the great Hamid Khan and Prof. M.A. Naseer also lived – just off College Road, which has been probably renamed Shahrah Subedar Samandar Khan Gulzai. I remember that Kazmi and I went to an intercollegiate debate held at Government College, Lyallpur, since renamed after the late Saudi king whereas it should have been named after my friend Zahid Sarfraz if not Farhat Mahmood.
But to return to the debate: Kazmi was preceded by a very pretty girl from one of Lahore’s colleges of which we small-town boys were always in some awe. She had spoken very well and hers was a difficult act to follow. Kazmi walked up to rostrum, shook off the curl that always overhung his brow, waited for the slow handclap that had started to die down a little and in his rich and ringing voice, he read the famous Ghalib verse: Balai jaan hai Ghalib uss ki har baat: Abarat kya, isharat kya, adda kya. He brought the house down. Kazmi spent many years at Lahore’s Law College and walked out with a degree in the end, but his heart was not in law: it was in journalism and advertising. He worked first in Karachi and then in Lahore for many newspapers and magazines and his poetry continued to appear in literary journals. He had the gift of holding the attention of even the most raucous of audience at a mushaira. He had a wonderful voice and the distracted look of a poet. He never published a collection which is such a pity because he was a fine poet.
One of the most memorable Murray College characters of our days was Israel “Izo” Massey who now lives in London where about twenty years ago I attended his wedding. The wedding party rode a topless double decker bus to the church which was just as it should have been because Izo used to go around on a bicycle with a little plate at the back which said ‘Caution. Left-hand Drive’. Once Zamurrad asked him if he had read Dostoviesky. “Zamurrad, you know very well that I do not read Urdu Books,” Izo replied. Izo’s father was headmaster of the Scotch Mission High School in the cantonment and they lived in front of the great cathedral where his younger brother Nanna played the organ. We used to go to Izo’s house to play cricket and even Gulli Danda matches. The Massey brothers were quite something else. There was David and Illo and Bha John who was in the army. The youngest was Tom, the only one who still lives in Sialkot. David called Baby died many years ago, as have Illo and Bha John, a major in the Pakistan army. Their only sister Mary who became a doctor, had left Murray College when we joined it.
She married Captain Robin Aftab of the Pakistan International Airlines.
Ain Adeeb, a couple of years my junior, whose given name was Muhammad Abdullah was both a poet and a short story writer. Once he was hauled up by a traffic policeman for riding a bike without a light. ‘What is your name?” asked the policeman. “Ain Adeeb,” he replied. “Don’t play any tricks on me. I am not inviting you to a mushaira; I am going to write you a ticket,” the policeman said. One of Adeeb’s inseparable companions was Abdul Waheed “Parvana”. His work would appear in the college magazine off and one, courtesy Adeeb as A.W. Parvana could not have written two words even if his life had depended on it. One of “his” stories called Sofa which was the name we had given to a well filled-out girl called Shamim was carried in the college magazine, much to everyone’s amusement, though not to Shamim “Sofa’s”.
A few years ago, my friend Akhtar Mirza wrote to me in Washington that on an impulse, one day he had driven to Sialkot from Lahore and found himself in Murray College. He had returned there after thirty-five years. “Everything has changed,” he wrote, “The hockey ground is covered with uncut grass. The tennis courts where Prof. C. W. Tressler – Pakistan tourism and minorities minister Col. Sushil Tressler’s father – used to play every other afternoon is like a tropical jungle. The chapel, which like all chapels always looked a little melancholy, now wears a forlorn and abandoned look. I walked through the verandas, touched the trees under whose shade on golden winter days birds with long red tails used to dance, but found only squirrels rummaging around for food. ‘Abandoned gardens are fated to get squirrels as their gardeners’, goes the Punjabi proverb. And it is true. That is your Murray College today.’
I wondered at the time why Murray College should not go to seed when so much else in Pakistan had done so. But then I thought, perhaps it could be made an exception, if for nothing else, then for the sake of Iqbal and Faiz who studied there and that great savant and teacher, Maulvi Mir Hassan. Also for the sake of Chacha Muhammad Din who sold oranges in front of the main gate. His entire life was spent there. When Faiz was a student, Chacha was selling oranges and when years later Faiz came to preside over a debate, he was still selling oranges. The two embraced. Chacha later said that Faiz still owed him money but he had decided to let that debt of honour go.
