An Obituary of an Ordinary Life

Waheed said good bye to this world on Monday, the 25th April 2016. Decades of heavy smoking, unhealthy food and complete lack of physical exercise had led to a weakened heart that he failed to protect through an indifferent attitude to medical advice. His fragile and limited sources of income compounded his difficulties. The regressive middle class values, that have hindered the progress of millions of Pakistanis, coupled with incomplete education and inadequate vocational skills, served to keep him weighted down on the lower rungs of social and economic ladder. His ailing heart had been diagnosed a decade earlier as too weak to undergo an angioplasty to open up his clogged arteries. Over the previous two months, his condition, and circumstances, had become very precarious due to a triple fracture of his hip bone that he sustained due to a fall outside his home on a patch of street that usually remained slippery due to poor cleanliness. He never walked or got up from his bed again. He was taken to hospital but the doctors found him, once again, physically unfit to undergo surgery to fix metal plates and screws that would have allowed him to be back on his feet. He went to his grave with a broken hip and an ailing heart. I learnt about his demise at 2 p.m. I had recently come back after an yearlong stay overseas and was juggling my time between load shedding, drafting, printing and emailing to reconnect with my clients to reactivate my software sales and training business. On this particular day, I was finding myself unable to cope with my various engagements. I had been out in the city since morning on an urgent business engagement to conclude a contract. It had prevented me from collecting my new car from the showroom. I had told the sales person that I could not take possession of my car before 1500 hours, when I thought I would be free. Later in the afternoon, I had to go to fetch my wife from Kamra in Attock district, where she was visiting our daughter. I couldn’t help but notice the acute difference between my unending engagements, and his state of complete and undisturbed rest amidst mayhem of wailing family members. I travelled with a saddened and gloomy heart. The funeral prayers, I learnt, were to take place after Esha prayers at quarter to nine at a mosque near his home. My younger brother had sent his driver to pick me up. Showing good sense, he had dispatched him on a motorcycle. We made it to the mosque about five minutes before the funeral prayers. In a car, we couldn’t have negotiated the narrow lanes of low middle class neighbourhood of Krishan Nagar fast enough to reach in time. After the prayers the Imam lifted the veil of the burial cloth and I saw for the last time the face that I had known so intimately. I recalled all the traits of his personality; his usual obstinacy, occasional obduracy and everlasting love, the typical traits of the youngest sibling. Our lives had taken starkly different trajectories since our friendship began over five and a half decades ago, when we were starting our lives and were living under very similar conditions. We had a lot of shared past; some that I can recount here, other that I dare not. We used to make efforts to meet when the opportunity came. We used to talk to each other about our lives without inhibitions. He moved from Karachi to Lahore some thirty years ago, built a small house for himself in Krishan Nagar and started working for a carpet exporter. He was making a decent living but never had enough to enjoy a good comfortable life. I used to go to his home with my family whenever I was in Lahore. Initially I used to go in my car but when the volume of the traffic increased and travel in a four wheeler on the narrow streets leading to his house became an ordeal, I started going on a borrowed motorbike. Later, due to certain family circumstances, the visits started becoming less frequent and far between till they ceased altogether. We had not been to each other’s house for the previous five years. The last time I saw him was in Karachi on 19th December, 2014, on the occasion of a marriage in the family. We had pledged to meet again in Lahore but I left for abroad in early 2015 for a long stay and came back in early 2016. Due to some commitments (Oh! How these, ultimately frivolous commitments never end!), I had gone to Lahore only once since my arrival from abroad and that too for a day only to see my mother, and despite thinking about it, couldn't find the time to go and see him. Old friendships, like old soldiers, never die but slowly fade away. This obituary is a tale of ordinary people belonging to a close knit artisan family, about their socio-economic transformation over a relatively small timeframe of five decades, the scattering of their various branches during the partition of Punjab in 197 and about the role of education in quickly lifting a family from ignorance and poverty to highest standards. It would, therefore, be incomplete without going into our family history. Our forefathers migrated from Kashmir to Amritsar to avoid economic hardship. Kashmir and The Punjab were two separate independent states at that time, with well defined boundaries, the former ruled by Abdali/Durrani Pathans and the latter by a fiercely strong Sikh statesman. My ancestry reads as Parvez Mahmood (I, the author of this piece.)) s/o Mahmood Sadiq (siblings Ghulam