Rehman Sahib
17 April 2021
I first met Ibne Abdur Rehman, Rehman sahib to everyone who knew him, in January 1989. It could have been sometime later, but that really is of no consequence. As an avid newspaper reader, I was acquainted with his work both as journalist and as human rights crusader as well as his activism in the dark days of the longest martial law of our sorry history. It was not without a degree of awe that I entered his office at Pakistan Times and introduced myself.
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| With Rehman sahib and Mahboob Ali, the only woodcut artist in Pakistan |
Only months earlier, I had foolishly invested everything we had in those infamous ‘investment companies’ and lost my last rupee within three months. Incidentally, the company I invested with was Alliance, owned and run by a bunch of bearded mullahs of the Tablighi Jamat. So much for these spurious claims to lay down lives for the honour of prophet hood! Shabnam and I were completely impoverished in the name of religion as practiced in Pakistan and we had borrowed from friends in Karachi to move back to Lahore.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:55,
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Major Munir Ahmad
06 January 2021
My first battery commander was Maj (later Lt Col) Bashir Ahmed. A Dhariwal Jat, tall and impressive, he was a fine, professional soldier. I learned much from him in the few months I spent in his command. Thereafter I, as a lieutenant, commanded the battery until early in 1974, word was received that Maj Munir Ahmed had been posted to the regiment.
Since my battery was the only one without a commander he was coming my way. As things go, reputations precede and the word I received was of a very stern disciplinarian who brooked not the slightest shade of misdemeanour. He was, in a word, a true terror.
Labels: Men at Their Best, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 11:19,
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Major Sharif, Punjab Regiment
25 March 2020
The story of my six and half year-long career in the army can be described in one word: Quixotic.
I never did anything right. I was always getting into mischief. And, worst of all, I had the tactless habit of talking back to my seniors. In this case this was mostly the adjutant who hated me with a vengeance.
Unsurprisingly, I was promoted captain a year later than my course-mates. That meant officers a course junior to me were also promoted, and I was steadfastly stuck in the lieutenant rut. I have no recollection now why or how I became a captain, but I did in April 1975 when I had completed three years of service.
Read more »Labels: People, Salman Rashid
posted by Salman Rashid @ 14:24,
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THE CHILD WITHOUT DREAMS
10 December 2018
L first met Shahdad Marri in March 2010. It was his third or fourth day in kindergarten school. He had still not received his uniform, but that was understandable. Stranger yet was that Shahdad of Kohlu town was then 11 years old.
The eldest of seven siblings whose father worked as a daily wage earning labourer, Shahdad had never been to school. In Kohlu, virtually a one-horse town then cut off from the rest of the country because of very poor, unpaved road connections, there were few opportunities for his father to employ himself gainfully. He daily went to the town square and waited to be hired to help either at a building site or on a farm. What he made at the end of a 12-hour day — if he was hired — was a pittance.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, People, Shahdad Marri
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:16,
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OBITUARY: THE NAIPAUL I KNEW
09 September 2018
It was September 1995 when Nadira (then Alvi) phoned me and said V.S. Naipaul was in town and that I should see him. I refused. Why, he was an abrasive, disagreeable old man who had destroyed journalist Nusrat Nusrullah in his book Among the Believers. I didn’t want the same done to myself.
No, said Nadi. I had to be myself and since I always was, I would hit it off with him. It was after much coaxing that I agreed. In fact, I took a couple of days telling her I was busy with something or the other. And then I said I couldn’t because I was going away to Islamabad. Good, said Nadi because he was already there and since we were going to be in the same hotel it would be easy.
Read more »Labels: About, People, Sir Vidya Naipaul, Travel Literature, Travel Writer, Travel Writing
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:56,
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Haji Machhli
04 November 2017
It was in 1989, the month was October. I had attempted to climb Takht e Suleman outside Zhob but lying in South Waziristan. But I failed. I failed because I did not believe that a mountain can be without springs of fresh water. Takht e Suleman is just such a mountain and I aborted halfway up dehydrated.
