One of the most debonair of our teachers was Prof. M. A. Naseer, M.A., which was how he would always write his name. He was a poet but he taught mathematics and was never to be seen except in a smartly-tailored suit. Being very fair, he looked quite dashing in a navy blue suit. Even in summer, he wore suits, though some of the teachers, such as Khwaja Abdul Latif, donned bush shirts to be free of the discomfort of a tie and a jacket. Not Prof. Naseer. During muahairas, organised in the college or the city, he would always be asked to read his poem about lighting clay lamps and letting the flowing river take them away. The refrain of the poem which ran into many stanzas was ‘Diyee jala ke mein darya kau saunp deta hoon’ (The clay lamps that I light, I consign to the rive). Another of his poems that we all knew was about watching the crowds walk past him on a scented summer evening in Murree, the one hill station in this part of the Punjab that the British liked. The opening line was” Murree ki sham jaag uthi. (Murree’s evening has come to life). He left Murray College in 1956 to teach at Lawrence College, Ghora Galli, Murree. It was he who made it possible for me to get a year’s teaching stint in 1958 at that wonderful school in the hills as assistant master of English. The principal of Lawrence College was John Flecker, brother of the famous English poet James Elroy Flecker who wrote The Golden Road to Samarkand. (We travel not for the trafficking alone/By hotter winds our fiery hearts are formed/For lust of knowing what should not be known/We take the Golden Road to Samarkand). James Flecker, who joined the British consular service died in 1915 at the age of 31.
Before I return to my memories of Murray College, I should narrate what happened at my first meeting with Mr Flecker. I had been selected and was asked to report in the first week of April. I sent a telegram to Mr Flecker from Sialkot that said “Reaching on …” The first thing he said to me was, “You don’t reach, you arrive.” He also told me in the same meeting that you do not chalk out a programme, you chalk out a tennis court, nor is there such a thing as “pin drop silence”. The correct phrase is, ‘It was so silent you could have heard a pin drop.’ These three mistakes I have never made since that day, though I see them being made all the time in speech and writing in Pakistan, no less than in India.
Back at Murray College, Prof. Amanullah Khan Aasi Ziayee Rampuri taught us Urdu and was a classic representative of UP gentry. When he first came, he was clean shaven but in time he grew a beard. Some years later, he joined the Jamaat-i-Islami and stayed loyal to the party until the end, a matter of some regret to me at least because he was too tolerant a person to have joined what is essentially an obscurantist, fascist party, pretending to promote a vision of the future but dragging back those who follow it into a medieval world of make-believe.
Our other English teachers were Prof. Mathur who came from Madras, if I recall, Dr Khairullah who later became principal and learnt Hebrew to better understand the scriptures. He had an impish sense of humour and had he taken to acting, he would have made a great comic actor. He knew more about etymology and the origin and structure of languages than anyone in our part of the world. Late in life, he moved to Canada which was where he died. On the annual sports day, Dr Khairullah used to do a running commentary on the proceedings which had everyone in stitches. One of our seniors, Mukhtar Bhatti, who was once given a sound shoe beating by a rather unkind fellow girl student, who was not amused by his being at her heels all the time, was named JKW by Dr Khairullah. The acronym stood for ‘Jutian khan wala’ or he who gets a shoe-beating.
Prof. Tressler was the college’s great disciplinarian. One roar from him was enough to freeze the blood of even the most incorrigible troublemaker. He used to say, “In this college, you may go Scott-free but, by God, you will not go Tressler-free.” He was a history man and had gone to the University of Allahbad where he had won his hockey and tennis colours. He used to cycle every morning to college, as did most others. Some walked and a couple came by tonga. I do not remember any of them owning a car or a motorbike. The scooter had yet to be invented. Our teachers were simple, poor and utterly contented.
The students were terrified of Prof. Tressler. They would come to a dead stop at his sight. One stern look from him would turn the worst prankster into jelly. Kalim Akhtar, my friend from Jammu and my classmate, was one of Prof. Tressler’s established sycophants. Once he said to him, “Sir, you are the father of discipline.” ‘Repeat it,” Mr Tressler said with obvious delight. Even when Prof. Tressler was being kind, his tone remained stern. One day, by some ill chance, a tonga found its way into the college through the front gate. This was strictly forbidden. Kalim who was hanging around the gate immediately rushed to Mr Tressler’s office to report the infringement. The great man was in a kinder mood that morning. “O’ tell him to go away,” he said casually. “But, sir he has defied your standing orders (In Urdu the words were: magar sir uss ne aap ke qanoon ko thukraya hai.) Mr Tressler roared, “Throw the bugger out!”.
I can see Mr Tressler standing at one end of the hockey ground surveying the scene. He could smell a troublemaker from a mile. Spotting a suspect at the other end, he would scream, “You!” Everyone would stop dead in his tracks. But the troublemaker knew he had been nabbed. “Come and see me in my office,” Mr Tressler would holler. His office was the last place any student wanted to be asked to visit. Mr Tressler rarely punished or fined students, but he would give them such a going over that they kept their noses clean for the next few months at least. Once a girl student (Mr Tressler told me this story himself) complained to him about a certain fellow who was pestering her all the time. Mr Tressler summoned the offender and suspended him from classes for a couple of weeks. She came a few days later with another complaint on the same lines. The fellow was collared and sent out of college for two months. However, when the same girl returned a few weeks later with another complaint, Mr Tressler rasped, “This time, young lady, you are to go, because it is you and not the boys who are the problem.”