Chacha Muhammad Din had been there for as long as anybody could remember. Generations of students had passed their recess period eating his oranges or other fruits of the season. He also made wonderful “lobia”, a spicy and sour mixture of the boiled, kidney-shaped tiny-sized lentil. Chacha remembered everyone’s name, even of students who had left the college twenty or thirty years ago. When I joined, Chacha was already gray. Perhaps he was in his fifties or even sixties. When you are fourteen or fifteen yourself, you have no sense of how old those older than you are. Even a person of thirty looks ancient which is no surprise because being thirty means he is twice your age. Chacha was short and thin and he wore his hair short. He always had plenty of time for those who were his favourites. Chacha’s credit was not extended to everybody, only to those he approved of. If Chacha was willing to sell you a cup of “lobia’ when you could not pay for it, that meant you had arrived. To be in Chacha’s good books was a privilege.
Once, one of our classmates by the name of Shah Din threw some dish water in Chacha’s eyes. He said it was just a prank and he was only teasing Chacha. So angry and in such pain was Chacha – since the water had been used to clean the cups in which he served his famous “lobia” - that cursing Shah Din to high heaven, Chacha rushed across the road, ran through the front gate into the college and burst into Mr Scott’s class, telling him in no-holds-barred Punjabi what Shah Din had done. Mr Scott put down the book from which he was reading, listened to Chacha with great patience and concern, calmed him down, asked him to go wash his face with clean water and promised to punish Shah Din. If I recall, Shah Din was suspended from classes for a couple of weeks, as well as fined. Chacha was treated by our teachers as an asset of the college and he would often put in a word for some unfortunate student who had been too harshly treated. Even Mr Tressler was willing to listen to Chacha.
One of Kazmi’s friends –older and colourful – was the poet and journalist Manzoor Anwar Qureshi who later moved to Lahore and worked several years for the Jang newspaper. Kazmi lived in a winding street off Beriwala Chowk – where the great Hamid Khan and Prof. M.A. Naseer also lived – just off College Road, which has been probably renamed Shahrah Subedar Samandar Khan Gulzai. I remember that Kazmi and I went to an intercollegiate debate held at Government College, Lyallpur, since renamed after the late Saudi king whereas it should have been named after my friend Zahid Sarfraz if not Farhat Mahmood.
But to return to the debate: Kazmi was preceded by a very pretty girl from one of Lahore’s colleges of which we small-town boys were always in some awe. She had spoken very well and hers was a difficult act to follow. Kazmi walked up to rostrum, shook off the curl that always overhung his brow, waited for the slow handclap that had started to die down a little and in his rich and ringing voice, he read the famous Ghalib verse: Balai jaan hai Ghalib uss ki har baat: Abarat kya, isharat kya, adda kya. He brought the house down. Kazmi spent many years at Lahore’s Law College and walked out with a degree in the end, but his heart was not in law: it was in journalism and advertising. He worked first in Karachi and then in Lahore for many newspapers and magazines and his poetry continued to appear in literary journals. He had the gift of holding the attention of even the most raucous of audience at a mushaira. He had a wonderful voice and the distracted look of a poet. He never published a collection which is such a pity because he was a fine poet.
One of the most memorable Murray College characters of our days was Israel “Izo” Massey who now lives in London where about twenty years ago I attended his wedding. The wedding party rode a topless double decker bus to the church which was just as it should have been because Izo used to go around on a bicycle with a little plate at the back which said ‘Caution. Left-hand Drive’. Once Zamurrad asked him if he had read Dostoviesky. “Zamurrad, you know very well that I do not read Urdu Books,” Izo replied. Izo’s father was headmaster of the Scotch Mission High School in the cantonment and they lived in front of the great cathedral where his younger brother Nanna played the organ. We used to go to Izo’s house to play cricket and even Gulli Danda matches. The Massey brothers were quite something else. There was David and Illo and Bha John who was in the army. The youngest was Tom, the only one who still lives in Sialkot. David called Baby died many years ago, as have Illo and Bha John, a major in the Pakistan army. Their only sister Mary who became a doctor, had left Murray College when we joined it.
She married Captain Robin Aftab of the Pakistan International Airlines.
Ain Adeeb, a couple of years my junior, whose given name was Muhammad Abdullah was both a poet and a short story writer. Once he was hauled up by a traffic policeman for riding a bike without a light. ‘What is your name?” asked the policeman. “Ain Adeeb,” he replied. “Don’t play any tricks on me. I am not inviting you to a mushaira; I am going to write you a ticket,” the policeman said. One of Adeeb’s inseparable companions was Abdul Waheed “Parvana”. His work would appear in the college magazine off and one, courtesy Adeeb as A.W. Parvana could not have written two words even if his life had depended on it. One of “his” stories called Sofa which was the name we had given to a well filled-out girl called Shamim was carried in the college magazine, much to everyone’s amusement, though not to Shamim “Sofa’s”.