With a day and a half for the flight to Dera Ismail Khan, I was wandering about the bazaar having green tea and conversations at every tea shop when I heard of Haji Machhli. My informant said he had a treasure trove of artefacts from the time of ‘Sikander e Azam’. I asked directions and walked through streets dusty as they can be only in autumn and was soon standing outside a rather beat two-storeyed building that in the dark of the evening seemed mud-plastered.
Read more »Labels: People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 09:38,
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'Hello, sir. Hello, Jimmy Carter'
04 August 2017
I first met him in the summer of 1979. I was walking down the stairway in either the city courts building or the metropolitan building of Karachi and he was on the way up. He wore a Coast Guards uniform with a subedar's two pips on his shoulders and his chest was a blaze of World War II ribbons. I, fresh out of the army, knew what the colourful ribbons meant and could recognise all of them. He wore the War Medal 1939-45, Africa Star and Burma Star. There were, besides, the Independence medal, the 1956 Constitution medal, Kashmir medal (1948) and the 1965 medals. He would have then retired for he did not have anything to show for the 1971 conflict. As he looked up, he caught me staring at his chest. The man saluted - a proper salute too, 'Hello, sir,' he said and I for a fleeting moment thought we knew each other. But then he quickly added 'Hello, Jimmy Carter!'
I returned his greeting with 'Hello, sahib,' the way we addressed Junior Commissioned Officers in the army. He was a right garrulous, jovial character and was chirping away as soon as our greeting was over. Every passerby who so much as glanced in his direction interrupted our conversation for they would be saluted with a hello either as 'sir' or 'Jimmy Carter'. Now, that was the time when the peanut farmer Carter was the president of USA whose name had somehow caught the fancy of our subedar from Coast Guards. I wasn't the only one to be called that name. We must have stood on the stairway chatting for a good few minutes before he took his leave telling me to come see him at the Coast Guards officers mess in Ingle Road where he was the mess JCO. He said we could have a cup of tea together.
Labels: Humour in Uniform, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 11:02,
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Killer Trains, Petrol Looters and Darwin Awards
22 July 2017
‘Train Kills Three at Level Crossing.’ This was a newspaper item some days ago. Semi-literate journalists who have never read a book in their lives and will never amount to anything in life write such headlines. Having got an MA (Journalism) by cramming three worthless pamphlets – and they are indeed worthless and nothing more than rags – their heads are so full of themselves that there is no room for anything else to get into those emptinesses. Least of all any real knowledge.
These pea-brained specimens belong to a race that should by the theory of Natural Selection have gone extinct centuries ago, but Pakistan being a country where only such pieces survive and indeed get to the top of the heap, they have thrived. These morons do not understand that a train travelling at, say, 60 km/h has such huge momentum that if the driver slams on the brakes upon seeing a moron on a motorcycle rickshaw trying to dash across the line, it is impossible to stop the train. It’s the train’s momentum that cannot, simply not, make it stop.
posted by Salman Rashid @ 12:48,
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The Cobbler From Ghulamullah
09 July 2017
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| Narain hard at work in his shop |
Here I am polishing people’s shoes and there she goes gadding about with her friends!” Narain laughed and looked up from the shoe he was repairing in the main bazaar of Ghulamullah town in Thatta district. He said he also told his wife that her pilgrimage to Sri Mata Hinglaj was nothing but a gallavanting tour because she had gone with her friends, leaving her elderly parents at home.
Two years ago, having met young Kamini, Narain had successfully wooed and wedded her: she a native of Lea Market in Karachi; he of a village just outside Ghulamullah. The two had a great few weeks together in the ‘outback’ of the Thatta district. But then Kamini began to pester him to move to Karachi with her. Narain was adamant on staying for how could he leave his widowed mother and his elder brother in the village all by themselves?
