Kotli Loharan

My cousin Shahid Malik recalled for me some years ago his first encounter with Zamurrad. Shahid, who now reports for BBC in Lahore, had come from Wah, which had no degree college at the time, to Sialkot which, in his father Nazir Malik’s (Bha Nazir) view, was a safer place for the moral health of this young man with dangerous ideas than Rawalpindi that was only 30 miles away. Shahid had to get into one or the other of the two city colleges. “Not to worry,” declared Mian Amin, another cousin of ours, “Malik Zamurrad is a friend. There hasn’t been a teacher like him since Maulana Abdul Hakim Sialkoti.” And with Shahid in tow, they set out in search of Zamurrad Malik. He was found (which is where they should have looked to begin with) in a dimly-lit corner of the Jinnah Islamia college tuck shop. He was smoking a Cavendar (he had changed to this brand when Scissors or ‘Qainchi’ disappeared from the market) with the remains of a “half set” of tea in front of him. Do they still serve “half sets”?

When told that the young man had a high first division in his intermediate, Zamurrad frowned, saying he had a prejudice against all those with first divisions. However, to prove himself wrong, he agreed to give the eager-looking youngster a test. “Translate these three sentences into English,” he ordered. The three sentences were: Tum ussay kiss hud tak jantay ho? Apni qameez ke button band karo. Wo apna kaam khatam kar chukka ho ga. Shahid got all three right, while secretly thanking God that Zamurrad had not asked him the English names of various vegetables. They became friends for life. Zamurrad never distinguished between his students and his friends, something that college management fuddy duddies frowned upon.

Zamurrad published only one book, a collection of Punjabi poems, called Ki Likhaan. It was published after he died by Fakhar Zaman who had become his friend. There never has been a second edition. Qurratulain, Zamurrad’s daughter, told me in 1999 that Fakhar Zaman has a large number of Zamurrad’s unpublished poems that he refuses to either publish (unless he has published them under his own name) or return. I should have asked my Lawrence College student Farooq Adam Khan “Halakoo” while he was the Big Honcho at the National Accountability Bureau in Islamabad to nab Fakhar Zaman and throw away the key until he produced Zamurrad’s missing poems.

Here, anyway, is one of Zamurrad’s poems, marred only by my tawdry translation. It is called ‘News’:

The TV is now silent/It’s only her lips that move/Her head and neck register the words she mumbles/Her eyes blink/ She goes on reading news/But the TV remains silent/For once I follow what she says/I look at her face and I know what she says/She has no voice, so her eyes can’t turn truth to lies or lies to truth/The line between friend and foe exists no longer/Today, her eyes are her own eyes/I look into them and I know what they’re saying/What you, I and the rest of us are saying/We who are sick to death of news.

Two people with whom I spent a lot of time were the brothers Kalim Akhtar and Nasim Akhtar, both now dead. We all came from Jammu and there was thus a natural affinity between us, our families having known each other for many, many years. Jammu, the summer capital of the Jammu and Kashmir State, though Punjabi and Dogri-speaking was not an extension of Punjab, as many seem to think today, but a city and a people with a style and way of life all their own. The Muslims were a minority but a gifted and vibrant minority. They all hung together and everyone knew everyone. Kalim and I were in primary school together. It was called Master Dadoo da School and we would sit on floor mats and intone sums and learn the alphabet. One of our teachers Master Allah Rakha like so many people of Jammu came and settled down in Sialkot after partition. However, the vast majority of Jammu Muslims was massacred in October 1947. The state-sponsored caravans or “qaflas” that were supposed to take them to the safety of Pakistan were set upon by armed men in a pre-arranged conspiracy. Few survived. The older women were killed, the younger ones abducted, including the daughter of Chaudhri Ghulam Abbas, one of the first among the Muslims of the State who fought for the rights of his community. But Jammu is another story and an untold one. This is not the place for it.

The majority of the Muslims of Jammu city and province who survived settled in Sialkot because at the time, most were of the opinion that these riots and communal disturbances would pass and people would go back to their homes. It simply could not occur to anybody that the line drawn across the map of India also marked the permanent separation of the two peoples as well. We always believed that we would go back where we had always lived. In that sense, ours has been one of the greatest human tragedies in history. And for the people of Jammu and Kashmir, there has been no closure since their fate continues to hang in the balance while India and Pakistan fight wars and when they are not fighting wars, they prepare for the next round. There were many camps around Sialkot where refugees from Jammu and the adjoining areas were made to live for a number of years after independence. One popular belief in Sialkot was that every woman on the prowl in the city was a Jammu wali. The people of Jammu took this sort of snide commentary on their morals with a good deal of humour and tolerance, virtues for which they were always known.