A few years ago, my friend Akhtar Mirza wrote to me in Washington that on an impulse, one day he had driven to Sialkot from Lahore and found himself in Murray College. He had returned there after thirty-five years. “Everything has changed,” he wrote, “The hockey ground is covered with uncut grass. The tennis courts where Prof. C. W. Tressler – Pakistan tourism and minorities minister Col. Sushil Tressler’s father – used to play every other afternoon is like a tropical jungle. The chapel, which like all chapels always looked a little melancholy, now wears a forlorn and abandoned look. I walked through the verandas, touched the trees under whose shade on golden winter days birds with long red tails used to dance, but found only squirrels rummaging around for food. ‘Abandoned gardens are fated to get squirrels as their gardeners’, goes the Punjabi proverb. And it is true. That is your Murray College today.’
I wondered at the time why Murray College should not go to seed when so much else in Pakistan had done so. But then I thought, perhaps it could be made an exception, if for nothing else, then for the sake of Iqbal and Faiz who studied there and that great savant and teacher, Maulvi Mir Hassan. Also for the sake of Chacha Muhammad Din who sold oranges in front of the main gate. His entire life was spent there. When Faiz was a student, Chacha was selling oranges and when years later Faiz came to preside over a debate, he was still selling oranges. The two embraced. Chacha later said that Faiz still owed him money but he had decided to let that debt of honour go.
Chacha Muhammad Din had been there for as long as anybody could remember. Generations of students had passed their recess period eating his oranges or other fruits of the season. He also made wonderful “lobia”, a spicy and sour mixture of the boiled, kidney-shaped tiny-sized lentil. Chacha remembered everyone’s name, even of students who had left the college twenty or thirty years ago. When I joined, Chacha was already gray. Perhaps he was in his fifties or even sixties. When you are fourteen or fifteen yourself, you have no sense of how old those older than you are. Even a person of thirty looks ancient which is no surprise because being thirty means he is twice your age. Chacha was short and thin and he wore his hair short. He always had plenty of time for those who were his favourites. Chacha’s credit was not extended to everybody, only to those he approved of. If Chacha was willing to sell you a cup of “lobia’ when you could not pay for it, that meant you had arrived. To be in Chacha’s good books was a privilege.
Once, one of our classmates by the name of Shah Din threw some dish water in Chacha’s eyes. He said it was just a prank and he was only teasing Chacha. So angry and in such pain was Chacha – since the water had been used to clean the cups in which he served his famous “lobia” - that cursing Shah Din to high heaven, Chacha rushed across the road, ran through the front gate into the college and burst into Mr Scott’s class, telling him in no-holds-barred Punjabi what Shah Din had done. Mr Scott put down the book from which he was reading, listened to Chacha with great patience and concern, calmed him down, asked him to go wash his face with clean water and promised to punish Shah Din. If I recall, Shah Din was suspended from classes for a couple of weeks, as well as fined. Chacha was treated by our teachers as an asset of the college and he would often put in a word for some unfortunate student who had been too harshly treated. Even Mr Tressler was willing to listen to Chacha.
Kotli Loharan consists of two large villages of Lohars (ironsmiths)
But I have my own Chacha story. We were much taken at the time by the movie Babul which starred Dilip Kumar, Nargis and Munawwar Sultana. One scene in particular had taken our fancy. Dilip Kumar takes off his hat, flirtatiously places it on Nargis’s head and blows smoke in her eyes. It was all very romantic. Inspired by that, but forgetting that I was not Dilip Kumar and real life was not a movie, I playfully blew smoke in the eyes of a girl called Nasim one day as she was on her way to Green Room, which was what the room set aside for girls was called. We were not allowed to go in there or even hang around it. She turned right back and rubbing her eyes walked into Mr Scott’s office (he had an office at his residence and one in the college) to report my misdemeanour. Mr Scott was not pleased and after giving me a dressing down – which he was always uncomfortable doing – told me that he was going to punish me for what I had done.