Anyway, said the man, since he had got the 30,000 rupee loan from the NGO, he was prospering as a shoe shop owner. When I met him this past April, Narain had already repaid his debt and was thinking of getting a bigger loan to enlarge his business further.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 12:20,
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Munawar Mirza
20 June 2017
My friend who told me of Mirza had lived in Township since before the start of time on this side of Lahore. That is, since 1974 when it first came into being over wheat fields and forest and when the Hadiara Nadi was still a clear, freshwater rivulet where one could fish for rahu. Mirza Sahib (as I address this fifty plus man with dyed hair and moustaches), is talkative as talkative can ever be. And when he talks, his hands stop working. Consequently, a job that would take thirty minutes lasts well over an hour.
posted by Salman Rashid @ 11:35,
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Celebrating Real Heroes
27 May 2017
Urdu article that appeared in Armed Forces Monthly Magazine Hilal.
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Labels: People, Telling a Story, Urdu
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The old man of Ghund
26 May 2017
When he was finally himself again, Baba Ghundi told the woman that under no circumstances was she to leave her home because he was bringing down a flood of mud and stones to destroy the evil folk of Chapursan. For her kindness, she alone was to be spared.
Chapursan is a right picturesque valley that stretches from the Karakoram Highway at Sost a full sixty kilometres westward to the watershed of the 5185 metre-high Chilinji Pass. Well-watered by many silvery streams and fertilised by the fine loam left behind by a glacier that melted perhaps about four hundred years ago, Chapursan has rich farmlands and orchards. The people, of old Kirghiz stock who speak Wakhi, a language that descends from archaic Persian, are notable for their extreme hardihood and cheerfulness.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Lovelorn Poet
12 May 2017
As we lounged over tea in the little inn below Ajri Kandao, the poet caught up with us again. The haunting, faraway look was still there as he quietly came in and sat to one side of the single room inn. Wordlessly cradling his cup of tea in both hands he started to sip without looking up at anyone. Wazir Mohammed who sports the nom de plume of Sha’ir Wazir Mohammed Zakhmi, had to be coaxed into speaking.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Kaghan, Northern Pakistan, People, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Wonder Woman of Dadu
17 April 2017
The land around village Kabir Panhwar, a few kilometres from Johi in Dadu district, has remained unirrigated and uncultivated for centuries. Only hardy desert trees can grow in its sandy soil. Amid the prosopis and acacia, the thorny mesquite provides rich and poor alike with excellent fuelwood. The only patches of cultivation that one sees are owned by landowners who have their own tubewells. The landless of Kabir Panhwar and nearby villages can either work on the farms of the rich or, if they are free-spirited, can be wood cutters. The remarkable Laalan Khatoon used to be among the latter.
Every two or three days, Laalan would hire a donkey cart, spend the whole day hacking away at the mesquite even as the thorns cut her skin and tore her clothing to make a cartload of firewood. In Johi she would sell the load for 1,000 rupees. Paying cart rental at 200 rupees per day she would share the rest of the profit with whoever partnered with her, each person ending up with, on average, a little under 300 rupees per day.
Read more »Labels: People, Profile, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The illiterate Engineer
30 March 2017
Seventy years old, he is a brick layer by profession, trained in the craft by his father who, he says, was an ustad - a master mason and teacher of the art. Apprenticeship began when he was still very young and it was a couple of years before Independence that Din Mohammed worked on his first construction site independently. But there was something that must have set the young man apart from his peers, and that surely was an insatiable curiosity - something that would have been lost on a society that cares little for such things. “In those days there was more traffic on the branch line from Larkana to Jacobabad and the wheezing black locomotives drew me like magic,” he says. Consequently, whenever there were a few minutes to spare Din Mohammed would go to the railway station to watch the dark behemoths shunting back and forth.
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Bull and the Boulder
16 March 2017
Through the night the gusting wind kept at it. At sometime after five the sun broke through the shackling layers of gray haze and appeared as a pale yellow disc levitating just above the horizon. It was time to take the short walk to the crest of the ridge of Bail Pathar.
