My life in PAF Public School Sargodha

In depicting the struggles of my emigrant family in post independence Pakistan -in articles published in this weekly- I had traced my life till joining PAF Public School Sargodha in Sep 1965 in class VIII and our evacuation on the eve of breakout of Indo-Pak war. I now pick up the threads and carry forward the story from there. We were called back to school in late October, about a month after the ceasefire. We rejoined our allocated houses and settled down in our dormitories. Our batch consisting of sixty three boys was distributed over three sections. We were tested in -if I remember correctly- English, Urdu and Mathematics. While I was good in the latter two subjects, my proficiency in English was dismal. I was better than most in grammar and translation but was appalling in spoken English, being unable to speak even one straight sentence. In fact, I had never communicated in anything but Punjabi. I spoke Urdu too with a heavy Punjabi accent. Consequently I - and twenty other boys- was allocated section B with the top twenty going to section A. This was to have an injurious affect two years later when, due to some adjustments, section A was wholly promoted by one year while the rest of the two sections had to continue with their normal academic year. I had come from Muslim Model High School Lahore -located next to Government College at the junction of Urdu Bazaar and Lower Mall -where the class strength ranged from 60 to 90 and where some students had to sit on the dais. A class of twenty seemed a bit extravagant and sparse. The classrooms were neat, clean and well dusted; a world away from the dirty overcrowded environment where I had been studying. For me, the life in the Public School was like a dream. Our beds were made and shoes polished by our batmen. Once a week, we would make bundles of our dirty cloth and they would come back ironed. A team of barbers would come to the house once a fortnight for giving us haircut. I was used to taking a shower in the washroom of a mosque before the morning prayers. Here, I could do that at any time of the day. The dining room seemed very impressive. It was a long hall with chairs and tables, and divided into four sections, one for each house, where all three hundred boys would dine simultaneously. For the first time in my life, I learnt to eat with knife and fork. It was a royal treatment -like stuff that dreams are made of. I knew that I had crossed a barrier in life for a better future and was determined to hang onto it. We followed a strict regime and discipline and I happily settled in the routine of morning collective PT, a breakfast -eggs, bread or paratha and a cup of tea- followed by classes till 1:30 in the afternoon. In the long break, we were served milk with jam-toast. Lunch -curry, lentils and fruit- was followed by an hour of compulsory rest. There was a study period followed by an hour of games. We then had some free time before dinner that we utilized to play indoor games, to listen to songs in the radio room (there being no TV at that time) or to go to house library. After dinner –some more curry, lentils and dessert- we again had an hour of studies and finally went to bed at ten at night. Being from an Urdu medium school, I had great difficulty in adjusting to the English medium of teaching. I couldn’t understand the teachers, my reading was slow and I had trouble understanding many of the words in the O Levels syllabus books. Resultantly, my academic performance suffered. By the end of first term, I had fallen to the bottom of the class and barely survived being terminated with only a warning. I recall that it was the summer break in July of 1966 and I was having lunch when my father came back from his office with my report card and the warning. He was very upset. He had worked very hard to put me in that school. He asked me the reasons for the abysmal results. I was very confidant and told him that it was only due to my difficulty in comprehending English language and that I will overcome this hurdle in the coming months before the next exams. I also told him how I had started tackling the issue of learning the language. My reading habits came to my rescue at this critical juncture, as they would in later life. Sensing the danger that the language posed for my survival in the elite school, I resorted to reading English story books with a dictionary in my lap. Later when I discovered thesaurus, I got that too. I remain indebted to the writers and publishers of series of great novels written in short simplified English; written, probably, for non English speaking students in the colonies. I read almost everything lying in the book shelves in this category. I read every book by Charles Dickens. Then there were some great books namely 'Gulliver’s Travels', 'The Prisoner of Zenda', 'The Lost Island', 'The Treasure Island', 'Blue Lagoon', 'The Count of Monte Cristo', and my favourite that I read many a times, 'Beyond the Lost Horizon' by James Hilton. I read and re-read these books, checking each word that I didn’t understand. In addition to my voracious reading, the school rule of conversing in English only ensured that my language skills improved rapidly. As a result, I started doing well in each exam and never fell below the 4th place in my class. With my language problem over, my expertise in mathematics returned and I will write more about in subsequent paragraphs. My reading habit has continued persistently and there has never been a time when I am not reading one or two books on fiction, history, psychology, philosophy or any other book that I lay my hand on. A long time after leaving school, a friend of mine asked me if I had left any book in the school library unread. It was only half in jest. In my last year at school, I was appointed the library in-charge of my house library and my reading desk was placed there. I was