The news that I was in trouble with the principal spread quickly and since everything that happened in the college was immediately reported to Chacha, this one was no exception. A little later someone brought me a message from Chacha. I was to go and see him, which I did right away. He asked me what the trouble was and when I told him, he said he knew the girl’s father – only then did I learn that like us, he was from Jammu – and he would take me to his home in the evening. I was reluctant to go, but Chacha said I should just leave it to him. “I will get it all sorted out, don’t you worry,” he told me. In the evening, he took me to the girl’s house. I first had to wait in the street while Chacha went in. Later, I was called in and I said I was sorry but it was just a prank. The next day, Nasim went to Mr Scott and said she wanted to withdraw her complaint. Mr Scott said if that was what she wanted, it was all right by him. That was Chacha. He was everybody’s Chacha. And he was as great an institution as the college in front of which he spent his entire life selling oranges and spiced lentil.
A few years after Akhtar wrote, I went to Sialkot and it was late evening when with two friends, I stopped in front of the brick building where I had studied for six years and taught for three. The front gate was open and there was no watchman around. He was probably watching TV or he had gone to his second job which, thanks to our national social security “safety net”, everyone now needs to survive. The main hall named after Maulvi Mir Hassan was in a state of disrepair: a poor tribute to a great man. There were signs of structural degradation everywhere. The classrooms were in bad shape. The L-shaped block that used to house the much-dreaded office of Prof. Tressler, the bursar’s establishment, the staff room, the chemistry and biology theatres and the science labs looked dirty and shrunken. The two hostels looked just about ready to collapse, especially the older one that fronted the hockey ground. A new set of classrooms had been built but they were ungainly. I did not go into the library because it was locked but I wondered what it looked like now. Prof. Arthur Mowat had catalogued the books in the rich and extensive English literature section personally. There he would sit for hours on end, writing their names and their Dewey Decimal numbers in his neat, careful hand on index cards. For a moment I was glad Prof. Tressler, Prof Mowat and Rev. David Leslie Scott were not around to see what had happened to the college they used to tend so lovingly like a garden.
Murray College was established in the closing years of the 19th century by the Church of Scotland which ran it also and ran it well. Then came Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s so-called nationalisation of privately run educational institutions and Murray College, along with other missionary-run schools and colleges such as Forman Christian and Kinnairds at Lahore and Gordon at Rawalpindi were taken over. They have now been denationalised but with the exception of Kinnaird, in such a shambles have they been left that the original owners do not want them back in the shape they are in. I do not know what the latest state of play is; perhaps they will take them back and restore them, but I very much doubt it.
My friend Rafiq wrote in the same piece from which I have quoted earlier, “Scotland and Sialkot are like chalk and cheese, poles apart. You may think long and you may thing hard before you will find any one aspect in which the two regions may have anything in common. It is by an almost superhuman feat of the imagination that one can comprehend a small band of people born and bred in the comparative comfort of Bonny Scotland, deeply moral and ordained to the Christian ministry, each one of them possessing an intellect of the highest order and educated to the highest levels of excellence in one of the five ancient universities of their country, to leave their home and live and work without recompense except for what will be barely essential to keep their and their families’ body and soul together, 7,000 miles away beyond seven seas in a strange land to educate the people of a town very different from theirs and not for one day or one month or one year but for a hundred years. Living here they must have missed hundreds of thousands of things of their country but none more so than perhaps the hills and mountains where they and their families were raised. The nearest in Sialkot to anything resembling a hill came into existence in the 1920s in the name of Mount View Hotel which had no mount and no view within miles of it – like the Greenwood Street concocted by some exporters to gloss over a vestige of greenery nor the sign of a wood in sight there. But just outside the garrison town at the crossroads is a giant milestone announcing that Sialkot is 0 miles from here and marking the place where the hot plains of the Punjab end and the hills of the Himalayas begin. And here if you can face north and lift up your eyes, as the psalmist, long ago, singing the Song of David, Psalm 121, did in a different time and place (I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills), you will witness on a clear day the most magnificent view of the hills forever cloud-cupped, a view which strikes in the onlooker the awe and magic of all things eternal. And it is perhaps here that these missionaries might have felt something akin to the feelings of home and one can imagine one of them one day standing at this spot gazing unto the eternal hills up in the north and being moved enough to carve verses in a milestone and erect it here as an enduring testimony to what he felt that day.”
