Chapter-4 a Young Man
Finding a title for a chapter is never easy. Many writers find a way around it by numbering the chapters rather than putting a name to it. My solution is to name it in the most unimaginative way possible; like, naming a ship, ‘A Ship’, or calling your pet cat, ‘Cat’. So, rather than going for something like, ‘A Debonair Man Ventures into the Unknown’, I have stuck to the simpler version above.
(1)
President Ayub Khan, having ruled Pakistan for over ten years, resigned on 25 March 1969, handing over power to the Commander-in-Chief Army, Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan. General Yahya Khan abrogated the 1962 constitution, declared Martial Law throughout the country and banned all political activity. The next day he announced that he would arrange to hold elections as soon as conditions permitted to allow the peoples’ representative to take over the government.
Ayub Khan has been blamed for not transferring power to the speaker of the national assembly, Abdul Jabbar Khan, a Bengali leader, as provided in the 1962 constitution. The law and order situation had however, deteriorated to such an extent in those days that it had become impossible for civil forces to control the situation. Bringing Army to help them would have brought them in direct confrontation with the public which would have been most undesirable because the agitation was against the person of Ayub Khan and not the Army. Imposition of Martial Law was the only solution but legally Ayub Khan could not do so because he was now a civilian. This was the view held by legal experts and supported by the Army Judge Advocate-General. Power therefore had to be transferred first to the Army C-in-C who would then declare Martial Law.
Three crucial decisions were taken by General Yahya Khan in advance of the elections and announced on 28 November 1969. One-Unit was dissolved restoring the four West Pakistan provinces of Punjab, Sindh, NWFP and Balochistan. Also, parity between the two wings mandating equal number of seats in the National Assembly for both wings was revoked. He also promised return to adult franchise, that is, the principle of one-person-one-vote, which would guarantee a permanent majority of members from East Pakistan in the National Assembly. Political activities, which had been banned with the imposition of Martial Law, were allowed to resume from 1 January 1969.
A Legal Framework Order (LFO) was promulgated on 30 March 1970 laying down the ground rules for constitution-making by the National Assembly. It provided for a Federal structure of government and made a simple majority sufficient for framing the constitution. Elections to the National Assembly were to be held in December.
The long period before the elections proved to be a bonus for the two principal contestants: Mujibur Rahman in East Pakistan and Z.A. Bhutto in the West and they utilized it fully to consolidate their hold over their constituencies. Mujib propagated his Six Points Plan with full vigour which vested all powers in the provinces with the exception of defence and foreign affairs. Bhutto, in the meantime, campaigned extensively in West Pakistan, advocating a more rational autonomy for the provinces with a viable centre. The old, established politicians severely underestimated his strengths and popularity among the masses and were in for a big surprize.
Elections were held on 7 December 1970 in a peaceful and fair environment. Mujibur Rahman won all but two of the 169 seats in East Pakistan while Bhutto won 88 seats out of 144 in the West. Both of them failed to win even a single seat in the province they did not belong to. The results thus gave birth to extreme polarization in both East and West Pakistan which was to culminate in their separation within a year.
According to General Gul Hassan, a retired chief of army, “The Shaikh and Bhutto had much in common. They were comparatively young; they were fiery rhetoricians; they oozed ambition; they were vindictive; and neither ever told the truth if a lie would serve the purpose – in fact they were creative liars. Nevertheless, they now occupied centre-stage.”
Events now started to move quickly, each one bringing the end one step nearer. Yahya Khan visited Dacca in the 2nd week of January to hold discussions with Mujib and on his departure referred to him as the future prime minister of Pakistan. He then went to confer with Bhutto in his home town of Larkana and persuaded him to visit Dhaka and hold discussions with Mujib to try to resolve the stalemate. The talks held on 27 to 30 January however failed to produce a consensus and, on his return, Bhutto advised Yahya Khan to postpone the Constituent Assembly’s session.
Yahya Khan however did not accede to Bhutto’s request and announced that the Constituent Assembly would meet on 3 March 1971 in Dhaka. The announcement was greeted with resentment in both the wings. In the East, the delayed convening of the assembly was seen as a scheme to withhold power from the majority party while Bhutto, now certain that he would be left out of both the power and the constitution making, refused to attend the Assembly session and threatened dire actions if the Assembly was allowed to meet. When some of the minority party members from West Pakistan announced their intention to attend the session, Bhutto threatened them that he would break their legs telling them to get one-way air tickets only.
Faced with an impossible situation, the President invited Mujib and other leaders of East Pakistan for talks with him in Rawalpindi. Mujib refused to comply. Law and order situation there now began to deteriorate and some non-Bengalese came under violent or murderous attacks. The long hate campaign started by Awami League against West Pakistan was beginning to bear its poisonous fruit.
During these turbulent times, there was a strange episode of hijacking of an Indian airplane by two young Kashmiris to Lahore airport. While negotiations were still in progress with the hijackers, they decided to blow up the plane with unusual alacrity. India immediately banned all flights between East and West Pakistan going over its territory and these would now have to follow the circuitous route through Sri Lanka. The circumstances behind this hijacking have never been fully explained but there are strong indications of an Indian involvement in all this as a pretext for banning the flights.
Finally, on 1 March, the President exasperated with the ongoing conflict between Mujib and Bhutto, announced that the Constituent Assembly session, scheduled for 3 March, was being postponed hoping that, given more time, some reconciliation would be possible. Mujibur Rahman’s reaction to this was immediate: he called for a strike and civil disobedience on 2 and 3 March. This also served as a signal for the start of mass killings of non-Bengali citizens claiming the lives of over 30,000 people. Army was called to help restore law and order; there were clashes between the troops and the mobs leading to heavy civil casualties; and before the situation deteriorated further, the troops were called back to barracks by General Yaqub Khan, who was wearing the triple hats of Governor East Pakistan, Commander Eastern Command and the Martial Law Administrator.
The Awami League cadres took the troop’s return to barracks as their victory and were jubilant. The responsibility for keeping law and order and protection of non-Bengalese was now theirs which was like leaving a lamb in the care of a lion. General Yahya Khan was sorely disappointed and replaced General Yaqub with General Tikka Khan on 6 March. At the same time, he announced 25 March as the new date for the Constituent Assembly’s meeting in Dhaka. Mujib announced his readiness to attend the meeting. He had already appointed Colonel M A G Osmany, a retired Bengali officer of the Pakistan Army to train Bengali police, other law enforcement agencies and Awami League workers to be used for insurgency and this plan was working well.
The President arrived in Dacca on 15 March hoping to wave his magic wand to break the political deadlock. After some talks with Mujib, he summoned Bhutto six days later and presented him with a compromise formula which was rejected by Bhutto as, according to him, it had the seeds for breakup of the country. Yahya Khan then asked the minority East and West Pakistan politicians present there to try to persuade Mujib to adopt a more realistic approach which would preserve the entity of Pakistan, but Mujib failed to oblige. The President first asked politicians and then Bhutto as to what he should do next. The politicians hedged the issue by telling him that as the President, the judgement rested with him. Bhutto, on the other hand, suggested a short and sharp military action; this advice was supported by his military aids also. Apparently, fortified by this advice, the President called General Tikka Khan on 25 March and ordered him to launch a military crackdown the same night, called Operation Searchlight. Mujib was arrested and shifted to Mianwali Jail in West Pakistan. On 4 April, Lt General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi assumed the charge of Eastern Command.
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(2)
The military action lasted from 25 March to 31 August 1971 achieving its main objective – restoration of government authority – though at a cost of almost total alienation of East Pakistan’s people towards the idea of a united country. General Tikka Khan was then replaced as Governor by an eminent Bengali Dr A M Malik, who had served as a federal minister in Yahya Khan’s cabinet until February 1971. Gen Niazi took over as Martial Law Administrator. However, by this time, the public had been estranged to such an extent that it failed to create any excitement nor did a general amnesty for the rebels announced shortly afterwards.
During this period violence was committed by both sides: by Bengali militants, mainly before 25 March, as well as by Pakistan Army reacting to control this violence. There were massacres of thousands of non-Bengalese and their families in Chittagong, Khulna, Dinajpur and other smaller towns. At the same time, Hamoodur Rahman Commission, a judicial inquiry commission set up by Government of Pakistan in 1971, cited many instances of atrocities committed by Pakistan Army in its report, and gave a number of 26,000 Bengalis killed during action. Not a single Bengali was killed, or even harmed, in West Pakistan even after reports of many Bengali army officers defecting to India and compromising war plans. However, as the Commission concluded rightly, “No amount of provocation by the militants of the Awami League or other miscreants could justify retaliation by a disciplined army against its own people.”
The agitation and unrest in East Pakistan was like manna from heaven for India and it was quick to turn it into its advantage. Soon after 25 March, it started to make noises about refugees from East Pakistan crossing over the border, grossly exaggerating their number. India began to arm and train the rebels and put in motion plans to invade East Pakistan at the first available opportunity.
Pakistan Army was at this time facing a strategic conundrum: its troops were dispersed all along the border in tiny formations (called Border Outposts or BOP), the aim being to deny the rebels an area which they could secure, declare independence, and call Bangladesh. This was essentially a political objective. On the other hand, an attack by Indian forces required a cohesive and consolidated army formation to fight every inch of land for the defence of Dhaka, and this was a military objective. In fact, the primary mission of the Eastern Command, according to well laid out war plans, was to defend Dhaka at all costs. Unfortunately, despite General Niazi having been warned repeatedly by the military high command of an impending Indian attack in November 1971, he failed to redeploy the forces to mount a credible defence.
Without a formal declaration of war, Indian forces launched a limited attack on several fronts on the border in East Pakistan on 21 November, two days after Eid. This had been foreseen many weeks earlier after receipt of reports of concentration of at least eight Indian divisions around East Pakistan, supported by ten jet fighter squadrons of Indian Air Force and a formidable Indian naval presence led by the aircraft carrier Vikrant in the Bay of Bengal. Facing them for the defence of East Pakistan were three infantry divisions, one squadron of air force and negligible naval support. Nothing can illustrate the lack of sense of urgency at the top level in Pakistan than the fact that the President, when called for a meeting in the Army operations room the next day to discuss this grave emergency, excused himself on account of a pre-scheduled meeting in Sialkot. When he did come, he was presented with the planned defence strategy to counter the attack on East Pakistan by an offensive from the West. This would force the enemy to pull out troops from that front causing disruption to their operations. Plans for such an offensive were ready, approved, and waiting for the go ahead from him.
The President, to the surprise of many, revealed that some political negotiations were in progress at that time and opening a front in the West would jeopardize them. The only action authorized by the President to counter widespread Indian aggression in the East was to register a complaint with the Secretary General United Nations! As expected, this did not achieve any results whatsoever. Had a military offensive been launched in West Pakistan at that time, it would have changed the course of the war.
Finally, after much delay, limited operations commenced in West Pakistan on 3 December, preceded by Pakistan Air Force planes attacking airfields in East Punjab. Most of the objectives were achieved, the major exception being the capture of Poonch in Kashmir. On the same evening, India commenced a full scale attack on our forces in the East. Limited strength of our forces there facing a much larger army, their dispersion over a wide front, Indian fighter planes ruling the skies and active support of Indian forces by the locals had almost guaranteed the outcome.
It had always been an established Army doctrine that the defence of East Pakistan lay in West Pakistan. A full-fledged counter-offensive should have been launched in the West against India on 21 November to relieve the pressure on Eastern Command forces but the green light for this was not given by the President until 13 December for launch of operations on 16 December. Why did it take so long for him to do this has never been fully explained except the view held by those close to him that, after 3 December, he had lost all hope of defending East Pakistan and was simply biding his time. By that time, the whole exercise had become futile because the fall of Dhaka was imminent and Indian army was in a position to move their troops back to the West.
General Yahya Khan had not always been like this. General Gul Hasan who had served him in various positions until the time that Yahya became Army Chief, found him, “competent, decisive, broad-minded, easy in manner which is a sign of confidence, and above all possessing a remarkable memory and high IQ. . . . . His tragic decline began when he became the President.” Like many people before and after him, the charms and perks offered by the absolute power of presidency went to Yahya Khan’s head. He allowed himself to be made a puppet in the hands of a small group of people close to him, including Bhutto, and gradually lost control over his decisions. Tragically for the destiny of our dear country, this transformation took place at the worst possible time in our history.
By 7 December, almost all sectors in East Pakistan had come under severe pressure and were on the retreat. General Niazi was invited the same evening by Governor Malik to the Governor House to brief him on the latest situation. Governor Malik was receiving reports independently from civil officers posted all over the province and was more or less aware of the situation on the ground. He started the discussion by offering words of comfort to Niazi saying philosophically that things never remained constant in life, there were ups and downs, and the generals too encountered victories as well as defeats. Col Siddique Salik, in his book ‘Witness to Surrender’, describes the scene, “General Niazi suddenly started shaking and tears ran down his eyes. He covered his face with his hands and started to sob uncontrollably.” The Governor consoled Niazi and with his agreement sent a wire to the President asking for some action.
General Niazi came back to his headquarters and remained closeted in his office for the next three days in a semi-paralysed state. Most of his divisions had lost coherence by this time and had fallen much behind ‘the line of no penetration’. Eastern command in the meantime continued to send ‘everything under control’ messages to HQ, keeping them totally in the dark about the real situation. The first despatch communicating the true state of affairs was not received at the HQ until 9 December shaking them out of their complacency. It admitted that defence of Dhaka was no longer possible due to enemy action which was supported by rebels and attacks by air force. Governor Malik also sent a telegram the same day to the President suggesting immediate end of hostilities and a political settlement. The President responded but shifted the responsibility to the Governor for taking whatever action he deemed appropriate.
Things now started to move into the realm of farce. Governor, encouraged by the President’s authorization, sent off a letter to the United Nations requesting it to arrange ceasefire and promised transfer of power to elected representatives. The letter got leaked to the press as soon as it reached New York and greatly offended Bhutto who was present there representing Pakistan’s case before the UN. According to him, it had compromised his efforts to obtain aid from China and United States. On 13 December, a spokesman in Rawalpindi denied that Pakistan government had ever suggested ceasefire and the matter came back to square one. In the meantime, to boost Eastern Command’s sagging spirits, a message was sent from Rawalpindi about expected intervention ‘soon’ by ‘yellow friends’ from the North and ‘white friends’ from the South (US had an aircraft carrier parked in the Bay of Bengal), with orders to communicate it to all command sectors. For the next few days, everybody kept looking up at the sky and towards the sea for heavenly help but none arrived.