Khwaja Abdul Latif taught economics and cut a dashing figure, tall, handsome and, by all accounts, a ladies’ man. His sons, Rahat and Wajahat were in the college at the same time as I was. Rahat, or Raata, who was my classmate and the captain of our cricket team, left while we were still in the second year, to join the army. He rose to be major general. He was sub-martial law administrator of Rawalpindi and overall in-charge of the Central Jail where Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged in 1979. There are many stories of how he assaulted the deposed Prime Minister in his cell one day, but I do not think they are true.
However, he did nothing to make the last days of Bhutto easier on him.
Wajahat, who was two years my junior but my close buddy, went to Government College, Lahore, took a degree in psychology, returned to teach at Murray College for a couple of years before joining the army as a psychologist on the selection board at Kohat. He spent several happy years in the early 1960s teaching at the Sind University in Hyderabad before sitting for one of those civil service examinations that earned him a slot in the Police Service of Pakistan where he stayed until he retired as a Grade 22 officer, the highest grade a civil servant can reach. I have always felt that he should have remained a university teacher but life is like that. You end up doing things you may not have wanted or may have wanted but would have been better off doing something else.
Prof. R.C. Thomas, who like Mr Tressler was from Allahbad, was head of the science faculty and taught botany. He was a superb tennis player and an Allahabad university blue. He was also said to be partial to drink but none of us ever saw him inebriated, though our only concept of inebriation was derived from the movies where anybody with a few drinks in him was obliged to walk about unsteadily, slur his words and finally fall flat on his face on the floor. When Mr Thomas spoke, his head would shake involuntarily. When Rev. Scott gave up the principal’s office and agreed to stay on just as a professor, the Mission board chose him and not Mr Tressler to be principal, something that nobody could understand or agree with because Mr Thomas was simply not cut out to run an institution. His daughter Promilla was quite a girl and the cynosure of more than one pair of eyes. She went to Government College, Lahore, for her M.A. in English. She was a natural to be picked up as a helper to an MGM unit led by famous director George Cukor who came to Lahore in 1953 or thereabouts to shoot a movie with Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger based on John Masters’ book Bhowani Junction. She also appeared in some of the crowd scenes. She married an Englishman who worked for the British Council, Lahore, as did her younger sister, the very pretty Robertina or Tina, who, following in big sis’s footsteps also married an Englishman from the British Council. In the process, she broke a number of hearts, but what of it! That, after all, is life. I think she was the girl friend of my younger brother Masood’s friend Mohsin Shah, son of our neighbour and well-known Punjab politician Syed Murid Hussain Shah. The crowd my younger brother Masood hung around with was made up of Zakaria, Mohsin, Shomail and some others whose faces I remember but whose names I do not. These fellows had their own world of cricket, books, movies and, above all, pursuit of even the faintest romantic possibility.
Prof. Vincent Amrit Das came to the college to teach psychology and became a good friend of ours. His brother Vivian was our classmate. Prof. Das stayed long enough to become principal of the college. He came to the University of Texas to get a doctorate, married an American and took her back. She was a fine woman and met a tragic death in Sialkot when the iron she was using short-circuited in their home. Prof. Das moved to the United States though after he retired from Murray College and now lives in Illinois. He never remarried. He used to tell us as students that the best way to win a woman’s heart was to put her on a pedestal and just when she thought you were going to look up at her in adulation, just cut her cold and walk away. “What will happen then?” I asked. “She will come running after you,” he said. I wasn’t sure then and I am not sure now if the Das Formula for Ladykillers works. I would say if a girl appears to show some interest, the smart thing is to cash in on it. Formulas only work in the labs, and not all the time even there.
One of the most popular figures in Murray College was that of our physical training and sports teacher Captain Moti Ram. There used to be all kinds of stories about his special brand of English. I never heard him say that but the boys swore that when he got annoyed with a student during a class, he would tell him to “meet me behind the bell”. He was always said to be fond of the expression, “Do, do, not do, what goes of my father?” He was a handsome man with a gray head. One student once asked him, “Master ji, were you out all of last night because I see a lot of frost on your head?” Master Moti Ram replied, “Son, you just wait for some years and you will have the same frost on that pretty black head of yours.”
These were wonderful people who loved their work though they could have barely managed to survive on the little they earned, they looked content. Our librarian was Babu Lal Din who had two assistants, Mr Daniel and Sadiq “Kana”. Sadiq was not really one-eyed really but had something the matter with his eyes, hence the name. Two of Babu Lal Din’s daughters, Hafeeza and Rashida, were in college, as was his son, Riffat. A new library was built while we were students and it was Prof. Mowat who catalogued books in the English literature section. Babu Lal Din would be in his high chair as you entered and behind his gold-rimmed glasses, he would watch all those who came and all those who went out, especially the latter because he did not want any of his books pinched. Actually, there was very little of that. We were an honest lot. If you were on Babu Lal Din’s right side, you could always expect special attention from him. If there was a book you wanted and it had a long waiting list, Babu Lal Din could always put you ahead of the rest with a wink. My father was fond of him and I remember a particular afternoon when the two Lal Din girls came to visit us. I was glued to the radio in the same room, listening to test commentary coming out of Calcutta with the Maharaj Kumar of Vijaynagar or “Vizzy” chortling his way through the play and Omar Kureishi saying “my word” every few minutes. I used to write the score in a book, ball by ball and could not afford to be disturbed when I was listening to the commentary. Those were pre-television days. I remain an ardent radio listener. Radio can bring you things. TV cannot. Effectively done, radio is a thing of the mind.