When I joined Murray College, we still had a number of Scottish teachers. Rev. David Leslie Scott, an angel of a man, was principal and Prof. Arthur Mowat taught us English literature. A true scholar with great insights, he had taught at Calcutta before independence but it was our good fortune that he had come to Sialkot. The other day, my friend Rafiq sent me an article Prof. Mowat had written for the college magazine on Shakespeare’s dramatic art. Here is a snatch from it. “In order to be intelligently appreciated, Shakespeare’s art must be properly understood. A Shakespearian play was not produced for modern stage conditions. It was not ‘realistic’ in stage-setting, plot, or even language. It did not observe pauses between Acts and Scenes and thus did not furnish the audience with an opportunity to check the consistency of its component parts. It was a continuous, poetical play performed on a bare, intimate platform-stage within the limits of two and a half hours and conforming to the stage conditions recognised in Shakespeare’s time.” This could as well have been from one of his lectures because that is the way he spoke when he taught. I can hear his voice. He was absolutely brilliant. Prof. Sirajuddin was one of his great admirers and Prof. Mowat always said that Prof. Siraj’s notes to a poetry textbook called The Stream of English Poetry were first rate. I don’t think the two ever met.
Prof. Mowat was a man of tremendous scholarship, a devotee of Wordsworth whom he considered among the greatest of poets, and of Shakespeare. He was always to be seen in winter in gray flannel trousers and a tweed jacket. Every morning, he would bike all the way from Bara Pathar to the college, a distance of no less than five miles. At the time, I was much taken with Swinburne and found poems like ‘When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces …’ quite irresistible. Prof. Mowat would say, “You would outgrow that sort of thing.” He was right, though I would never have believed it. I once asked him if he had thought anything of having spent his life teaching ignoramuses like us. Would he not have rather stayed back home and taught at one of the great English or Scottish universities? He replied that this was what he had decided to do early on in life and he had never looked back, nor did he have any regrets.
When I came to Murray College in 1948, the memory of its legendary principal John Garrett and the philosopher William Lillie was still fresh in people’s minds. Garret had consolidated the college and made it one of the finest in Northern India. Dr Lilliewas a man of great learning whose book on ethics may still be required reading at many universities of the world. Rev. Scott’s father was principal in the early years of the last century and Mr Scott was born in Daska. He spent almost his entire life in Sialkot. His only absences were the time he spent every few years on furlough in Scotland. He married another Scottish missionary, Mary, and they had three children, Peter, Margaret and Agnes. In winter, Rev. Scott would take some of his smaller classes on the lawn with the students sitting crosslegged on the grass and he standing against a chair with a book in hand. Peter would sometimes appear through the bushes on tiptoe and make faces at the students. He was always caught by his father as someone or the other would burst out laughing at Peter’s antics.
We had some wonderful teachers. There was our English professor, the very handsome and elegantly dressed T.S. Dutta who had converted to Christianity, having been born a Hindu. He lived in Puran Nagar in a rented house right behind ours which faced Paris Road. He always had a shy smile on his face and I never heard him raise his voice at any student. He would bike every morning from Puran Nagar to the college, the bottoms of his well-pressed trousers being carefully tucked in with a clip so that they wouldn’t get tangled up in the chain which being greased was the ruin of anything caught in its teeth. I can still hear Prof. Dutta read in his soft, lilting voice the lovely and tragic love poem The Highwayman. ‘And the highway man came riding, riding, riding, riding to the old Inn door’ to meet the landlord’s ‘black-eyed, red-lipped daughter’ Bess who is tying a love knot in her dark black hair. In the end, Bess kills herself to save her lover. But the Redcoats get him anyway.
It was during my third year that Eric Cyprian came down from Lahore to join the English Department. He had been chased out of there, it was clear, by the intelligence establishment which has always been particularly virulent in the Punjab. Cyprian was a life-long, card-carrying member of the Communist Party, whether it was overground or underground. He had seen the other side of the jail wall and police lockup several times in his life. He had gone to England in the 1930s and returned with a degree in English lit. I am not sure whether he joined the Party while he was in England or whether he did so on return. However, until the end of his life, he remained a “comrade” and a proud one at that. He may have come to the relative obscurity of Sialkot but the operatives of the intelligence agencies – often called Kar-e-Khas walay – had not removed him from their watch list, with the result that there was constantly a man or two keeping an eye on Prof. Cyprian. Sometimes when he would ride out of the college on a bicycle, we would see that on his carrier was perched the plainclothesman on duty. This was mystifying until somebody told us that since the poor fellow assigned to keep an eye on “this dangerous communist” was always without a bicycle, Prof. Cyprian had offered to give whosoever was on duty a ride so that the poor bugger would not have to run after him or concoct some colourful story as to what the suspect Cyprian had been up to.