Once I recall running into someone at Shah Sahib’s Whiteways shop who asked me where I was from. When I told him I was from Jammu, he said something very funny in Punjabi, “Wah Jammu walio, jad de aye wo, sadian vi twadiyaan wangoon chalniyaan shurru ho giyyan nain.” While the flavour of how he put it in Punjabi is impossible to translate, what it roughly means is, “Bravo, you who come from Jammu. Ever since you arrived, our women, taking a cue from yours, have also begun to hit the street.” This sort of wit is very Sialkoti which is perhaps why the old saying: Sialkoti, haram di boti. Sialkotis are born rascals.

Kalim and I joined Murray College together. Nasim who was older to Kalim was still in Srinagar and came to Pakistan somewhere in 1949. We used to walk to college, as we both lived in Puran Nagar, through the green fields that lay at the back of our mohalla. For the most part, those fields are now gone and have made way for ugly housing. In other countries, houses are built so that those who live in them are protected from the harsher aspects of the weather. In Pakistan – and Sialkot is a microcosm of the country – houses are built according to some weird reverse airconditioning formula. They are guaranteed to trap the heat in summer and in winter keep the sunlight from warming those who reside in them. Kalim was always a writer and he wrote in Urdu and he wrote almost exclusively on Kashmir. The first biography of Sheikh Abdullah was written by Kalim though in his boyish enthusiasm, he built him up as a great freedom fighter when the fact is that if there is one man who is responsible for the misfortunes of the people of Kashmir, it is none other than Abdullah. He cannot be forgiven. His son, and even his grandson, are carrying on the Sheikh’s despicable mission. They remain Indian lackeys and they have proved that there is something to be said about the existence of the genetic code.

My lifelong friendship with Akhtar Mirza was formed at Murray College, though he was about three years junior to me. His father, Khan Bahadur Muhammad Din who in Bombay had set up a successful waterproofing and construction business in the 1930s was a well-respected figure in the city, which he visited every year. He was one of the engineers who had helped build the Sukkur Barrage. One of the engineering processes that he pioneered still bears his name and is used to this day. He was a village boy but he was born with the determination to succeed. He built up a fortune through hard work at a time when few Muslims had any money or any interest in callings other than the most menial ones. He used to tell his children that the most important thing in life was to apply oneself and to never give up. Akhtar was and is a photographer and in those days when few people had a camera, he used to go around with a Zeiss Ikon Super Ikonta 35 mm camera with which he took superb pictures. Since everyone in Sialkot invariably earned himself a name, Akhtar was called either “Super” or “Kanta”. The farthest anyone of us had ever been was Lahore, more often than not to see a movie which we never expected to make Sialkot or, if so, not early enough. A group of us went to see Barsat at Rivoli Cinema some weeks after it was released. The Rivoli was owned by that debonair cricketer Aga Saadat Aly’s family and run by his mother, a most remarkable lady. We also travelled to Lahore to see Julius Caesar, From Here to Eternity and India’s first technicolour movie Aan with Dilip Kumar, Nimmi and Nadira.

Akhtar’s brothers Iskandar and Salim, the first one older than him, the other younger, also became my good friends. Iskandar Mirza was a very stylish and colourful person. He was dark and handsome and wore T-shirts and cardigans that were a rarity in Sialkot. He lived in Karachi and often went to Bombay, as did Akhtar. We would be regaled with stories of the great city and of its movie studios and actors and actresses. At the time, one of my greatest desires was to go to Bombay of which I had a very romantic mental picture. I also felt drawn to Bombay because of Saadat Hasan Manto who had once described himself as a “chalta phirta Bombaii” – a man who carried Bombay with him wherever he went. I was not to get to Bombay until 1981 and when I did get there, I was a bit disillusioned. It wasn’t the way I had imagined it, though I stayed at the famous Taj. It was depressing to see that the squalor of endemic Indian poverty and homelessness was within a block of that great and glittering hotel. The drive from Santa Cruz airport to the city had also been depressing because of the succession of shanty towns through which the taxi passed. The high point of my Bombay visit was just one. I finally met Qurratulain Hyder who has remained a great friend to this day.

My classmate and close friend during my third and fourth year was Rafiq Shah who always signed his name, and does to this day, as M. Rafiq. He was also in Prof. Mowat’s B.A. English honours class which he passed with distinction. Of him, Prof. Mowat once said, “He writes English like an Englishman.” This is was not meant to be derogatory of those who did not because Prof. Mowat was incapable of even thinking of making such a supercilious slur. What he meant was that Rafiq never used any Anglo-Indian or Anglo-Pakistani-isms that have made us the butt of so many Peter Sellers type jokes. It is a fact that most of us write and speak English as if it were a dead language. We continue to use expressions and phrases, particularly idioms that we love, that no Englishman would be caught dead using. Rafiq wrote in a simple and spare manner and had a feeling for the language and an amazing grasp of its grammar and structure. He taught English at Murray College at the same time as I did and stayed there until he went to England in the 1960s where he is well and happily settled, though he visits Pakistan at least twice if not thrice a year.