Looking at the war situation tactically, Indian forces had still not been able to cross the three huge rivers of East Pakistan: Brahmaputra, Jamuna and Meghna around Dhaka, and with a determined force it would have been possible to hold the enemy there for at least a month. But now the Eastern Command had to face the grim reality: there was not even a single platoon of regular army left in Dhaka to defend the city. The sector commanders spread all around the country when ordered to begin retreating towards Dhaka to fight a final battle there, were either unable to do so or sent in various excuses.
Dhaka was in the end left with a force of barely five thousand men drawn from civil armed forces, police and volunteer corps under the command of Major General Jamshed. The troops were mostly armed with old and obsolete ammunition and suffering from low morale. General Niazi was now beginning to see the writing on the wall and requested the Governor to send a signal to Yahya Khan on 12 December evening requesting him to take immediate measures to prevent further loss of life. Nothing happened until 14 December when the Governor House was bombed by Indian MIG 21 planes causing it extensive damage and disrupting a high level meeting in progress there. The Governor, his cabinet and senior officials repaired to Hotel Intercontinental which had been declared ‘a non-partisan zone’ by the Red Cross. Fourteen December was practically the last day of the Government of East Pakistan.
A telegram was finally received from the Presidency addressed to General Niazi on 14 December at 05:30 pm saying that he had requested the UN to advise India to cease fire in East Pakistan guaranteeing safety of people there. It authorized Niazi to start proceedings to arrange a cease fire. Niazi hardly wasted a second and immediately fired off a message to the Indian army chief, General Manekshaw, offering ceasefire. The Indian general responded the following day on 15 December accepting ceasefire provided the Pakistan army laid down arms. These terms were communicated to and approved by Rawalpindi the same evening and forwarded to all sector commanders.
Indian army Major General Nagra arrived in the outskirts of Dhaka on the morning of 16 December. He was met by Major General Jamshed sent by Niazi to greet him and he entered Dhaka without firing a single bullet. Nagra walked into Niazi’s office and they talked casually about old days when they had been together in the British army. Later in the afternoon, Niazi went to receive Lt General Jagjeet Singh Aurora, chief of Indian Eastern Command, at the Dhaka airport and on his arrival saluted him in military style before shaking hands. They went together to Racecourse Ground and there, surrounded by thousands of cheering Bengalis, on a small table laid down for this purpose, General Niazi signed the surrender document. He took out his revolver from his pocket and presented it to General Aurora, putting the final seal on Pakistan’s surrender to India on the Eastern front. This was the birth of Bangladesh.
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(3)
Karachi had the only international airport in West Pakistan in those days and it was from there that I flew to London on 26 March 1968 to continue my accounting studies. It was a pleasant spring morning and my father saw me off at the airport having travelled with me from Lahore to give me company. I wasn’t feeling my best leaving home and, as the plane took off, the situation turned from bad to worse. Breakfast was served and after the trays were picked up, people started to relax and settle down. The plane was only half full and the seat next to me was unoccupied. I started thinking of home, about my mother and my sisters and tears started rolling down my eyes. I could not believe that I was now going to live thousands of miles away from them and wouldn’t be able to see them or even talk to them for years. I must have been at that time the most unhappy passenger in the history of air travel.
I am not sure how long I carried on like this but suddenly I saw somebody coming to sit next to me. I looked through bleary eyes and saw that it was an air hostess. She started talking to me in soft tones and asked me if everything was all right. I kept quiet for a while but when she continued to probe, I told her that I was going away from home and was missing it terribly. She then started talking to me offering words of consolation and telling me how exciting London would be when I got there. She continued to sit there for about half an hour and left only after I promised that I would be fine. I never knew who she was but shall always remember her kindness and compassion in comforting me.
Getting to be on the plane to England though had not been an easy ride. We had to find our way through a sea of bureaucratic rules and procedures. Pakistan in those days was in the tight grip of government officials running what was a called a ‘quota, licensing and permits’ regime, and they had unlimited discretionary powers. For a start, a passport was not an automatic citizen’s right as it is now and it was granted on a strictly ‘need to have’ basis. The Director General of Immigration and Passports though happened to be an Aligarh College friend of my cousin Baqir Hasan who took me to meet him and so that was that. Getting a British visa required a job offer letter from an English firm of chartered accountants which would normally be possible only if you were there already, a real chicken and egg situation. But this was somehow managed with the help of a distant relative in England, Sahab Alam bhai, who arranged to send me an offer letter from the firm he was working with. Next, we had to arrange foreign exchange permit from State Bank of Pakistan which was allowed only to a limited number of candidates proceeding for studies abroad on merit and for this, Murtaza sahib, a school friend of my father working at SBP Karachi proved helpful. Networking perhaps was as much in vogue then as it is now.
My father had arranged for a person called Mr Mahmood, resident representative in London of a company owned by a business associate, to pick me up at the London Heathrow airport. After completing the immigration and customs formalities, I emerged from the airport to be greeted by a cold and wet evening already getting dark. Mr Mahmood somehow identified me and asked me to follow him to his car, parked some distance away in the car park. Driving through heavy traffic we reached our destination in about an hour which turned out to be a small room in the basement of a house he had found for my accommodation. After unloading my suitcase, he gave me his telephone number and departed saying that he would get in touch with me later on.
By the time I got settled in my room, it was late evening. It was a sparsely furnished single bed room with only a bed, small desk and chair. I had no idea what to do for my dinner and didn’t have an appetite anyway so decided to go to sleep. There was no heating of any kind provided in the room and with passage of time it grew intensely cold. I spent the night wrapped up in the single blanket that I could find shrunken in a heap in a corner of the bed. As the day broke, I noticed another blanket lying folded at the bottom of the bed and realized that may be people used double blankets here.
I changed and came out of the house trying to find some place where I could have a cup of tea and breakfast. I noticed an Englishman coming towards me and asked directions to a restaurant. He mumbled something and went on his way but I couldn’t catch a single word he said. I carried on regardless and eventually found a café where I had my first cup of tea in England.
Later in the morning, I managed to telephone Sahab Alam bhai from a telephone booth to tell him that I had arrived in London. He promised to visit me in the evening on his way back from office at my address which, as it turned out, was not far from his flat in Finsbury Park. He duly arrived in the evening, had one look at my basement flat, declared it totally unfit for any decent person to stay and took me to his flat. The next morning he departed for his office leaving me to stay at the flat where I slept most of the day enjoying the warmth of a heated apartment, going out only to have lunch and to send a telegram home advising ‘reached safely’. When he returned in the evening, we decided that I would be much better off moving to the Pakistan Students’ Hostel situated in central London, living in the company of people all having arrived recently and the availability of Pakistani food day and night. He took me there and arranged for me to be allotted a room.
The Pakistan Students’ Hostel, situated in the posh Belgrave area of London next to the Pakistan High Commission, was a whole new world for me. Decently furnished with two beds in each room, it was a hub of activity crowded with students coming from all corners of Pakistan. My roommate was Habib Khan who was about ten years older than me. He was a district education officer in Punjab arriving in England for some professional training, and despite the difference in our age we hit it off together immediately. Food served at the hostel canteen was tolerable but cheap, and having Pakistani food served in London was, in any case, a luxury, as was the freedom to talk in one’s own language as loudly as one wanted to. The nearest tube station, Knightsbridge, was only five minutes’ walk away.
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My first priority though was to send a letter home and I bought a few aerograms from the nearby post office for this purpose. An aerogram was a thin lightweight piece of foldable and gummed light blue paper for writing a letter which also served as the envelope. The first few aerograms that I sent home were written in tiny little script by me because I had to say so much in the limited space available for writing: I had to narrate all the incidents in detail and also to express my feelings of homesickness. In those days, I used to write a letter home almost every day and my mother or sisters also sent a reply almost daily and these took about three to five days in transit.
We had to rely on letters so much because the long-distance telephone calls in those days were prohibitively expensive. Calls from Pakistan to UK cost fifty rupees per minute in those days (close to Rs 5,000 in today’s money). There was no direct dialling so one had to book a trunk call through an international operator who would take anywhere from a few hours to a day to connect your call, limited to maximum three minutes per call. Once connected, these also suffered from hissing, low sound level and delayed voice transmission making it extremely hard to talk coherently. No wonder, during all my stay in England, I did not make a single telephone call to my home nor received any. It seems strange now that even in an emergency, one hardly ever used long-distance calls.
Later on, whenever there was a longish delay in my letter, I could expect to receive a telegram from my father with the stock phrase ‘wire welfare’, to which I would respond with something like, ‘everything fine’. Both letters and telegrams, which used to be such lovely means of bringing people together and share intimate personal experiences, have disappeared in folds of time.
Almost everybody used to write letters in those days, some long, some short, some using postcards for short messages, others writing pages and pages. Naqoosh, a Lahore literary magazine, had devoted one of its voluminous issues to publishing letters written by various Urdu literary figures – poets, story writers, scholars – to each other through the ages, which were a fine commentary on their thoughts and lifestyle. Letters written and received by British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell form a major part of his autobiography. As somebody said, “Modern electronic communication methods are instant and direct but charmless. Letters, on the other hand, reveal the hopes, worries, excitement, desperation and humour of the writers.”
Our family members used to write letters to each other constantly. Each had their own style. The elders used mainly postcards writing in a scrawl only the other elders could decipher. My female cousins also exchanged letters all the time writing about comings and goings and juicy gossip. Often, the letters were accompanied by the latest photographs taken after full make-up and in studied poses. One of the photographs sent by one cousin to another, a beautiful portrait with long hair falling down one side of the face, had an expectant inscription on the back, “Tell me, how am I looking?” Mansoor bhai, despite being an extremely busy person, was very fond of sending letters to all and sundry and would find time to write short letters even when he was in a hurry, calling them ‘khati’ (a small letter). I started writing letters to my elder cousins when I was barely five or six years old. In one of my earliest letters, I had announced jubilantly to a cousin living in Karachi that we now had a water connection installed at our new home (in Samanabad), and that our old servant ‘Boota’ had left and his younger brother ‘Younus’ had joined us.
One of the memorable postcards in our family was written by an aunt in Karachi to her sister in law in Lahore announcing the engagement of her daughter. The postcard gave long and interesting details of the prospective bridegroom ‘A’, his age, job, parents, background, everything, which covered the whole postcard. As the reader reached the end however, the last line of the postcard read, “Her marriage is not with bridegroom ‘A’ now, but with bridegroom ‘C’.” What !!!?
One could well understand the thought process going through the aunt’s mind. She had bought the postcard and then spent time and effort in writing it. It would be a pity, she would have thought, to let it all go waste. Much better to send it, and inform the reader of the minor matter of change of bridegroom too.
Like the dying institution of letters, one has fond memories of the telegrams too, now officially discontinued in most countries. Telegrams were sent by visiting a post office and writing out the telegram on a form using minimum number of words because payment was made for the number of words used. Some famous telegrams come to mind, like the ones exchanged between the New York Times’ war correspondent in Cairo during the early days of WWII and his boss in New York. To economise on words, ‘no’ was called ‘un’ in press language and joined with the next word. As it happened, the war correspondent was enjoying his life in Cairo and took his time sending reports to New York. The boss getting impatient wired a query, “Unnews?” meaning No News? The reporter considered himself clever and wired back, “Unnews, good news”. Back came the wire, “Unnews, Unjob”.
The English writer Lytton Strachey visiting Venice for the first time, sent a worried telegram to his friends back home, “Streets full of water, please advise.” American writer Mark Twain perturbed over his death being falsely reported in newspapers, wired a classic understatement, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” The shortest ever telegram was sent by Oscar Wilde to his publisher enquiring about sales of his book, “?” to which the publisher replied appropriately, “!”.
When we moved to our first home in Lahore after our wedding, there was no telephone there. Communication with in laws living in Karachi was either through letters or telegrams. My mother in law was due to visit us later that week. A telegram from me reached her home late at night, people got up fearing the worst, Mansoor bhai tore up the envelope and read the telegram to everybody gathered around him, “ Bring Daal Maash Green. Dali (Betel Nut) Not Required.”
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The day next after arriving in the Students Hostel was a Friday and after breakfast I and Habib decided to venture outside the hostel to see London. We decided to visit Hyde Park which was not far from the hostel, really at a walking distance, but being new to the area we decided to go there by underground train from Knightsbridge station to Marble Arch. It was a beautiful sunny morning, though quite cold, and being a working day the Park including its famous Speakers’ Corner, was almost deserted at that time. On Sundays though, the Speakers’ Corner would come to life when anybody wishing to address the public on any subject under the sun could mount a wooden box and start speaking, or addressing or preaching or shouting, whatever one may call it. People would keep moving from one speaker to another either cheering or making sarcastic remarks, and this drama would go on from morning till evening.
It was a huge park with walkways leading in various directions, one of which took us to Serpentine, the long winding lake in the park. We stopped to have a cup of tea and snacks in a café on lake side. I started munching a sausage patty which going by its name I thought would have some sauce inside it. When we came back to the hostel and I mentioned this to somebody, I was in for a shock when told that sausages were made of minced pork. I could not help immediately going to the bathroom and throwing up; there was nothing wrong with the patty, it was an automatic psychological reaction to something one had always believed to be haram. I then realised that I should better be more careful eating anything in this country.
After a day or two, I telephoned Mr Mahmood to tell him about my new abode and he invited me to his place in West Kensington. The following day was the 1st of April and I went to see him at his third floor, one bedroom flat in a residential house near Barons Court which doubled as his office. On pressing the bell, the door was opened by an elderly white lady who directed me to go up through thickly carpeted stairs. Mr Mahmood this time proved to be very friendly, we talked about this and that, and he showed me how to tie a tie using English knot. Everything in London was new for me and that day sitting there I saw my first snowfall through the flat’s windows; soft white flakes slowly floating towards the ground. I agreed with him to use his address for all my correspondence till the time that I moved to a more permanent address of my own.
Politics reigned supreme in the Pakistan Students Hostel in those days with most residents expressing their affinity to either of the two students unions: Bengali Union and Sindhi Union. Other students like Punjabi or Urdu speaking either supported one of these two or didn’t care for either. Bengalis were highly vocal, organized, and politically conscious. As a result, the hostel canteen was controlled by them though one couldn’t say that the food served was Bengali, it was more or less neutral .
