Twenties must be one of the most exciting phases of one’s life.
It is a time of self-discovery, struggle, ambition, and transformation;
full of restless energy of young adulthood.
For some it, “highlights the idealism and disillusionment of youth”.
For others, “the thrill and hardship of youthful ambition.”
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PAKISTAN
(1)
Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) government crossed half way mark of its five years parliamentary term in 1975. Wholesale nationalization of industrial and financial sectors by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1972 and 1974 had by now started to cause serious damage to the economy. On the political front too, things were far from rosy for the government commencing almost since the day it assumed power.
Troubles started first in Bhutto’s home province of Sindh after the government led by Mumtaz Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali’s cousin and confidant, announced plans in early 1972 to introduce a new language bill that would make Sindhi the official language of the province as well as the medium of instruction in public schools. This was not acceptable to the Sindh’s Urdu speaking people calling themselves Muhajir, meaning migrant. They were about one third of the Sindh population, and living mostly in the urban centres of Karachi and Hyderabad. They had migrated at the time of partition from Urdu speaking areas now in India, like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Bhopal and Deccan and were not happy to see Sindhi replacing Urdu, which continued to be the official language in the other three provinces of Punjab, KP and Baluchistan. Deadly riots erupted between Sindhis and Muhajirs and continued to spill blood in Karachi, Hyderabad and other cities of the province for most of this year.
PPP had a clear majority in Punjab and Sindh assemblies but had to form coalition governments in the two other provinces, KP and Baluchistan. It did so in April 1972, with help from National Awami Party (NAP) led by Wali Khan and Jamiat e Ulema e Islam (JUI) led by Mufti Mahmood. Unlike the finesse and sophistication Bhutto displayed in his dealings with foreign leaders, he had an uneasy relationship with his coalition partners from the start. Citing reports of some internal troubles as pretext, Baluchistan government headed by Sardar Ataullah Mengal was dismissed on 15 February 1973 and his associate Mufti Mahmood too resigned soon after as chief minister of KP. The NAP-JUI accord with PPP thus collapsed in less than a year. Both the provinces were placed under direct federal government’s rule and would remain so for the duration of the PPP’s rule. This was the start of a long insurgency in Baluchistan with the various sardars fighting against the army as well as among themselves; people of Baluchistan were the ultimate losers.
Things were running more or less smoothly in Punjab though Ghulam Mustafa Khar, first the governor and now the chief minister and one of Bhutto’s closest friends, was proving to be a liability. His unsavoury private life had been brutally exposed in a book, ‘My Feudal Lord’ by his wife Tehmina Durrani and he was losing support among party members due to his arrogance and scandals. In March 1973, he was replaced by Hanif Ramay, a poet and painter, and as opposed to Khar in background and temperament as chalk and cheese. Ramay was soon embroiled in the worst religious riots against Ahmadi community since 1953. The situation was diffused only after the National Assembly declared Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority on 10 September 1974 denying them the high offices of presidency or prime ministership.
The Party was slowly moving ideologically towards the right and in the process losing its idealists and thinkers, such as, Finance Minister Mubashir Hassan and Commerce Minister J.A. Rahim. They were replaced by sycophants bowing before Bhutto’s every command and he had now become the all-powerful ‘master of all he surveyed’. Nobody dared to venture a dissenting opinion in his presence. According to Wolpert, “Zulfi had no friends now, only followers, servants, or family.” J.A. Rahim found this to his peril when after waiting for Bhutto at a dinner until mid-night, declared that he could not stay any longer for, ‘the Maharaja of Larkana’ and left. A couple of hours later, his home was raided by men of Federal Security Force and he was badly beaten. Bhutto owned up to this savagery some years later innocently asking, “What harm did poor Larkana or the even poorer people of Larkana do to Rahim?”
Then there was the secret Dalai Camp, a detention centre built especially to detain Bhutto’s personal prisoners, situated in the scenic hills of Azad Kashmir. Ironically, the inhabitants of this prison were all former members of PPP, including ex-provincial ministers, who had managed at some time or the other to displease Bhutto and as a result were subjected to torture and abuse there. Dalai Camp thus became a symbol of Bhutto’s vindictive and vicious nature, not allowing any dissent and giving full vent to his autocratic instincts.
A particularly annoying irritant for Bhutto for some time had been a young politician Ahmad Raza Kasuri. One of the earliest members of PPP, he was once so enamoured of Bhutto that he wanted to be just like him, a revolutionary leader. Yet within a year of PPP coming to power, Kasuri started to become disillusioned and “felt betrayed, as did many other young, sincere, hardworking, radical idealists who had devoted themselves to the PPP, believing all the promises made by its Quaid e Awam.” However, while others were afraid to speak out, Kasuri was not. He spoke in the parliament against Bhutto repeatedly and provoked him again on 3 June 1974 by his fiery rhetoric. Bhutto could no longer control his temper and shouted, “I have had enough of you, absolute poison. I will not tolerate your nuisance.”
A few months later, Kasuri was driving home with his father, mother and an aunt coming back from a wedding party when his car was attacked by armed gunmen. One of the bullets hit his father. Kasuri drove fast to the nearest hospital with his father who was now soaked in blood. He was operated upon immediately but was unable to recover. Kasuri named Bhutto as the prime suspect in the police report filed by him. A special tribunal appointed by the government later to investigate the murder found that the bullets used in the attack had been imported especially for use by the FSF.
Kasuri’s murder received massive media attention but was not the only political assassination to hit the news in those days. Dr Nazir Ahmad of Jamaat e Islami (JI), an MNA belonging to Dera Ghazi Khan, was shot to death in his clinic a few weeks after receiving a threat from Ghulam Mustafa Khar. Khawaja Rafiq, another political activist and father of Khawaja Saad Rafiq later a federal minister, was gunned down behind Punjab Assembly while leading a procession.
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SAEED
(2)
My meeting with the senior partner of Fergusons, Mr J.P. Patel, at their Karachi office in May 1974 a month or so after my arrival in Pakistan did not go very well. Everything was different here from England, as can well be expected, but nothing more so than the ambience at the offices of Price Waterhouse in London compared to that in the offices of their Pakistani counterparts A.F. Fergusons in Karachi. PW London office was located in an impressive old mansion type building in central London, the partners had big, spacious rooms for their use and had a cheerful, confident demeanour. Fergusons’ partners’ rooms were somewhat modest and most partners worked in small wooden cubicles, next to each other. When I entered Mr Patel’s room, I found him to be a rather obese man in his early sixties with thin white hair on top. He was apparently going over some figures in a huge bulky ledger lying in front of him at the table with a pen in his hand. He kept sitting while I advanced towards him and introduced myself by presenting to him the Fergusons’ appointment letter that I had received in London. Mr Patel turned out to be a man of few words and after motioning me to be seated, immediately came to the point by asking me when I could join their Karachi office. I respectfully mentioned to him that I had returned to Pakistan after more than six years and would very much prefer to be based at their Lahore office close to my parents. He responded dryly that it would not be possible and the only vacancy available was in their Karachi office. I tried to explain to him that I belonged to Lahore and the whole point of my coming back to Pakistan was to be living close to my parents and my family; setting up a new home in Karachi would present problems for me. He didn’t seem interested in my problems and dismissed me curtly by saying that it was either Karachi or nothing. By this time, I was getting more and more disillusioned by his manner of talking and the bulky accounts ledger sitting on the table between us. I told him that in that case my decision was to try my luck somewhere else and that ended our short interview.
I came back to Lahore and had no idea what I was going to do next. My parents received the news with some apprehension fearing that I might decide to go back to London. Within a few days however, something totally unexpected happened and a wonderful job landed in my lap as if it was always destined to be so. One of my childhood friends Ina’am Ellahi Shaikh known to me since college days who had come back to Pakistan a year ago, was working as an audit manager at the Lahore office of Ford Rhodes Robson Morrow (FRRM), a well-known firm of chartered accountants, second only to Fergusons in size and professional reputation in Pakistan. Ina’am had sterling qualities like warmth, empathy and a sharp wit but had a weakness for making impulsive decisions on the spur of the moment regardless of consequence. A few years back in London, he had made plans to return to Pakistan to settle there. I put him in touch with Abbas, another friend of mine, a decent and noble soul, to take over the lease of his room and Abbas, in turn, gave notice to his own landlord to vacate his flat. Nasir, another friend living in the same block of flats, helped him pack all his belongings until 2:00 in the morning. Sometime during the next couple of hours however, he suddenly changed his mind, deciding to stay back in London after all. Nasir was to know about this in the morning when Ina’am knocked at his door and innocently asked him if he could borrow some sugar to make tea. Abbas was left homeless and not too happy with me for my role in this incident.