Prof. Cyprian was always smoking a pipe and he had a deep, grating voice. He was a brilliant teacher and he detested the establishment, all establishment. It is no small wonder that he was ever able to hold down a job. He used to live in the college hostel, of which he had been appointed superintendent. The hostel residents just loved him because he never interfered with them. If they were out for the night or playing cards in their rooms for money, he would leave them alone. There was one condition: they had to be reasonably well behaved. As long as they did not make a racket or get into physical fights, they were welcome to do whatever they wished, though within reason. It was sometimes said by the more conservative of the college staff that Prof. Cyprian had given much too much leeway to the students, but if Cyprian heard such criticism, he never gave a damn. His method of teaching was also quite different. What he wanted to do was to encourage his students to think, write and act creatively. He never preached Marxism as such but he encouraged the students to ask questions and not to accept anything as the revealed truth unless they were satisfied that it was so. He did not believe in rote learning either. I think anyone who studied under Prof. Cyprian gained intellectually and became conscious of things other than the prescribed textbooks.
Prof. Cyprian went as suddenly as he had arrived. We learnt one morning that he was gone and he had not gone alone. With him had gone a certain married lady with grown-up children. This was quite a scandal and a rather an un-Christian one. Where they had vanished, no one had any idea. However, some time later, we learnt that they had got married (she had, of course, duly obtained a divorce). They lived happily together until her death. A couple of years later, Prof. Cyprian remarried, this time a Muslim. What was most astonishing was that he converted to Islam and was named Ijaz Cyprian. When he died, I remember writing an obituary with the caption: ‘Ijaz Cyprian is dead: long live Eric Cyprian.’ Prof. Cyprian was one of the founders of the Shah Hussain College, Lahore. His last years were spent in Islamabad where he worked first at the newspaper Muslim and, when that closed down, at Pakistan Observer. His work on classical Punjabi literature – though he came from U.P. and Punjabi was not his mother tongue – is highly regarded by those whose opinion on the subject is respected. In him, Pakistan had a true revolutionary and iconoclast who remained loyal to The Cause when most others had thrown in the towel.
The news that I was in trouble with the principal spread quickly and since everything that happened in the college was immediately reported to Chacha, this one was no exception. A little later someone brought me a message from Chacha. I was to go and see him, which I did right away. He asked me what the trouble was and when I told him, he said he knew the girl’s father – only then did I learn that like us, he was from Jammu – and he would take me to his home in the evening. I was reluctant to go, but Chacha said I should just leave it to him. “I will get it all sorted out, don’t you worry,” he told me. In the evening, he took me to the girl’s house. I first had to wait in the street while Chacha went in. Later, I was called in and I said I was sorry but it was just a prank. The next day, Nasim went to Mr Scott and said she wanted to withdraw her complaint. Mr Scott said if that was what she wanted, it was all right by him. That was Chacha. He was everybody’s Chacha. And he was as great an institution as the college in front of which he spent his entire life selling oranges and spiced lentil.
A few years after Akhtar wrote, I went to Sialkot and it was late evening when with two friends, I stopped in front of the brick building where I had studied for six years and taught for three. The front gate was open and there was no watchman around. He was probably watching TV or he had gone to his second job which, thanks to our national social security “safety net”, everyone now needs to survive. The main hall named after Maulvi Mir Hassan was in a state of disrepair: a poor tribute to a great man. There were signs of structural degradation everywhere. The classrooms were in bad shape. The L-shaped block that used to house the much-dreaded office of Prof. Tressler, the bursar’s establishment, the staff room, the chemistry and biology theatres and the science labs looked dirty and shrunken. The two hostels looked just about ready to collapse, especially the older one that fronted the hockey ground. A new set of classrooms had been built but they were ungainly. I did not go into the library because it was locked but I wondered what it looked like now. Prof. Arthur Mowat had catalogued the books in the rich and extensive English literature section personally. There he would sit for hours on end, writing their names and their Dewey Decimal numbers in his neat, careful hand on index cards. For a moment I was glad Prof. Tressler, Prof Mowat and Rev. David Leslie Scott were not around to see what had happened to the college they used to tend so lovingly like a garden.