Within a few days, I began to notice the strong feelings that most East Pakistanis in London had against West Pakistan. I was first surprised and then stunned by the intensity of such feelings: they simply hated what they called, West Pakistan’s ‘domination’ over their land, their resources, their earnings and their well-being. Mujibur Rahman had presented his Six Points Programme back in 1966 which meant an almost total autonomy for East Pakistan. Most people in West Pakistan considered the demands as extreme, almost fantastical, assuming (incorrectly as I realized) that the people in East Pakistan would hold the same views. Mujib was, however, much more politically adroit and his detention under Agartala Conspiracy trial, combined with the long Army rule under President Ayub Khan made his popularity grow exponentially. Though there must be millions of East Pakistanis at that time who held the concept of a united Pakistan dear to them, an overwhelming majority was swayed by the extremist and incendiary rhetoric of Mujibur Rahman; for anybody freshly arriving from West Pakistan, this was a rude shock.
In those days, I started to develop a lifelong friendship with Mohammad Ashraf. Originally belonging to a landholding family in Sargodha, he was in England to study for bar at law at Lincoln’s Inn and had many friends from East Pakistan. In fact, he was the only person from West Pakistan I knew who could count so many East Pakistanis among his acquaintances. Living in a flat in north London near Holloway Road, he was a dear old fellow, totally devoid of mischief or ill feelings towards anybody. He had a permanent smile on his face and was ever willing, even eager, to be as helpful to you as he could. He looked and behaved so innocent, it was difficult to believe that he was a law graduate; but then he qualified as a barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, alma mater of such giants as Iqbal and Jinnah and Gladstone and Asquith, so he must have a lot going for him, though he never showed it. He lives a retired life now in Sargodha, close to his lands, and is still as happy and contended as ever.
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(4)
I had to start looking now to get a job with a firm of chartered accountants because a four years training contract with an approved firm was a requirement to qualify as a chartered accountant, in addition to passing three exams. The next morning, I went to the stationers, W.H. Smith, bought a supply of plain paper and envelops and found my way to the nearest local library, as there happened to be one in every district in London. I went to the library’s reference section and borrowed a thick red book titled ‘List of Members – Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales’, containing names and addresses of individual members as well as firms. I selected a secluded corner of the library, settled myself comfortably and started to write applications, selecting firms of medium and large size situated in central London. This was a tedious job because the applications had to be written very carefully without any mistake, as the one containing even a single error had to be trashed. At the speed I was going, I could not manage more than ten applications a day. In total, I wrote about 75 applications which produced interview calls from about fifteen firms.
One of my applications written on 7 April hit the jackpot as I received an interview letter on the 9th for an interview just two days later on 11 April. It was from a medium-large firm called Tansley Witt & Co with eight partners and looked promising. I presented myself for the interview on the due date and received an appointment letter the next day for joining them just three days later on 16 April.
Just like in Lahore a year earlier, I again had to start at the bottom of the ladder and this time the ladder was slippery too. I was not considered fit to be sent to the clients even, and had to remain in the office from nine to five. One of the jobs assigned to me was the usual calling over of letters and accounts I was familiar with, but this time the person at the other end listening to me calling over was an old grey-haired lady, Miss Collins. She was short and stout, who it seemed was permanently in bad temper. Any mistake from me elicited a swift reprimand and, when this did not prove effective, she threw an eraser at me from her desk which could hit me anywhere in the face – for her age she had an incredibly strong arm. It was up to me to fend off the attack in whatever way I could. It was sometimes hard for me to believe that all this was happening as part of the noble cause of qualifying as a chartered accountant.
The other jobs were not much more creative either – updating Moody’s company information sheets daily; moving furniture between floors as the firm occupied all four floors of a building; getting sandwiches for partners and managers on need basis; or carrying papers between offices, etc. I remember getting home in an exceptionally good mood one day and telling my friend Razzaq how happy I felt. When he queried the reason, I told him that this was the first time in about six months when I had actually taken a fountain pen out of my pocket and written some figures on a piece of paper. He thought I was crazy but I assured him that this was true; none of the jobs that I had been doing up to now required the use of a pen! This was in fact the result of working in a large firm, in smaller firms one started audit and accounts work right away. On the other hand, in a large firm, one swiftly moved up the ladder to supervising audits of fairly large companies after a couple of years while the smaller firm boys were still dealing with the same kind of jobs they had started with.
Our office supervisor was a Mr Taylor, a New Zealander in his early fifties, usually a cool and kind character but capable of enforcing strict discipline in a firm full of headstrong British boys straight out of school or college. They were predominantly from a middle or upper class background, all speaking in a bewildering variety of English accents. I asked a senior his name and he said it was Robin Wyke and so I started to refer to him in the office as Mr Wyke. To my embarrassment some days later, I came to know that the name was in fact ‘Wake’ and he, being an East Londoner, had pronounced it as Wyke in his cockney accent. This accent was, of course, immortalised by the great actress Audrey Hepburn in the film ‘My Fair Lady’ playing the part of a flower girl from East London. The prescribed dress for the office in those days was strictly a black or dark blue suit and tie, with either a white or light blue shirt. Anything else was frowned upon and a staff member arriving in office once wearing a brown coloured suit was told to immediately go back home. The length of our hair was kept under close scrutiny too and an upper-class type boy, Mark Jennings, who preferred to keep his blond hair long was frequently in trouble.
One thing which immediately struck me as odd, though pleasantly, was the total lack of formality between the partners, senior managers and other staff members. The partners would frequently come out of their offices to the main hall and start talking to a person standing in front of his table while this person as well as the other people would continue sitting, or the partner would sometime sit perched casually on the office desk. Nobody would notice their comings and goings in the least, unlike Fergusons back home where the entry of a partner in a room would force everybody to immediately stand up and behave in a highly deferential, even servile, manner.
After the completion of my six months’ probation in Tansley Witt, I was articled to Mr Christopher Gee, a handsome, tall and lean young partner who had been elevated to this position only a few months ago. This was only a formality though and I hardly ever saw him again after the contract documents were signed. My reporting was mostly to the managers, Nick Simpson or Chris May, both highly competent, understanding and friendly personalities. This was an all ‘white’ firm, the only overseas clerk other than me was another Pakistani, Sharif, a couple of years senior to me, but I hardly ever saw him because he belonged to another section of the firm. There was only one female, Roseanne Keeble, in our section. With one or two exceptions, all the boys were graduates from ‘red brick’ universities in England, so called to distinguish them from Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
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After a few days of moving to Pakistan Students Hostel, Razzaq also joined me there while Abdullah was already here in London having arrived a few months back. Razzaq had initially found accommodation at his uncle’s home in East London but wasn’t particularly happy there especially with his aunt asking him before every meal, “How many chapattis would you like to have, Razzaq?” It was now time to start looking for a permanent accommodation of our own and, with our meagre resources, decided to share what was called a ‘bed-sitter’ meaning one room with a kitchenette in a corner of the room. There was usually one bathroom provided on each floor of the house shared by the tenants on that floor. Ads for rent or purchase of all kinds of accommodation were published daily in the two evening newspapers, pages and pages of it, and we started phoning the prospective landlords or landladies.
For such rentals, men with Asian background were usually considered close to the bottom of the list with White girls topping the list followed by White men and then Coloured girls. West Indians were mostly living in South London. We too preferred to avoid certain areas, such as East London. Our persistent search bore fruit and after about a week, we found what we were looking for: an apartment situated on Westbourne Park Road in North Kensington. It was a first floor medium-sized flat at the back of the house facing a small garden down below, at a rent of £6 per week. Our landlord was a tough looking heavily built Greek-Cypriot in his thirties who seemed gentle enough as long as you didn’t step on his toes. We bid farewell to the Hostel in the last week of April and moved with our modest belongings to our flat, the start of a new chapter in our lives.
As none of us knew how to cook, we continued to visit the hostel daily in the evenings for our dinner. There we were joined by Abdullah and some other class mates from Hailey College who were trickling in one by one to London, and it became a sort of club for daily meeting of old class fellows. This was proving to be costly though for our budget and we started to collect an assortment of pots and pans and crockery and cutlery to set up a kitchen of our own. I started a regular correspondence course with my mother to take lessons in cooking, starting from the very basics – ‘heat the oil in a pan, fry chopped onions until light brown’ – and slowly got the hang of it.
Habib Sb, our friend from the Students Hostel days, was a frequent visitor to our place. About ten years older than us, he was a delightful character. Of medium height but heavily built and with a slightly bulging tummy, he was always clad in a three piece suit and a tie, showing himself off as a model gentleman. Slow and ponderous, he regarded us as two naughty and worrisome kids and we didn’t disappoint him.
Razzaq once telephoned him posing as his boss, Mr Cow, the principal of the school where he was teaching. Picking up the phone, Habib Sb naturally became extremely attentive and respectful receiving a call from Mr Cow. Razzaq, speaking in an authoritative and menacing tone started to admonish him, after which Habib Sb became even more submissive. Razzaq could not control himself at this point and began to giggle, listening to which Habib Sb, surprised, asked him, “You are laughing, Sir?” Razzaq now speaking in an even more menacing tone, shouted, “How dare you say I am laughing, you fool? Shut up.” Habib Sb, now at the point of fainting, managed to mumble, “Sorry, Sir. I’m very sorry, Sir.” Feeling that this was quite enough, Razzaq now speaking in his natural tone, announced, “It is me, Habib Sb.” One can well imagine the explosion that erupted at this stage, but thankfully things soon calmed down.
Self-locking doors of England did not match Habib Sb’s personality; he would frequently forget to take the house key with him with the door inconveniently locking behind him. This would leave him stranded outside on the road in his dressing gown running here and there trying to find somebody with a key to let him in. He would then start cursing the entire white race for their ‘stupidity’ in inventing such messy locks.
The word punctuality did not appear in his dictionary and one always had to be on guard while making plans with him. Once when visiting our place, Habib Sb wanted us to accompany him to go to Hyde Park. We were not in a mood for some reason and declined. After long arguments lasting more than half an hour, he suddenly announced that, in that case, he should proceed to Holborn station to keep an appointment with a Mr Shaikh, a friend of his, who would be waiting for him there right at this moment. We were astounded to hear this and felt sorry for Mr Shaikh who would have continued to wait indefinitely at the Holborn station had we agreed to go with Habib Sb to Hyde Park.
For a punctuality freak like me in any case, even Razzaq proved to be challenging sometimes. We had agreed once that he would meet me at 1:00 pm in front of my office; I stood there for full half an hour but he failed to turn up. Reaching home in the evening, I was naturally expecting some kind of an explanation from him but, to my utter dismay, he not only didn’t offer any excuse, rather – after I had chided him for this – he had the nerve to say, “So I didn’t come. But you were only standing in front of your office, weren’t you.” This made me real mad and when I insisted on an apology, he mumbled, “Ok, I am sorry.” This didn’t satisfy me at all and when I continued to nag him, he blurted out, “ I have said sorry, haven’t I. Do you want me to fall down on my knees now?” There was nothing more one could say to this.
There was an interesting incident one evening. Habib Sb, Razzaq and I were walking on a street close to our home when we saw a man walking unsteadily towards us in the distance. It was a giant of a man, a black guy, who appeared to be heavily drunk as he was wobbling from side to side. We talked between ourselves that we must try to walk past him as lightly as possible. As he went past us however, Habib Sb somehow felt that he had touched him and being ever polite said, “Sorry”. The giant suddenly stopped in his tracks, peered at us with half open eyes and shouted, “What are you sorry for, man?” Habib Sb got totally nonplussed at this unexpected query. “Nothing, Sir, nothing,” he mumbled in his usual soft voice. The giant refused however to be mollified by this feeble explanation and persisted, “No, no. Tell me, man. What are you sorry for?”. We had no idea how to resolve this argument and I pushed Habib Sb forward telling him to leave the man alone. We started walking again not daring to look back, fearing that at any moment we would be hit violently on the back. Mercifully, however, the giant considered us too small a fry to merit his further attention and started walking away from us.
After a few months, Habib Sb departed to the United States for further education. We missed his company and were sorry to see him go.
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By this time, London had become thick with our Hailey College class fellows trickling in one after the other, all aspiring to become chartered accountants one day. At one time, we could count close to thirty of them there. Almost all of them knew me and Abdullah in Lahore while Razzaq also had a wide circle of friends. Our place started to look more like a club and friends like Abdullah, Ina’am, Khalid, Nasir, Naseer and Ifitikhar became much like members of a family.
The card game we used to play on the weekends was not my favourite Bridge but another game called ‘Seep’ (originally ‘Sweep’), the popular card game of Punjab. This in a way was more mentally tough to play because it required you to keep in your memory not just the cards of a particular colour (like, Spade or Heart) as in Bridge but the cards of each denomination (like, how many Aces or Eight or Ten). We would spend hours playing it with various combination of partners and time would pass quickly.
Sometime during the winter, Razzaq’s younger brother Amjad, having recently arrived from Lahore, came to stay with us for a few days. New to the country and naturally homesick, he would stay all day alone closeted in the room and by the time we arrived back from our office in the evening, would be close to tearing his hair out. My pleasant remarks used to fall like a ton of bricks on him. Asking him, “How are you?”, he would respond, “ “Of course I am ok, what else do you think I would be?” And when I would follow it up by asking, “How was your day?”, he would retort, “My day? What do you mean, my day? My day was just like your day.” Not accepting failure, I would persist, “And I hope everything remained well with you today.” To which he would say, “Why are you asking if everything remained well? Do you think I have cholera?” Having concluded these pleasantries, I would then start preparing dinner. Some of the married guys may find this line of conversation familiar to them.
Amjad left us to complete a study course in a small town somewhere in the south of England. After a few weeks when he was fed up eating vegetables day and night as halal food was not available at the college, he approached the principal. “Yes, what do you want?” asked the principal. “I want to,” replied Amjad boldly, “slaughter a cock, Sir.” When the principal said, “What?” because he thought he may not have heard the boy correctly, Amjad repeated the request, “I want to slaughter a cock, Sir.” The principal now having collected his wits, thundered, “Get out, and never dare to use such filthy language with me again.” Sometime later, Amjad telephoned us to complain about the principal’s strange and angry response to his, what he said, very reasonable request.