True to form, Ina’am decided one fine morning that he had enough of Lahore and wanted to go back to London. As a favour to his employers, he promised to find them a substitute and asked me if I was interested. An interview was arranged with their senior partner Mr Aspy Fatakia. Meeting Mr Fatakia for the first time at FRRM’s Lahore office, I immediately fell under his spell. He was about forty at the time, of medium height and robust build, but seemed to be bursting with energy. He talked ceaselessly about almost everything under the sun with a lot of passion and tried to leave me in no doubt what brilliant prospects I had if I joined their firm. He was one of the few people I have had the privilege of meeting who had a truly charismatic personality. Before the interview ended I had decided to join the firm. My starting salary was a princely sum of Rs 2,750 per month which was slightly better than the going rate at the moment.
I found out later that he was closely related to Bapsi Sidhwa, the famous Pakistani novelist of Parsi origin, and always stayed at their home near Regal chowk. I saw Mr Fatakia many years later in Karachi when he was in his seventies. He was wearing a neck band and due to some speech impediment could speak only in a hoarse whisper. I paid my respects to him and wondered about the cruel fate which had reduced this man who had a silver tongue once, charming everybody around him with his eloquence, to this condition.
I was to stay with the firm for five years until 1979, thanks largely to the FRRM Lahore office manager, Mr Ijaz Ahmad, who was about four years my senior. A gem of a person in every way, Ijaz sahib was somewhat anglicised, having proceeded to England immediately after doing A levels from St. Anthony’s School. Soft spoken and gentle by nature, he made every effort to make my transition from England to Pakistan as smooth as possible, and in that sense, was an ideal boss to have. He loved to smoke pipes and cigars and his room always had a sweet aroma around it. We made an excellent team and I loved every day of the time I spent with the firm in Lahore.
After a few days working at the Lahore office, I was asked to go to Karachi to supervise a special assignment. The job was to determine the amount of compensation to be paid to the owners of Muslim Commercial Bank (MCB), mainly the Adamjee family, after its nationalization by the PPP government along with all other financial institutions on 1st January 1974. I arrived in Karachi staying at the home of my maternal uncle, Sajid Hasan, in Rizvia Colony, Nazimabad, a middle class housing estate not very far from the city centre. The mode of transport to and from the office was simple: I took a shared taxi accommodating four passengers at the fixed rate of one rupee per person per trip. The taxi followed a fixed route, which suited me very well as both my home and office were located only about five minutes’ walk from the taxi’s pickup and drop points. For a Lahore resident, who had never seen this kind of arrangement back home, this was an amazingly efficient and decent mode of transport.
My family in Lahore was probably missing my absence and made plans to visit me in Karachi during school summer holidays. My younger sisters and brother (Tazeen, Nageen and Ambareen followed by Naveed and Tamkeen) were thrilled as they hadn’t been to Karachi for a very long time and hardly remembered it at all. They arrived by train covered in dust and food stains as the train compartment they were in had its lights off and they ate their dinner in complete darkness. There was another drama at the Karachi Cantonment Railway Station where they were supposed to disembark but made no move to do so thinking that they had to get off at the next stop, City Station. I luckily noticed my father standing at one of the compartment’s door enjoying the hustle and bustle at the platform below minutes before the train was to depart. I gave a huge shout to him and they started jumping from the train one after another in great hurry and confusion. This went on with the luggage following while the train started moving but thankfully nobody was hurt.
We now had to meet our relations in Karachi who were quite a few in number because not doing so would have been considered unsocial, even arrogant. I still remember meeting one of our elderly uncles, called Buddhu Chacha (so called because he was born on a Wednesday) who being an extremely kind and affectionate person, insisted on escorting us personally to his home. He arrived early in the morning at our place in Rizvia Colony and explained that taxis being very expensive, he would chaperone us through bus. Having no other choice, we accepted his kind offer. The travel involved, as we discovered later, walking about fifteen minutes from home to the first bus stop, changing to a second bus after half an hour’s journey, travel on this bus for another half an hour, followed by a short walk to his home. The extreme courtesy, devotion and kindness shown by his family in hosting us more than compensated for the fatigue but matters came to a head in the afternoon when he offered to chaperon us back to our home through the same route, emphasising again that taking a taxi would be quite expensive. Before my little sisters fainted with fright at this prospect, my father politely declined his offer explaining that it would not be problem for us finding our way back to the bus stop. Once there however, we immediately ordered a taxi and rushed home, not even daring to look back.
MCB’s head office was located in a huge hall on the seventh floor of the Adamjee Building on I.I. Chundrigar Road. Head offices of almost all commercial banks and State Bank of Pakistan were situated on the same street, as was the head office of my own firm FRRM, a couple of blocks away. On one side of the hall there were some small cubicles for senior officers. I was allotted one such cubicle while my team of three or four audit clerks worked sitting around a large table in the hall. I found my transition to local working conditions quite challenging at first though surprisingly speaking in English as I did most of the time, did not present any particular problem as everybody else also spoke a mixture of Urdu and English. This, however, produced hilarious situations some times.
The head of advances at MCB was a delightful character called Mr. Amin. In his late thirties, he was an extremely competent and capable man with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the bank’s loan portfolio. For some reason he loved to speak English with everybody, though in a thick Punjabi accent. I had an encounter with him early on during the audit when I asked him to fill in a questionnaire dealing with the bank’s loans and advances. One of the questions asked him as to how many times in a year the bank’s officials checked the customers’ inventory held as security for advances. To this question, Mr Amin had provided the short reply, ‘Frequently’.
Not satisfied with this reply, I dared to ask him to elaborate the word frequently, meaning exactly how many times in a month or year. To this he replied rather hotly speaking in his thick Punjabi English,
“You don’t know the meaning of frequently?”
I replied that I understood the word to mean often but would prefer a more specific response. At this Mr Amin, now even more enraged, said,
“No, go and see the dictionary. Frequently means once every three months.”
I was left speechless at this novel definition though, having received the answer to my question, we moved on to other topics.
A week or two later, I noticed Mr. Amin entering the cabin adjacent to mine to talk to his boss, Mr. Majid, who was a Senior Vice President. An elderly, soft spoken gentleman with a cool demeanour, Mr Majid appeared to be the sort of person who had been through all kind of situations in his life and seen everything. Mr. Amin had apparently come to discuss some grievances of his and started to speak in his usual haughty manner. Mr Majid was trying to pacify him mumbling short phrases whenever he could during the torrent being unleashed by Mr. Amin. After a few minutes, I heard Mr. Amin saying in a loud, forceful manner thumping the table,
“I have tolerated this for so long, but now I – WILL – SPOKE.”
At this, Mr. Majid replied to him in Punjabi in his usual cool manner,
“Spoke nai honda, speak honda jai.” (You should not say spoke, you should say speak)
Hearing this and now being unable to control myself, I had to go outside where I let out a loud laughter, startling many people walking in the corridor.
The set of financial statements we were provided for calculation of compensation had already been audited by a reputable firm of chartered accountants and given a clean report. This continued to amaze me because the more closely we looked at the figures, the more inconsistencies and discrepancies we found. I finally had a meeting with Mr. Akbar Hussain, senior executive vice president and the bank’s chief financial officer in his very handsome office. I asked him quite plainly, as to how come the bank’s auditors had not qualified (i.e., expressed their concerns about) the accounts in the face of so many objectionable points. I remember Mr Akbar’s words as clearly now as I did on the day they were said,
“We do not ALLOW our auditors to qualify the accounts.”
We finished our job in a couple of months’ time. The compensation allowed to the ex-owners of MCB computed by us represented the net assets value of the bank’s assets acquired after its nationalization on 1st January 1974. To most people, the act of nationalization looked grossly unfair and unjust to the owners of banks who seemed to have been deprived of their rightful property. The reality was otherwise; what people did not know was that the way the compensation had to be calculated in the light of guidelines issued by government, the banks’ owners ended up profiting hugely. This was because the amount of compensation was based on net assets held by the bank in former West Pakistan as well as those owned in East Pakistan, though the latter had effectively became worthless after the succession of Bangladesh. By allowing the compensation to include the value of assets left in Bangladesh, the government, or in other words the Pakistani taxpayers, practically assumed this loss, awarding a huge bonus to the owners of nationalised banks.
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(3)
Upon my return to Lahore after the conclusion of MCB assignment, I began to experience for the first time the joy and excitement of living with one’s family. My sisters and brother were no longer kids as I had left them when going to England but mature and grown up young people. They were all gifted with an incredible sense of humour inherited probably from the father’s side of our family. We treated our parents with great love, respect and deference but this did not stop us from laughing at them or at each other for one reason or another which would with hindsight look nonsensical. My mother’s was perhaps the only sane voice in this wild and noisy scenario but then this cost her being at the receiving end many times which she forbore with her customary patience and poise. The slang for making fun in Urdu is ‘record lagaana’, and she used to say with sarcasm, “aaj kal record laganay ka bahut fashion ho gaya hai.” (These days making fun has become a fashion.)