Sadiq, Mahmood Sadiq, Irshad Hassan and Manzoor Hassan) s/o Ameer Bakhsh (siblings Ghulam Nabi, Ameer Bakhsh, Ameer Begum, Ghulam Muhammad (Father of Waheed), Ghulam Fatima) s/o Peer Bakhsh s/o Muhammad Shaikh s/o Saddique Shaikh. The last mentioned forefather belonged to Hindu faith, and was the one to migrate from Kashmir and convert to Islam. Unfortunately his Hidnu name is lost. Taking an average of 30 years per generation, this places our ancestor’s migration close to the year 1820, a time when, following the defeat of its Afghan rulers by Ranjit Singh at the battle of Shopian in 1819, the political and social life of Kashmir went through a profound change. Incorporation of the State in the Punjab allowed thousands of Kashmiris to settle in the adjoining areas of the Sikh state in Gurdaspur, Sialkot, Narowal, Gujranwala, Ludhiana, Amritsar and Lahore. My father had gathered and remembered a good deal of family history but, unfortunately and strangely, he never got down to writing it, even though he was a keen diarist. According to him, as narrated to me at a young age, some of the family members were simply ‘coolies’ and were called ‘Haȶo Log’. While carrying heavy loads on their backs along the undulating roads of cities in Kashmir, the coolies would keep shouting ‘hatto’, with a soft ‘t’, Kashmiri for ‘get aside’, so that they could keep moving. Stopping and restarting with a sack weighing a ton on their back, sometimes supported by a string around their head, must have been quite difficult. Those who heard them, started calling them ‘Haȶo Log'. Most members of our family were petty artisans such as ‘qali-gars’ (utensil polishers), ‘rafo-gars’ (carpet menders), tailors, jewelers. The members of paternal branch of my father were ‘rafoo-gars’, carpet and shawl weaving being cottage industries in Kashmir. Waheed’s father, like his elder brother (My grandfather) and their father before them, was a carpet ‘rafoo-gar’ but had mastered the various aspects of carpet weaving, knowledge that served him well to settle early, and comfortably, in the difficult days following the partition of 1947. On the other hand, this success made him so secure that, instead of educating his sons, he made them learn the fading art of carpet mending. He, and his sons, didn’t value the promise of good education. Lacking education and profitable skills, they were neither able to make a comfortable living nor to give good education to their own children. The only exception being Waheed’s elder brother, Hameed, who passed his B.Com to become an accountant but he also did not study further to his full promise. My grandfather, Ameer Baksh, died young in 1926. My father, second of four brothers, was only four years old at that time. My grandmother, Shahmali alias Wazir Begum, became dependent on her brothers, who had moved on from being ‘qali-gars to be come successful wholesale traders of cloth. They were, in fact, the only Muslims in the city cloth market dominated by Sikhs and Hindus. My grandmother’s living with them allowed her to educate her children. My elder uncle, Ghulam Sadiq, did his Intermediate Science and became a ‘Guard’ in the North Western Railways, the section that comprised the railway network north of Lahore. My father and a younger uncle, Irshad Hassan, did their matriculation and joined Amritsar Railway Workshop. The youngest uncle, Manzoor Hassan, who was born a few months after the death of his father, completed his matriculation and began earning his livelihood in Pakistan after Partition. The off-springs of all the four brothers were to go on higher levels of education and economic success. I occasionally wonder that had our grandfather lived out his normal span of life, his children and grandchildren, including me and my brothers, who have done well in life (and are even able to reflect back on life and write this article), would probably have followed careers in carpet mending or jewelry, or, at best, in accounting/ledger keeping. Waheed’s father was the younger brother of my paternal grandfather. Due to incredible age differences in large families, Waheed was my father’s cousin but just about two years my senior, hence our friendship. My father was very close to Waheed’s family. In the late 1930s, Waheed’s father moved out of Amritsar, first to Delhi and then to Calcutta, in search of better opportunities. From Calcutta, he boarded a ship and landed in the British colonial city of Singapore, where there was a sizeable Indian community. He did well there selling carpets to the British soldiers stationed in the Island city and to the large number of naval and merchant sailors visiting the busy port. The world, however, suddenly spun out of control and took a turn for the worse. World War II broke out in 1939. The Japanese occupiedthe city in early 1942 and Neta Jee Subhas Chandar Bose began setting up his Indian National Army to fight the British. Not only the Indian POWs but every young able-bodied Indian in the Malaysian Peninsula was pressed into this new force. Sensing the danger, and free of any national or political leanings, Waheed’s father left the city, vanished in the country side and settled in a small Chinese village. He was to remain there for the duration of the War, incommunicado with his family, for the next five odd years. He also contracted a marriage with a local girl and had two children, a girl and a boy. The marriage saved his life by