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.
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