Emmanuel Gill who was several years our senior and a lecturer in English at Murray College while we were still students, became a close friend of the whole gang by the time we were graduating. He was cool and laid back and he wrote fine English poems. He was made to marry under pressure from his family. The woman was a doctor and a few years older than him. Gill had absolutely no intention of staying married to her. He was also planning to go to England to try his fortune there. The only quick way of getting out of his Christian marriage was for him to convert to another religion and he did exactly that. So technically, he was a Muslim for some days. In other words, to borrow one from the great Pakistan Air Force wit Squadron Leader “Lala” Muhammad Afzal, if in the past Gill was drinking like a good Christian, now he was drinking like a bad Muslim. Gill flew to England in the Spring of 1954 and never returned to Pakistan. He sent me a few letters from there in the beginning which were really rejection slips from various magazines to whom he had sent his pieces for publication. He finally settled down to teaching. When I went to Paris to work as the Pakistan embassy’s press attaché in 1972, I managed to find Gill in London. In 1973,he came to see me and we spent two or three days lounging around Paris. He had not changed but seemed to be very much into jazz. After that there was no contact. Word of his death reached me somewhere in the early 1990s. The year I forget. He had married an Englishwoman who had died some years earlier. I am told they had a daughter Julie who lives in London, where, I have no idea. Gill had an acerbic wit. Once Izo Massey said to him, “Gill sahib, you know all Gills are Sikhs.” Gill took a long drag at his cigarette and replied, “Izo, I can be a street sweeper but Sikh I am not.”
One of Gill’s poems – for which I thank my friend Rafiq – is called Fantasia Emancipated. This is how it runs: Fantasia they call her/So fanciful and fantastic/Her view so elastic/on Deity and ethics/Ugliness surrounds her/Horror all around her/Yet glory has so found her/To Deity and ethics/So prim and so pertinent/So full of sweet sentiment/And conscious of her commitment/To life and society/That chappie in white/With a forehead so wide/he is very inelegant/And his eyes so bright/He is much more intelligent/Than my dog so bright/In the head he’s light/When out of his element/I like him a lot/Though his head is rather bald/For his arguments so hot/On Deity and ethics.
The Christian community of Sialkot played a pivotal role in the life of the city. It was the foreign Christian missions that had set up the first modern schools there. Both Iqbal and Faiz went to the Scottish Mission school. Murray College was one of the most highly-regarded educational institutions in this part of India through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. So many well-known people were associated with it. The late Chief Justice of Pakistan, Muhammad Munir, taught there and had to leave under some kind of a cloud. Iqbal Singh who wrote such a wonderful book on Muhammad Iqbal, and later, on Amrita Sher-Gil the painter, graduated from Murray College, as did the Indian journalist Kuldip Nayyar (who was born a Sikh) and whose father, Dr Gurbakhsh Singh, ran a clinic in Trunk Bazar. The family also lived in the area in one of the back streets. Kuldip’s sister, Khwaja Mahmood who graduated from Murray College in 1944 told me, also was his class fellow. When Kuldip Nayyar came to Pakistan for the first time after independence to interview Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (I was Mr Bhutto’s press secretary at the time), I made it possible for him to go to Sialkot, something he had longed to do for years. In Murray College his inseparable friend was Khwaja Shafqat Ali, Wajahat and Rahat Latif’s cousin. They all lived in one large family house in Mohalla Imam Sahib. The house still stands there and members of the family still live there.
Another great institution run by missionaries, who also ran the American Memorial Hospital on Paris Road, was the Christian Training Institute (CTI) in Bara Pathar, Sialkot. CTI produced some of Pakistan’s finest basketball players, including Wallace Badruddin “Walli”. In our time it was headed by an American missionary named Mr Foster and the headmaster was a popular and dynamic person by the name of Lal Moti Lal. Some of our best friends were Christians. There was the great Massey clan: Izo, David, Illo, Nanna and Bha John. Then we had the soulful and artistic Francis Xavier who came from the village Sahowala near Sambrial about 15 miles from Sialkot. He wrote poetry, sang and played the harmonium. He was involved in a rather exciting event later when he ran away with a girl from the college named Zia Batool who came from one of the well-known Syed and Shia families of the city. They got married and stayed married for many years. It was quite a scandal but nobody lost much sleep over it. In fact, the general attitude was, “Good for them.” That was the sort of tolerant and good-humoured atmosphere in which we lived. We used to celebrate Christmas with the Massey family. By the time we would get there on Christmas eve, David “Baby” would be happily drunk and insisting that we all take a swig. Many of us would attend the morning service at the chapel at college, sometimes to be able to sit close to the girls but nobody minded. I do not remember one occasion in all the years I was at Murray College when there was a single incident involving a religious dispute. This sort of thing is hard to imagine in the hate-saturated atmosphere of today’s Pakistan.
Yet one more of the memorable teachers of the time was Dr Jamsheed Ali Rathore, whose brilliant son, Tajammul Rathore, who had scored a runaway first in philosophy from Punjab University and who had later gone on to get a degree in English, committed suicide for reasons no one has been able to fathom. Dr Rathore was a man of great piety. He also had a thing about Iqbal and used to say that if Iqbal was a PhD, so was he. If Iqbal was a student of Maulvi Mir Hassan, so was he. And if Iqbal was a poet, well, so was he. So what was all that fuss being made about the man! Dr Rathore had taught Mr Scott Urdu which was why he always addressed him as Doctor Sahib. Dr Rathore used to feed Murray College’s ants every day by sprinkling rice around their colonies. Prof. Maulvi Muhammad Din Bhatti, the great college wit, was not impressed. “Look at the amount of sin Jamsheed is stockpiling! Not only does he waste rice but he is also responsible for the murder of millions of ants because the moment he leaves, the crows move in and pick up both the ants and the rice they were trying to squirrel away.”