Murray College was perhaps the only college outside Lahore which ran M.A. classes in English. However, to sit the examination, you had to go to Lahore. Rafiq and I went to Lahore together for our M.A. final and stayed at my brother Bashir Ahmed’s father-in-law, Khwaja Muhammad Iqbal’s house in Model Town. He was secretary of the Model Town Society and had been a fine cricketer, like his other brothers, in his day. His youngest brother Khwaja Bashir used to open for City Club in Sialkot with Khwaja Mahmood Anwar. While Mahmood was well over six feet, Bashir was very short and they always looked a bit funny when they went in to open for their side. It was impossible to dislodge Bashir or to tempt him into making a false or risky stroke. There he would be doing what we called his “thip, thip” and he would be there at the end of the day with maybe twenty runs on the board.

From Model Town, Rafiq and I would take the excellent Model Town bus service to the Punjab University in front of Kim’s Gun to sit for our papers. When the examination was over, we were so relieved that we were practically jumping around like a pair of frogs who have had a dose of Three-X rum. We picked up our books and went to Urdu bazar to hawk them. We were not able to sell all of them but we did sell a few. I do not remember how much money we made but it could not have been much. However, in those days, even a little money went a long way. What is more we were content with little and grateful for what we had. By the way, it never occurred to us what we would do if we failed. Rafiq and I, barring some breaks brought about by distance and lack of knowledge of each other’s exact whereabouts have remained close and can read each other’s thoughts, such is the empathy that old friends can develop. Rafiq today in my view has the most complete and mind-bogglingly detailed and accurate information about the Indian and Pakistani film industry. He has been at it for years though I only learnt of it less than two years ago. It is quite amazing how much he knows.

Being an old boy of the college, I was offered a lectureship in English and I gladly returned from Lahore where I had taught for about six months. The average size of the class was over two hundred and so short of space the college was that the classes used to be held under tents. In one of my fourth year English writing classes at Murray College – called composition groups – was someone who became one of my closest friends in the years to come. His name was Khwaja Fayyaz Mahmood whom Rehmatullah Rad used to call “Khwaja Khanzeer” or Khwaja “Khin”, but of course behind his back as prudence demanded. Years later, when I was working at the Pakistan Times and living in Temple Road in a rented room, someone suggested to Rad that the Red Cross was asking for blood donations and Khwaja Fayyaz being a roly-poly fellow should be asked to donate some. Rad said, “I wouldn’t advise that because anyone who is given a transfusion of blood donated by Fayyaz will find himself in a happy state of drunkenness instantaneously, because there is more of 3-X Hirjina Rum in Khwaja’s veins than there is blood.”

Fayyaz would never come to my class and twice a week, I would duly mark him absent. He lived in the hostel and ruled the place. He kept late nights, played cards, took the odd drink and was not to be messed around with. The hostel superintendent had wisely decided to befriend rather than discipline him. I was told that I was better off with Khwaja Fayyaz out of my class than in it. Finally, I sent him a message that we should meet. I was curious to see what sort of a character this fellow was. We met in the hostel tuck shop or canteen. He was short and fat, almost square and his hair was short-dropped. He offered me a Gold Flake cigarette and we drank tea. Then we began to chat and I took an immediate liking to him. He said he preferred to befriend teachers rather than get bored saying yes sir, no sir to them. He also offered me a drink any time I desired one. In front of other students, he would call me Professor sahib but when we were together, I was KH to him. I left Murray College, went to Murree’s Lawrence College for a term and from there to Cadet College, Hassan Abdal before joining the income tax service, having by pure accident come first in the countrywide competitive examination held by the Federal Public Service Commission in 1958 to Finance and Other Services.

When I came to Lahore, Khwaja was at the Department of Political Science at the Punjab University and living in the Law College hostel, a classic place where most of the residents were not students. It was also one of Lahore’s better-known card-playing places. The game was Flash or “teen-patti’. Khwaja was very much into cards. When Khwaja moved out, he suggested that we share the top-story flat of his cousin Sheikh Bashir in Old Anarkali. We lived happily together for over a year until I moved out of Lahore. But we remained friends all through. It was always my attempt to get Khwaja a nice job but it never quite worked out. He was with Lever Brothers for a while, then with PIA at Faisalabad. His time in PIA had familiarised him with airline jargon. Once he told me that he was supposed to be meeting a girl but she turned out to be a “no-show”. When I was at Pakistan Times, we used to meet practically every day. At one point, we also rented the portion of a house in Gulberg’s Mini Market in 1967 and part of 1968. A year later, I left for the United States but with Fayyaz my contact never broke. I always think of him and along with him of my other friend of those days in Lahore, Sheikh Asghar Latif, Justice Maulvi Mushtaq’s cousin whom we used to call Asghar “Krim”. He too has “joined the majority”, as Abdul Qayoom “Hello” is fond of saying.