literary living among books and enjoying every minute of it. Soon I discovered the Russian novelists and British historians, and have been in love with them ever since. I believe that 'War and Peace' by Tolstoy and Vol. I of Toynbee's 'A Study of History' should be a compulsory reading in every high school. I have rarely been more saddened than to see all thirteen volumes of Toynbee's history lined up in the central library of a PAF Base in Karachi and 'never' issued, even once, to anyone. Having read a variety of books on a wide range of subjects, I became completely liberal, progressive and a lifelong agnostic. As a school boy, I felt confident enough to correspond with Maulana Maudoodi questioning him on some of his concepts. Sports were a regular activity in the school that maintained fabulous spacious playing fields. Prior to joining the institution, the only sport I knew was kite flying and a bit of rooftop cricket. I learnt to play hockey, football and basketball. I also learnt my still continuing activity of swimming. I participated in field athletics. Though I wasn't very good at any of these sports, yet I represented my house in debating, swimming and 200-meter races. In Sargodha, I did well in studies though I didn't outshine some of the more hard working intelligent boys. However, thanks to my father's prior diligence, I excelled everyone else in mathematics. My class fellows would seek my help whenever they lacked behind in the subject. When the son of the Base Commander of local Base, studying in the same class as us, needed help in the subject, he was put under my charge for about six months. Mr. Naseer, the head of the department, held me with special regard. When I was selected for PAF Academy, he called me to his office and said that I should not join the air force. I was utterly surprised at his suggestion but he said that I should instead keep studying mathematics because he had not seen any other student in the college with my ability to understand mathematical concepts. This is the highest compliment I have ever got for my proficiency in my favourite subject. The Gold Medal that I won in Bahria University in MCS - that I completed after my retirement from the Air Force at the ripe age of 50 - doesn’t even come close to the appreciation that my teacher gave me at that time. PAF School is a great institution. I had class fellows from all walks of life. Some belonged to social and economic strata that were far above my reach but the college had an environment where the only things that mattered were excellence in education and proficiency in sports. As everyone got equal amount of pocket money, we had same buying power during the weekend. We remained oblivious and unconscious of our background. Our friendships that have endured over the last five decades were formed on the basis of common temperament and interests. The education that the college imparted and the character that it built set me up to close many of the material and social gaps that existed between me and my more affluent classmates. While we were in class X in 1969, disturbances broke out in the country against the Ayub regime. Inspired by Bhutto, students were in the forefront of these agitations. However, our school remained secluded from what was happening outside our school walls. The students of local Government College once marched towards our school to get us to join their rallies. While being turned back by civil and PAF police, they handed over a few sets of bangles to be given to us. As a consequence, our going to town on weekend was stopped. The matriculation exams that were originally scheduled for march were postponed till September. This gave us a chance to revise our course a few more times, enabling us to secure excellent results and win scholarships. I won a talent scholarship that earned me a hefty sum of Rs 2,500/- in the first year. Most of us had however been politicized to quite an extent. I would frequently go out without permission to attend the political gatherings. I recall attending a charged public meeting by Bhutto in the Company Bagh and witnessed a rousing performance of mike smashing and un-buttoned cuffs. A week later I attend a milder public meeting by Mian Tufail. I was joined by some of my class fellows in these surreptitious outings. We were obviously not ignorant of what was happening to the country. We were getting some of the newspapers and would listen to BBC regularly. Our Bengali friends were drifting and our relations with them were becoming strained. On the question of integrity of the nation, they had clearly reached a point of no return. Our view of Bengali nationalism was however heavily coloured by our jaundiced understanding of the issues. The situation would continue to worsen over the next two years. Our stars were really crossed because when we needed a leader with vision and wisdom, we got Gen. Yahya Khan. Within two months of our joining the Academy in Oct 1971, two wings of the country were torn apart irrevocably. I myself was living in a torn world. I have written in this weekly about the struggles of my migrant family in post partition Punjab that can be accessed at http://thefridaytimes.com/tft/picking-up-the-pieces. In the school, my lifestyle was comparable to that of Aitchison, Eton and Harrow where royal and feudal go to study. During the school holidays, I would go back to my one room dwelling on the fourth floor of a crowded building in the walled city of Lahore where there was no running water or a clean toilet and where I would go back to my old routine of fetching water from the street tap and watch my family struggle against strangling poverty. This tale, however, needs to be told separately and will be continued in the next part of this article. This article appeared in the weekly The Friday Times on 24th Nov and 1st Dec 2019 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