Maulvi Jamsheed Ali Rathore was not without a sense of humour. One of my classmates, Rana Muhammad Akbar, wrote out the entire story, plus words to the songs, of the runaway hit Barsat in his Persian test. He was awarded 20 out of 100 marks. When we asked Maulvi sahib why, he said, “Hard work must be rewarded.” He followed a strange ritual when he entered the class. He would stand in one corner and recite some prayers under his breath, his eyes closed and his chin touching his breast. Then he would go to the other corner and recite some more prayers. The he would sit in his chair on a raised wooden platform under the blackboard and “take attendance”. Unlike other teachers, he did not call out our names or roll numbers. We had to do it in the order in which they were inscribed in the attendance register. While all of us always called out in English, one of our mates, Jonathan K. Mall, invariably would do so in Punjabi. The class would burst out laughing every time that happened but Dr sahib never took any notice of it. Jonathan was duly marked present. Off and on, someone who was on the lam would have one of his friends call out his roll number, pretending to be him. Without exception, Maulvi sahib would catch the culprit. The worst punishment was, “Stand up on the bench and remain standing, till told to sit down.” He would not drink the water from any of the college taps. His supply would be brought to him by one of his favourite students. It was considered a great honour. He was greatly devoted to Imam sahib, the great saint of Sialkot and people have sworn, that after Dr Rathore died, that they would see him near the shrine.
Dr Rathore’s younger son Tahammul was our classmate and bright, but he was not like Tajummul who was a true intellectual. Tahammul went to the Hailey College of Commerce in Lahore, as did several of our friends, got himself a degree and went into banking. In Sialkot, he was known to be a “rather close” friend of Qurban Ali, universally known as Bana who operated the projection machines at the Minerva Talkies which was close to our college and in the next block from Tail Ghar, or the courtesans’ quarter where the most famous of them all was called Sardari “the well-stacked one”, she being rather generously endowed in that area. The Sialkotis felt comfortable with such names. I am sure her real name was Sardar Begum. After the Tel Ghar was swept off the street in another ill-considered and periodic “moral cleanup” drive, she moved to Lahore’s Mohni Road, behind Hira Mandi, where she became one of the better known madams of the city. If one of her clients claimed a Sialkot connection, he was sure to receive a “discount”.
Khwaja Fayyaz Mahmood would always evaluate female looks on his “Mai Daro” measure. He would say, “If I found this at Mai Daro’s kotha, I wouldn’t part with more than thirty rupees, if that.”
Bana was in some ways the most frequently cursed character in Sialkot because whenever during the screening of a movie, the lights failed or the film snapped, there were immediate catcalls from the audience in the front of the house which could at best be described as somewhat disrespectful to Qurban Ali Bana’s mother and sisters. In fact, Bana was the generic villain for anything going wrong in any of the city’s three cinemas. In the 1960s, several new cinemas were built on Commissioner Road which linked the city to the cantonment. But in the fifties, the fourth cinema was in the cantonment. It was called the Garrison Cinema and was built during the Second War, if not earlier. It showed English language movies for the most part and was patronised by army officers and their families. We would bike our way there off and on to watch a movie which we knew would never make the city where English movies were shown but only now and then.
Tajammul Rathore had a set routine. He would leave home in Mohalla Kashmirian in the early evening, walk through Adda Pasrurian, Do Darwaza, Trunk Bazar and make his first stop at Amelia Hotel, where he would stand against the counter of the small stand Agha Mubarak (called ‘Aspro wala Jinn’ behind his back) maintained at the entrance. Only the elect were permitted the liberty of standing against the counter and chat with Agha. Tajammul Rathore was among those privileged to stand against the stand, as Muhammad Zakaria, my younger brother Masood’s buddy reminded me in a long, nostalgic message from Italy where he has lived for nearly thirty years. From Agha’s tiny storelike stand, you could buy perfumes, toiletries, “fancy goods” like silk handkerchiefs and neckties and cigarettes. Others who were welcome to stand there and chat with Agha and exchange notes on the latest music – Agha played the violin and played it beautifully – included Arshad Majeed, who was to marry the tomboy sweetheart of Punjabi (and later Urdu movies) Musarrat Nazir, Khalid Pal, Riaz “Qibla” (called that because he would always address everybody as ‘Qibla’ or respected sir), Zamurrad Malik and myself.
Tajammul committed suicide, but why? nobody knows to this day. He could have been no more than thirty-six or maybe a year or two older. Though we never talked of philosophy for the simple reason that I knew nothing about it then, as I know nothing about it today, we talked a good deal about literature. He was a man of few words and would listen more than he would talk. There would always be a shy smile on his lips. He would shave every third or fourth day and I never saw him wearing a necktie. In winters, he would have a woolen scarf with a blue and black Tartan pattern thrown around his neck. It was always the same scarf and perhaps the same tweed jacket. His walk always ended at Bhed da Pull which was the geographical end of Paris Road where we lived. There he would stand for a long time against the railing with whoever happened to be with him at the time. Mostly it was his friend, Shoaib bin Hasan. Off and on, it would be Ahsan Pal Khwaja whom he liked. I would tag along off and on as well. Sometimes, he would drop in on his way home to chat with me. I would take him to my room which had a separate entrance from the side of the house (used off and on and on lucky days to smuggle in girls).
