My Life in post-partition Lahore - Part I

In earlier two articles in this blog ("A tale fo two cities" and "An obituary for an ordinary life") I wrote an account of my family’s background and its migration from Amritsar to Lahore in August 1947 at the time of partition of India. These narratives appeared in the issues dated 1st July and 26th August 2016, and were titled ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Requiem for an Ordinary Life’ respectively. I now describe how we confronted the difficult task of making this alien but friendly land our home. My father was serving as a draftsman in the Railways Workshop Amritsar when the partition of Punjab forced him and his family to migrate to Pakistan. After settling in, he started looking for a job but couldn’t find any. He commuted between Rawalpindi and Lahore looking for a suitable vacancy. The private sector was completely uprooted due to mass migrations and riots. The hastily set up national government was barely functioning and was deploying all its energies and resources in grappling with the gigantic task of finding shelter and food for the refugees. In despair, he tried to set up a cloth business with two of his uncles ¬-one maternal and the other paternal- but lack of business experience combined with mutual suspicions forced the closure of the venture. His application against a vacancy in the Irrigation Department Punjab bore fruit and he was appointed as a tracer, the entry level position, in drawing section at the Montgomery office in March 1948. Later in the year, he was transferred to Balloki Headworks, about 65 kilometres from Lahore off Multan Road. He didn’t like to go to this secluded lonely place but had no choice. He got married while there to my mother whose family had also migrated from Amritsar to Lahore. He was to continue this service till 1970 and was to serve in Jhelum, Gujrat, Lahore and Faisalabad. I was born in 1952 in Gowalmandi, Lahore at my maternal grandparents’ home, when my father was stationed at Jhelum. I started my schooling while we were at Gujrat in a local Municipal Corporation (MC) Primary School, which was a ‘Tat School’. While I was in class three in 1959, my father was posted to Lahore. As he couldn’t afford to hire a separate house, we moved with his maternal uncle in his room in a building owned by my father’s Phupha– husband of his paternal aunt. The room that we shared measured 12 x 10 feet was without a kitchen and running water, and had a community latrine. As stated in my earlier article, the building was located in a Muhalla that was named Pani Wala Talab -after the still functional elaborate system of water supply established by the British Punjab Government headed by Lt Governor Charles Aitchison, who served from 1882 to 1887 and was an industrious administrator. He established, among other institutions, Central Model School and the Aitchison College. He built this water supply scheme, which was the first running water system in the walled city with connected tube wells, water pumps and pipelines to individual houses. The actual storage, the Talab, was built over nearly 14 acres of land that is about 50 feet higher than, say, Bhaatti and Shah Alam Gates. Before that, people were solely dependent on private as well as community ground water wells. Some of these wells survived till the 1970s and may still be in use. The water supply system was constructed for a small population. We started living in the area in 1960 when the population of the area had substantially multiplied since late 19th century. Nevertheless, we were living on the fourth floor where there was no provision for any wash room (Ghusal khana), or water lines or proper drainage. The room was a barsati meant only for sleeping in the humid monsoon season to avoid the oppressive heat in the closed lower floor rooms that had little air circulation. We had access to one of the bathrooms on the ground floor to shower and to fetch water. However, its use was quite tedious as it was in the portion occupied by another family. We would keep track of the water timing, knock at the door of that family and then walk through the charpoys and other stuff that lay in the courtyard to reach the wash room. As can be visualized, the arrangement was unpleasant for us as well as for them and fraught with unpleasant incidents. We didn't get to use it often or regularly. We were, therefore, constantly short of water. We progressed in family size from four children when we moved in, to eight when we left in 1973. There was an ever increasing demand for water, especially in the summers. We needed water for a lot many daily activities and its availability was a persistent thought. When we got up, we needed to go to the toilet. We needed to wash our hands and faces –yes, just that- before going to school, a full bath being a once or twice a week luxury. There was cooking and dish washing to do. We needed it for drinking and laundry for our large family. To store water, we had bought a large faucet fitted drum and placed it in a corner of our small room. There was a small drainage hole in that corner of the room that was connected to the external drain pipe. The corner served for dish washing, bathing, hand rinsing, clothes washing and everything else that used water. I don't recall ever brushing our teeth. The drum was also regularly filled by water carriers, the ‘mashkis’, who charged about ten rupees per month for one ‘Mashk’ per day, or by us by fetching water from the ground floor washroom. One ‘mashak’ or the water goatskin -not cow skin as being too big and heavy to be carried