Murray College was established in the closing years of the 19th century by the Church of Scotland which ran it also and ran it well. Then came Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s so-called nationalisation of privately run educational institutions and Murray College, along with other missionary-run schools and colleges such as Forman Christian and Kinnairds at Lahore and Gordon at Rawalpindi were taken over. They have now been denationalised but with the exception of Kinnaird, in such a shambles have they been left that the original owners do not want them back in the shape they are in. I do not know what the latest state of play is; perhaps they will take them back and restore them, but I very much doubt it.
My friend Rafiq wrote in the same piece from which I have quoted earlier, “Scotland and Sialkot are like chalk and cheese, poles apart. You may think long and you may thing hard before you will find any one aspect in which the two regions may have anything in common. It is by an almost superhuman feat of the imagination that one can comprehend a small band of people born and bred in the comparative comfort of Bonny Scotland, deeply moral and ordained to the Christian ministry, each one of them possessing an intellect of the highest order and educated to the highest levels of excellence in one of the five ancient universities of their country, to leave their home and live and work without recompense except for what will be barely essential to keep their and their families’ body and soul together, 7,000 miles away beyond seven seas in a strange land to educate the people of a town very different from theirs and not for one day or one month or one year but for a hundred years. Living here they must have missed hundreds of thousands of things of their country but none more so than perhaps the hills and mountains where they and their families were raised. The nearest in Sialkot to anything resembling a hill came into existence in the 1920s in the name of Mount View Hotel which had no mount and no view within miles of it – like the Greenwood Street concocted by some exporters to gloss over a vestige of greenery nor the sign of a wood in sight there. But just outside the garrison town at the crossroads is a giant milestone announcing that Sialkot is 0 miles from here and marking the place where the hot plains of the Punjab end and the hills of the Himalayas begin. And here if you can face north and lift up your eyes, as the psalmist, long ago, singing the Song of David, Psalm 121, did in a different time and place (I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills), you will witness on a clear day the most magnificent view of the hills forever cloud-cupped, a view which strikes in the onlooker the awe and magic of all things eternal. And it is perhaps here that these missionaries might have felt something akin to the feelings of home and one can imagine one of them one day standing at this spot gazing unto the eternal hills up in the north and being moved enough to carve verses in a milestone and erect it here as an enduring testimony to what he felt that day.”
When I joined Murray College, we still had a number of Scottish teachers. Rev. David Leslie Scott, an angel of a man, was principal and Prof. Arthur Mowat taught us English literature. A true scholar with great insights, he had taught at Calcutta before independence but it was our good fortune that he had come to Sialkot. The other day, my friend Rafiq sent me an article Prof. Mowat had written for the college magazine on Shakespeare’s dramatic art. Here is a snatch from it. “In order to be intelligently appreciated, Shakespeare’s art must be properly understood. A Shakespearian play was not produced for modern stage conditions. It was not ‘realistic’ in stage-setting, plot, or even language. It did not observe pauses between Acts and Scenes and thus did not furnish the audience with an opportunity to check the consistency of its component parts. It was a continuous, poetical play performed on a bare, intimate platform-stage within the limits of two and a half hours and conforming to the stage conditions recognised in Shakespeare’s time.” This could as well have been from one of his lectures because that is the way he spoke when he taught. I can hear his voice. He was absolutely brilliant. Prof. Sirajuddin was one of his great admirers and Prof. Mowat always said that Prof. Siraj’s notes to a poetry textbook called The Stream of English Poetry were first rate. I don’t think the two ever met.
Prof. Mowat was a man of tremendous scholarship, a devotee of Wordsworth whom he considered among the greatest of poets, and of Shakespeare. He was always to be seen in winter in gray flannel trousers and a tweed jacket. Every morning, he would bike all the way from Bara Pathar to the college, a distance of no less than five miles. At the time, I was much taken with Swinburne and found poems like ‘When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces …’ quite irresistible. Prof. Mowat would say, “You would outgrow that sort of thing.” He was right, though I would never have believed it. I once asked him if he had thought anything of having spent his life teaching ignoramuses like us. Would he not have rather stayed back home and taught at one of the great English or Scottish universities? He replied that this was what he had decided to do early on in life and he had never looked back, nor did he have any regrets.
When I came to Murray College in 1948, the memory of its legendary principal John Garrett and the philosopher William Lillie was still fresh in people’s minds. Garret had consolidated the college and made it one of the finest in Northern India. Dr Lilliewas a man of great learning whose book on ethics may still be required reading at many universities of the world. Rev. Scott’s father was principal in the early years of the last century and Mr Scott was born in Daska. He spent almost his entire life in Sialkot. His only absences were the time he spent every few years on furlough in Scotland. He married another Scottish missionary, Mary, and they had three children, Peter, Margaret and Agnes. In winter, Rev. Scott would take some of his smaller classes on the lawn with the students sitting crosslegged on the grass and he standing against a chair with a book in hand. Peter would sometimes appear through the bushes on tiptoe and make faces at the students. He was always caught by his father as someone or the other would burst out laughing at Peter’s antics.