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(5)
One of the bonus points of living on Westbourne Park Road was that it was at a walking distance from Portobello Road market, a famous street market selling all kinds of antique and used goods, which attracted people from all over London on Saturdays. Hawkers selling their wares thronged the street carrying everything you could think of on their handcarts : clothes, electronics, fruits and other things of everyday use. Shops sold cheap second hand furniture, dresses and electronic items. In the afternoon, there were so many people walking on the street, it was difficult to move around handcarts. We used to go there almost every Saturday – I was especially looking to buy a radio cum record player – but usually returned in the afternoon carrying only a bag of bananas due to my tiny budget. This went on for a few weeks when I finally found something I was looking for: a second hand portable radio and record player amazingly within my budget.
From that day onwards, the radio would be kept playing nonstop in our flat during all our waking hours. It was permanently tuned in to Radio One of BBC belting out the latest pop songs. Radio One was later on replaced by Radio Luxembourg performing the same job. Razzaq was already a music fan and refreshingly took to English songs in no time. The memory of Tony Blackburn show in the morning brings to my mind visions of hectic activity: its timing coincided with myself and Razzaq running back and forth in the room to get ready in time for a fifteen minutes’ walk to the Notting Hill tube station on our way to the office. The various shows following one another hour after hour played only the latest songs; it was survival of the fittest in the most brutal fashion, any song going down in the pop charts was quickly discarded and replaced by an emerging new song. I still remember the songs which started to become popular in 1968 because we used to hear them from morning till evening, like, ‘Those were the days’, ‘With a little help from my friend’, Classical Gas, and the greatest of all, Hey Jude by Beatles which shot up through the charts to land at the number one spot in the very first week that it was launched.
BBC Radio had four channels, all catering to different types of clientele. Radio One was pop music all day long; Radio Two was more into specialist music like, folk, jazz and light entertainment; Radio Three was devoted to classical music and Radio Four was everything else like news, current affairs, art, history, science, in-house drama and comedy, etc. On Sunday afternoons there was a very interesting hour-long talk show run by the famous DJ, Jimmy Seville on Radio One. It was a discussion participated by four or five people on some controversial or hot topic of the day. The tempo of discussion would gradually build up, egged on by Jimmy, leading to some heated comments by the participants at which time, Jimmy would start playing a record. This would tend to make people cool down and they would restart the discussion in a fairly civilized fashion. In one of the programs the topic under discussion was, would you believe, Jesus Christ. Opinions of participants of the program ranged from those who regarded him as the son of God to those at the other end of the spectrum believing that he didn’t exist at all and it was all a myth. Other participants held views somewhere in between these two. As one could imagine, the talk quickly became heated and as tempers flared up, it was time for a song. This process repeated itself many times over until the end of program. I could not help myself feeling amazed at the level of maturity and broadmindedness of these people who would tolerate any opinion and be prepared to discuss it, howsoever extreme or even resentful it might be.
Having the ‘freedom’ to listen to a song as many times as one liked turned out to be a huge luxury for me, used to as I was back home listening to an English song once and not knowing when, if ever, I would have a chance to listen to it again. I became hooked on to the English songs in school listening to the weekly ‘Western Music’ program broadcast every Saturday at 12:30 which happened to be our lunch time. This was the hay day of singers like Elvis Presley, Bobby Darin and Nat King Cole. The only other source of English songs other than this weekly fare was BBC radio on shortwave transmission which one could listen to in the evenings, though the connection was always uncertain and accompanied with lots of static noise.
I used to park myself on a chair in front of our Normandy brand radio every evening and try to explore all the shortwave bands in search of any hidden treasure one could find, a hint of an English song. Usually, most of this time was spent hearing meaningless radio noise or chatter but sometime one could hit pay dirt in the most unusual places and in strange sounding languages. It was one such evening in late 1963 when I bumbled on to the Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ on some unknown channel. The song electrified me – it was out of this world – and I had never listened to anything like this before. My search for English songs on the radio took on a fresh impetus trying to listen to the Beatles again. In time, one came to know about the phenomenon of Beatles just hitting Europe and America through news and magazines and, along with the millions of screaming and shrieking teen-aged girls welcoming them all over the world, I too remained one of their most devoted and passionate fans until their break up a decade later.
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In Tansley Witt, I had started at a princely salary of £500 per year on joining the company, paid weekly. The exchange permit allowed to me by the State Bank of Pakistan was £625 per year reduced by the amount of my net salary, and my father was in this way sending me about £17.50 every month This was barely enough for the daily food and other expenses after paying rent and train fares. For about six months, I made do with only two white shirts laundering them over the weekend. The American Woolworth department store, situated near my office, proved to be my life support in those days. It was an economy store with everything offered within a limited price range which suited me very well and though the quality of goods was naturally much below par, I couldn’t afford to be choosy.
If I was feeling it hard to make ends meet, Razzaq was even worse off. His passage to England had been funded by his elder brother but there the financial assistance ended. Though he had also found a job with a firm of chartered accountants, the salary was small like mine and in order to balance his budget, he had to find a second job. This he did by working at a car park in the evening shift. There was not much traffic during night time thus allowing him time to study and to doze off for a few hours in the ticket booth. He would rush back home in the morning, in time to change and to set off for the office. This was truly hard work and I marvelled at his energy and stamina in remaining cool and cheerful throughout the day in the face of such back breaking daily routine. When we look at successful people leading comfortable lives, we often tend to overlook the amount of incredible suffering and hardship they had to endure to arrive where they are now.
The tiny size of our domestic budget in those days can be gauged by one example. One of my cousins in Karachi was proceeding to US for studying for MBA and stopped over in London overnight staying with me. After I picked him up at the airport, I suggested that we take the underground train to proceed to home, this being our usual mode of travel, but he insisted that we take a taxi. After a brief argument, I backed down and we had a comfortable ride home. Looking at it from his point of view, the request was quite reasonable as hiring a taxi was routine in Karachi. However, here in London, the taxi fare of around £5 from Heathrow to Kensington was exactly equal to half my weekly pay, putting some strain on our limited home budget.
We weren’t the only ones living from hand to mouth in those days. Visiting our place once, Khalid mentioned that he was going to visit his sister in Birmingham next week; when we met him next however, he said that he had cancelled the program and bought a shirt instead. The same thing happened a month later when he told us that he had cancelled the program once again and bought a tie this time. Razzaq wasn’t going to let an opportunity like that go by and quipped, “Why do you keep making plans to go to Birmingham? Better make a plan to visit Paris next time, then cancel the program, and buy yourself a nice three-piece suit instead!”
I also began to sense during those days that ‘giving’ was not always co-related to ‘having’. Despite his meagre resources, Razzaq told me one evening that he had advanced a cheque of £100 to one of his senior office colleagues, a Pakistani, moved by his sob story and a promise to return it within a month. After receiving the cheque however, the senior had declared that may be he could return the loan in instalments over a period of six months or a year. I was horrified, realizing immediately that he had been conned and told him in very strong terms to visit his bank first thing in the morning to ‘stop’ the cheque’s payment. This he did and a disaster was thankfully averted. I then sat with him and made a rule: he must never advance money for an amount more that £5; that was the cap. Though he continued to dole out money here and there – he couldn’t help it – the outflow remained within limits.
The exchange permit which allowed my father to send monthly remittances had to be renewed every year by the Education Attaché of the Pakistan High Commission in London, and for this I had to make occasional visits there. As soon as one entered the building, one realized that the High Commission staff had made strenuous efforts to replicate the Pakistani style of maintaining shabby offices and disagreeable attitudes exactly as these were back home, and in this they had succeeded brilliantly. The reception area looked like one was back in a Pakistani post office with indifferent clerks sitting on raised chairs behind counters shielded by an iron grill, with huge piles of dirty, decaying files lining the shelves. The officials behaved as if you were somehow disturbing their hard earned leisure time and made every attempt to dismiss you as quickly as possible. It was beyond belief how they had made this possible in the middle of London which had an entirely different kind of ambiance in their offices.
In this sea of inefficiency and indifference there was one exception. And fortunately, this was the person responsible for managing the annual renewal of exchange permits. Was this a coincidence that this gentleman was not a Pakistani but an Englishman, Mr Conquest, working as an officer at the Pakistan High Commission. I used to meet Mr Conquest once a year for the next three years and my case was always dealt with quickly and efficiently. In fact, he used to plead my case with the State Bank if they made an error in calculation. RIP Mr Conquest, wherever you are, and God bless you.
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A few months after arriving in England, I developed cold and fever. Nothing hits you more living away from home than when you get sick. There is nobody to take you to a doctor; to attend to your medication; to prepare light foods for you; you are all on your own and brooding over your misery. I had a cup of tea, got dressed and then lumbered off to a nearby telephone booth to get in touch with the doctor. In England, the National Health Service appoints family doctors in each area whose services are free. The alternative is either to go to a hospital or to consult highly expensive private specialists. I thumbed through the thick telephone directory hanging in the booth to find the name of the doctor in my area: it was a Dr Levy and I rang him. He picked up the telephone immediately and asked me what seemed to be the trouble. I explained to him that I had a cold with fever and wanted to see him. He replied that the earliest appointment he could manage for me was next Wednesday, which was about a week away. I told him in a slightly aggrieved tone that I was feeling sick now and asked what I should do in the meantime. He said: no problem, just have some aspirin and hot cups of tea, have lots of rest, and you’ll be fine. I had no choice but to do what he had recommended. By the next day I was feeling much better and was able to resume office a day later.
Another kind of medical emergency was waiting for me in a department store, Gamages, situated near my office. It was my lunch time and I was rushing through the aisles to get something in my usual brisk manner when, turning a corner, I suddenly slipped on the floor banging my head sideways on a shelf. My left ear hit a can of food and started bleeding. It seemed that somebody had dropped a sugar bag which had burst open spreading its contents on the well-polished floor. I was immediately taken to their in-house well equipped first aid section. A nurse dressed in a starched white uniform awaited me; she cleaned the wound and stopped the bleeding with a few stitches. I was also given a Tetanus injection with a card to record the follow up shots. I was good as new and went back to my office after a few minutes.
By the evening I had almost forgotten about the incident. Recounting it to Razzaq however, he suggested that we must sue the store because the accident was caused due to their negligence. I was reluctant to do this at first but then deciding to give it a try just for the fun of it, wrote to the store demanding appropriate compensation. A reply was received from the store’s solicitor who, though denying liability for the incident, offered a compensation of six and a half pounds. I accepted it with alacrity because there was no way I could challenge it in the courts and, in any case, it was a welcome aid to our tight budget.
A year had now passed in our Kensington flat and Mario, the landlord, was demanding an increase. Somebody told us that Rent Control Act was very strong here and we could file a complaint with the authorities against undue demands made by a landlord. We thanked our stars to know what a nice country we were living in, and immediately filed an application at the relevant office. When I got back home in the evening a few days later, I found Mario waiting for me in the lobby. Razzaq usually arrived much later. Mario followed me going up the stairs and entered the room with me. Before I could ask him to take a seat and offer him some drinks, he advanced towards me and grabbing my face with the fingers of his right hand started to squeeze it violently. He had a big enough hand and held my face so tightly, I could hardly breath let alone raise an alarm. He then told me in a firm menacing tone that making a complaint won’t do me any good and that we must vacate the premises as soon as possible, failing which there would be trouble for me. I did not want to test him on his threat and promised that we will. He left as quietly as he had come. I had an aching jaw to remind me of Mario for many days to come.
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(6)
The hunt for an apartment started again, this time with some urgency. We were much more experienced this time however, knowing the kind of districts we should aim for and how to go about it. Even then we were more than lucky. I saw an ad in the paper for a vacant apartment in South Hampstead, a mildly expensive area, and took an appointment to meet the landlord. He, or rather they, turned out to be Mr and Mrs Wright, a couple in their early fifties, highly refined and cultured, offering a second floor flat in their house on Canfield Gardens, a street containing neat, well maintained semi-detached houses with big gardens in the back. They interviewed me and somehow I passed their test. The rent was incredibly only slightly higher than what we were paying presently. We moved there on the weekend.
It was a sea change for us. We found ourselves moving from a lower-middle class to an upper-middle class area. The view looking at the spacious garden below in the summer was awesome with all kind of flowers blooming there. Our neighbour in the flat facing our apartment was a Mr Dasgupta, an Indian Bengali living in England for many years. He was an intellectual of sorts, dabbling in music as well, speaking in a thick Bengali accent but kind and affectionate.
There were few Indian or Pakistani grocery shops in London in those days and those that we could visit were mostly owned by Sikh families. The Sikhs were all remarkably mild mannered and friendly, not at all like the image we had of them of the partition days swooping down in hoards on Muslims fleeing towards Pakistan holding shining kirpans in their hands. They were in fact, for want of a better word, rather simple minded. I was shopping for some vegetables to cook at home once and not being able to locate the potatoes, asked Sardarji about it. He replied immediately, “They are just by the side of onions.” I resumed my search but couldn’t find the onions either. Asking Sardarji where the onions were, back came the instant response, “They are just by the side of potatoes, Sir.” I didn’t have the heart to ask him where both of them were. Another shop owned by a Sardarji had a notice permanently hanging on the glass door, ‘Open on Sundays”. This was a welcome change because most of the shops remained closed on that day. Having got there one Sunday morning to cook food for some friends we had invited for lunch, I was amazed to find a notice hanging on the same door announcing, ‘Closed on Sundays’. There was an explanation below, ‘Due to Staff Shortage’. Apart from the fact that the two notices happened to be contradictory, ‘staff shortage’ seemed to have been copied from somewhere because their shop was manned by a husband and wife duo!
There were very few Indian restaurants either, especially in Central London. The sole exception was a restaurant near Holborn Viaduct specialising in South Indian delicacies such as vindaloo. The few Indian restaurants in suburbs were almost all owned by Bengalis serving curries which for some reason all tasted the same. The mystery was solved when we found that all such restaurants used a single ‘all-purpose curry paste’ stored in a big jar, which they would mix instantly with whatever type of dish we ordered, whether it was a vegetable, chicken, mutton, fish,or anything else. It was therefore a rare occasion when we could enjoy a real Pakistani tasting food and this was possible only when were lucky enough to visit the home of a Pakistani family.
Perhaps it was the longing for a family atmosphere that moved me and Razzaq to start watching Indian films which were chock-full of intimate family relationships of all kinds. And, once started, we went about it with unmatched energy and determination. Naz Cinema, situated in east London, screened two Indian films every Sunday in those days, the first film starting at 12:00 noon and the second, after barely a ten minutes break, at about 3:00 pm. Coming out in the open after sitting continuously for six hours inside the cinema in darkness, one could hardly walk straight. But we got addicted to this routine. Every Sunday morning for many months to come, we would have a hurried breakfast and start on our one-hour underground train journey to east London, spend the whole day there, and reach back home nearly dead with exhaustion late in the evening.