Tajammul once asked me if I had ever read Kipling’s ‘The Way through the Woods’. I hadn’t. “Read it,” he said, “it will leave you spellbound.” This is the poem he was referring to: They shut the road through the woods/Seventy years ago/Weather and rain have undone it again/There was once a road through the woods/Before they planted the trees/It is underneath the coppice and heath/And the thin anemones/Only the keeper sees/That, where the ring dove broods/And the badgers roll at ease/There was once a road through the woods/Yet, if you enter the woods/Of a summer evening late/When the night air cools on the trout-ringed pools/Where the otter whistles his mate/(They fear not men in the woods/Because they see so few)/You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet/And the swish of a skirt in the dew/Steadily cantering through/The misty solitudes/As though they perfectly knew/The old lost road through the woods/But there is no road through the woods.
Zakaria, my brother Masood’s friend, wrote me from Naples after I sent him the short memoir of Sialkot I had published in the Lahore weekly The Friday Times near the close of 2001, “Those names have triggered a million memories. Mohalla Kashmirian, Do Darwaza, Chowk Pasroorian, Shivala, Chowni, Akhtar Mirza, Chacha Muhammad Din, Prof. Tressler, Rev. D.L. Scott, Tajammul Rathore (his regular evening walk to Ped da Pull (that we used to call Trent Bridge) via Paris Road after a short stopover at Agha Mubarak Ali’s little store to buy fags and exchange a few or no words, depending on who knows what), Drumman Wala Chowk (Whisky Shah, Malik and Sons and the group of thoroughbred Sialkot elite sitting in a circle at Burmah Shell petrol pump in front of Amelia Hotel smoking and gossiping with that typical earth smell in the summer evening moist air after the passage of the mashki, the water-sprinkling man, N.Q. Khwaja, Abdul Hamid Khan, Khalid (Khallo), Hamid (Hammo), Babar, Jahangir Jango (Jhangex Mattha to us), Riaz Ali “Photo By” (apart from his landscapes decorating Amelia Hotel’s greasy light blue walls, do you remember his craze to photograph pitiless kites with their menacing look, feasting on dead cows, donkeys, dogs etc.?) Park Café (always called Kay-fee), Rahim Bux the waiter (‘Zakaria sahib, don’t say that the chutney is not hot enough. Wait until tomorrow morning. Swear you will howl. You will eat your chips without chutney for the rest of your life.’), Ghulam Qadir and Sons (the fantastic bread – double roti – and the savoury fruitcake one bought there). All those names bring back some memories and make me relive perhaps the best part of my life without visiting Sialkot. It is so strange. I miss Sialkot most of the time, but once I am there, I would rather leave soonest. Our Sialkot is dead. Its old glory is buried forever because Chacha Muhammad Din is no more around, selling oranges in front of Murray College main gate.”
Zakaria has mentioned Park Café. That was our hangout when we were not at the Amelia hotel or playing billiards at Grand Eastern Hotel in the city, a successor to the single billiards room at Shabeena Hotel where every game had a bet on it. The Sialkotis were gambling men and loved games of chance on which money could be put. But the game of billiards and Sialkot need a more extended account which will be found at the appropriate place in this memoir, which is what I have chosen to call it. Park Café was next door to Ghulam Qadir and Sons that the British used to call Goolam’s. The Park Café had two billiards tables, one good one and one bad one. They had put a table tennis table on a floor above. We were always hanging around there to play billiards. The regulars included Nawaz Shahid “Teela” (which he no longer is), Wajahat Latif, Zamurrad Malik and myself. Others came in the evening and we would sit on the lawn and drink tea, thanks to the hospitality and abiding good humour of the greatest waiter in the city – or elsewhere – Rahim Bux. He came from UP but had lived in Sialkot for very many years. He had a walrus-like moustache which gave him the appearance of an ageing but graceful Rajput nobleman. “Rahim Bux!” we would shout as we would gather around one of the tables in the lawn, sometimes as many as eight to ten of us. He would appear in the door which led into the café, take a look at his regulars, count the numbers, make an allowance for those who he was sure would be coming along soon enough and bring us piping hot tea. Our favourite snacks were the famous Park Café fried fish and chips with plenty of tomato ketchup and chutney. I have never had chips which were tastier. Rahim Bux never had to be told what we wanted. He just knew. I have no idea how long he was been dead or if he had any children and where they are. All I remember is that he served us with great love and humour and for that God will bless him.
The locals who played there – and by locals I mean those who lived in the cantonment, unlike us who all came from the city on our bicycles, riding double and sometimes treble – and who were mostly from the Ghulam Qadir family, included, in fact were led by Shaukat Sheikh, the most brilliantly artistic billiards player I ever saw, with the exception of the splendid Aga Saadat Aly. There was Sheikh Ghulamullah who hit hard and accurately and most of whose games were played against his friend Agha sahib, whose full name I have, to my shame, forgotten. Agha sahib was a tall and handsome man who was a serious amateur classical musician. He once told me about Raag Bahiroon Bahar which he said was one of the most beautiful in classical repertory. And it was and it is. There was also Sheikh Siddiq whom we called Siddiq “Jhoota” behind his back because most of his charming stories about earlier days were, well, not entirely rooted in fact, or so they appeared to us. He was a wonderfully warm human being and a handsome man who spoke in a soft voice and always had a story to tell. What did it matter if they were not always true? They were harmless, anyway.
Though I never got to be the local equivalent of Minnesota Fats, God knows, I spent enough afternoons and evenings watching billiards being played. In Sialkot, where I first got acquainted with the game, there used to be a table at Shabeena Hotel around which I could be found most of the time when I should have been in college or the library. The Shabeena was run by Mir Muhammad Ali who had a sign on one of the walls that said it was forbidden for those who fancied themselves as members of the gentry and those who were without funds to enter this place. That sign said everything you needed to know about Mir sahib’s establishment. All games had bets on them, both by the players and by those who were watching them from the only bench the tiny basement could afford. The city’s big time card players were often to be found in Shabeena placing big money on small games. Some of them even attempted to play but when one of them damaged the green baize of the table with an ill-aimed cue, Mir Muhammad Ali put an end to that nonsense.