One of my great Sialkot friends was Abdul Salam “Bata”, called Bata because for a few years he worked for the Bata Shoe Company. He was what can only be called “one hell of a guy”, a true ladies’ man if there was one. He could produce a woman out of thin air and in the most unlikely situations. During the 1960s, he was running the Waldorf Hotel in Lahore’s Gulberg Market. The hotel belonged to his sister whom we all called Apa and who was one great lady. Her husband, T.M. Sheikh, who was one of Pakistan’s most dynamic executives, rose to become head of Bata East Pakistan when he was barely forty. It is a shame that he died of kidney failure when he was only forty-three. This hotel was one of the greatest rendezvous points in the city and you were always certain to run into the most unlikely persons in the company of, well, easy going ladies who had come to keep them company of an afternoon or evening from the city or even from out of town. It was one happy place. Occasionally, there would be visits to the premises at unwelcome hours from spoilsport minions of the law. However, they were seldom permitted to disturb the establishment’s honoured and until that hour, happy guests. Bata was a past master at dealing with such intruders.

It has never ceased to amaze me how the Pakistani police has been interfering with the good life of citizens in utter and complete violation of the law with impunity for so long. I must also confess that my brothers in profession, the akhbarwalas, at least some of them from certain sections of the Urdu press, have gleefully printed stories of police raids for the titillation of their readers (of whom I do not think much). There was one senior superintendent of police in Lahore, the late Sardar Abdul Wakil Khan, who had vowed to clean the city of all sin. The number of girls whom he pushed into the clinker was large as, no doubt, were the prayers for a befitting end to this self-styled chief inspector of morals. Since he is now on the other side, I wish him well, but he made a lot of Lahore’s young blades and their companions unhappy. May Allah deal with him as He considers fit. I mention Sardar Wakil Khan because Bata’s hotel was on his hit list.

The house that stood next door to ours in Sialkot was called Lachman Niwas and had been built by a rich Hindu family on the eve of partition. And though it has since been given a very Arabic and Islamic name, it was to the credit of the Ghulam Muhammad Hazir family that the original name had been left in place. The Hazir family was very much from Sialkot and came from Mohalla Rangpura where most of the cousins still lived. Hazir sahib had done very well as a contractor with the British Indian army during the war and the family was settled in Dehra Dun. He had four sons, the eldest being Mazhar, followed by Nazir who was universally known as N.Q., Zulfiqar, Taufiq and Shahbaz or Sheedo. Sheedo joined Murray College the same year as I did but left soon after to join the army. He rose to the rank of brigadier in the army aviation corps and died around 1980 while well below fifty of some incurable disease, probably cancer that John Wayne called the Big C.

Our hero was N.Q. who led the cricket team we had all joined, Hassan Gymkhana, which had its own separate nets at the other end of Connley Park. We were the “other team’, our rivals being the much older and far stronger City Club presided over by Abdul Hamid Khan and Babu Fazal Karim and containing a whole truckload of six-footers in Khwaja Mahmood Anwar, Mushtaq Mirza “Shako”, Mohammad Sadiq, Agha Sarfraz, Agha Mumtaz, and Mohammad Yusuf (called Yusuf “Goot” because though he never agreed, he chucked). Our team had a lot of useless youngsters like me but it also had the brilliant all rounder Shoaib “khabba” or left-handed who played against the MCC. He was a delight to watch, both when he was batting and when he was bowling his medium off and leg breaks. N.Q. was a character beyond compare. He kept wicket and was a good middle order batsman. He it was who gave some of us our first taste of Scotch, the brew which, to quote Saadat Hasan Manto, inscribes in one heady moment the words ‘Long Live Revolution’ as it races down your gullet. N.Q. was Hazir sahib’s favourite, and his spoilt son. Nothing was too good for him. He was one of the most handsome men I have known and he had a heart as big as the old Connley Park. He also had a tremendous sense of humor.