allowing him to melt in to local village folks. Back in Amritsar, the family assumed that he had become a victim of Japanese cruelty. All his children born till that time, two sons, Abdul Rauf and Abdul Hameed, and two daughters, Arshad and Rahat, were very young and school going. In these dire times, my father, who was himself only 20 years old, assumed the responsibility of taking care of the family. He had joined the Railway Workshop and was earning the princely sum of Rs. 46/ per month. The food items were scarce because the British Prime Minister Churchill had ordered the shipment of every conceivable consumable and edible thing for the Allied Army, causing severe shortages in India that led to a catastrophic famine of 1943 in the Bengal. Being in government service, my father had developed useful links with the local civil administration and would procure wheat flour and sugar for the entire family. He would also ensure that the children of the missing uncle go to school regularly and pay attention to their studies instead of loitering around. Waheed’s elder brother, Hameed, who was the only one amongst his siblings to get educated and became an accountant, would always acknowledge that except for the efforts and care of our father, he would have given up studies. After the reoccupation of Singapore by the British in late 1945, Waheed’s father was able to send a telegram about his well-being. He came back in early 1946 when it became possible for passenger ships to resume service. After his arrival, he broke the news of his second marriage that brought much anguish to the family. He moved to Delhi soon after in connection with his carpet business. He had planned to go back to Singapore but the political events in the sub-continent, followed by the mass migration of the entire family to Pakistan thwarted his plans. He never talked about his second family but he did once remorsefully recall that his daughter, who was about three years old when he repatriated, was very attached to him and wouldn’t go to sleep unless he held her close to him. Partition of the sub-continent was a tragic affair for the people of all faiths. For over three months, there was arson and bloodshed in the whole of Punjab. The soul of the calamitous events is admirably captured by Amrita Pritum in her laments titled ‘Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu’. Law and order broke down in Amritsar very quickly. Friends and neighbours turned on each other. Hall Bazaar in Amritsar was destroyed by fire, as were many other shops and markets and there were knife attacks on daily basis. Homemade bombs were lobbed against unsuspecting passers-by. Our family ran for life with a little of their belongings. Luckily, they all made it to the railway station. Those who decided against early departure faced the brunt of Sikh brutality. After migration to Pakistan, Waheed’s father landed in the village of Sukhkho, on the Gujar Khan – Chakwal road. I am hazy about the reasons for his moving to this out of the way place, but it must have been the lure of carpet weaving that took him there. There was, however, no work there and, to support the family, her elder daughter, Arshad (my future chachi), worked there as a teacher in the local school. They stayed there for a few months before moving to Lahore. A Kashmiri carpet manufacturer from Amritsar had set up a factory in Landhi Karachi by the name of Bokhara Palace, and was looking for someone of experience to take care of the fledgling manufacturing unit. They knew Waheed's father from his days in Amritsar and immediately hired him and made all possible offers, including a spacious free accommodation, to induce him to travel to and settle in the alien city of Karachi in the migrant town of Landhi-Korangi. His double trauma of Japanese ordeal and migration upheaval was finally over. He was to spend the next thirty years in that town, where four of his children are buried. The contact between these two branches of my family became stronger after partition. Both of Waheed’s sisters were married to my younger uncles, Irshad and Manzoor. Waheed’s elder brother, Abdul Rasheed, was born in India after his father’s return from Singapore while Waheed was born in Karachi in 1950. Having worked at low paying jobs in Lahore and Rawalpindi, both my uncles, Waheed’s brothers-in-laws, my chachas moved to Karachi in the early 1960's to work in the same carpet factory in white collared clerical positions and took up residence in the low cost quarters built by the government in Landhi for the migrants from India. Waheed and I became friends at an early age. His parents used to visit Lahore from Karachi every year and we two, being of the same age, would play and roam about together. Our friendship blossomed when I got commissioned in the Air Force in January, 1974 and was posted to Karachi. I was working in shifts and had plenty of time off. I would hitch rides in the public transport and spend time in Landhi with Waheed and the families of my uncles. His parents were living in a three room apartment on top of the office block within the factory. It was an airy place. My Arshad Chachi (Waheed’s sister) and her family, who were residing in the same building as my family, would visit her parents in Karachi every year during the school summer break. In 1962, when I was ten years old, she took me along. Landhi-Korangi area was sparsely inhabited at the