Soon my unaccompanied baggage arrived by sea cargo from UK. Other than clothes and other personal effects, the trunk contained the collection of my treasured books and music records as well as a record player. However, what seemed to be taking very long to arrive was a brand new Toyota Corolla car that I had booked with a shipping agent in London before departing. The shipping agent was a Pakistani named Abdul Majid who was running a successful cargo business there. What seemed to be behind this success was revealed when I slowly realized that he did not have any intention of actually shipping the car, safe behind the knowledge that I was sitting thousands of miles away unable to do anything. My repeated reminders were not having any effect. He didn’t know of course that I had no intention of foregoing my car that easily, and that I still had a friend like Razzaq to help me in London. Razzaq took up the challenge of injecting some sense into the deceitful mind of Mr Majid with his usual vigour, tenacity and imagination. Luckily Safraz Nawaz, the famous Pakistani cricketer who happened to be Razzaq’s cousin, was in town. Upon hearing about this episode, Sarfraz immediately telephoned the editor of Akhbar-e-Watan, an influential Urdu daily of London, and sought his help. Finally, Majid was issued a warning that unless the car was shipped immediately, an ad disclosing the full details of his fraud would be published in Akhbar-e-Watan on the same page as the ad of his firm usually appeared. This at last produced the desired result and a car was duly shipped.
It was beside the point that the Toyota Corolla car that I found standing in the porch of my home one fine day in Lahore was not exactly the one that I had booked. Though it was a beautifully made latest model of the car in metallic brown, it was a ‘left hand drive’ car which was not very convenient to drive in a LHT (left hand traffic) country like Pakistan. The car that I received had actually been shipped from Belgium. It seemed that Majid had no intention of shipping the car from Japan as per our deal but, faced with the pressure having been put on him, hastily procured a car from Europe for shipment to Pakistan.
I have never quite understood why some Pakistani businessmen in foreign countries, and there are many like Mr Abdul Majid in my experience, turn out to behave this way. They spend their lives abroad where all around them are people, including ordinary traders and businessmen, who are smart but, with some rare exceptions, honest and law abiding. Most such Pakistani businessmen run successful enterprises, and so there is no apparent need for them to indulge in unfair practices. They must also know that in case they do so, there is a fair chance that they will eventually be caught and given punishment as per law. The only conclusion one can draw is that they are not only dishonest, they are short sighted and stupid as well. Dishonesty with stupidity is a lethal combination which most such people learn in due course of time.
Though I loved my little car, I was loathe to drive it at first. To say that there was a marked difference in the quality of traffic I was used to driving in London compared to that in Lahore, was to put it mildly. The Lahore traffic was not just bad, it was chaotic, what with cars, buses, motor cycles and motor rickshaws running side by with horse driven tongas and rehras. I was especially wary of horse carts because they had a round protrusion sticking out at the centre of their wheels, totally needless as far as one could see, which I usually failed to notice when moving too closely past them. I was hit once or twice by such monstrosities when driving my father’s car, producing big dents in the car’s doors. One of my London friends, Nasir Mahmud, remarked that, “Saeed has found out that denting and painting in Pakistan is quite cheap, and is hitting his car here and there with abandon.” After hesitating for a few day, I took my courage in both hands one day and drove my car to the office; slowly becoming used to the ‘left hand drive’ and discovered in time that it had some benefits as well.
We made full use of the car when we visited Murree hill resort the next summer. I had never driven on the tricky mountain roads before and this was much before the wide motorway style road had been built. The road from Rawalpindi to Murree was not very wide in those days containing steep hair-pin turns, some so narrow that one had to back up right to the edge of a sloping ditch in order to get back on the road. At some places the road did not allow two way traffic and one had to wait for the incoming traffic to pass before proceeding further. But the journey went well and we reached our hotel safely which was perched on a hill directly above the Murree GPO building. Our balcony faced the main artery called Mall Road and thus an ideal location. Incredible as it may sound, my mother had taken care to load a small two burner cooking range with us along with some utensils to make sure that we did not have to depend on the hotel food all the time.
My driving proved adequate for the resorts we visited situated around the Murree town, until one day it was decided to go to Nathia Gali situated at an altitude of about 8500 feet up from Murree at 6500 feet. The incline was quite steep and as we crossed the border from Punjab to KP province, the road became rough and uneven. We climbed and climbed until we reached the town of Khaira Gali. By this point my father had seen enough and, declaring that the drive was becoming too risky, told me to turn back to Murree. The next morning we hired a wagon and restarted our journey to Nathia Gali. To our surprize and dismay, it turned out that the tricky part of the road with the steep climb had in fact ended at Khaira Gali, the road from there onwards to Nathia Gali was a smooth ride! After spending a day at this breathtakingly beautiful hill resort, we returned to our hotel in Murree in the evening.
All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable trip especially for my sisters who despite living in Punjab all their life, had never seen this part of their beautiful country before.
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(4)
My mother was now getting quite anxious to see me tie the knot with a suitable lady. But where does one find a suitable lady? I felt somewhat embarrassed to burden my mother with this onerous task when she already had so much on her plate taking care of my younger siblings. I should have fallen madly in love with a shy and demure young girl while studying in college or in England. Or maybe, with somebody vivacious, playful and sprightly who would wrap me around her little fingers. Or with anybody walking and talking. But then may be my mother preferred to have it this way and enjoyed looking at the prospective brides. There was a lot of exciting talk in the evenings between my mother and sisters who were also fully involved in this playful venture. After a while, it began to emerge that I had somehow missed the bus; as with everything else, I was late arriving here as well. All the girls who could form a suitable match had already tied the knot themselves and living a happy and contended life surrounded by happy in-laws. I now prepared myself for living a long and lonely life somewhere, spending the rest of my days free from the burdens of domestic chores. After all, many great men had done the same and were none too unhappy.
In the midst of all this however, a candidate emerged who seemed to have a decided edge over everybody else. Somebody who was there all along but somehow not mentioned as being too obviously the ideal person. Like a beautiful painting hanging in your home which you hardly ever notice because it has always been there. Or was it that my mother always had this person in her mind as her first choice, but was kind of going through the motions of selecting and then rejecting people one by one to give the impression that she wasn’t really biased when she had every reason to be; I would never know.
One quiet evening, my mother took me aside and asked me about my views about Tabana, daughter of my mother’s eldest brother Hamid Hasan and my first cousin. I can’t say that I was surprised hearing this because to me it seemed a sensible choice. On the other hand, I had never viewed her in this light, principally because she had been a great friend, in fact the most dear and trusted friend, of my sisters all her life. Ever since my childhood she was a constant presence in our family. Either on weekends when they were living in Lahore, or during holidays when her family moved to Islamabad and then Rawalpindi, she would spend her days closeted with my sisters constantly talking, whispering, giggling or whatever else little girls do. We would hardly ever chat with each other perhaps because of six years age difference between us and also because my sisters never left her to talk to anybody else. She and her parents had moved to Karachi a couple of years back along with her brother Mansoor Bhai and his family.
I told my mother that while I was happy with this choice, I was not at all sure that my hand would be accepted by her family. After all she was quite an eligible maiden and would have no dearth of young men asking for her hand. It was therefore with some surprise and utter joy that I learnt that my proposal had been accepted. I found myself to be experiencing the same feelings as millions of people have experienced before me and millions would after me; a feeling of deep love and affection so intense that it overwhelms you and so all-consuming that everything else seem petty and unimportant. I wanted to be close to her, talk to her, share my feelings with her. At the same time, I was too shy to phone her and also fearful that with my customary abruptness, I might say something which would upset her. I decided to send her a gift without letting anybody know about it. A piece of jewellery perhaps but not gold as I have never liked gold jewellery. I opted for an elegant blue and white artificial pearl necklace. This was delivered to her personally by another cousin of mine living in Karachi, Izhar Bhai, in complete confidence.
The wedding ceremony was to be held in the coming summer as it would be a comparatively lean period in my busy office schedule. As was usual in our part of the world, a religious almanac was consulted to find the right days of the month to hold the wedding function; the date finally decided was 25th June 1976. As the day approached, my parents seemed bent upon indulging in an orgy of lavish expenditure which to my mind was totally unnecessary and even insane. I protested vehemently but was brushed aside with the snide remark, “ It is our money and we can spend it anyway we like.” I had already respectfully requested my in-laws to either not give any dowry at all or keep it as modest as possible. The only expense I thought was genuine and useful consisted of a few items of basic household furniture and crockery etc. which one would need starting a domestic life, and of course the wedding events which I had happily arranged. I refused to contribute to anything else.