He was totally unself-conscious and he was capable of saying just anything in front of anybody. While N.Q. was tall, his father the venerable Ghulam Muhammad Hazir was quite short. Once N.Q. told us that if his father did not have a beard, he would look like his son. Another time, he walked into the clinic of Dr Bashir Ahmed and in the presence of about a dozen patients, after saying “excuse me”, placed his whaddoyacallit on the table right under the gentlemanly Dr Bashir’s nose. “There is this little pimple that appeared out of nowhere last morning at this most inconvenient place, so take a look, doctor”. Dr Bashir, blushing to the roots of his hair, stammered, “Khwaja Sahib, please not here, let me take you inside and we would take a look.” “But you can take a look at it right here,” N.Q. insisted, quite unmindful of about a dozen people, all trying to turn their eyes away from the sight and going red in the face while trying not to laugh. Khwaja Mahmood, N.Q.’s cousin, used to say that whenever he heard N.Q. utter the words “excuse me”, he held his breath because you could never be sure what N.Q. would say or do. In fact, N.Q.’s more outlandish acts or remarks were invariably prefixed by “excuse me”. Zulfiqar, N.Q.’s younger brother who was called General Jullo was of a less fair complexion than his other brothers which induced N.Q. to ask his mother one day, “Now tell me the truth. Is Jullo really Ghulam Muhammad Hazir’s son?” That was N.Q., very much N.Q.

We used to be invited to play against Officers Club in the cantonment, something we always looked forward to because of the tea break which used to be the high point of our visit with cucumber sandwiches and cakes of all kind. The Officers Club team was almost entirely made up of serving army officers, some of them British. There used to be Brig. Packwood who belonged to one of the Punjab Regiments. After he retired, he stayed on. He died in Lahore and is buried there as far as I know. There was also a Capt. Rowe who used to bowl leg breaks. There was also one officer (Capt. Shamsie I think his name was) who played for the Services team later. The Officers Club used to have a turf while in the city, we were still playing on matting. The first time I played on turf I realised how differently the ball behaved after being pitched. You needed to move in quite another way and readjust your sense of timing. Whenever there was a match at the Officers Club, deck chairs would be laid out around the boundary line where spectators who always included women would watch the play and even clap when a good shot was played or someone lost his wicket.

Another cricketing figure in the city that I sometimes think of was Mirza Bahar Beg who was such a great enthusiast that he had formed his own team, the third one in Sialkot, the other two being City Cricket Club and Hassan Gymkhana. Mirza Bahar Beg had gray hair and must at one time have played cricket because he knew a great deal about it. At the nets, he would carefully watch his players and tell them what it was they were not getting right. Once I heard him tell a strong, bull-like youngster who, we later learnt, was a weight lifter, “Son, cricket is a game which requires technique, not brute strength. If brute strength alone could make a man a cricketer, why, Gama Pehlwan, the world wrestling champion, would have been the greatest batsman in the world.” I also once heard him give this priceless advice to a talented youngster we used to call Deepak Shodan, after the Indian cricketer, “Listen, remember just this one thing. The ball that pitches at good length, play it with your foot forward; the one that falls short, play it on the back foot.” I think better advice to a batsman could not be given.

Another of N.Q.’s younger brothers was the poet Taufiq Rafat who died in 1998, having suffered a nervous breakdown several years earlier. Taufiq was a quiet person. There can be no question that he along with Kalim Omar and Makki Kureishi was the only genuine English language poet Pakistan can lay a claim to. When his younger brother Shahbaz Ghalib “Sheedo” died, he wrote: His wife gives me/one of his old shirts/U would like to think/they are being used, she says/He was tall and heavy/The shirt hangs loosely/on my smaller frame/but where it touches the skin/it will not be shaken free.

Taufiq married Rehana Pal, the most beautiful girl in Sialkot. She was my friend Ahsan Pal’s cousin and we used to pine for her. What a splendid figure she cut as she walked down the street, tall and utterly self-possessed and uncaring and, I am sure, unaware of her smashing looks. They had many children together and by all accounts it was a happy marriage. I asked Rehana, whom the family called Haani, after Taufiq died if she had ever asked him why he had stopped writing poetry. She said she had and in answer he had said, “I can’t seem to be able to put things together.” His name will live because he found a true Pakistani idiom for English poetry written in Pakistan. As Athar Tahir said, he took English to a new creative and imaginative terrain. This is an achievement only major poets have the gift of making. In my view, the best poem about Pakistan is by Taufiq. Written in 1971 after the breakup of the state, he called it ‘Pakistan’ and here is how it goes: Child and mother, I loved her/before she was born, and again/I call her my green one/in a panic of despair/A cripple at twenty-three/she has limped to the edge and now/stares blindly at the sea/Who are these secretive men/harnessing her where she stands?/Do I see feathers in the air?/Do I smell wax on my hands?