Mir sahib also had that famous picture of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah playing billiards with a cigar tucked in his mouth. “If it was OK for the old man, it is OK for me,” he used to say. So in that sense the Quaid was seen as the patron saint of the Shabeena establishment though had he been alive and had he come to know what went on there sometimes, he would have rushed in with the vice squad to close the place up. Shabeena Hotel was never raided by the police because of Mir sahib’s connections and general goodwill in the city, but it was often invaded by irate fathers and even distraught wives in search of their loved ones who had been missing for long hours. It became such a common occurrence that we stopped taking notice of these enraged men and sometimes women. Once Mir sahib said, “A sign is soon going up on that wall banning the entry of fathers, wives and the like to this establishment. They should stay where they belong.”
As a young man, Mir sahib once told me, he had run off to Bombay because he was smitten with Waheedan, a star of the early Indian cinema. The length of her hair was legendary and the young Muhammad Ali wanted to see her and, even more than her, her hair. He sat outside her home for several days until one morning, Waheedan, curious to know who that young fellow was, asked her Pathan watchman (all watchmen guarding Bombay movie studios and the homes of movie stars used to be Pathans, and may still be) to find out why he was camped outside her home and what it was that he wanted. All the love-lorn young man from Sialkot wanted, Waheedan was told, that she should appear at the window, let her hair down and allow him look at her for as long as he wished. And that was exactly what Waheedan did. She also had the watchman persuade Muhammad Ali to return home to Sialkot where, she had it conveyed to him, his parents must be worried sick. Mir sahib said to me one day, “What sort of a country is this that we have got! In my day, young boys used to have a city to run off to: Bombay. Where can they run off to now?”
Shabeena Hotel actually belonged to a former post office official by the name of Zafar Khan. He was either under suspension from his department or had been sent home permanently, as far as I recall. The money with which he had acquired Shabeena Hotel was, well, to put it mildly, not quite earned in the normal course of service. Zafar Khan was fond of fast cars and fast women. Can a man ask for more! One of the first Buicks brought to the city was his. It was a splendid looking car which we used to greatly admire. He then changed it to a Pontiac, if I remember correctly, another magnificent piece of work. I think it was a convertible and off and on, one would spot one of the Khan’s lady friends in it. However, Zafar Khan who was a very nice man indeed, ran out of luck at some point and was arrested. This was a great scandal in the city. Those who always rejoice at the misfortune of others would wag their heads and make such predictable observations as, “Well, what else did you expect? It had to happen one day.” I do not know what happened in the end. Like all such investigations in Pakistan, this too must have come to nothing. A nephew of his, Iftikhar Khan, one of the most handsome young men I have ever cast my eyes on, in Pakistan or elsewhere in the world, was a good friend of mine. He joined the Pakistan International Airlines as a steward and here and there I would run into him. I have no idea where he is now, though he is not in Sialkot otherwise somebody would have told me.
The two wizard billiards players in Sialkot were Muhammad Yunus or “Ustad Khamb”, “khamb” or feather because he was thin, and Shaukat Sheikh from the cantonment. Shaukat was a touch player while Yunus was a fierce stroke player, hitting the ball with great power and deadly accuracy. Off and on, we used to get pros from other towns to play against Yunus and Shaukat for serious money. There was one birdlike character from Rawalpindi who once came to Sialkot and stayed several weeks. He wiped everybody out, until in a decisive, marathon, all-night encounter, Yunus divested him of all the loot he had collected in the previous weeks. The Rawalpindi pro’s name was Saranga, if I remember. There also used to be a table at the Officers Club in the cantonment where we would go once in a while, courtesy one or the other member. One could also be guaranteed a glass of draft beer from the bar. I never played billiards after I left Sialkot but the passion we all felt for the game still lives in memory.
Some great characters used to hang around the city’s billiards tables. The first table to come up was the one at Shabeena Hotel and when that establishment closed down, one was set up on Railway Road close to the artificial limb-maker A.F. Ahmed’s factory. That one was raided by the police and closed down. Perhaps the owner had forgotten to pay his “monthly” to the law. Then Khwaja Nazir Ahmed, Prof. M.A. Naseer’s elder brother, who had been in the hotel business in Calcutta – now Kolkotta – opened the Grand Eastern Hotel, named in honour of the famous one in Calcutta I suppose. There he set up three tables on the ground floor and that was where most of the city’s billiards players hung out. I particularly remember Ibrahim “Thekedar” who was a fine player and who used to talk to the balls. After executing a particularly deft in-off stroke, he would stand in front of the pocket for which the ball was intended and coo to it with such loving entreaties as, “Aa ja meray bulbul dey bachhay.’ Come right in, my little nightingale baby. His opponents were not amused and at their urging, the house finally adopted the rule that it was forbidden to talk to the balls. Sialkoti billiards had its own terms. For instance, if you managed to pot the red and your hand ball as well in the same pocket, it was called “gurdum kapoorum”.