One such expense my mother had planned was to book a whole compartment in a train containing 60 seats to bring her guests from Karachi to Lahore for the walima function. We too would be going to Karachi for the marriage ceremonies. The proposal was of course lapped up eagerly by our extended family members residing in Karachi and eventually over 70 people travelled together in this reserved compartment. Booking the compartment did not prove much of a problem: one of the articled clerks in our Lahore office was Ghulam Mustafa Aziz, later my colleague in ICI as well, whose father Mr Abdul Aziz happened to be the Chairman Pakistan Railways. One phone call from his assistant to the Reservations was enough and we had the papers for the reserved compartment in our hand. It turned out to be a memorable journey for everybody who had the good fortune to travel in that train as it was kind of a grand family picnic on a moving train. It also meant that when my wife and I reached Lahore by air the next afternoon, not only were we received by the family members living in Lahore, some of the seventy odd people who had reached Lahore the previous evening by the wedding train were also there to receive us with flower garlands in their hands. The airport looked like a giant reception area full of excited cheery people and we had hardly any opportunity to thank people individually for their kindness before being quickly whisked away to our home.
I have only a hazy memory of our short stay in Karachi earlier as too many events were taking place at a dizzying speed every day, the usual ones at most Pakistani weddings: mehndi, maayon, baraat, and then rukhsati. Our baraat was remarkable in one way: the groom’s wedding party reached the bridegroom’s home, where the nikah was to take place followed by dinner, exactly at 08:00 pm, which was the time mentioned for this event in the wedding invitation. This feat could not have been achieved by anybody except my maternal uncle Sajid Hasan, known for being a strict disciplinarian, who had been given this responsibility and succeeded admirably. Unfortunately, most Pakistanis did not share his sense of punctuality and I found myself being the first ‘guest’ to arrive at my own wedding! Thankfully, my great friend Ahmed Patel, then a manager at the FRRM Karachi office and later to become its senior partner, arrived soon to give me the much needed company. Other guests however did not start to arrive until more than an hour later and everything went smoothly afterwards including nikah and dinner. I still remember the golden words uttered by Mansoor Bhai, Tabana’s elder brother, as his parting advice to Tabana at her rukhsati that night, “Be happy and keep everybody else happy.” Seven words encapsulating an exemplary code of life.
Back in Lahore after the epic train journey, accommodating such a large number of guests would have been a logistics nightmare but my parents managed to deal with it with the kind of meticulous planning that was their second nature. Menus for breakfast, lunch and dinner for each of the nearly seven days the guests were expected to stay had been carefully discussed, planned and provisions ordered weeks before the event. Food was prepared under the supervision of Sajid Bhai, an old friend of the family, and he toiled in the intense heat of June drenched in sweat almost all day long (see chapter 1 for more details about Sajid Bhai). My three young sisters too were seen working to their bones from morning till evening performing an endless number of chores, running here and there, their faces glistening with sweat; but still for some reason appearing immensely happy. I felt helpless seeing them in this sorry state and sometimes annoyed at myself for being the cause of all this. I used to tell them that they must have had some kind of masochistic nature to be able to face such torture without complaining, but they laughed at me. When the night came, people were seen sleeping in rooms, sleeping in long verandas, and sleeping in the big lawn at the back of the house, sprawled on thin carpets on the floor shoulder to shoulder. Taller people could spread their legs under the fireplaces. There was only one air conditioner in the house which was reserved for women and children and there was hardly space in that room to put one’s foot down without stepping on someone’s toes. But it was all great fun for everybody and a truly memorable event for the guests lucky to be there.
Me and my wife did not remain part of this melee for long and a day after the walima dinner, we set out by car for our honeymoon in the state of Swat. I had by now become quite used to drive up to Islamabad and Rawalpindi occasionally for official work and was looking forward to venture beyond the dusty flatlands of Punjab. We were not disappointed as Swat proved to be lovely beyond expectations. Passing through the bustling KP towns of Nowshehra and Mardan, one drove up to the steep hills of Malakand and then down again to the town of Mangora which was kind of gateway to the Swat valley. From here onwards, the road gently slopes upwards, snaking through various small villages in the constant company of River Swat. We had booked a room in Hotel Madyan, the same hotel built on the banks of River Swat where I had stayed with my father eighteen years ago. There was little change in the hotel since then except that its surroundings were much more densely populated. The water in the river just outside the hotel was as usual ice cold and flowing briskly downwards. This was the first time Tabana had stayed in a hotel anywhere and found it an exhilarating experience. I began to discover the joys of married life and what a constant pleasure it was to move around in the company of a delightful woman. After staying a couple of days here, we moved on first to Bahrain and then to Kalaam, known for its breath taking beauty.
After about a week we started our return journey, not realizing how hot it was down in the plains. In those days most cars were not air-conditioned and by the time we reached Nowshehra, our lips were parched with thirst and the first thing we did after ordering lunch at a restaurant there, was to gulp glass after glass of cold water. Our next stop was the town of Wah but half way down the journey, I again felt so thirsty that I had to climb down the steep banks of River Attock running alongside the road and drink some water from the river.
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TABANA
Entrance into 889-N
Entrance into 889-N and a new phase of my life was unique and an unprecedented experience literally as well as emotionally. Upon reaching home from the airport, we entered the house from the side door in the “gali” (a side passage) as the main doors in the veranda were closed. It was a completely unexpected and somewhat shocking experience for me. Familiar, as I was, to coming in a going out of 889-N from early childhood, had never encountered such an spectacle. The floors of the house (and it was a big house) were all covered with sleeping people right from the corridors to the bedrooms and to the spacious lounge. I had to literally walk over the sleeping people to reach the lounge where I had to sit as a new bride. My mother-in-law hastily told everyone to get up as the bride had arrived and then arranged for a masnad (a decorated floor cloth sewn by my mother) to be laid down for me to sit down. All the people woke up one after the other and a singing party started singing old wedding songs
Early Days in 889-N
The next few days I was constantly surrounded by “people” – people from our immediate and not so immediate family as well as distant family members. One of them was Taj Bano whom I had hardly ever met before, was always surrounded by my cousins who were very fond of listening about their future by showing their hand-lines to her.
One of the events which surprised me a lot was that the very next day of my arrival when I was about to say something to my sisters-in-law (Nageen and Ambareen), they addressed me by calling “Bhabi” to me. Used to hearing “Tabana” from them always, it was quite shocking and felt strange to me, but they explained that if they did not start to call “Bhabi” the first day then it would never be possible. Slowly and with time, I got used to hearing the word “Bhabi” form them all.
Time passed by and I slowly settled to my new life with somethings looking very strange to me. One of them was that there was always an eating competition whenever something delicious was either cooked at home or brought from bazaar. Like if they had ‘samosas” at the evening tea, all of them attacked and picked the best piece for themselves. As I was not used to this kind of behaviour, was left with no choice but to pick the worst piece left of the lot in the end. Same went for shami kebabs. Saeed even picked up some as soon as they were brought and hid them in his cupboard which I found very embarrassing later on.
Another unwritten rule of the house was that everything was shared and done as a group and family. As a result if I wanted to go somewhere with Saeed it was practically impossible. I remember very distinctly that when we used to go to a movie, we all sat in a line with Saeed at the corner, then me and then all the sisters and brother. Now it was ok if the things remained at that, but as soon as the movie started, a non-ending series of queries and discussions started between Saeed and all the sisters and brother. Now the situation was that I was flanked by the person whoever was asking the question and Saeed who was answering so I could hardly watch the movie, let alone enjoy it. Same went for any other trip. I used to sit at front in the car with Saeed and the whole party was at the back and there was such a loud series of discussions that I had no option but to keep quiet and enjoy them.
There were no mobile phones at that time and in 889-N, there was a big heavy looking black landline phone (very few homes had even have a landline phone) which was placed in a central corridor corner where all the bedroom doors opened. Now if Saeed called from his office, whoever was near the phone picked it up and was very happy to talk to him. Then everyone else had the pleasure of talking to him and in the end it was given to me as most probably Saeed had called to know about my wellbeing in the first place.
One year passed by quickly during this hustle bustle, and our first wedding anniversary was celebrated with great fervour and enthusiasm with a new beautiful dress for me.
During this first year, I missed my home in Karachi deeply although it was a pre-decided plan that I would visit my home in Karachi after every three months. During this time I missed everyone back home but surprisingly the people I missed the most were not my parents but my two little nieces Shazia and Lali to whom I was deeply attached before my marriage.
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SAEED
(5)
Reaching Wah, we found our way to the home of our close relation and much loved Mumtaz Baji, generally known as Bi in the family. We were to meet her husband, Jafar Bhai, and her three lovely children, Zoon, Shabi and Shazi. The house they were living in astounded us, it was built like a home one only sees in films. Two roads, coming up on either side of a beautifully manicured front lawn half the size of a football field, climbed steeply upwards in a semicircle to meet in a grand porch providing the entrance to the house. Somewhat in a daze we parked the car and gingerly stepped in the dark hall. The vague feeling of being part of an Indian film set became a reality when we found us being greeted by Zoon, hardly fifteen at that time, clad in an expensive looking silken sari!