But it was worth it. We watched priceless jewels during this period: classics like Mother India and Pyaasa as well as the new movies coming out of Bollywood film industry in those days. We watched enough films in those days to fill one’s appetite of a lifetime. They introduced us to the intricacies and complications in close family systems and the way these affected delicate relationships. I saw the way some ruthless mothers in law schemed to dominate or torment their innocent young daughters in law, and hoped that I won’t have to encounter such species in my life.
A truly memorable film I saw in those days was ‘War and Peace’, an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel which I had read recently, produced with help from Soviet government. The movie was eight hours long which started at midnight with refreshments served during the intermission and breakfast served in the morning. The Soviet army reportedly provided hundreds of horses and over ten thousand soldiers as extras. Amazingly, the film by its brilliance, managed to overshadow a novel described as the best fiction ever written. It has often been described as the grandest epic film ever made.
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Life at Tansley Witt was moving on. Time passes quickly when one is involved in daily routine and it was now more than two years since I had arrived in England. I had passed my first exam – one of three – called Intermediate in the summer of 1970, unexpectedly achieving 23rd position in all England out of nearly two and a half thousand candidates. My name was selected for special mention in the office newsletter and I suddenly found myself being known to everybody in the office. This was all the more surprising for many of them because I had prepared for the exam through the ‘Foulks Lynch’ correspondence course rather than the highly expensive crash or crammer courses most of my office colleagues preferred, which I couldn’t afford anyway.
Most of the time at an audit firm is spent at the clients’ premises for audit assignments. My colleagues would usually go out for lunch to a nearby bar and I accompanied them there. While they would gulp pint after pint of beer, my favourite beverage used to be either a juice or bitter lemon; I must have had gallons of bitter lemon inside me in those days. It was amazing the amount of beer they could consume during one hour of lunch time, and it was never enough. Usually they took it well, but sometimes it produced funny results. The senior incharge at one of our jobs would come back from lunch flushed with sweat. Anything explained to him then, no matter how carefully, would be forgotten by the next morning, though he would vehemently deny it.
As usual, the new arrivals in the firm never failed to disappoint. I asked one of our fresh female juniors once to ‘cast’ a cash book which meant checking the additions of its figures. Normally the job would have taken a whole afternoon but when she came back after only half an hour, I asked her how had she done it. She replied, “I casted my eyes over the first page, then I casted my eyes over the second page and likewise I finished casting the whole cash book.” Another junior, when asked to “tick off” cash book against bank statements (meaning comparing the two and listing the differences) literally ticked each and every item in both the documents and finished the job in a few minutes.
There were many memorable audit jobs but one or two stand out. One of our clients was Michelin Tyres, also famous for their highly coveted Michelin Stars awarded to top quality restaurants in Europe. Michelin happened to have a large factory in Belfast, Northern Ireland and I was assigned to go there for their annual audit along with my colleague Kevin Harkin in early 1971. We would take the early morning flight to Belfast every Monday, spend the week there and return to London Friday evening; this we did for four or five weeks. Entering the small plane early morning, I would be greeted by the overly cheerful and lively British Airways airhostesses, shouting something like, “And how are we this morning? Top of the world?” I would on the other hand, be half asleep cursing my luck having to travel this early, and couldn’t stand their cheery bubbly faces. I would nod to them gloomily and go and sit on my seat.
Northern Ireland, a part of UK, was a beautiful place, looking lush green everywhere, but at that time was in the middle of an armed conflict (1968-1998) with Irish Republican Army (IRA) fighting British forces to obtain freedom. IRA had the support of the minority Roman Catholics while the majority Protestants wanted to remain part of UK. There was frequent inter-communal rioting, house burning, shooting and bombing. I was not by any means averse to land in the middle of this strife torn area, in fact quite excited to see at first hand the conflict one read about only in newspapers. I didn’t hear any bomb going off myself and the only sign of troubles we were exposed to was to come out of the offices once or twice during our stay for police search after a bomb scare. We were staying the nights at a hotel about ten miles away from the city and thus far from the trouble-zone.
The local audit team assisting us were extremely helpful and hospitable. They spoke in a Northern Irish accent which has a tendency to raise the pitch towards the end of every sentence, even if the speaker is not asking a question. My London accent, in comparison, sounded somewhat commanding. I went to see their chief accountant once with an audit objection that it appeared that he had not properly inspected some vouchers before signing them. “I can assure you, Saeed,” he told me, “I examine each and every voucher very carefully before signing them. I try to make sure that I sign nothing which is not proper.” All this time he was signing vouchers looking directly into my eyes at bullet speed, scarcely looking at any of them. I was left speechless at such a brazen contradiction between words and deed.
We were having dinner one night at the hotel in their elegant dining hall, with music playing in the background. We were deep in conversation when suddenly the instrumental version of the Beatles song, “Fool On the Hill” sounded in my ears. Its haunting tone forced me to stop in the middle of whatever I was saying and become totally engrossed in its music. Kevin was much amused by this but I couldn’t help it. Music has that effect on me. I have stopped innumerable times in the middle of a meal the moment a tune I like starts to be played on the music system. I once stopped in the middle of a sentence talking to a salesman in a shopping mall in Karachi when the haunting song Hiyonat by Ummon started to be played on their music system, leaving him clueless.
The other audit I remember distinctly was when we were visiting Yorkshire in the north of England later that year near Christmas time and were caught up in the miners’ strike. The strike had forced all power to be cut off with no heating possible. It was freezing in Yorkshire and it was the first time when I experienced what extreme cold could do to the human body. We would be sitting in the office hall together with the clients’ staff, busy in our work wearing overcoats all day long, and sometimes gloves as well. Even then, it was difficult to continue working normally because the brain would start to become dull with cold after a few hours and then stop functioning all together. Despite such conditions, we did not discontinue the audit and tried to cope with the situation as best as possible, finishing it on time.
On the last day of our audit which was Christmas eve and everybody was leaving after lunch, bottles of wine were brought to the office. Small portions were poured in glasses and everybody took one. I thought about declining the offer but then decided against it as it would have required a long explanation which was quite beyond me at that time, especially as everybody was in a festive mood. I finished my drink in one gulp and then started to wait for the time when it would hit me and I would start behaving in a funny way, may be climb the window sill and start dancing there. To my surprise and mild disappointment, nothing happened at all and I remained as much in control as anybody else. This was the only time in England when I can truthfully claim to have had a drink.
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(7)
Razzaq and I were getting tired of our mundane and monotonous lives in London and felt badly in need of some vacation, preferably in Europe. But our limited budget made it impossible and we couldn’t even think about it. Where there is a will, there is a way, and a solution soon presented itself – ‘Youth Hostels’. These hostels were spread though out Europe and offer almost free accommodation. There was only one condition: one must be young, and that we definitely were. I booked the passage through the famous travel agents, Thomas Cook and we departed London going by train to the port city of Folkestone, crossing the English Channel by the delightful hovercraft to the French port of Calais, and then proceeding to Paris again by train. During this leg of the tour, Abdullah was also with us, visiting the famous historical sites of Paris together.
From Paris we took the train for the next leg of our tour to Switzerland. French people are well known for not speaking even a word of English and we had an interesting experience as well at the railway station in Paris. We went to the ticket desk to ask about the time for the next train departing for Interlaken in Switzerland. We tried various ways to communicate this request to the clerk sitting at the counter with words as well as hand gestures but nothing seemed to work. Exasperated, I took off my wrist watch and placing it on the counter, gestured first at the time in the watch and then towards the Interlaken train standing at the platform. The clerk promptly took off his own wrist watch and placed it next to mine on the counter, indicating happily that his one was better! I accepted my defeat and left him in a happy mood.
French trains even in those days were second to none in comfort, speed and punctuality, far superior to anything we had seen in the UK. Once inside the train, one hardly felt it moving. We crossed the border at Basle and then passing through the capital, Bern, arrived in Interlaken, our destination, in the evening. It is a beautiful city situated at the junction of two lakes, and hence its name. Arriving at the youth hostel, we were escorted to a big hall with rows of bunk beds lining one side of the wall. This was fine with us: it was warm and comfortable there and the beds had clean sheets and blankets laid out nicely for us. All the other boys were white apparently belonging to different countries of Europe and talking in their own languages. They looked at us once and continued to do whatever they were doing. After putting our bags down, we went to the bath room to freshen up and then proceeded to the big dining room for the evening meal. This was being served in one corner of the room like any self-service restaurant.
Interlaken turned out to be a one-road scenic city with hills surrounding it on all sides. It was full of tourists at that time of the year and the main attraction was boat rides in the two lakes, Brienz and Thun. Upon seeing the clear blue water of the lake, Razzaq couldn’t help himself and took a dive intending to have a long and leisurely swim; he lasted barely a few seconds inside the water before jumping back out as it turned out to be freezing cold.
From Interlaken we proceeded to Grindelwald which offers a panoramic view of the mountains and is the entry point to Jungfrau, one of the highest points in Switzerland. There is a special train to take you there and the ride itself is well worth the trip. We had by now only six Swiss Francs (CHF) left in our kitty for excursions and I sent Razzaq to buy tickets for the train to Jungfrau as long as the price did not exceed three CHF. He came back and told me that the price was higher than our limit. I thought may be the price was 50% higher or even double that. He said, “No. The special train ticket price is sixty-three CHF; twenty-one TIMES what we have.” I gave a serious thought to joining the Communist Party there and then to protest against the unacceptable disparity in world incomes. I did realize my ambition to see Jungfrau eventually when we (me and my family) visited Interlaken many years later.
Overall, the Paris and Switzerland trip had been a great success, long to be remembered.
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In the winter, I took leave from the office for a badly needed vacation to visit home, reaching there in early December after a few hours stopover in Karachi. I had no idea that my physical appearance in the short period of the past two and a half years had changed me so much that nobody was able to recognize me in Lahore until I introduced myself. Lahore airport in those days had a cosy and informal look with none of the security checks that later transformed the character of all airports. There was a small ‘arrivals’ hall divided into two parts: the front portion for baggage delivery and the back, separated only by a three foot high wooden barrier, for the visitors.
After coming down from the plane, I arrived in the baggage hall and started looking for my two suitcases. I was not aware that a small army of my family, uncles, aunts and cousins was already there in the visitors lounge to receive me. They were trying to identify me among the scores of other people standing around in the baggage hall just a few yards away, but were not having any success. One of my sisters pointed out to me as a possible candidate but the other one firmly rejected it as being not possible. While still looking for a suitcase, I happened to glance towards the visitors lounge and spotted my father standing there. I jumped over the fence and started hugging my family members one by one. I was done only about half way when I realized I still had to collect my luggage, went back over the fence, picked up the two suitcases and re-joined the family. Apparently, it was my longish hair and change in complexion that had made the identification so difficult. Meeting my sisters, there was much change in them too who were all in their teens now. My brother and kid sister who were only six and three when I had left them appeared even more grown up.
Back home I was in a different world. People kept coming and going and I found myself speaking almost nonstop telling them about my life abroad. I was finding it difficult to speak in fluent Urdu and somebody commented that it was obviously because I must be speaking English all this time. I corrected them and pointed out that it was not English, it was Punjabi. All my friends that I was spending time with in London were Lahoris and we conversed in Punjabi most of the time. I was quite enjoying being the centre of attraction, especially of my kid sister, Timmy, who kept staring at me intently.
One of thing that surprised me was how freely my parents seemed to be spending their money. It was not as if they had suddenly started throwing money to the wind; I had been conditioned to count every penny in England to such an extent that the money passing through their hands seemed a fortune to me.
The entire country was caught up in the election frenzy in those days. President Yahya Khan had announced the first ever elections to be held on adult franchise basis to be held on 7 December. Members of national and provincial assemblies were this time to be elected directly by the votes of all adult people. The only elections held previously in the country were in 1965 when Ayub Khan had contested the presidential elections against Miss Fatima Jinnah but in those elections, people had voted only to elect a group of eighty-thousand ‘electors’ who then casted their votes for the two presidential candidates. Campaigning was in full swing and corner meetings were being held in every locality. Bhutto’s Peoples’ Party was very popular with young people, women and the intellectuals as it offered promise of a new, people friendly, anti-rich social order. Its slogan ‘roti, kapra or makaan’ meaning food, clothing and housing for everybody made a strong impact on people disapproving the growing inequalities resulting from the fast industrial growth experienced in the past decade. It had, however, few ‘electable’ candidates – leaders commanding loyalties of their clans or communities – in its cadres because most of the old established political parties like the three factions of Muslim League, Jamaat e Islami and Wali Khan’s National Awami Party were still likely to be the winners in the eyes of the political pundits; and these parties had commanded most of the political funding too.
My mother had always been politically conscious and she had taken care to get my vote registered in my absence. On the polling day, we made a trip to the nearest polling station as proud citizens of our country and casted our votes, my vote going to the PPP. Pakistan Television (PTV) was the only channel available in those days, broadcasting in black and white, and we made ourselves comfortable for an all-night session in front of the TV. PTV had prepared an elaborate program for the election night, transmitting election results as soon as these were announced interspersed with reviews, music shows and comedy skits. This was the first time the famous singer Tahira Syed appeared on TV with her mother Malika Pukhraj singing the famous nazm, ‘Abhi Tau Main Jawan Houn’ which was an instant hit. PTV had excelled itself this time and kept all of us glued to the screen throughout the night.
The first results started to come in just before midnight and then continued to trickle in a steady stream. After the conclusion of polling time, most commentators had started to forecast a comfortable win for Awami League in East Pakistan and a swing towards PPP in the West. However, as more results started to pour in, the size of the PPP vote astounded us. Most of the big names associated with Muslim League factions as well as the religious parties failed to win, some of them forfeiting their deposits. In the end, Awami League won 53% and PPP 27% of the total seats. Of the West Pakistan seats, PPP had captured 60%, ML factions 13%, religious parties 12%, NAP 5% and independents 10%. This showed the almost complete domination of Awami League and PPP in their respective provinces. We were all very happy at that time that this augured well for the country ridding us of the weak coalition governments that were the norm in the fifties in Pakistan, responsible for much political instability. The elections were held in a remarkably free and fair environment with hardly anybody complaining about any irregularity. The air was full of hope and optimism for our dear country and yearning to welcome the first ever elected government in our history. Little did we know that personal egos, parochial attitudes and individuals’ lust for power will soon sabotage the people’s will expressed so clearly and unambiguously in the elections, and tear the country apart.
