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.