After a few minutes, we managed to gather our wits and met Jafar Bhai who had arrived home from his office for lunch. He was dressed in a light suit and greeted us warmly. I had first met Jafar Bhai in 1960 when he had stayed briefly at our home in Lahore for his wedding. He was wearing a well-worn beige lounge suit which I found was his favourite dress for all occasions. I took an immediate liking to him being much impressed by his vibrant and lively personality. He was accompanied by his cousin Wazir Hasan who being rather a simple minded person was a perfect foil for him. Jafar Bhai was a mechanical engineer and at that time was working at the Maple Leaf Cement Factory in Daud Khel, a small town near Mianwali.
My liking for him turned into awe when I found out that he was a communist. To my mind communists existed in books only, great leaders like Lenin, Trotsky or Mao Tse-tung. I had bought the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Capita published in Russia while still in college though found in difficult to digest it. Jafar Bhai was the only living, talking communist I had ever seen and this changed my view about communists generally viewing them much more favourably. I am not sure though whether Jafar Bhai could be called, or even considered himself, a true communist: he was too much of a non-conformist by nature to fit in any neat classification. Nobody could ever accuse him of being dressed ostentatiously, even though mostly wearing a suit, sometimes with its jacket off, it was usually crumpled. He couldn’t care less about his demeanour, and people would sometimes see Bi silently tightening his trouser belt or arranging his tie.
He was in a way my ideal personality as the principles he followed for his life accorded exactly with my own views about things, though he could enunciate them much more lucidly. He once told me that he could never understand why people spent so much money on two things, their shoes and their watches. I took his advice to heart: I have never worn an expensive shoe or watch in my life; in fact I have never owned more than one pair of shoes at any one time and buy a new pair only when my cobbler gets fed up with repairing and re-repairing my existing pair. The same goes for my watch.
He was my preferred bridge partner in our family rubbers, for the simple reason that he was the only person among my elders who did not plunge into furious analysis of the game as soon as it ended. Many of my elder cousins were passionate bridge players and played regularly on weekends. I, though being only a moderately good player, was much in demand as a substitute in the absence of one or the other co-player. I dreaded such occasions as I usually found myself at the receiving end of acid comments as soon as the game ended. Jafar Bhai was the exception. He was an avid player of this game and quite an expert but took things rather casually, enjoying the game for game’s sake and refrained from unnecessary criticism. I loved him for this.
Jafar Bhai spent the early days of his career in East Pakistan posted in Chittagong. His family barely managed to escape from there after the start of agitation in 1971, managing to find a berth on one of the last ships sailing from there. His home there had become a safe house for many families fleeing from the atrocities of Bengali agitators called Mukti Bahini. They had to make a sudden departure when he overheard some conspirators secretly making plans to kill them the next day. Arriving in West Pakistan with almost all their assets and belongings lost in Bengal, the family undertook to restart life here. His job took him to various factories situated in far off places, places like Daud Khel, Lawrencepur, Gharibwal, and then Wah Cement Factory as the general manager. Having stayed there overnight, we packed our bags and bid the family goodbye early next morning.
Little did we know that we would meet the family again after only a couple of months, but this time in harrowingly tragic circumstances. It was a morning in September when we received the incredible news that Jafar Bhai had passed away in Wah as a result of an accident in the mill. His body, placed in a wooden casket, reached Lahore in the evening and he was buried the same night in the nearby graveyard. I had the unforgettable task to step down in the grave, take the shrouded body from the hands of people standing above and place it gently on the ground. I still remember it being icy cold having been packed in ice for its journey from Wah to Lahore.
How could he come to this sudden end? It was said that he was on a morning inspection tour of the plant standing on a walkway above the crushing plant, when he somehow slipped and fell into the jaws of a giant crusher. By the time the plant had been shut down, it was too late to save him. But then questions arise. Weren’t there people accompanying him and why didn’t they take immediate action to save him? How could a person who had spent his life walking in and around cement plants meet such a fate? An enquiry must have taken place but we never knew the real circumstances.
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His wife, our cousin Bi, took over the onerous job of bringing up her three young children on her own with remarkable courage and fortitude. They settled in Lahore and she was allotted a cement agency. I offered to prepare the agency’s accounts and handle its tax affairs. Little did I know the filth and squalor permeating the tax department. Bi told me that she wanted the agency’s income and expenses to be recorded truthfully with nothing hidden whatsoever. I did so and filed the accounts with tax department. The income tax officer must have been amazed to see the declared income being much higher than that disclosed by other agency holders but, to my dismay, questioned the accounts and demanded to see the owner personally. This was unusual because clients hardly ever meet tax authorities if represented by a consultant. Our honesty had turned into a black mark against us. I explained to him that the owner was a widow, a home maker, and should be excused from personal appearance, but he was adamant. When Bi finally appeared before him, he was brash and even rude with her, but Bi answered all his questions patiently in her characteristic cool and confident manner. The proceedings still dragged on.
About a year later, I was reading the newspaper one morning when my eyes caught a familiar name. It was the income tax officer who, while travelling with his family in a car to Islamabad, had met with an accident. He along with his wife and three children died in the car crash.
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(6)
My job as audit manager at the Lahore office of Ford, Rhodes, Robson, Morrow, Chartered Accountants, was not very exciting but useful for a ringside view of Pakistan’s industrial and financial corporate culture as well as for exposure to the local company and tax laws. My preference had always been for financial or corporate management and most of my life would be spent in that field; time spent in auditing field was a kind of extended internship. The job did provide some perks though, like networking with senior management of major industrial, commercial and banking concerns in Lahore which would prove extremely useful in my future career.
One of our clients was a commercial concern owned and managed by a Mr Gill, who had a vast network of influential contacts. My colleague, Ijaz Sb had mentioned to him once that it would be useful to our firm to have me admitted as a member of Lahore Gymkhana Club. The club was one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions of Lahore dating back from the days of the British raj. It had an exclusive membership much sought after and considered indispensable for socialising with the elite society of Lahore. Mr Gill agreed to help and indeed within a few days I received an invitation from the club offering me membership. But even more amazing was the offer of permanent membership of the club a few weeks later, a process which would normally take years.
When I ventured there one afternoon to have lunch, I found it difficult to park the car as it was full to capacity. Going inside, I tried to push the lounge door to enter but couldn’t do so. Apparently, it was so full that the people standing inside were blocking the door. I managed to get in with some difficulty and found men standing shoulder to shoulder, holding a glass of drink of various hues and colours. The air was thick with cigarette and cigar smoke. These were the days before the prohibition and clubs were one of the few places where one could drink openly and with abandon. As I didn’t drink, I hastily made my retreat to the dining room which was relatively peaceful. It used to be the same at dinner time: the club was always a lively, humming place full of people laughing and talking….. and drinking. Things changed drastically after the Bhutto government imposed prohibition in 1977.
For the first time in my life, I began to experience dealing with a special class of people: the club’s attendants and waiters. Since then I have been a member of many private clubs, in Lahore and Karachi, but have found the waiters of all these clubs to have an amazing similarity in the level of service, skills and courtesy, or really the lack of it. They are all uniformly lazy, absent minded, slow in service and somewhat discourteous. I have concluded that waiter of the elite clubs are a species apart and radically different from the waiters one is normally served by at restaurants; may be they have all attended the same training college somewhere before finding employment at the club.
A few weeks after joining the Gymkhana Club, I had the occasion to visit the club and asked the waiter there what kind of sandwiches they had on offer. Promptly came the reply, “They are all made of bread, Sir.” I was dumbfounded at the reply and had to elaborate as to what was ‘inside’ the slices of bread to get the desired information. Still, I had a suspicion that when the waiter would be talking to his wife in the evening, he must have said to her something like, “Look, what kind of idiots visit our club these days, they don’t even know that the sandwiches are made from the bread.” And the wife would have said, “Pity. They are all ignorant neo-rich fools these days, aren’t they.”
On one of these days, I was attending a seminar arranged by Institute of Chartered Accountants of Pakistan (ICAP) at a local hotel. There was a question and answer session at the end and I too stood up to raise a point introducing myself with my name. After the conclusion of session and as everybody was leaving, I was approached by a young man shyly and asked if he could talk to me for a minute. He then mentioned my name asking me if I was indeed that person and then enquired if I had established a new record of obtaining the highest marks in B.com Part II examination some years earlier. I was now thoroughly intrigued and while confirming that this was indeed the case and that I had broken the record of highest marks established by a Hindu student some 28 years earlier, asked him what was this all about.
The young man introduced himself and then told me that he was seeking to meet me for a long time because it was he who happened to break my record only three years after I had established it. I was taken aback but then gathering my wits told him that though I probably wanted to break his legs for this audacity of his, it was only in jest, and in reality would like to congratulate him warmly for establishing the new record. This young man was Ishaq Dar, later Pakistan’s Finance Minister.