It was soon time to pack the bags again and say farewell to my dear family. I moved from the brilliantly sunny Lahore to the usual wet and cold London. But this in no way compared to my arrival here three years ago when I had spent a night alone freezing in a cold basement room. I was welcomed this time to the warm embrace of my own comfortable apartment and the energising company of my roommate Razzaq.
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(8)
As the summer approached, and I was free from my Final Part I exams taken in May 1971, I started feeling the need for a change from living in a one room bed sitter. It had been three years sharing an apartment with Razzaq and we had a remarkable time together despite somewhat contrasting personalities, or may be because of it. We had our usual tiffs and arguments but nothing ever serious. Razzaq takes the full credit for this as it would not have been easy to live with a person like me. It had always been my view that it was better to make a change while the going was good.
One of my college friends, Naseer had taken up residence recently in a two roomed ground floor apartment in Wimbledon with his elder brother, Javaid Aziz, and was looking for another person to share it with. The apartment was located at Merton Hall Road, about ten minutes’ walk from Wimbledon station in the suburb. It had a large lounge-sized room furnished with a divan bed, a three piece sofa set and a small round dining table; a smallish bedroom with twin beds; and separate kitchen and bath. The lounge faced the back garden seen through large French windows. I had a look at the apartment and developed an immediate liking as I was being offered the use of lounge facing the garden. Having a separate kitchen away from the bedroom was an added attraction.
We had a marvellous time together for the next three years. Javaid sahib, about five years older and who I had always called Bhaijan, was a gem of a character. Having a permanent smile on his face, he never imposed his seniority upon us and always behaved as a slightly older friend. He had a large circle of friends and through him I had the good fortune to start getting acquainted with many Pakistani families settled in England for a long time. One of the families had three married sisters belonging to Karachi: Bi Appa, Baji and Begum – the youngest – about ten years older than me. Baji’s husband was Yusuf Bhai, who was then in his forties wearing thick pebble eyeglasses and was a thorough gentleman whose passionate love for Pakistan was exemplary.
We would often discuss the political situation back home. Things had quickly started to go from bad to worse since last year, in contrast to the general air of optimism at the time when I had left Pakistan. I had kept myself fully in picture as, ever since my first day in England, I had started buying a British newspaper on a daily basis, first The Times and then The Guardian. I had the paper delivered to my apartment by a newsboy every morning and could never imagine starting my day without a newspaper and a hot cup of tea. Most Pakistanis however, relied mainly on Radio Pakistan’s overseas service for their news or sometimes the BBC Urdu news service, hardly ever reading a British newspaper. Fall of Dhaka therefore hit them like a bombshell, like it did most people in Pakistan.
Anybody reading British newspapers could see the drift of events as they were taking place in Bengal weeks, if not months, earlier. Bhutto had declared on the morning after the Army action of 25 March 1971, “Thank God, Pakistan has at last been saved.” To my mind however, living among the East Pakistanis in London and reading reports in the newspapers of mass killings of unarmed civilians, demolition of newspaper offices and elimination of intelligentsia, it was very clear that this was the end of united Pakistan. Bhutto had also failed to appreciate, in the words of Wolpert, “How seriously India would take it upon herself to get involved in our dilemma and ensure that the turmoil in the East be precipitated.”
As the endgame approached and the war started after the full scale Indian invasion of East Pakistan on 3 December 1971, Pakistanis in London fed on Pakistani radio reports, were jubilant hearing about the ‘heavy losses being inflicted on the enemy.” Yusuf Bhai used to tell me in very excited tones about the Pakistan army’s “resounding’ victories” taking place every day. I would try to calm him down but he wouldn’t listen. People had been feeling especially energised after General Niazi made a bold announcement in Hotel Intercontinental, Dhaka on 10 December declaring that he would fight the enemy to the last drop of his blood; secretly, he had already appealed to the President to try and arrange a cease fire.
I remember telling Yusuf Bhai and his friends around 12 December that most reports coming in from the front indicated that Pakistan seemed to be heading towards a crushing defeat. Yusuf Bhai did not take this very well and became angry with me. Peering at me from behind his pebble eyeglasses he accused me of being a defeatist. I could understand his feelings as his intense patriotism was not allowing him to face unpleasant facts. When the end came however on 16 December, despite having sensed the inevitable a long time ago, the terrible news made me as heartbroken and devastated as everybody else.
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Included in our group of friends was Mohammad Khalid, one of my class mates from Hailey College and a top student who had achieved fifth position in the University. A tall, sturdy fellow belonging to Faisalabad, he was living with the family of his elder brother who ran a successful travel agency business, in central Kensington. Khalid suggested that we could study together for our Final Part II exam due in May 1972 and I readily agreed. This proved to be a good move as both of us enjoyed this time very much and studying became a kind of fun. Usually he would come to my place and we would study for hours together.
After a few months of anxious wait, it was finally the results day: 15 July. As I picked up my morning mail there it was, a letter from the Institute. I hastily tore up the envelope to find that I had passed the Final Part II exam. I immediately sent off a telegram to my home: “QUALIFIED. WHAT A RELIEF.” And relief it was indeed; I was now free from exams for ever. I vowed to myself that day that I would not sit for any more exam ever, and have remained true to my words.
Razzaq had in the meantime been joined by another of our college mates, Bakhtiar Syed at the Canfield Garden apartment. As time progressed, Bakhtiar turned out to have a slightly different set of preferences compared to what Razzaq (and I) were used to, listening to pop music on the radio all day long, for example. Bakhtiar had no time for music; even a nightingale singing far out in the garden would disturb his concentration while studying. Razzaq tried to find a solution by getting himself a set of earphones and then settled himself comfortably one evening to listen to his favourite music in peace. After a while however, he sensed that something must be wrong as Bakhtiar continued to stare at him with fiery eyes. Removing the earplugs off his ears, he found that the room was actually resounding with loud music: the earphones were for some reason not even plugged to the radio!
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At about this time, I started making plans with my friend Ina’am to go and see the Olympic games in Munich, scheduled to start on 26 August 1972. Watching athletic track and field events had always been my passion and continues to this day. A priority item also was to see our own Hockey team, then the world champion, playing against the top teams of the world. To be present at an Olympic game was really once in a life time opportunity and I didn’t want to miss it. Ina’am had developed friendship with a German girl, Barbara, when she was visiting London a few months ago and she generously offered to arrange our accommodation in Munich for the games. This clinched the deal and we had now no excuse not to go.
We reached Munich by train on Saturday, 2 September. Our lodgings were in a hostel not very far from the Olympic Village. Germany, we found, was far more developed than Britain and the cottages scattered on the rolling hills on the way to Munich and which we discovered later belonged to the miners living in that area looked more picturesque than even those found in the prosperous suburbs of south England. The second and final week had started at the Olympics and tickets were difficult to find, but we tried to watch as many events as possible. Barbara and her friend Victoria were our guides, showing us around the Olympic village and generally acting as our translator.
The ambiance of an Olympic village is difficult to describe in words, it was a city on its own. Apart from the sports arenas here and there, there were restaurants, shops, post offices and open green areas for the visitors’ use. We saw many athletics events in the main stadium which had been built with a special metallic canopy, crowded with people, and where new world records were being set and broken. After an athlete from the USSR won an event, their national anthem was played at the medal distribution ceremony. The moment I heard the anthem, I began to love its tune and composition. I prayed for more Russian competitors to win their events to it to be played again. This must be one of the most melodious anthems ever: British pop group, Pet Shop Boys, used its rhythm and tune for one of their most popular songs, “Go West”.
We watched the Indian Hockey team as well, also one of the best, playing against a European team. After the Indian team won the match, their Sikh supporters staged a cheerful bhangra dance atop a wooden bridge straddling a small stream in the village, their feet banging loudly on the wooden floor in perfect rhythm. The feeling created by this high-spirited dance is something which I have never forgotten.
The most important match for us however, was the Pakistan hockey team playing the German team in the final. Germany had only just begun to emerge as a strong competitor and Pakistan was still hot favourite to win this game. It turned out to be a historic match: fifty-two years rule of the hockey game by India and Pakistan came to an end on this day when West Germany won on home soil against Pakistan 1-0 to claim their first Olympic title in this game. It came as a total shock to us and to most people in Pakistan, especially after an emotional and biased radio commentary (there was no direct TV relay then) by the Pakistani broadcaster Farooq Mazhar who blamed the referee for Pakistan’s defeat. In reality, Pakistan had lost simply because it played badly: it did not adjust its game to the astro-turf and the team had also not trained enough to counter the fierce man-to-man markings by the Germans. Bhutto, being Bhutto, reacted so strongly to the commentary that he protested officially to the German government. It was only after the people in Pakistan could see the TV recording of the match that they came to know about the truth.
Another incident about the game was also reported incorrectly in Pakistan’s press. Shahnaz Sheikh, Pakistan’s Centre Forward, was reported to be so upset at the biased refereeing of the match that, as shown in some photographs, he had tied his silver medal to his shoe laces while standing at the podium for medal distribution ceremony. The fact was that the photograph was taken when he was tying up his shoe laces standing at the podium while holding the medal in his hand; I was a witness to this incident.
The famous German efficiency and discipline was at full display at the Games. In the main stadium there was a large ‘Standing only’ section without chairs, whose tickets were much cheaper than other stands. One fine sunny morning, we bought our tickets and went there to watch ‘heats’ of some track events going on there. As there were hardly a few dozen spectators at that time scattered here and there in a stand with a capacity of thousands, we sat down to watch the games. After about half an hour, a young policeman wearing a smart uniform entered the stand. He stood there for a few seconds, almost next to us, and then suddenly bellowed, “Stand.” Everybody sitting there obeyed his order instantly and stood up. We also reluctantly made ourselves to stand as we had no choice. The policeman stayed there for a few minutes and then left; everybody else however continued to stand. We were left speechless at this, in our view, sheer stupidity of having to keep standing in an almost empty stadium but as they say, discipline is discipline.
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The 1972 Olympic games would however always be remembered for the Palestinian militants attacking Israeli delegation at their flat inside the Olympic village on 5 September. Eight members of a Palestinian militant organization, Black September, infiltrated the village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team and took nine others hostage. They demanded release of 234 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails. The news spread through the city like wild fire. In the morning, we could actually see from a distance some militants holding shotguns walking around the first floor of the flat. The games continued for a while with the athletes oblivious to the drama unfolding nearby but were suspended later and the village looked like a ghost town.
In the evening, when we were having dinner at a restaurant downtown, we noticed a convoy of police vehicles, fire brigade and ambulances rushing towards the airport. It was only in the morning that we heard the news: in a late night ambush by the German police at the airport, five of the eight militants were killed but the rescue attempt failed and all the Israeli hostages were killed. Most of the hostages died by a hand grenade lobbed at them by the militants while they were lying bound up in a helicopter. West German government was later criticized for the poor execution of the rescue attempt. On 6 September, a memorial service attended by athletes and spectators was held in the Olympic stadium paying homage to the dead Israelis and one German policeman.
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My return journey to London a couple of days later saw a somewhat unusual episode. I was travelling alone as Ina’am had decided to stay back in Munich for a few days. Arriving at New Haven port in England from France by ferry about noon, I was booked to board the boat train, as it was called, to Victoria station in London reaching there well before the start of evening rush hour. The immigration officer at the railway platform had, however, other ideas. He was an elderly man in his fifties with a tired face. He started by asking the usual questions like, where I was coming from, what was the purpose of my visit, etc. I told him that I had a job in London and was going back to my home there. For some reason, he asked me to step aside and wait until he had finished dealing with other people in the queue. It took him about an hour to do so and soon after that the train blew its whistle and started to move slowly out of the platform. I could do nothing but to watch it sullenly as the next train to London wasn’t scheduled to leave until about three hours later.
After sometime the immigration officer called me back and restarted his questioning. The platform was now deserted as everybody had already left. I told him where I worked and he then asked me about my salary. My answer seemed to upset him greatly. He changed his tone and, to my surprise, started shouting about how people were now coming here from all sorts of places to take away local people’s jobs. He said he had worked hard all his life but still received a salary which was less than mine, a foreigner. I told him patiently that I was a chartered accountant, a profession much in demand, and was being paid only what the market allowed. My submission did not satisfy him and he continued to rant and rave against immigrants. He then took hold of my passport and stamped it with a ‘conditional entry’ stamp, meaning I could not enter into an employment in England. After I explained that I already had a job, he remarked sarcastically, “You can take your chances.” I took the next train which reached Victoria bang in the middle of rush hour with packed trains and it was hours before I managed to reach home lugging my heavy suitcase. The ‘conditional entry’ stamp was later removed by the Passport & Immigration Department.
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(10)
One of Bhaijan’s friends was Moeen Ahmed, a charming fellow about the same age as him, who along with his wife Abida, a consultant physician at one of London’s hospitals, became our lifelong friends. He was looking to replace his small car, a maroon colour Mini Morris, with a bigger one and offered it to me at a reasonable price of £175. At the spur of the moment I decided that I must have a car, though I didn’t know how to drive, because to me having moved into the suburbs a car was now a necessity. I paid him the price and became the proud owner of a car for the first time in my life. Having a car demanded driving it, and the only vehicle I had driven so far was my father’s scooter in Lahore. One fine cool winter evening I decided that I must take the car out on the road. This proved to be a fateful decision leading to many unintended consequences.
I started the car and drove very slowly forward on my street using the clutch and brakes, same as I would with a scooter. Having reached the main road, I turned left as turning right would have meant crossing the road, and continued to drive slowly. So far so good. However, I found that I was moving towards the city centre, the traffic was getting thicker and, unknown to me, I was caught up in the evening rush hour on a very busy road crawling bumper to bumper. I was not used to driving in this traffic at all, or any driving for that matter. Numb with fatigue, my left foot slipped off the clutch pedal, the car jumped forward, hit a motorcyclist in front, who in turn bumped into the car crawling ahead of him. I had well and truly landed myself in trouble this time. The three of us moved our vehicles to a side lane to exchange addresses and to give our ID’s to the police, all done very amicably. Having completed these formalities, I managed to reach back home safely though in a considerably agitated state of mind.
The next evening I went to see the motorcyclists at his home. He turned out to be a white haired senior citizen, an Irishman living alone in a bedsitter, who told me he wouldn’t like to press charges even though he had a slight bruise on his left leg. The car owner, a black guy, proved to be a tough customer though. His car had only suffered a tiny dimple of a dent on the bumper, hardly visible. But he insisted on getting paid, to which I readily agreed because this was the least of my worries.