We had some wonderful teachers. There was our English professor, the very handsome and elegantly dressed T.S. Dutta who had converted to Christianity, having been born a Hindu. He lived in Puran Nagar in a rented house right behind ours which faced Paris Road. He always had a shy smile on his face and I never heard him raise his voice at any student. He would bike every morning from Puran Nagar to the college, the bottoms of his well-pressed trousers being carefully tucked in with a clip so that they wouldn’t get tangled up in the chain which being greased was the ruin of anything caught in its teeth. I can still hear Prof. Dutta read in his soft, lilting voice the lovely and tragic love poem The Highwayman. ‘And the highway man came riding, riding, riding, riding to the old Inn door’ to meet the landlord’s ‘black-eyed, red-lipped daughter’ Bess who is tying a love knot in her dark black hair. In the end, Bess kills herself to save her lover. But the Redcoats get him anyway.
It was during my third year that Eric Cyprian came down from Lahore to join the English Department. He had been chased out of there, it was clear, by the intelligence establishment which has always been particularly virulent in the Punjab. Cyprian was a life-long, card-carrying member of the Communist Party, whether it was overground or underground. He had seen the other side of the jail wall and police lockup several times in his life. He had gone to England in the 1930s and returned with a degree in English lit. I am not sure whether he joined the Party while he was in England or whether he did so on return. However, until the end of his life, he remained a “comrade” and a proud one at that. He may have come to the relative obscurity of Sialkot but the operatives of the intelligence agencies – often called Kar-e-Khas walay – had not removed him from their watch list, with the result that there was constantly a man or two keeping an eye on Prof. Cyprian. Sometimes when he would ride out of the college on a bicycle, we would see that on his carrier was perched the plainclothesman on duty. This was mystifying until somebody told us that since the poor fellow assigned to keep an eye on “this dangerous communist” was always without a bicycle, Prof. Cyprian had offered to give whosoever was on duty a ride so that the poor bugger would not have to run after him or concoct some colourful story as to what the suspect Cyprian had been up to.
Prof. Cyprian was always smoking a pipe and he had a deep, grating voice. He was a brilliant teacher and he detested the establishment, all establishment. It is no small wonder that he was ever able to hold down a job. He used to live in the college hostel, of which he had been appointed superintendent. The hostel residents just loved him because he never interfered with them. If they were out for the night or playing cards in their rooms for money, he would leave them alone. There was one condition: they had to be reasonably well behaved. As long as they did not make a racket or get into physical fights, they were welcome to do whatever they wished, though within reason. It was sometimes said by the more conservative of the college staff that Prof. Cyprian had given much too much leeway to the students, but if Cyprian heard such criticism, he never gave a damn. His method of teaching was also quite different. What he wanted to do was to encourage his students to think, write and act creatively. He never preached Marxism as such but he encouraged the students to ask questions and not to accept anything as the revealed truth unless they were satisfied that it was so. He did not believe in rote learning either. I think anyone who studied under Prof. Cyprian gained intellectually and became conscious of things other than the prescribed textbooks.
Prof. Cyprian went as suddenly as he had arrived. We learnt one morning that he was gone and he had not gone alone. With him had gone a certain married lady with grown-up children. This was quite a scandal and a rather an un-Christian one. Where they had vanished, no one had any idea. However, some time later, we learnt that they had got married (she had, of course, duly obtained a divorce). They lived happily together until her death. A couple of years later, Prof. Cyprian remarried, this time a Muslim. What was most astonishing was that he converted to Islam and was named Ijaz Cyprian. When he died, I remember writing an obituary with the caption: ‘Ijaz Cyprian is dead: long live Eric Cyprian.’ Prof. Cyprian was one of the founders of the Shah Hussain College, Lahore. His last years were spent in Islamabad where he worked first at the newspaper Muslim and, when that closed down, at Pakistan Observer. His work on classical Punjabi literature – though he came from U.P. and Punjabi was not his mother tongue – is highly regarded by those whose opinion on the subject is respected. In him, Pakistan had a true revolutionary and iconoclast who remained loyal to The Cause when most others had thrown in the towel.
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