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.