Many months passed and I almost forgot this incident as a bad dream. My Final Part II exams, the last exams before qualifying, had started and I was studying frantically one evening for the auditing paper next morning. Naseer and Bhaijan were out when the door bell sounded. I went out to see who it was and found a policeman in blue uniform standing outside. He asked me if he could come in, my heart jumped into my mouth, but I welcomed him calmly inside. He sat down and told me that they had completed the investigation of the car accident I was involved in and were ‘considering’ to charge me for reckless driving and some related offences. He added that I would be contacted sometime later for further proceedings and then left the room. I somehow managed to get back to my books and continue studying as best as I could.
The drama reached its finale a couple of months later. I received a notice by mail to report to the Wimbledon police station to discuss my case. I presented myself there, another policeman in uniform received me and we went to a small meeting room with a desk and some chairs. The policeman informed me that my case had been reviewed by the crown prosecution service and it had been decided not to proceed further. The file had been closed.
The prosecution actually had no case after the soft spoken, gentle, white haired Irishman had declined to pursue it any further. For so many times in my life, I have been blessed with people who have come to my help when I needed them most.
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I never stopped driving after my accident, in fact driving regularly and going across town from south to north London frequently over the weekend to visit Razzaq. It was like having gone through a baptism of fire. What astounds me now is that I was brave (or reckless) enough to drive many months all over London without a license, which is really a serious offence. I was stopped by policemen twice during this period, thankfully not because of any driving offence, and let off both times with a mild warning without having my license checked. I was stopped once in posh Belgravia late evening by a uniformed policeman performing a guard duty outside an embassy. He told me that I had been stopped because my back light was not working. When I said I was sorry and would attend to it immediately, he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was studying to become a chartered accountant. He then said something I would never forget: “So you are not the kind of person who goes round breaking the law, are you, Sir.” I said I wasn’t and he let me go.
I am not sure how they find people who could utter such gems effortlessly. Razzaq was coming back home from a town outside London one evening with his boss Dobson driving. Anxious to get home quickly, he was going over the speed limit and was stopped. The uniformed policeman calmly walked towards him and told him so. “But officer,” protested Dobson, “I was just following that lorry.” “You should follow the rules, Sir,” said the officer looking into Dobson’s eyes, “not the lorries.”
There was a tough driving test to pass to get a license; I took help from a coach to help me do this and he was really good. There is a simple rule, a basic one, that you always have to look into the rear view mirror before initiating any move like starting, stopping or turning, etc. He told me to make a turn and when I did so, he said that I hadn’t looked in the mirror, I said that I had. He then told me something that would prove to be a golden rule not only for the driving test but generally for everything. He instructed me to jerk my head emphatically forward towards the mirror to look in it. This looked really funny to me but he said, “Doesn’t matter if it looks funny. It is not enough for you to do something, you have to make the examiner know that you have done it.” The way he said it, I understood the wisdom of his words. So many times in our life we do things for others assuming that the other person would be aware of it, but he or she may not be. Like loving your sweetheart, for example. Wouldn’t it be better if from time to time we indicated to her by some small gesture, like bringing a gift, how much we value them. We take so many things for granted and ignore the inestimable value of visible gestures.
My little car served me faithfully for a long time, taking me from city to city for audit assignments. Razzaq also took driving lessons from me on the same car when, according to him, I would be so tense that I would be constantly grinding my teeth and grunt out instructions to him to turn left or right, though I didn’t think so at all. We were driving out to Kingston once to visit Abdullah’s place with the car loaded with friends, when the front wheel suddenly started to wobble dangerously. The brakes failed too and the car went out of my control. Fortunately, it was a Sunday morning and there was not much traffic on the road. I tried to continue driving while moving the car all over the road first in one direction and then the other to slow it down, and finally had to bang it to the three foot high metallic barrier on the right to make it stop. The right fender took the blow and fell silently down on the road. Everybody was shaken out of their wits but I managed to drive the car slowly to a car repair shop.
This had happened just a few weeks before I was due to go back to Pakistan. The mechanic repaired the wheel but refused to have anything to do with the fender as, according to him, the car had by now become too brittle to undertake repairs. I managed to glue it on to the bonnet (hood ) of the car with the help of some metal adhesive. The car was left standing on the street in the same condition when I departed for home. It was picked up later by the local authority people and deposited in the junk yard.
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(11)
Our group of Hailians was now living in England for more than three years, had started to feel financially secure, though only just, and felt the need to organize itself into some kind of society. The aim was to provide social support to its members in times of need as well as act as a forum to air our views and give us some political leverage. It was named Pakistan Accountancy Students’ Society (PASS). I was elected as its president by consensus and Nasir the general secretary. Funding was arranged through voluntary contributions by its members.
At the same time we began to take an interest in the activities of Chartered Accountants Students’ Society of London (CASSL), representing chartered accountancy students resident in London. Normally a staid and quiet body, it was in a state of considerable unrest in those days. A group of students led by Paul Hendrik, a super active and inspirational character, was striving to make the student body more independent of the Institute and become truly representative of the students. In the present set up, the qualified members of the Institute together with some unelected members were able to exert great influence over its activities. All this changed dramatically at the annual general meeting of CASSL held on 6 June 1972 in the Great Hall of the Institute, and PASS played a major, in fact crucial, role in the proceedings.
Paul Hendrik proposed a special resolution at the meeting to set up a Special Sub-Committee of five student members to draw up a new set of rules for the Society to make it more independent and democratic. The only votes counted at the CASSL meetings were of those members physically present there, and each member could also carry up to three proxies. PASS members made it a point to be there in force as well as carry three proxies each, which made it a formidable presence. The special resolution passed with a thumping majority, mainly with our support. A special sub-committee was set up consisting of five student members elected by members, to “draw up a new set of rules for the Society and to report back to a Special General Meeting within six months with their recommendations.” I was elected as a member of this sub-committee. At its first meeting, Paul Hendrik was elected chairman and I as the secretary of the sub-committee. The Institute’s members had no idea what had hit them.
Thanks to the zealous work performed by committee members, it managed to complete its work in less than six months. It presented its report as well as a set of new Rules at a Special General Meeting of CASSL held on 5 December 1972. The resolution proposed by Paul Hendrik and seconded by me for adoption of these Rules and revoking all previous Rules and Constitutions was carried by a comfortable majority. The meeting also instructed the sub-committee to present the Rules to the Institute’s Council and negotiate their approval. This was made possible only because of a sizeable presence of PASS members at the meeting with their proxies once again supporting adoption of new Rules, even though the Institute’s representative and even ACASS, the parent body of all CA students societies, had strongly argued for voting against the Rules.
Working at the committee level at the Institute to negotiate acceptance of CASSL’s new Rules with the London and District Society (LDS) of the Institute – before its submission to the Institute’s Council – proved to be a great experience for me. We used to meet in one of the many committee rooms of the Institute at its office in Moorgate Place. There were usually three people from the LDS and the same number representing CASSL, Paul Hendrik, CASSL’s chairman Richard Vinson and myself. The elderly Secretary of CASSL Mr Derek Du Pre served as the committee’s secretary. Despite the extremely contentious and heated nature of the matter in hand, the discussions almost always took place in a cordial manner with the two sides calmly presenting their respective cases. Mr Du Pre circulated well written minutes to all participants immediately after each meeting to keep an accurate record of the proceedings.
Despite our best efforts however, there was not much progress in obtaining LDS’s support for the new Rules and it continued to drag its feet. Faced with this situation, a resolution was put up at the next CASSL annual general meeting held in June 1973, proposed by Paul Hendrik and seconded by myself, expressing concern at LDS’s lack of support for the new Rules and endorsing the decision of the sub-committee to submit the Rules directly to the Institute for approval. It also instructed the CASSL Executive Committee to launch a major campaign for adoption of these Rules in case negotiations with Institute did not prove successful. The elections of the CASSL Executive Committee held later showed interesting results: eight of the fifteen elected candidates were Asians including two PASS members, Razzaq and Qadir.
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PASS held its first annual dinner on 15 June 1973 in a grand manner at the majestic Chartered Accountants Hall and invited Mr Kenneth Sharp, Deputy President of the Institute as chief guest. Paul Hendrik, now Chairman of CASSL, was also invited to the dinner as a special guest. Welcoming the chief guest as the President of PASS, I said that changes in the attitudes of students societies that we were observing, whether good or bad, were here to stay and the Institute would be better served by accepting this. The event was extensively covered in the next issue of the prestigious ‘Accountant’ magazine and managed to establish PASS as the only society representing Pakistani chartered accountancy students in London serving the interests of its members.
PASS complimented its efforts at CASSL with a vigorous campaign launched in the press, mainly steered by Razzaq. He started writing a series of letters to the accountancy publications, such as ‘The Accountant’ in support of CASSL. These letters, written in somewhat strong and emotional tones, created a furore among the students body, starting a war of reply and counter reply, much to our amusement.
Flush with our success at CASSL, we then ventured into the muddy political arena of politics at the Pakistan Students Federation (PSF), head-quartered at the Pakistan Students Hostel. PASS now commanded considerable political leverage, and all political players at PSF were now eager to enlist our support for their campaigns. PASS was also able to help when a Hailian named Azmat committed suicide due to personal reasons and money was raised through contributions to send his body home. We arranged for another possible suicide candidate Shahzad to be sent back home before it became too late, surprisingly in the face of considerable opposition from his own family who had regarded his qualification more important than his survival.
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(12)
At Tansley Witt, I had moved on from being hit by Miss Collins by erasers to becoming a senior, supervising medium-large jobs. The firm offered excellent experience in terms of varied nature of jobs, very small to very large. If I had decided to stay back in England and make it my home, this would have been an ideal firm for me, where I could easily aspire to be a manager and, who knows, even a partner. However, as I had always planned to go back to Pakistan after my studies, I started looking to move to a firm with international connections which could eventually help me in getting a reasonable job there. The firm that I ranked above all was Price Waterhouse, one of top four firms in the world.
I applied to Price Waterhouse and surprisingly almost immediately received a letter setting up a date for interview. An offer letter followed and I joined the firm sometime later. The first few weeks were spent in training. This was a huge firm, divided in four groups in London which were almost four different firms because we had no contact with members of other groups. I had been appointed as an investigating senior, one level below assistant manager, manager and partner. People making the grade were able to advance smoothly through these ranks but many of them didn’t and either left the firm or remained stuck as assistant manager or manager; I could see many elderly people working in these two positions, content to be where they were.
After arriving in England and looking at an average Englishman, many Pakistanis had often wondered how it had been possible for the British to rule over us for nearly two hundred years. Granted their industrial revolution and advances in technology, the people living and moving around us did not inspire much confidence in the human race. These were my views too for a long time. Within a month of joining Price Waterhouse, however, I knew exactly how the British had managed to build an empire and to rule over us for nearly two centuries.
Price Waterhouse was a nearly 100% graduate entry firm: About 60% of people working there were Oxford University graduates, 30% Cambridge graduates and the rest from others universities. I had tried to analyse what it was that was different here from my previous firm. The characteristic which distinguished the people in PW from my colleagues in Tansley Witt was not necessarily their academic brilliance, though it might possibly be. It was more so their competitiveness, their dedication, and most of all, what can only be described as ruthlessness. Almost all of them were incredibly serious towards their job, worked ferociously hard to achieve the given objectives and were prepared to tear their peers or subordinates to pieces if results did not match expectations.
Being an Oxford or Cambridge graduate opened all kind of gates for you in UK. One could choose to join the civil service and enjoy all kinds of power and perks available to senior government servants. Or one could opt for technical courses, such as medical, engineering or business, or join politics with the aim of ‘serving human kind’. Oxford or Cambridge alumni who chose to become chartered accountants did so to make money and then went about it in no uncertain terms.
Oxford has produced thirteen of the 16 prime ministers since the world war and thirty overall. Ted Heath, a carpenter’s son and Margaret Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, both prime ministers, effortlessly moved into the ruling class after they graduated from Oxford. In the words of Anthony Sampson writing in his book, ‘The New Anatomy of Britain’, “Their prestige and wealth is perpetuated by the large number of their alumni who themselves control corporate wealth.” It was this group of people, relatively small, whether in government or business or in other fields, who had built and then ruled the empire, and ruled their own people as well, content to be governed by them as long as their job and wellbeing was assured.
PW had some very large clients naturally but they had smaller clients as well. One was an agricultural farm near the town of Godalming in south-west London, a charming little place, and commuting on my car there every day was a great pleasure. Returning from there in the evening during winter, my car would often be covered with snow and viewed with amazement as London would be snow free. Most of the 1973 summer however, was spent by me working as part of a team at an assignment involving investigation into the murky affairs of a huge business empire which was incredibly complex involving multiple currencies and exchange transactions. We were all driven hard by the manager in charge, Steve Cuthbert, for more than four months sitting inside dark gloomy rooms, and I very nearly suffered a nervous breakdown. There was a reward however, in the form of a generous ‘special effort bonus’ belatedly credited to my London bank account months after I had already returned back to Pakistan.
As the winter approached, I was getting more and more inclined towards going back home now. I had worked nearly one and a half years post qualification and this should have been good enough for a job in Pakistan. In December, I took an appointment to see our staff partner, Chris Burley, and told him that I was having an excellent time with PW but would like to say goodbye now to go to Pakistan. Upon his asking me why would I want to do so, I replied that Pakistan was my home and that’s where I wanted to settle now. He asked me if I had a job back there. I told him that it had been nearly six years since I had left the country, didn’t know anybody and would try my luck once I got there. Upon hearing this, he asked me if I would like him to help me in this. I did a double take and said I would really like nothing better. He mentioned that an ex-partner of their associates in Pakistan, Fergusons, was presently working in London and he would see if I could be interviewed by him.
As promised, an interview took place a few days later in one of the conference rooms there. The ex-partner turned out to be Faizol Alam, who I already knew by name from my days of working at Fergusons, Lahore many years ago. He had been a resident partner there before Hassan Shoaib and, being from East Pakistan, had decided to settle in London after the fall of Dhaka. The interview was conducted in a strange manner; both of us kept standing on our feet throughout the interview on either side of the conference table. I have never found out why this was so; Being only an assistant manager working in PW tax department, Mr Alam probably thought that the proceedings might become too informal for his liking if I was allowed to sit, or maybe there was some other reason.