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(7)
The audit jobs were mostly routine while a few being more complex provided some excitement. None however matched the human or indeed the emotional element involved in a special assignment related to the units acquired by government as a result of the 1976 nationalization.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, not satisfied with nationalizing all major industrial sectors of the country, followed by the banking and insurance sectors, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto announced the nationalization of agro-based industries on 1st July 1976: nearly three thousand cotton ginning, rice husking and flour milling units were taken over by the government. In my view, this was one of the most senseless, ill-planned and reckless acts of the government. However, this proved a bonanza for the auditing firms because each of these three thousand units was to be audited and its accounts prepared no matter how small, in order to compute the amount of compensation to be paid to the owners of such units.
The companies controlled by government after the first and second round of nationalization had already become a lucrative source of income for the firms of chartered accountants, as these clients provided not only audit assignments but also tax consultancy and special investigation work. The latest nationalization was in another ballpark altogether; every audit firm in Pakistan was ‘allotted’ not just one or two units, they got them in hundreds! As most of the nationalized units happened to be located in Punjab, Lahore firms received the bulk of such assignments. FRRM Lahore office was allotted nearly one hundred and fifty units.
I was suddenly overwhelmed with work. Every day dozens of bundles of documents relating to financial records of cotton ginning, rice husking or flour milling units were received in our office, couriered by the relevant government department. As I started to unpack these bundles one by one, the full horror of this round of nationalization slowly started to unravel before by my eyes. These were not like the financial records of the types of clients I was used to audit – large industrial, banking or commercial organisations. These were not even like the records of medium sized partnership firms some of whom we had in our firm as our clients. The bundles I began to untie represented something else altogether. Most of these were tiny little units, some as small as occupying only one or two rooms of a house. The cotton ginning, rice husking or flour milling units taken over forcibly by the government were owned by ordinary small town or village people passed on from generation to generation. As I plunged myself into these documents pouring in our office, I found that in many cases the ownership had passed down to a widow, or may be to the owner’s orphan children. And these were the people I was supposed to be calculating the compensation for!
Slowly teams were assembled, audit plan developed, assignments delegated and work started. We started to laboriously construct financial statements based on information gleaned from the bills, invoices, vouchers and other documents provided to us. The picture that emerged was that, barring a few decent sized units, most of the owners would receive compensation far below what they actually deserved. The guidelines or directive provided by government to the auditors for calculation of compensation instructed us to calculate the assets’ values based on their historical (actual) costs which were obviously much below their current market values. But then another horror struck, we received directions that the compensation accounts must also incorporate claims lodged by anybody declaring that money was owed to him or her by the owner of the nationalized unit.
This opened a Pandora’s box. Letters now started to pour in the office declaring claims of amounts receivable from owners. We were required to incorporate all such claims in the computation even if these were supported by questionable evidence, such as, notarized stamp papers. The result was that compensation, already meagre, turned into even smaller figures, even negative amounts sometimes. I could see the blatant unfairness underlying such thoughtless guidelines but was powerless to do anything about it.
We were now confronted with another challenge. Owners had somehow found out the names of firms dealing with their cases and a few started to visit our office in person to plead their case. Some of the ex-owners of rice husking or flour milling units happened to be widows or orphans who had simply become destitute after nationalization of their belongings. My heart went out to them and I sometimes went mad with frustration at the way these helpless people were being treated. I never turned them away but listened to them and tried to pacify them as best as I could. This was the least I felt I could do in the unfortunate circumstances.
In a meeting in Islamabad, I took this matter up strongly with the relevant secretary, Mr Ahmad Nawab, who happened to be a distant relation as well, I protested against such obvious unfair treatment meted out to the nationalized units’ owners and questioned the political wisdom of alienating such a vast number of potential PPP supporters. He was a thoroughly honourable and noble gentleman belonging to that class of civil servants who had held Pakistan together in its early days. To my surprize, he wholeheartedly agreed with me. He told me that all senior officials were fully aware of the situation but were helpless as according to him, “Nobody, not even the senior ministers, have the courage to tell this to Bhutto Sahib.” Listening to this, I thought to myself that there had to be some justice in the heavens and God would surely listen to these people sooner or later. As it happened, I was to see heavenly justice prevailing with all its splendour even sooner that I thought possible. Nationalization of agro-based industries was reversed within two years and its chief instigator met with a tragic fate soon after, as described in the following pages of this book.
There was a flip side to this story as well. While the ordinary, small owners suffered tragically as a result of this round of nationalization, some losing their life savings in the process, big cotton ginning units profited immensely as a result of the same nationalization. This was made possible by the use of a simple legal stratagem. Many units, notably some cotton ginning mills in Multan, sold their assets to third parties at heavily inflated prices, recording the transactions on back dated legal documents. By the time these documents landed in our office, these appeared in all respects to be genuine, properly drawn up, signed and sealed. We had no choice but to accept these on their face value and the owners were compensated accordingly.
Such are the ‘unintended consequences’ gifted by history. A powerful initiative announced by the leader of a socialist party having come to power with the help of votes cast by poor and middle class people, ended up in impoverishing and evaporating the life savings of a vast majority of such people, at the same time enriching the class of people who had most probably opposed him tooth and nail.
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(8)
We were having a super time as a married couple surrounded by a loving family of my parents, four sisters and a kid brother. After a few months however, I began to feel a bit crowded living among so many people. The living space was not an issue as we had the use of two medium sized rooms; rather it was the lack of privacy – it seemed as one was living in a crowded bazaar. It was probably due to me having spent a long period in England sharing a flat with only one other person and wanting to go back to something close to that life.
Contrary to what many people might have suspected, as it is usually the daughter in law who is considered responsible by her in laws for taking their innocent son away from them, it was not Tabana who wanted a separate home. She was in fact terrified at the prospect of running a household on her own, having no previous cooking experience. She would have preferred for all of us to move together to a more affluent area like Gulberg or Garden Town but this was not considered possible. After some discussions, she agreed with me that it was better for us to move away sooner rather than later. My family on the other hand was another matter, they were not at all keen on parting ways with us and my father was in particular totally opposed to the idea. My mother, being a hard headed realist as always, sensed that in the long run it would be perhaps better to have two separate households, and eventually managed to convince my father as well.
We started looking for a reasonably liveable place close to the home and with unbelievable luck immediately struck gold. A single storey newly refurbished house was available at a location ideal for us at a very reasonable rent: it was only about seven minutes’ walk from our home, had an excellent location situated at the corner of a small park, was close to the market and, as a bonus, was situated just opposite the home of one of our cousins, Baqar Bhai. The house was owned by an elderly gentleman, a building contractor living at the other side of town near old Ravi, who was later awarded the contract for rebuilding the mausoleum of Data Gang Baksh, the well-known saint of Lahore. He was an extremely kind, soft spoken person and we struck a deal at our very first meeting at his house.
The house itself was modest by any means – it had been built well before the idea of drawing-dining rooms or bedrooms with attached baths had taken off; it simply had three medium sized rooms whatever you may call them. But it suited us well as we were ourselves people of modest means. The little furniture that we had filled the rooms adequately and we started a brand new household.
We now had to take stock of our available finances to plan further acquisitions. And it was at about this time when Tabana received the first shock of her happy married life. I told her that I simply did not have any money left to arrange for things like a television or fridge, things that we had taken for granted most of our lives. Not only was I penniless, I owed a princely sum of fifteen thousand rupees to my father, equal to about four months’ salary, for financing the wedding expenses. Tabana was dumbfounded; she thought she was marrying a chartered accountant and had visions of opulence all around. I quickly brought her down to the ground level. To my pleasant surprise, she was even more opposed to having a loan hanging over our heads than I was, in fact berating me for taking it in the first place.
The first thing I did after moving to our new home was to get a water cooler as a substitute for fridge and a radio as substitute for TV. Every evening I would get some ice from the nearby market and make iced water for the cooler which would serve us till the next evening. I applied for a government ration card available to all households which allowed us to get our quota of flour and sugar at below market rates. We turned one of the three rooms facing the front into our drawing room and the other one as bed room. The third room, located at the back of the house, was our dining room where a thin carpet served as the dining table. The same room was our lounge too and the radio there blared at full blast from morning till night. Tabana would be constantly changing and re-changing the furniture settings and when I came back home one evening, I found to my amazement that our drawing room had become the bed room while the bed room had changed into the drawing room. I asked her who had done all this moving around and was told that she had herself finished the job a few minutes ago by pulling and pushing furniture from one room to another. It wasn’t just her strength which did it, it was her planning and determination; she has always been like this, once she makes up her mind to do something, no power on earth can shake her resolve.