Another character often to be found at billiards tables was Sanaullah who once lost the entire pay packet of his office to Ustad Yunus “Khamb”. The game ended well past midnight. Sanaullah left, much distraught and when Yunus stepped out on the street, he was waylaid by none other than old Sanaullah. “Your money or your life,” he screamed. Yunus gave him the money without hesitation because it was his anyway, though won fairly. Since Yunus was the most outstanding player in town, you only played him if he gave you a “start”, which meant that whereas you had to notch up only twenty or thirty to win, Yunus set himself to score a hundred or even a hundred and twenty. Nine times out of ten, Yunus won because if he managed to get his initial shot right and put the balls in scoring positions, he could go on to make what were called “breaks” or shot after successful shot. We did not see Sanaullah for some time after the Yunus assault episode but before long he was back. All had been forgotten or mentioned only when he was not around. He never played Ustad Yunus again. Abdul Rehman or “Manna Bagga” was another fine player and could even beat Yunus on a good day. He was called “bagga” – fair in Punjabi – because he was exceedingly fair. I think he lived in Mohalla Rangpura and may have been a Kakkezai Pathan of whom there were plenty in that neighbourhood.
It is strange how one’s life is intertwined with places as much as with people. Our Sialkot was inextricably linked with Amelia Hotel where we spent hours and hours drinking tea, listening to music and meeting friends. If things exist in some dimension exactly as they once were, I would like nothing better than to walk into Amelia one cold but sunny winter morning and ask Lal or Benny for a special tea with double milk and a piece of crisp buttered toast. I would also ask him to raise the volume on the radio that was always playing Radio Ceylon at this time in the morning so that I would better hear Lata Mangeshkar singing her heart out.
One of the Amelia regulars, Qazi sahib – never knew his first name, now that I think about it – used to say, “I am going to ask Panditji. Panditji, keep Kashmir, just give us Mai Lata.” It may not have been a bad swap but what Madam Nur Jehan would have done to Miss Mangeshkar, I hate to think. The Madam did not fancy competition. Amelia was founded by a lady whose name was Amelia and who was very much around. It was run by her sons, all four of them, whose talents were as varied as were their looks.
Also around was Mian Fayyaz, who was Hamid Khan’s classmate at Murray College and, consequently, of Faiz. He was a tall, stately man who served as the city’s excise and taxation inspector. That meant all the hooch outlets were under his direct control. He was not into cricket but he was very much into cards and a regular drink with friends in the evening. The Murree Brewery agency in the city was held by Faqir Syed Nazir Hussain Shah popularly known as “Whisky Shah” though nobody could have dared say it within Shah sahib’s earshot. He was – and remains – a gentleman of great dignity and class. He came from the famous Syed family of Faqir Khana in Lahore. One of his direct ancestors was Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s prime minister. Shah sahib who played cricket well into his forties and used to bowl at good medium pace, played for the City Club. Shah sahib was in the British Indian army during the war as a young man and he had seen active service in Greece. There he had married a Greek and they had a son. I don’t know if she ever came to Pakistan, but if she did, she must have left soon after. However, Shah sahib kept in touch with his family in Greece and would also visit them every few years. I recall that when I was in Paris in 1972 through 1973, once or twice I sent some money to his son on behalf of Shah Sahib as at that time, there were several restrictions on foreign exchange remittances from Pakistan.
Shah sahib’s liquor store in the city stood next to Amelia Hotel. A curtain separated the front of the shop from a small backroom where only a select few were admitted and even fewer allowed to take a drink. I was always in his good books and was, as such, always welcomed affectionately, as was Khwaja Mahmood Anwar, Hamid Khan, Malik Ghulam Nabi, Syed Asghar Ali Shah who was lord and master of the city’s principal goods carrier station on Paris Road. Others who were allowed beyond the curtain included Abdul Salam “Bata”, Sheikh Mohammd Iqbal a.k.a. “Balla Dabbi”, Mian Fayyaz and some more. Shah sahib was very particular about people. He was also blunt. If he did not like someone, he would tell him so and even refuse to sell him any liquor and, under no circumstances, on credit. Sometimes, he would allow cards to be played too but regular game sessions were held at other places, including N.Q.’s home on Kutchery Road and a couple of other places in the city. It was out of the question for juniors like us to join the game because we simply did not have enough money. Zahoor Ahmed Khilji or “Jhoora Brownie” was Shah sahib’s shop assistant but as a volunteer. He was one of Shah sahib’s trusted ones.
A person of whom I always think with great nostalgia and affection is Malik Ghulam Nabi (uncle, I discovered many years later, of Zahid Malik, editor and publisher of Pakistan Observer). I have seldom met anyone with a subtler sense of humour than the old Malik. He was a contractor and was often running after held-back payments from government departments, the fate of all contractors in Pakistan. Once he brought a friend along at a big game of flash organised at N.Q. Khwaja’s house. Neither this friend nor Malik Ghulam Nabi won a single hand. The goddesses who preside over games of chance were not smiling on those two that evening. His friend had a peculiar habit. Whenever the player to his left got to deal the pack, he would ask him to let him “cut” the pack each time he completed a round.
Since in the game of flash which is only common, it seems, to India and Pakistan, every player is dealt three cards, he would insist on cutting the pack three times. The party took a pause for food and sat down again after a “cut for seat”, meaning each player picking out a card and the one with the highest card deciding what seat he wanted to occupy. Gamblers are superstitious people and believe that cards sometimes go to a particular spot or seat and not to the player. It just happened that Malik Ghulam Nabi’s new spot was to the left of his friend. For the first time that evening, Malik won a hand – though there was not much money in the kitty – and as he shuffled the cards and got ready to deal, his friend cut the cards. After he had dealt one card each, his friend wanted to cut again. Malik put down the pack and said to Khwaja Mahmood, “Mahmood, you know the crow picks up the cake of soap with which the woman of the house is doing the day’s washing. Now do you think that bastard needs the cake of soap to wash clothes. No, it is just a bad habit, just like my friend here who must cut three times. May be that is why today’s game has caused our financial ruin.”