I didn’t hear anything more until one fine morning about two weeks later in January when opening my mail, I found a letter from Fergusons, signed by their senior partner J.P. Patel, offering me a job at their Karachi office. The letter referred to correspondence exchanged by him with Mr Burley. I was happy but my parents, when I told them about it, were much happier because even after my decision to relocate to Pakistan, they feared that I might have to go back to England if couldn’t find a reasonable job there.
I am not sure why Chris Burley worked so diligently to find me a job in Pakistan. But throughout my life I have been blessed with people who have come to my help when I needed them most.
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Three months later, having completed my audit assignments and settled my domestic affairs, I flew back home. I had mixed feelings this time: immense pleasure at being able to go back and join my parents and sisters and brother again and, at the same time, sad to leave my dear home in England where I had spent so many happy and memorable days. A beautiful country, I could never reconcile myself with England’s long cold and wet winters with bleakness all around. So much so, that even now when I hear the songs of that period, I can immediately relate in some way to whether I had heard it first during the sunny summer or dark cold winter. I can never forget looking at the first lone flower of the season at the start of spring and the absolute joy it filled me with.
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(13)
General Yahya Khan tried to hang on to power after the fall of Dhaka but had to step down in the face of a near open revolt in the army ranks. On 20 December 1971, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, leader of Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) which had emerged as the largest party in West Pakistan in the December 1970 elections, became the President and Chief Martial Law Administrator of Pakistan.
Z.A. Bhutto (1928-79) belonged to the landholding classes of Sindh. His father Shah Nawaz was the Diwan (chief minister) of the State of Junagadh, now part of India. “Bhutto,” according to his biographer Stanley Wolpert, “was the son of his second wife, a young Hindu dancing girl with whom he had fallen in love at first sight.” The marriage with Lakhi Bai, later named Khurshid when she converted to Islam, took place at the palace of his good friend, the Khan of Kalat. At 37 he was more than twice the age of his bride who bore him two daughters, Manna and Benazir, and son Zulfiqar Ali.
Bhutto obtained his bachelor’s degree at University of South California (USC) followed by a degree in law at Oxford and bar at law at Lincoln’s Inn. It was during one of his visits home in 1949 that he first met his future wife, Nusrat Ispahani, a friend of his sister Manna. Daughter of Kurdish-Iranian parents, she was at that time one of Karachi’s most beautiful debutantes, living at her home in 23 Clifton. “To me he did not look very handsome or dashing that first moment . . . . Of course, later on I thought he was very handsome and I loved him,” Nusrat recalled later. “Then he proposed to me, and I took it as a joke,” she added. Time did not dim his resolve however. Returning to Karachi after two years, he again proposed to her to make her his second begum. Initially, both families opposed the marriage on account of their different culture and background but then had to relent in the face of the couple’s strong emotions for each other.
Bhutto started practicing law in Karachi but his heart lay elsewhere: diplomacy and politics. He had close family relations with Iskandar Mirza, now the President of Pakistan, who was often invited to Larkana for annual hunt at his ancestral estates. Mirza appointed him first as a member of Pakistani delegation to the United Nations and then as Chairman of another delegation to UN in Geneva. Bhutto appreciated this gesture so much that he wrote to Mirza shortly after to reassure Mirza of his “imperishable and devoted loyalty to you.” He then raised his admiration to another level by adding, “I feel that your services to Pakistan are indispensable. When the history of our Country is written by objective Historians, your name will be placed even before that of Mr. Jinnah. Sir, I say this because I mean it, and not because you are the President of my Country.” He then thought it prudent to conclude his remarks by declaring that, “I do not think I could be found guilty of the charge of flattery.”
Returning to Pakistan, he was appointed minister of commerce in Mirza’s cabinet, a post he retained when Ayub Khan sent Mirza packing and become the President himself. Soon however, he would be allotted the portfolio he coveted most: foreign affairs. This proved to be only a stepping stone for Bhutto’s ultimate ambition, the highest office of the land – Presidency.
The most crucial issue Bhutto had inherited from the previous regime when he became President was the sense of acute despondency the nation was feeling after the loss of East Pakistan; it had been a year of bitter disappointments. He had to take some immediate decisions, even out of the box. To the surprise of many, just a week after taking charge, he ordered the Bengali leader Mujibur Rahman to be transferred from his prison cell to an army bungalow in Rawalpindi . Bhutto held long meetings with Mujib there, pleading with him to find a way to be able to still live together, East and West Pakistan, even if it was only a loose Confederation. He even promised to accept him as the country’s President if he wanted. Mujib replied that this should be left to him and Bhutto should trust him. Mujib then flew to London on 8 January 1972 by a PIA plane from where a chartered plane took him to Dhaka to receive a hero’s welcome from thousands of cheering Bengalis.
In the summer of 1972, plans were being made for Bhutto to meet Indira Gandhi to resolve the pressing issues of ninety-three thousand prisoners of war and Indian occupation of Pakistan’s territory in Sindh and Punjab. The process however did not get an auspicious start. The famous Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had just published her interview with Indira Gandhi who had described Bhutto as, “not a very balanced man.” Burned by this, Bhutto invited Fallaci to Pakistan. In his subsequent interview, he spoke of Mujib as “mad, mad!” and called Indira Gandhi “a mediocre woman with mediocre intelligence . . . . a diligent drudge . . . . a woman devoid of initiative and imagination.” He however expressed his willingness to “meet her when and where she likes.”
This they did in the mountain resort of Shimla, near Delhi in June. President Bhutto’s delegation of ninety-two people was personally received by Prime Minister Gandhi at the Shimla airport. The agreement signed on 2 July 1972 stated that India and Pakistan had resolved to settle their differences by peaceful means; Indian troops were to be withdrawn from the roughly 5,000 square miles of Pakistan territory; and each nation agreed to respect the line of control in Kashmir resulting from the cease-fire of 17 December 1971. No mention was made of Pakistani prisoners of war as India had refused to discuss this without Bangladesh being present while Pakistan had still not recognized Bangladesh. It would in fact be not until 28 August 1973 when an agreement was signed between the two countries that started the repatriation of prisoners of war and allowed Bengalis still living in Pakistan to be sent to Bangladesh. The fate of the 50,000 persons left in Bangladesh who considered themselves Pakistanis was however left in balance and shall forever remain unresolved.
Bhutto’s second major achievement, and his enduring legacy, was the building up of consensus among waring politicians to pass the new constitution on 10 April 1973. This is a constitution which has stood the test of time, including two Martial Laws, and is still respected by all. The constitution provided for a federal and parliamentary system of government. For the first time, there would be two houses of parliament – the upper house would be called the Senate and the lower house called the National Assembly. Members of National Assembly shall be directly elected by people of Pakistan on one-man-one-vote basis while Senate would be elected indirectly by members of provincial assemblies with equal number of votes for each assembly. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto stepped down to become prime minister and the speaker of the Assembly, Fazal Ilahi Chaudhry, became the fourth president of Pakistan.
The third crowning achievement of Bhutto was to hold the second Islamic Summit on 22 February 1974 in Lahore. The luminaries attending the conference included King Faisal (Saudi Arabia); Presidents Sadaat (Egypt), Boumedienne (Algeria) and Assad (Syria); Colonel Qaddafi (Libya) and Yassar Arafat (Palestine). The presence of much awaited Mujibur Rahman was made possible by Bhutto’s announcement of his decision a few days earlier to ‘recognize’ Bangladesh. “With Qaddafi and Sadaat seated on one side of him,” commented Wolpert, “and Faisal and Mujib on the other, Bhutto already felt potentially much stronger than India; it was an overwhelming transformation, less than three years after the disastrous Bangladesh War.” Though it was Mujib who received a brotherly welcome from Lahoris, the event’s superstar was undoubtedly Qaddafi, the handsome young Libyan colonel who captured their hearts. Qaddafi stayed back in Pakistan for four more days and Libya was the first Arab nation to ship its oil to Karachi at production cost.
Foreign relations and diplomacy had always been Bhutto’s forte. He had the vision to chart a new course for Pakistan’s foreign policy formulated during the days of Liaquat Ali Khan and then followed more or less faithfully by his successors including Ayub Khan. Soon after becoming president, Bhutto flew to China in early February 1972 meeting Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou En-lai. The latter asked him why he seemed to be in such a hurry about his reforms to which he replied frankly that army may not give him a chance to consolidate his position; prophetic words indeed. Chou En-lai also told him to build a ‘People’s Army’, an advice which he took to heart and later used to set up the Federal Security Force, his personal elite force reporting directly to him. Bhutto then visited Moscow for two days in March meeting Premier Kosygin and signed a five year treaty reviving trade relations which had remained frozen since the beginning of Bangladesh War. USSR would later help to set up the country’s first steel mill at Pipri near Karachi, inaugurated in December 1973.
Bhutto visited China again on 11 May 1974 and received promises of military support including aid in developing nuclear capability. This would come in handy when exactly one week later, India exploded a plutonium device in a deep salt cave in Rajasthan on 18 May 1974. Bhutto made a solemn resolve on that day to make Pakistan a nuclear power as well and assembled a team immediately to start work on the project. He had earlier inaugurated the country’s first nuclear power plant in November 1972 under supervision of the famous physicist Professor Abdus Salam and had personally chaired the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. His dream came true twenty-four years later when Pakistan carried out a successful nuclear test in May 1998 in the hills of Balochistan.
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(14)
One of the first major steps after assuming power was Bhutto’s announcement on 3 January 1972 of immediate nationalization of thirty-one companies. These belonged to ten major industrial sectors: iron and steel, basic metals, heavy engineering, heavy electrical, motor vehicles, tractors, basic chemicals, petro-chemicals, cement and public utilities like power and gas. The total value of these industries came to about Rupees one billion ($100 million). These were now to be managed by a newly created Board of Industrial Management, headed by the then finance minister, Dr Mubashir Hasan.
This one single move by Bhutto dealt a severe body blow to the then thriving industrial sector of Pakistan. Quite well managed and profitable factories were handed over to be run by an army of inexperienced, unmotivated and sometimes corrupt government officials who turned them into a shell of their previous self. Soon they became loss making entities, gulping hundreds of millions of tax payers’ money. Capital started to move out of the country. The country’s international credit rating started to drop rapidly hurting its exports and foreign exchange reserves. For the first time in its history, Pakistan had to look for financial support from its friends, Libya, China and Abu Dhabi.
Nationalization proved disastrous for the country: the average industrial growth during the years 1958-70 had been 9.5% which plummeted to less than half, 4.5%, during period 1972-77. Large-scale manufacturing in particular achieved a miserable growth rate of only 3% during the latter period and that too helped by huge public sector investment. The carefully planned and implemented industrial policy of the previous decade, an envy of nations like China or South Korea in those days, was taken to pieces by a coterie of selfish and greedy politicians and bureaucrats.
Faced with an acute economic crunch and desperately short of cash, Bhutto then raided two other vital sectors of economy. At a formal dinner on the night of 31 December 1973 attended by Karachi’s industrial and banking leaders, he had declared that they had ‘nothing to worry about.” However, the next day, as a new year’s present to the people of Pakistan, Bhutto announced the immediate nationalization of all banks and insurance companies.
The noted economist Ishrat Husain summed it up, ”The nationalization of the major manufacturing industries, banking, insurance, education and the like caused a major disruption of the economy and an erosion of private investor confidence that continued for the next twenty years . . . . The substitution of a culture of entrepreneurship, risk taking and innovation by rent-seeking and patronage supressed the dynamism of the private sector. The emergence of bureaucrats as business leaders reinforced the new culture,“ concluding, “Nationalization did irreparable damage to Pakistan’s economic take-off and pushed it behind its competitors.” Worst of all, this experiment with socialism done ostensibly to break the stranglehold of the famous 22 families on the economy, failed to provide any relief to the common people, especially the poor classes. Inflation shot up to 16 per cent during 1971-77 adversely affecting the buying power of poor sectors. Workers were not getting wages and went on strike joined by students demanding cheaper food. Things rather than getting better had in fact got only worse.
Not content with the nationalization of country’s major industrial and financial sectors, Bhutto now turned his attention to the agro-based industries, comprising medium and small, even tiny, industrial units involved in simple processing of industrial produce in rural areas. Twenty-six vegetable ghee units had been nationalized in September 1973. Then quite out of the blue, an announcement was made to nationalize nearly three thousand cotton ginning, rice husking and flour milling units in July 1976. This must rank as one of the most senseless, ill-planned and reckless acts of the government at that time. Residential houses were nationalised if the owner had found it convenient to install machinery in one part of his large rural compound. Cattle, poultry and fish ponds were also nationalised if they were on the premises of the factory. The three corporations set up to manage these units were used mainly to recruit thousands of people and ended up making huge losses. The worst affected province was Punjab and the mass discontent felt after the forcible acquisition of private properties worth nearly one billion dollars from tens of thousands of mainly middle-class people was one of the major causes of the downfall of Bhutto regime a year later.
There is evidence that Bhutto was made to realize his mistake soon. Finance Minister Hafeez Pirzada announced on 11 April 1977 appointment of a committee to “reconsider the position of” recently nationalized agro-based industries. But it was too late by then to control the backlash.
A question arises as to how could a highly intelligent, shrewd and well informed person like Bhutto take decisions which turned Pakistan from being a prosperous industrial economy into a nation tottering on financial crutches in less than two years. The answer lies partly in the political philosophy he had preached for many years to win the votes of masses – Islamic Socialism, and also his family background. He tried to rule Pakistan, not as a skilled administrator, but as a feudal lord, and in the words of Wolpert, “with alternate threats and promises, with carrots and sticks, with bribes and hunting rifles, curses and tears, and solemn oaths to God.” Like most large landowners, he had always been suspicious of Karachi businessmen, industrialists, and bankers; they were not his type of people, not his class anyway, even going to the extent of calling them ‘parasites and blood-suckers’ in a speech he made shortly after nationalization.
He also failed to gather people around him of competence and integrity, the ones he did, failed him time and again. Bhutto was always suspicious of everyone around him fearing some conspiracy. It is intriguing how he could entrust the control and management of huge industrial companies to the members of Civil Services of Pakistan, the same group of people for whom he had nothing but contempt and derision. He had retired some 2000 of them in 1972 declaring that, “They were sucking the people’s blood. They were parasites,” in a public speech made on 19 March 1973. It seemed that he had managed with great effort to transfer the stewardship of the ten major industrial sectors of Pakistan to a group of, what he had called, ‘parasites and blood suckers’.
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