time.. No public transport connected the locality with the city and it would be completely deserted after sunset. There were very few buildings from Darul Uloom till DHA Phase I. Without a bridge over the Malir River, the road across was frequently under water, forcing transports to stop on either side till the water receded. I was there when the first GTS bus ran from Saddar to Landhi. We all went on the roof to witness its arrival and could see the bus from miles away across the then barren landscape. The people were happy that they could avail a cheaper passage to the Saddar/Bohri Bazaar shopping areas. One serious disadvantage, with far reaching adverse consequences, of living in Landhi was that the area had no good schools or colleges. Sadly, the situation in this regard has not improved since then. Living in city centre Lahore, I and my brothers went to the best of schools which catapulted us to higher standards of life within a generation. The single story small houses constructed for the migrant families, and given away practically free, were all similarly built and had pre-fabricated corrugated roofs. Very few of these houses are now in their original state with most of them been converted to double story structures. Subsequently, Waheed’s family, including his four brothers and two brothers-in-law (both my younger chachas), were to get six of these houses allotted between them in sector 36-B. Three of these are still occupied by their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. I, and my brothers, visit them whenever we are in Karachi on some official, business or family commitment. During me posting in Karachi from early 1974 to late 1976, my favourite past time in Waheed’s home was cooking my favourite dishes. Waheed’s mother, whom I addressed as ‘Dadi Amma’ (grandma) used to jealously guard her kitchen but would let me loose there. I would make my favourite dishes, specially minced meat stuffed bitter gourds (karelas), which everyone would eat with relish. Dadi Amma was very particular about cleaning her house. She would have all her carpets rolled, furniture shifted and the floors washed every day. We couldn’t understand the need to do it every day but no one could argue with her. Everything was dusted properly and not a speck of dust was found anywhere. She would keep her clothes closets in perfect order. I still admire the cleaning lady, who came to work there, for her patience. There were scores of carpet weaving looms in the factory where children, women and men worked at paltry wages. The factory would come alive at about eight o’clock and would remain active till late in the afternoon. There was a small pool in the factory to store water for the extensive scrubbing and washing of new carpets. We two would frequently take a dip in this rather deep pool for long times. I enjoyed swim there more than in the palm lined swimming pool of the Officer’s Mess in the Air base. Waheed and I would talk about everything under the sun and stay awake till late in the night. I used to urge him to study further for a BA or B.Com degree but he had given up on studies. While I was there, he got married. I moved out of Karachi in September, 1976. He also moved to Lahore soon thereafter. His parents moved with him and died in the early 1980s. They are buried in Lahore. I continued to visit Waheed at his home with my family very often. He was working for one of the nephews of the owners of the Landhi carpet factory. He worked in the same place for the rest of his life. Waheed is survived by one son and two daughters. His elder son was a special child and died at the age of about ten. The surviving son is, unfortunately, poorly educated, unskilled and poorly employed. His younger daughter is happily married but his elder daughter has had a difficult life. She was married to her paternal cousin, son of Rasheed. The boy is not educated and worked at very low paying jobs. Frequent quarrels resulted in a divorce. Both the boy and the girl were remarried but their second marriages again resulted in divorces. Consequently, the elders of the family got them remarried to each other. They have a daughter from their first marriage who is in her early teens now. Because of my father’s determination and his unwavering belief in good education, we siblings, and our careers and circumstances, continued to rise rapidly; in stark contrast to the undistinguished and indifferent circumstances of his uncle’s off springs, resulting in a huge social and economic gulf between our two families that were once very close, and similar, in the long gone past days of pre-partition India. One clear indication of this schism is that while two of my uncles got married to two of Waheed’s sisters a generation ago, no such unions have taken place among the children and grandchildren of my father and the off springs of his uncle (Waheed’s father). I feel a surge of guilt, remorse and self-reproach in not seeing Waheed in his last days. I should have shown a better sense of affection, respect and responsibility, and visited him when I had learnt of his fractured hip to see if he needed my help. In a way, my father was a greater man than me. In his youth, he had taken care of his uncle’s family and later he gave me another valuable lesson. I recall a bicycle ride with my father in early 1960s. He took me from our home in Pani Wala Talab, all the way via Chuburji and Ferozepur