Hamid Khan was always to be found between certain hours at Amelia. He would sit at a table that in Germany would have been called a stammtisch or the table reserved for special customers. Hamid Khan who had a fine ear for music was one day sitting sipping tea and listening to something on radio. He had a spoon in his hand and absentmindedly he would gently hit the saucer that a man sitting next to him had in front of him when the singer hit “sum” or the note on which she had begun. After Khan sahib had hit two “sums” without being conscious of it, when the man protested. “What do you think you are doing?” he asked. Hamid Khan took one look at him and said, “You can go sleep with your mother but nobody is going to stop me from hitting ‘sum’.”
The intellectual, business and artistic life of the city of Sialkot was centred around Amelia and there was always a generous, loving welcome and a hot cup of tea for those who were considered “family”, among which I was always lucky to count myself. If you had no money, which was often the case, you could eat and drink on credit and pay when you had the money. Good friends who were also good customers were never reminded that they owed. Amelia was our hangout, our “Left Bank” in Sialkot.
Like all good things, it too has gone to ruin, though it still stands there, a sad reminder of the way it once was and of the people whom it offered its love and generosity without asking any questions.
e
Everyone thinks his contemporaries were remarkable and everyone may be right. However, during my time at Murray College and Sialkot, there indeed were some extraordinarily gifted people around, the most extraordinary by far being Zamurrad Malik. He came to the college when I was already in my third year. After an initial period when we from the backwaters sussed him out as he had lived in Lahore and knew so many people we had not even heard of, we became friends. Our circle was made up of Mehdi Naqvi, Ain Adeeb, Khwaja Mahmood, Qaiser Shirazi (known as “six hankies” since he actually carried about that number on his person), Irshad Hussain Kazmi, Saeed Tabussum (who was a marvellous singer, good enough to have sung for the movies), Izo Massey and Akhtar Mirza,. Zamurrad had the most fantastic theories. For instance, he used to say that every third word in the Concise Oxford Dictionary meant “genus of fish”. If you don’t believe it, you can look it up, but speaking for myself I have no doubt that Zamurrad Malik was right and I don’t need to look it up. Every third word in the Concise Oxford Dictionary must mean “genus of fish”. Who knows why! Maybe every third thing in this world is genus of fish, which may partly explain why there is so much fishy business on this earth.
Zamurrad Malik had a theory about everything, from poetry to astrology to kite flying to existentialism to revolution to tea drinking – especially tea drinking – to playing billiards. He could read palms, work out a horoscope, decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, read and write Gurmukhi, quote at random from any of Freud’s books – and accurately, what’s more – explain the inner workings of the Kremlin, recite Punjabi mystical poetry, speak for hours on impressionist painting and why Picasso was different from a coconut, count the names of books that most people swear they have read but haven’t – Zamurrad had – and where to get a hot cup of tea in the middle of the night when everything was boarded up. Tea was to him what absinthe was to Henri Toulouse Lautrec, except that Zamurrad drank far more tea than Henri ever drank absinthe. Had they met in Paris at the turn of the century, they would have taken to each other like long-lost brothers. What is more, Zamurrad may have spun out a few theories about painting that would have floored Lautrec. There is no question but that Zamurrad was a true Bohemian spirit.
It is a shame that he died after showing no signs of an ailment and while still in sound health, of a heart attack, in one of his favourite places, Lahore’s Mall Road. And he died in front of a bookshop too, the International Book Service, once the haunt and permanent headquarters of that prince of Lahore’s boulevardiers, Sardar Muhammad Sadiq. Although this is not about the Sardar but Zamurrad, one can’t let Sardar’s name pass without recalling that he had once advised an emotional, chanting group of young hotheads that if they really were on their way to liberate Jerusalem, they might get there earlier if they proceeded via Beadon Road.
Zamurrad had come from Montgomery – which was how he knew Munir Niazi and Majid Amjad – but he had spent time in Lahore’s coffee house and its literary dives. And he knew men like Anwar Jalal Shamza, Moeen Najmi, Ahmed Pervez and his mad genius of an uncle, Michael, who could draw a perfect circle with his eyes shut. Zamurrad knew them all and there we would sit, all small town boys with big romantic ambitions, our mouths half open, listening to Zamurrad’s amazing stories. Whatever he did, there was a degree of excellence about it. He wrote a hand of such perfect beauty, both Urdu and English, that had he done nothing else but calligraphy, he would have had to do little else to prove his extraordinary talent.
One by one, as time passed, we moved away from the city, chasing our elusive futures in this or that corner of Pakistan. Zamurrad stayed and began to teach, first at Murray College, then at Jinnah Islamia College which was run by Anjuman-i-Islamia, Sialkot. When Prof Eric Cyprian, Manzur Ahmed, Amin Mughal and other comrades-at-heart and stalwarts of the West Pakistan College Teachers Association founded the Shah Hussain College in Lahore, Zamurrad moved there. He was a superb teacher of English and even a more superb Punjabi poet. In between, he had married his college sweetheart Zarina (whom he called “Major”). How many people really get married to the first flames of their youth? Like him, she also is gone and, of his children, one is in touch only with his daughter Qurratulain who is married to a very nice young man. She lives in Mianwali from where Zamurrad’s family of Awans came. His eldest son, Imdad from his first marriage to a cousin that did not last long, once phoned me from New York in 1996 or 1997, saying that he was there driving a taxi. He said he would keep in touch but hasn’t.
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