Those of us who were into books – and most of us were – would also hang around Maliksons, Sialkot’s only news agents. It was also a bookshop which used to carry both English and Urdu books. The Lahore newspapers used to be in the city by daybreak and would be delivered all over town by hawkers riding bicycles. Old Malik sahib who had started the business in the 1920s had five sons, the eldest being Hyder Malik who used to run Modern Book Depot in the cantonment, the only bookshop there. It still remains where it once was. One of the sons, Aslam, was my classmate, but my close friend was the one older to him Iqbal Malik who died in 1993 of a heart attack and whose sunny personality and hearty laughter I have seldom found in any other. It was at Maliksons where my friend Zamurrad bought the beautiful John Middleton Murry edition of John Keats’s collected poems that he later lost to me in a chess wager. This was ironic because he was a far better player than I was. He read books on chess and knew both the Indian and the European systems. It was from him that I first heard the name of the legendary player from Sargodha, Sultan Khan, who is listed among the game’s great maestros. His patron, Sir Khizr Hayat Khan Tiwana’s father who is known in Sargodha as “Sir sahib”, took him to England where he dazzled London with his brilliance.

Iqbal Malik was also the Sialkot correspondent of the Pakistan Times for many, many years, and later also of the Associated Press of Pakistan. He also used to bring out a newspaper of his own in Urdu called Hamdard-e-Pakistan. He died of a heart attack while on assignment at the local women’s college. It was his heart that gave up of which he had plenty. I was abroad when it happened. A friend wrote that Iqbal went suddenly. Just slumped to the ground and said, “God will make it all come right in the end.” He was tall, handsome, fair and blue-eyed, as were the other brothers. Prof. Meerza Riaz, one of the great Sialkot wits, once said, “All of Malik sahib’s sons look like a collection of laltains (which is what lanterns are called in Urdu and Punjabi).”

Maliksons was managed by Iqbal. It was at this bookshop that I bought my first books in English. I still have somewhere Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English that I paid seven rupees and twelve annas for. A lovely edition of Maupassant’s collected stories that I picked up at Iqbal’s urging, I was only able to pay for in four installments. I lent the book to someone some time later and never got it back. It was also from Maliksons that I bought Margaret Mead’s Growing up in Samoa (though I never read it) and J.W.N. Sullivan’s life of Beethoven. It is really amazing that in the backwaters of Sialkot, we had access to such books. But then Sialkot was always a city where people read books and wrote them. We used to spend a lot of time at Iqbal’s bookshop, marred only by the occasional appearance of “burray” Malik Sahib who actually used to sit upstairs from where he ran his little empire. He was a tall and austere man who always wore a Peshawari lungi or turban, a headdress that is truly noble. One day as he walked into the shop, Prof. Riaz Meerza said, “Malik sahib, there is more dust on the picture of Jinnah sahib that hangs on the wall than there is on his grave.” Malik sahib looked at Iqbal, “How many times have I told you jackasses to dust Jinnah sahib every morning!”

Maliksons played another important role in the life of the city. The matriculation, intermediate and B.A. results announced by the Punjab University in Lahore were obtained by Maliksons a day before their publication and proclaimed from the upper story which had a balcony, by one of the sons after the student who had sat the examination had deposited a rupee for the information downstairs. His name and roll number would be inscribed on a chit which would be carried upstairs to be checked out from the result sheets. It was amusing to hear, for instance, “Roll Number 7341 Muhammad Iqbal: Fail.” Muhammad Iqbal, roll number 7341 was, of course, not amused. Details as to what division those who had passed had secured were not available at that point, only the fate of the candidate: pass or fail.

Another regular at Maliksons was Prof. Asghar Saudai who wrote the famous tarana around 1946: ‘Pakistan ka matlab kya hai, La Ilah-au-Il-Lillah’. So was that delightful man Tasawwar Kirtpuri, the poet and journalist who also once ran the most unsuccessful poultry business in the city. There were quite a few things Tasawwar had tried, including screenwriting. When he was running his failed “murghi-khana”, to an army major’s wife who was going on and on about the tiny size of the eggs he had sold her, he finally said, “Begum sahiba, I don’t know how to put it more delicately, but were I to try to make my bird disgorge larger eggs, it would involve grave physical consequences for them.” Tasawwar’s maiden screenwriting assignment did not result in the film actually being shot and released but I remember a couple of lines. The situation, as Tasawwar narrated, is that a lecherous landlord is eyeing the budding maid who works around the house. He gives her a lecherous look, then turns to his gardener (this scene takes place in a garden) and asks, “Khillay huway phool pe kis ka haq hai, Ramu?” The gardener who like most servants in such movies is called Ramu, answers, “Jo tor lay maalik.” In English, the lines would be: “Who has the right to a flower in full bloom, Ramu?” “He who plucks it, master.”