I am no mountaineer and though I’ve been in some high places, I have never actually climbed a real peak. But one thing I know: even insignificant peaks, simply by their very nature of being peaks and therefore higher than the surrounding ground, offer something more than just great views. It was here where long before the dawn of history primitive man placed his gods. Peaks were sacred. Whether it be the puny Miranjani near Nathiagali; or the 4800 metre Deo nau Thuk (Peak of the Jinn) on Deosai; or Musa ka Musallah in Kaghan; or Ilam in Swat; or Kutte ji Qabar (The Dog’s Grave) in the Khirthar Mountains; or Takht e Suleman, they, one and all, were revered places. Those were places for man to approach in worshipful and reverent state of mind, perhaps with an offering or two for whatever gods man believed in.
Labels: People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Boat Business
15 March 2017
‘My family never gave up building boats since they built the ark of Hazrat Nuh!’ Ghulam Arabi did not so much as bat an eyelid making this startling disclosure. Then he went on to tell me that before the time of the prophet who saved mankind from the Deluge, ship-building was unknown. As irrefutable finality of that statement, Ghulam Arabi cited the Quran.
For added authenticity he said even his great-grandfather was a boatwright. I did not point out that between his great-grandfather and Hazrat Nuh there must have been several thousand years. Quick to see the doubt in my eyes, he said that since his family knows only this craft, it has long been suspected that they go back to those biblical times. That was arithmetic at its simplest, and I could hardly quarrel with it. At forty Ghulam Arabi, having learned the trade at his late father’s knee, himself had twenty-five years of boat-building experience.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Grand Canyon of Sindh
13 March 2017
Here is a rift in the Kirthar Mountains west of Ghaibi Dero (seat of the Chandio Nawab) with walls 200 metres high and a blue-green stream of considerable depth at the bottom. Where the rift opens up at the southern end, the stream, too, fans out to form a lovely tarn. In this placid sheet of water, there lives a colony of gavials. The whole place is straight out of the wildest imagination of a designer of film sets.
Our guide and mentor was the unbeatable Hasil Chandio of the tiny settlement of Rahu jo Aitho. It was a goodly walk from his village to Toshangi and we had to stay overnight in Lohira with Hasil’s kinsfolk. Early on that March morning, we climbed up a large knob of rock to marvel at this remarkable chasm. Created first, perhaps, by an earthquake and then enlarged by millions of years of flowing water, it was indeed a grand canyon.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Walk the old city of Peshawar
09 January 2017
In the Bazaar Qissa Khwaan (popularly Qissa Khwani), opposite the lane leading into Mohallah Jehangirpura, there stands a pair of marble cupolas. The plaque below commemorates the patriots who laid down their lives on the twenty-third day of April 1930. That was when the freedom movement took off in Peshawar. As the demonstrators reached this point in the bazaar, a heavy police picket opposed them. Then as the sides stood facing each other down, there came from the side of the cantonment an armoured car that drove right into the rioters as Raj authorities would have called them or the patriots as we like to say.
Then all hell broke loose. The authorities opened fire and many died. That was what made it to the history books. What never merited recording was the story of the boy not yet past his tenth year who had come to watch the demonstration. He stood to one side of the surging crowd and when the first volley was fired was as terrified out of his wits as any ten year-old should be. Ducking quickly under the shop-front ledge that extended over the gutter running along the side of the street, he could only get himself partially under cover.
Read more »Labels: History, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Borderline Sanity
26 December 2016
I am a fraud. But the kind that does not hurt others. I am a fraud in order to empathise with others in conditions worse than me.
Several years ago, Salman Aslam (Lt Col, retired) the secretary of our course sent out a text message asking for my email address so that I too be a part of the course yahoorgroup. Unthinkingly I forwarded my address to him.
Now, that was the beginning of the group and everyone of us formerly Gentlemen Cadets now retired officers (even deserters like me) was required to send in their bios. Salman had, very thoughtfully, created a form for us to fill. Among other items, it contained a notification of one’s illnesses, surgeries etc.
Since our course was expanded (not in duration but in intake) because of the 1971 war, we had passed out some four hundred and forty from PMA in April 1972. Now, at the fag end of their lives, all those energetic, fresh-faced young cadets, some of who could run the mile in under five minutes (hear that, Sikander Afzal? Admire my memory, chum.) had a litany of medical complaints.
Read more »Labels: About, Men at Their Best, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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