But the first priority for any human being to exist is food, of course. And Tabana didn’t know the A,B,C of cooking. She took up this challenge with her characteristic determination too and we started the project by procuring all the necessary pots and pans which started to fill in the empty kitchen. Tabana started a correspondence course with her mother (as we did not have a telephone) and this soon turned into live tuition when she arrived in Lahore to stay with us for a few weeks. In a few months, Tabana’s cooking became as good as any, at least in my eyes but still, if I ever took the courage in both hands and asked her what could be the possible reason for something tasting odd, back would come the terse reply, “If I knew the reason, why would it be there in the first place?”
The next few years that we spent in this house were probably one of the most pleasant in our life. Our home was located in the centre of Samanabad, where most of our extended family consisting of dozens of households lived. There was a constant traffic of people coming and going to our home. House gates were never locked in those days and people could come in and knock at the door which was also unlocked most of the time. My father dropped in every evening on his way back after his round of evening walk. He would give a cursory knock at the door, open it with a bang and come in. Most of the time he inspected our kitchen too, checking what was on the stove. Almost a daily routine too was the visit of my sisters and brother in the evening. They were entertained by us with hastily procured bakery items, like bun and butter or fruit cake. Baqar Bhai or his wife were almost a permanent fixture sitting in the veranda on the first floor of their house facing our home. My sisters were extremely wary of his presence there as he would start making fun of them if sometimes they didn’t find us at our home and had to turn back.
Our cousins, aunts and uncles visited us at all hours of day or night too. One of my aunts, Begum Baji, had the habit of coming in early in the morning on her way to the market to buy groceries. This was the time when I would be frantically running around the house to get ready for the office while Tabana was busy in the Kitchen preparing breakfast. Begum Baji would try to get our attention and then start complaining loudly about not being attended to properly, but it was all in good humour. Two of our nieces, Zoon and Nousheen, latter the daughter of Baqar Bhai and both in their teens then, also had the habit of coming in freely any time of the day, head straight for the kitchen, grab whatever took their fancy and leave without even a word of thanks. Nousheen also made full use of her veranda ‘watch tower’ facing our house, raiding our home with Zoon the minute she saw us bringing sweets or samosas from the market; all that remained for us then were some left over crumbles. Our cousin Sahab Bhai usually came in during quiet afternoons but instead of entering through the door, would take a peek through the wire mesh window and whisper loudly, “What is happening around here?” This would make us jump in our seats.
Nousheen got married a couple of years later and her debonair husband Ghazanfar also became our close friend. When staying with her at her father’s home and occasionally facing water issues, he would cross over to our place to take a bath. He would ask Tabana to keep a watch on the traffic while crossing the road with a towel wrapped around his waist. He would take a furtive look left and right and hop over quickly to the other side of the road. The sweet aroma of his elaborate toilette of perfumes and lotions would keep our bathroom fragrant for many days. He was a delightful company and often regaled us with his funny anecdotes.
This could only happen in a place called Samanabad. Life was a constant story of fun and frolics.
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TABANA
Moving into 559-N was another milestone in Saeed’s and my life. After looking for a rental house or portion in some posh locality like Gulberg, Shadman or Muslim Town and finding it either not suitable or too expensive for our budget, we settled down for a mediocre looking house in Samanabad with three rooms (just rooms, no bedroom or drawing-dining or lounge), a front and back veranda and a small courtyard at the back. A small kitchen opened at one side of the inner veranda and a washroom on the other side. The toilette was in a corner of the courtyard (sahen) as was the norm in those days.
We shifted to our ‘new’ house with our very few belongings like a set of two beds, a three piece sofa-set and a set of three tables. In addition to that we brought some old and spare items from 889-N like a Naimat Khana (a small cabinet with nets in front and sides for keeping eatables in the kitchen) and an old table. To manage a house all by myself with such meagre resources and at such a young age was definitely a huge challenge for me. Both of us were used to living with families and the usual items of comfort if not luxuries, but somehow it did not prove to be very hard to live without the basic necessities like fridge, T,V. or a dining table. We enjoyed listening to the radio and drinking water from the cooler or having meals sitting on the floor. The only thing I felt bad about in those days was that I had to put all my clothes in suitcases which were kept at an open space below the staircase.
From the very beginning of my married life, I found this inclination in me to set and reset the furniture and to imagine, plan and design the house. So I kept changing the bedroom into drawing room and the drawing room into bedroom and was never satisfied.
Beside setting the furniture, another big challenge for me was ‘cooking’. Having never cooked before in my life except making tea, suddenly it dawned upon me that either I quickly learnt to cook or get ready to starve (to order food or even buy form bazaars was not a choice in those days). So I immediately started cooking and soon found out that, like setting the house, I had that ‘natural talent’ for cooking. Much later I discovered that this natural talent for cooking was ingrained in all my maternal family females, like Bi (Mumtaz Baji), Shannan Baji, Sabiha Baji and Rafia Baji and, of course, my mother from whose letters I found all the recipes.
Cleaning and washing was not a big problem except that whenever I came back from the visits to my Karachi home, everything was in a shambles. The whole house used to be covered in a pool of dust and dirt as it was an ‘open house’ and Lahore had its usual dust storm culture.
There was no garden or lawn in our house but there was an open space outside our house which I soon converted into a lawn with flower beds and a bougainvillea hanging over the wall.
Fortunately the location of our house was very good with a park just in front and a mini- market almost adjacent to our house. The sabzi wala soon became our good friend. The location was also very good in the sense that all our family members (cousins) lived in the near vicinity of our house. Just in front of our house was the house of Nannoo Bhai (Baqar Hasan) who usually sat in the front balcony watching us all the time. The other relatives like Ishrat Baji’s family and Farida Bhabi’s family also lived at a walking distance. Sahab Bhai and Shannan Baji lived in the downstairs portion with Nannoo Bhai along with Allan Sahib (Abba). All of them kept coming in and going out of our house for almost the whole day and I never felt that I was living alone. The other daily visitors to our house were Saeed’s father who came to visit us daily after his walk in the park and his sisters and brother who came daily in the evenings and with whom we had bun-makhan (buns and butter) and sherbet or tea together.
The one thing that I enjoyed the most during those days was going out – going to cinemas, bazaars or eating out. I specially remember going to Alfalah cinema with Saeed to watch movies and going to Ichra Bazaar mostly with Ishrat Baji who was an expert in doing shopping in Ichra and had close bonds with almost all the shop-keepers there.
Eating out was a big entertainment in Lahore as Karachi did not have this facility in those day. By eating out I mean ‘eating on the streets’. We particularly enjoyed eating naan and Haleem outside Ichra Bazaar and Dahi-bhalla chaat from the Main-market street vendor in Samanabad. Also, I enjoyed eating Chicken-tikka and naan for the first time in a shop in Main-market. Lahore Gymkhana club was another place which we used to visit in the evenings. I particularly liked their ‘Fish and Chips’ which was not a commonly available dish in those days.
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PAKISTAN
(9)
Tikka Khan’s retired as chief of army staff in February 1976. Bhutto by-passed six senior lieutenant-generals and selected the junior-most officer of that rank, Mohammad Zia ul Haq, then fifty-two, to fill this vacancy. Zia had been described in the reports as ambitious, quiet and watchful but of doubtful reliability. Zia’s own deputy and confidant, General Chishti considered him, “the best sycophant to win over Mr Bhutto.” Benazir Bhutto recalled, “being startled when I saw him . . . . The general standing in front of me was a short, nervous, ineffectual looking man whose pomaded hair was parted in the middle . . . . He looked more like an English cartoon villain than an inspiring military leader.”
Bhutto regarded Zia with contempt almost from the start. According to Wolpert, “He made Zia the butt of public ridicule, shouting at him from the head of the dinner table, ‘Where is my monkey general? Come over here, monkey!’ He would pretend to pull Zia toward himself on an invisible string and then introduce him to distinguished foreign guests, quickly dismissing him, even before Zia finished bowing, ever smiling . . . . , humiliating the man he had singled out for such high and powerful office.” This seems an incredible attitude by an elected prime minister towards the country’s commander in chief of the army. Zia on the face of it accepted all this patiently, “always smiling, bowing, even thanking Bhutto for ‘your such kind attention, Sir.’” But inside, Zia never forgot any insult, any humiliation or any slight, just biding his time. In the end, he would have the last laugh.
By the end of 1976, Bhutto was so confident of his overwhelming popularity among the people as well as the weak opposition that he decided to call snap elections, almost a year before the expiry of the five years term of parliament. Elections for national assembly were to be held on 7 March 1977 and for the provincial assemblies three days later. A day after the announcement made on 10 January, all major parties opposed to PPP joined forces and agreed to field joint candidates as the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA). Mufti Mahmood was elected president of the alliance.
Bhutto now decided that in order to prove his massive popularity, he would not only win his seat for Larkana district, he would get elected ‘unopposed’. Jan Mohammad Abbasi, the Jamaat e Islami candidate, was first gently persuaded to stand down and when he refused, was abducted. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was then declared elected unopposed. Following the worthy footsteps of their leader, many other PPP candidates from Sindh and Punjab, including Sindh chief minister Jatoi, federal ministers Mumtaz Bhutto and Hafeez Pirzada, as well as the chief ministers of other three provinces also successfully managed to get elected unopposed by somewhat similar tactics.