Ijaz Malik was another friend who, a refugee from Batala, chose to settle down in Sialkot. He was called – as was to be expected, behind his back – Ijaz “Bagri” because of his personality and looks. He was tall and dark and he talked in the upper register. He used to be with either the irrigation or the public works department but the two had parted company rather early. Ijaz was doing different things at different time, including travelling abroad for a sports goods exporter. One when I was in Lahore, I got Ijaz a small loan from the United Bank Ltd. since I knew the manager. Some time later, the Bank asked me to intercede with my friend as none of the agreed repayments had been received. When I raised this delicate matter with Ijaz, he said, “Are you out of your mind? Who with any white matter in his head would repay a bank?” In the end, I suppose Pakistan’s most sought-after head of account called Bad Debts found itself with another entry. The moral of the story is: don’t lend money and don’t ask anyone else to do so, either, for anyone.

Ijaz, who was a great fan, friend and admirer of Chaudhri Anwar Aziz, Pakistan’s most astute political strategist after Mian Mumtaz Muhammad Khan Daultana – at least in my opinion – had given Ijaz yet another name: “ghappar qainch” which is a tortoise in Punjabi. If there was anyone Ijaz admired, it was Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, many of whose great speeches and passages from his writings, he knew by heart and would recite on demand. Ijaz believed that the partition of India was a mistake. Once he said that the subcontinent had been “done in” by two Gujarati Kathiawaris. “Who?” someone asked. “Gandhi and Jinnah,” he replied. He was not surprised by Pakistan’s inability to settle down. He used to say, “This was only to be expected.” He also used to say that had India not been divided, the Muslims would have been a formidable minority with tremendous clout. But the Muslims of the subcontinent had been divided while the non-Muslims had been unified in one solid block. Ijaz was not optimistic about the future of the country. There is enough reason to feel that way for anyone who cares about such things. His death in 2000 took away one of the most colourful personalities of the city.

The streets which lay at the back of Paris Road were collectively called Puran Nagar. Before independence, it was exclusively peopled by Hindus and Sikhs who, of course, were all gone when we moved into our house. Their homes had gone to – or been allotted to, as the term went – to refugees from East Punjab and Jammu. Some wily locals had managed to sneak in too though they had no business to be in occupation of those properties. It has been said that if a single progenitor of corruption in Pakistan were to be identified, it would have to be the Department of Rehabilitation which was set up to deal with the millions of homeless people pouring across the border into the new state of Pakistan. A similar department was created in India but it completed its work in a few years while in Pakistan the Rehabilitation Department ran on for over twenty years. False and inflated claims were filed and approved because money changed hands. Once a claim was approved, the applicant was given a claim book that he could hawk for a profit. That was one door through which the locals were able to gain possession of properties abandoned by non-Muslims in 1947. They would buy a number of claim books and get the house that they had their eye on.

Few of the people from our time are around. Many moved years ago to other cities, at home or abroad. Even more have gone on a longer journey from which even that slippery rascal Houdini was unable to return. With Khwaja Mahmood Anwar’s death a couple of years ago, one of my last secure links with Sialkot was snapped. N.Q. Khwaja is gone and the great Abdul Hamid Khan, the doyen of cricket, died years ago. He had also gone to college at Murray and about the same time as Faiz. He used to bowl a mean off break which the entire world, except the bowler, swore was the result of a murderously suspect action. Naturally, he could turn the ball at 45 degrees or less. He used to say, “Anyone who bowls a lesser off break than mine is not a bowler and anyone who bowls a bigger one is a nut.” He had never missed a single important match played at Lahore since he was a young man. He never married because he was wedded to cricket and chess. Marriage and its offshoots would have interfered with cricket, so he had decided to stay single.

The Khans of Beriwala Chowk were to cricket what the Barrymores in another world and another time were to acting. Hamid Khan, whom N.Q. Khwaja, the most colourful cricketing personality of the time, used to call ‘Pagal Khan’, a playful description only the irreverent N.Q. could have got away with, was in turn called N.Q. ‘Jungi’. Jungi being mad in a Bertie Woosterish way. The entire Khan family was made up of cricketers. Hamid Khan’s nephews, Khalid, Hamid, Babar and Jahangir were all fine cricketers. Khalid Khan who was Skipper Kardar’s contemporary or a couple of years younger, could have played for Pakistan had he devoted himself to the game more seriously. He was a natural. Aftab, Hamid Khan’s brother had played in NICA which was what the Northern India Cricket Association was called. After Pakistan, he played for the Services XI for many years. But more of him later.

Of Hamid Khan’s nephews, Khalid or Khalo could easily have played for India, so good he was, but people say he lacked application. He was at Murray College but moved to Prince of Wales College, Jammu, at the urging of Sheikh Rashid, the popular professor whose passion in life was cricket. Sheikh Rashid was killed during the 1947 bloodbath by, it is said, one of his Hindu students, such were the times. Khalo later came to Islamia College. He practically looked like a Greek god and was as stylish in the execution of his strokes as Nazar Muhammad, Pakistan’s great opener with Imtiaz Ahmed whose career came to a tragic and early end when to escape Madam Nur Jehan’s jealous husband’s goons, he jumped from the window of a place of assignation and landed on his arm. He never played cricket again. Love costs, and sometimes heavily. Khalo’s eldest brother was Maqbul Javed though everyone called him “Boola”. He was a fine all rounder but did not play representative cricket. He had a dry, acerbic wit which he often matched with that of C.A. Hamid, alias "Meeda Guddi". C.A. once said that if Boola spat on a patch of green grass, it would immediately catch fire.