Road, to over the Walton railway crossing (there was no overhead bridge at that time). Then he turned right on a dirt road along the railway line towards opposite Kot Lakhpat, where the nascent Qainchee colony was taking shape. (It is called Qainchee, or scissors, because Walton road meets Ferozepur road here at a very acute angle). In the distance, he spotted a ‘Chabri’ frosh and whispered that he has found the man he was looking for. We reached near and I could the man selling some sweets and toffees etc in a round cane basket. My father embraced the man, who looked extremely sad, gloomy and cheerless. There were hollows on his cheeks and sadness in his eyes. We were taken to a nearby hut where this man, his wife and a young child lived. My father, with me in tow, sat on a charpai bed. He wanted to speak but words failed him. With his hands he gestured round the hut in a questioning manner. The man looked around and his eyes welled up with tears. My father started crying too. I understood little but started crying myself. The woman probably didn’t understand the gravity of the emotions and kept making tea. “This is all that I could manage.” the man said. “Didn’t you go and ask him to return your gold?” my father asked. “I did.” He said, “But he says that he didn’t take anything and that he has set up the shop with his own resources.” They chatted for a while. Then my father got up, took out some money and gave it to the boy. We slowly rode back. On the way, I asked my father who the man was. He said that he was a far off relative who had a thriving gold jewelry shop in Delhi. During the partition, when the great mayhem started and the Hindu gangs went on a killing spree of Muslims, this man left his shop in the care of one of his assistants and ran home to save his family. Unfortunately, the family was killed before he could extricate them to the safety of the Red Fort, where a large number of Muslims had taken refuge. Seeing that the Hindu crowds would vandalize the shop, his assistant packed away as much gold as he could and ran away. Later he would set up his own jewelry shop in Lahore's Suha (gold) Bazaar, refusing to admit that he stole anything from the Delhi shop, whose original owner, grief stricken as he was, went destitute and couldn’t find the energy and resources to start his business afresh. That was my father. Here I am, lamenting my acts of omission in doing what was clearly my duty in helping out a close friend and a cousin, when, perhaps, he needed my help the most. "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players:" said the Bard. Waheed also played his part on this wide stage for sixty seven long years. He had his little triumphs and failings, like we all do. He wasn't one of those who yearn to live in the comforts of a moneyed life, and are prepared to work to acquire it. He had small ambitions and little desire to soar high. He was content with what he had achieved in life. He was devoid of jealousy and never eyed anyone else’s assets. He once borrowed some money from me and despite my refusal to take it back, returned it at my mother’s home. He said that he didn't need it, though I knew that he always had some financial holes to fill. Some people are served a challenging hand in life. Waheed was born at a difficult time for his parents when they were still trying to find their bearings in a new environment in post partition Pakistan. His father had gone through a series of hardships caused by forces beyond his control and comprehension. They were used to living with an extended supportive family around them in Amritsar. Now they had to fend for themselves alone. There was no one around to guide the children towards good education. Looking forward to becoming a carpet mender is hardly an incentive to hard work. A few people do manage to overcome the obstacles and impediments tossed in their way, to create sense and meaning of their existence. However, most are weak willed and succumb to the overwhelming odds stacked against them. They are unable to rise and extricate themselves from the inherited deprivations and privations. They also fail to realize that good education is the key to success and an assured path to a bright future. An individual or a family that is ensnared in the vicious cycle of poverty and mediocrity has either to find supreme physical energy, mental capacity and will power to break free from their meager heritage and build their own legacy, or simply fade away unsung, unknown. Sadly, Waheed and all his three brothers died within one year from mid 2015 to mid 2016, the elder two in Karachi and the younger two in Lahore, the cities that they had made their abode. His sisters, both my chachis, had died earlier a few years ago and are buried in Karachi. Having played their played their parts in this world, all six siblings have now departed for heavenly abode. My father and all his brothers also reside in heavens. Of the Peer Bakhsh line, I, one of his numerous great grandsons, am the eldest male offspring alive. A whole chapter of history stands closed. My dear Waheed: Rest in peace. You will be missed. Silsa-e-Roz-o-Shab will no doubt continue, as it must, but you will live in my memory. August 2016, Islamabad Parvez Mahmood retired as a Group Captain from PAF and is now a software engineer. He lives in Islamabad and writes on social and historical issues. He can be reached at parvezmahmood53@gmail.com