The American ambassador Henry Byroade had been invited by Bhutto to his home to watch the election results with him as these were announced on television. “He was losing in Karachi,” Byroade recalled. “He was losing in Peshawar. Then the Punjab numbers started coming in and the guys who were absolute thugs won by 99% . . . . Then [Bhutto] became absolutely quiet and started drinking heavily, calling Lahore, and he said, ‘What are you guys doing?’ I saw Bhutto the next morning, and he wasn’t himself . . . . he was just sad.” Contrary to intelligence reports predicting PPP to win at the most 60% of seats from Punjab, PPP had won 105 out of 116 seats. Overall, PPP bagged more than 77% of the elective seats of national assembly. Bhutto may be overly ambitious and greedy but he was politically astute. He knew that his goose was cooked; opposition would never accept such grotesque figures.
As expected, PNA refused to accept the election results, accused PPP of systematically rigging the elections and announced boycott of provincial assembly elections. The campaign battle now moved from ballot boxes to the streets of Pakistan with demonstrations and strikes taking place on a daily basis. From this day to the end of June, things got progressively worse with the country coming to almost a stand still. All PNA leaders were in jail. The cities of Karachi, Lahore and Hyderabad had become uncontrollable, were later put under martial law and curfew was imposed. The agitation had consumed hundreds of innocent lives getting shot by law enforcement agencies at rallies or for violating the curfew. PNA now demanded nothing less than Bhutto’s resignation and holding of new elections under a neutral set up.
It was now end of April and faced with continuing agitation, the government was forced to start negotiations with opposition leaders, prompted by the Saudi ambassador, Sheikh Riyadh Al-Khatib. Jailed leaders were brought to the Sihala rest house near Islamabad from their distant prisons. The talks continued off and on throughout the two summer months of May and June, sometime breaking down completely, then restarting. Desperate for a solution to the lengthening crisis, Bhutto tried to woo the public by appealing to their religious sensitivities offering lollipops one by one. He declared Friday, a holy day in Islam, as the weekly holiday instead of Sunday. He then promised to introduce even more stringent anti-Ahmadi legislation.
Finally, in a remarkably cynical move notwithstanding himself being a life-long drinker, he introduced ‘complete prohibition’ throughout Pakistan, and banned all gambling, nightclubs, bars, and other ‘anti-Muslim’ activities as a superficial concession to Islamic sentiments. This single measure changed the look and character of this country for ever. Karachi used to be the fun city of Asia with a booming night life bustling with bars, night clubs, and live music and dance shows, and lived up to its reputation as the ‘city of lights’. Cabaret dancers were in great demand. Tourists flocked here especially from gulf countries who found the city near to their home and most attractive for entertainment. Almost all the international airlines touched base at Karachi airport which remained extremely busy with dozens of flights full of tourists landing here throughout the night. All this came to a sudden halt after prohibition. Also gone out of the door were ambitious plans to open a major casino in May 1977, then under construction at the Karachi Clifton beach. The casino was financed by Tufail Sheikh, a Karachi based businessman expecting to draw in a large number of tourists from the oil-rich Arab countries. He was assured by Bhutto that his announcement was a temporary measure which would be reversed soon after things had cooled down; Tufail Shaikh would live to see the gradually crumbling structure of the huge casino becoming an eye sore for many years before being demolished and replaced by a shopping mall.
Prohibition proved to be a devastating blow for the country’s economy. It failed miserably to achieve its stated objective: elimination of alcohol consumption in the country. Instead, it simply pushed the alcohol trade underground boosting sales of illicit liquor. It thus deprived the country of billions of rupees in taxes on legal sale of beverages. It had a disastrous impact on the inflow of tourists in Pakistan, especially from rich gulf countries, who brought in millions of dollars to spend here. This, in turn, forced the foreign airlines to curtail and then cease their flights to Pakistan wiping out the significant amount of fees and charges they were contributing to the local airport authorities. Prohibition forced tens of thousands of peoples employed by the entertainment industry, hotels, clubs and foreign airlines to lose their jobs. In the long run, it served to seriously hurt the country’s exports industry as it provided a continuing comparative advantage to countries offering more congenial surroundings to the prospective buyers abroad for holding negotiations or discussions with local customers.
The thee-member PPP and PNA teams finally met on the evening of 1st July and emerged at 6:30 the next morning with a ‘final accord’, to be approved by the PNA Central Council. The Central Council however proposed a few more points as a condition of its approval which were insignificant but required approval of cabinet. On the evening of 4th July, Bhutto met with his key cabinet members and General Ziaul Haq. He announced afterwards that he would break the deadlock next day. That day never came.
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(10)
General Ziaul Haq staged a coup to take over power in the early hours of 5th July. True to form till the end, he told Bhutto on telephone, “I am sorry, Sir, I had to do it . . . . We have to hold you in protective custody for a while. But in ninety days I’ll hold new elections. You’ll be elected Prime Minister again, of course, Sir, and I’ll be saluting you.” He was to stay in power for a little more than eleven years.
Bhutto was provided full protocol and driven in his black Mercedes to Murree’s hilltop military rest house. His prime minister’s staff was there to welcome him and he was told that he was being held only for “protective custody”. Zia went to meet him there a week later and assured him that this was a temporary stay only during which, “he should rest and recoup.” Zia met him again on 15th July and now Bhutto was blunt reminding him that, “the constitution called for the death penalty for any officer who toppled a government by force.” With these words, Bhutto effectively dug his own grave. It confirmed to Zia in no uncertain terms what he already suspected: “unless he lived to see Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto dead he himself would not live very long.” As he later told a fellow general, “There are two bodies and one grave.” Bhutto’s personal staff was removed the next day.
Outwardly however Ziaul Haq continued to act in a remarkably conciliatory and pacifying manner. In a broadcast to the nation on 27th July, Zia promised to hold elections in October. The next day he met Bhutto at his Murree rest house and told him that he was free. The prime minister’s falcon jet was placed at his disposal to fly him back to Larkana where he rested for a few days before proceeding to Karachi. A huge crowd welcomed him at the Karachi train station and took him in a long procession to his home at 70, Clifton. He received the same rousing welcome from public in Lahore and Rawalpindi. Unknown to him, his day of reckoning was inching closer.
Bhutto was arrested from his Karachi home on 3rd September on several charges of murder and other high crimes. Released briefly on bail the next day, he was rearrested shortly after midnight on 17th September. He would not look at the sky as a free man ever again. The elections, scheduled to be held in October, were now postponed, “until the process of accountability was completed.”
Bhutto was brought to face a trial at the Lahore High Court for conspiring to murder Ahmad Raza Kasuri. The panel of five judges was presided by Maulvi Mushtaq Hussain who had been twice before passed over by Bhutto to become Chief Justice in favour of justices junior to him. Mushtaq Hussain handpicked the other four judges and was openly harsh and rude towards him during the trial. Bhutto was found guilty as charged by a unanimous decision of its five members and sentenced to death in March 1978. The sentence was appealed in the Supreme Court of Pakistan, the highest court in the country, which ruled on 6 February 1979 by a majority of four to three, to dismiss the appeal. Mercy petitions and pleas were received from many heads of state but rejected summarily by Ziaul Haq because, as he confided to his interior secretary Roedad Khan, “It’s either his neck or mine.”
At 2:00 A.M. on 4 April 1979, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was taken from his death cell to gallows in Rawalpindi’s prison and hanged. His body was flown early morning to his home town of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh and received by his first wife, Shireen. He was buried in his ancestral graveyard next to his father, Sir Shah Nawaz the same day.
“No! the scream burst through the knots in my throat,” recalled Benazir Bhutto later. “Papa! Papa! I felt cold, so cold, in spite of the heat, and couldn’t stop shaking. There was nothing my mother and I could say to console each other. . . . ”
Khalid Hasan, Bhutto’s press secretary and by no means his critic, once wrote: “ZAB had all the makings of a classical hero, carrying the seeds of self-destruction within him – he was a flawed genius, a god who turned out to have feet of clay . . . . ZAB had many personal failings, including an inability to trust others, a congenital suspicion of friends and high sensitivity to personal criticism . . . . Bhutto forgot that power in order to be kept, must be dispersed.”
“Had he been less greedy,” added Wolpert, “less suspicious, less mistrustful or insecure, he would most likely have won a majority, even if not two-thirds of the seats in the national assembly, and might still be alive today at the helm of Pakistan Peoples’ Party government. No more popular leader has yet emerged from the soil of Sindh or Punjab or the harsh and rugged Frontier, none more admired, even ‘worshipped’ by the impoverished peasants and simple labourers than Quaid-e-Awam Bhutto. But no one was more feared or hated either . . . . “
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