C.A. was a man who did what pleased him. He was also sure to do exactly the opposite of what he was advised to do. I recall a particular match for which he was told to open the innings. C.A. was not an opener and was being sent as a sacrificial lamb or “qurbani ka bakra”. It is a given in cricket that you do not square cut as long as there is shine on the ball which makes it swing. If you do, you will either be caught in the slips or bowled neck and crop. C.A. said he did not buy that at all. If one timed the stroke correctly, one could cut or chop the ball no matter how much shine it had. C.A. said those who said you could not cut a ball should watch him square cut Ajmal Malik from Gujranwala who could bowl at great pace. It was Ajmal Malik whom C.A. faced that morning as he went in. Ajmal Malik was called “Cyclops” or simply Ajmal “Kanna”, since he was one-eyed. It was a cold morning and the grass was still dewy. We watched the encounter from the boundary line, holding warm cups of tea. Ajmal Malik walked to the start of his run which was a full twenty-two paces, turned and came in. C.A. after taking guard had moved well outside the leg stump with the object of executing his promised square cut. The Pride of the City of Wrestlers, “Cyclops” Ajmal, already a rising star, came in like a freight train, bowled short and in a wild arc, the ball swung away, only to be gathered somewhat precariously by the wicketkeeper.

C.A. stood perfectly still and when he was sure that the ball had been gathered, he shuffled his right foot a few inches towards the slips, raised his arms high in the air, holding the bat as a matador holds his cape. “Well left,” we screamed. It was another matter that he had gone into the text book motion of leaving a ball alone or doing a “well left” after the ball was already in the wicketkeeper’s hands. The next three balls were also short and rose menacingly outside the off stump. C.A. left them all well alone, striking the classic well-left pose as many times. The last ball of the over fell at perfect length. It was the kind of delivery that can only be kept from doing grievous harm if the batsman puts his head down, shuffles his left foot forward and brings down his bat slowly, respectfully and absolutely straight to block the missile from going where it has been intended to go. C.A. did no such thing. He leaned back, brought his bat down at a radical angle to square cut, but laws of physics being laws of physics, it was not to be. C.A. lost his middle stump and one of the two bails had to be retrieved from the boundary line. The other could not be found. Perhaps it had flown to Gujranwala which, after all, was only forty miles away.

C.A. would come to the cricket ground riding a bike from Kashmiri Mohalla, a bike that was always without brakes, C.A.’s feet being his brakes. His kit was always unique. If his shirt was white, his trousers were bound to be khaki and if his shoes were freshly “blancoed”, his shoelaces had to be brown or black. C.A. first ran off to Bombay in 1946 to become an actor but returned to Sialkot after a year. We heard that C.A. had managed to break into the movies but had decided to return home for some time. In Sialkot, he made one “movie” but that was directed by N.Q. Khwaja to test his new 8 m.m. movie camera. C.A. played the villain who tries to decamp with the heroine (Promilla Thomas, Prof. Thomas’s daughter, but more about her later). The hero was Inyat Khwaja, who thereafter was known in the city as Hero or “Naita Hero”. However, C.A.’s heart was not in Sialkot. It was in Bombay where he eventually returned, never to come back. My friend Akhtar Mirza says C.A. has died. He learnt it from his eldest brother Fazal Karim who never came to Pakistan and stayed on to manage the business their father had set up.

I often think of C.A., especially when I watch someone make a square cut. I also think of C.A.’s ingenious theory that you can cut the new ball perfectly as long as your timing is right. I am sure on a perfect day, in a perfect world, it is perfectly possible to execute a perfect square cut with the new ball swinging away. I believe it can be done because C.A. said so and I like to think he was right.

Hamid Khan’s brother Major Aftab Ahmed Khan was a superb all rounder. The eldest, Aziz Khan, had also played cricket. He married the handsome Indian screen actor Al-Naseer’s sister, a statuesque beauty. Aftab could turn the ball both ways, making full use of his great height and a very large pair of hands. In fact, so large were his hands that when he held the ball, it seemed to shrink several times. He took a short start and came in at an angle. Aftab was quite a batsman, going in at number six or seven. He was at Murray College in 1933-34 when, it is said, he was noticed by the great cricket organiser, Colonel Aslam, who took him to Islamia College, Lahore, for which he performed brilliantly in 1935-36, helping it defeat Government College in a historic encounter in