on one's back-, can carry about 30 litres of water. Because the water carrier had to climb six stair cases, 56 steps in all, to reach our floor, he would sometimes cheat by carrying less. We had to be watchful to ensure that he had brought the full load. After all we were paying for it with our scarce cash. We used to get three or four loads every day, depending upon the cash we could spare while balancing our other vital needs. Even then, this amount of water would run short in summers. We, therefore, had to fetch water ourselves, pale after metallic pale, from the ‘Sarkari Nalka’ (Municipal Committee public water tap) across two streets in the Maiya Bazaar, where water supply was more regular. (On my recent visit, I found this tap surrounded by vendors but still operational.) As technology had not yet placed the now ubiquitous light-weight plastic utensils within the reach of common people, we had to use the heavier metal buckets. When we started living in the Building, I was only about eight years old and had started helping my father in this vital chore of collecting and managing water. My mother still recalls that once I was standing in the window late at night that I shouted ‘water’. She was startled before she realized that I had seen people fetching pales of water from the ‘Nalka’ (tap). I picked up two buckets and ran six stair cases down (remember 56 steps), across one street, round the left bend in to the other street and across the Maiya Bazaar to the community water tap -with my father trailing closely behind with two more buckets- where there was already a beeline of thirsty neighbours. We took two turns each for a total of eight buckets that, to our delight, nearly filled our drum. There had been water shortage for the previous day or two for our celebratory water run. My father remained an early riser throughout his life. He mentioned that while in Amritsar, he used to go the local mosque to have a bath. He started this routine in Lahore as well. There was a mosque in Gujjar Gali near Chaṫṫa Bazaar. The mosque had a well and a hand operated mechanism for drawing water. My father used to get up much before fajr azan and take me along to the mosque for a bath. There was a shower room in the mosque with a small water tank and a tap at a height of about six feet. The tank was accessible from the outside so that it could be refilled by drawing water from the well. My father would fill the tank with ‘boka’ –leather bucket- and let me have a bath. Then he would fill it and take bath himself with me replenishing the tank standing on a wooden crate. With morning prayers held at about 4 a.m. during the summer months, we must have been going to the mosque about 03:30. Even now, five decades later, having been a resident of Islamabad for about 25 years in an area where we have never run out of water and for a time having been in-charge of a complete water supply system for about five thousand persons in a PAF Base, I still have anxiety about running out of water and am constantly checking the ground and the overhead tanks of my home. I have pleasant and happy memories of my time in that small room, yet, even at that tender age, I was acutely aware of our economic difficulties, constant shortages of everyday supplies, want of better physical living, cramped living conditions and exposure to weather. I developed a desperate desire to break free of shortages and wants. I was aware that I had to succeed in education because that was the only escape door available to me to a better life. I had seen my closely related elders not applying themselves seriously to education and falling for vocations of tailoring, jewellery or carpet mending. A slight weakening of resolve would have taken me to those professions too -and there would have been no one to write these accounts. I felt standing on the edge of a precipice, where the only chance for survival was to keep climbing. I have never felt secure enough to rest on my oars. This feeling grew stronger as my hard work, with a great leap of ambition, faith and conviction of my father, gained me the first sweet smells of success in September 1965, as I will explain in the third episode of this article. Two decades later, when I was selected as a ‘Selector’ for the prestigious Inter Services Selection Board -the institute that selects officer cadets for the three armed forces- the senior psychologist, having access to my psychological profile, briefed me that fear of failures was a dominating trait of my personality. I couldn’t tell him that this fear got instilled in me at a tender age at a critical phase of my life when I didn’t have any room for failure. Luckily, for all us brother, my father was a firm believer in good education and sacrificed every bit of personal comfort and material holdings for sending his children to the best possible schools. My mother supported him in this undertaking through every ordeal. For most of that decade and a half, when we were in a desperate struggle with life, her little pieces of jewellery -a few thin bangles, a ring or two and a locket- were mortgaged to meet the necessary expenses like school fee, books, food and clothes. She thought she would never see her gold items again but our refusal to back away from those challenges was to be rewarded with phenomenal rewards. She was anyway working the longest hours; waking up before anyone else, going to bed after we had gone to sleep and remaining busy each minute in between taking care of a large family with meagre resources. As I was studying in a ‘tat’ school in Gujart, I had to shift to a similar school in Lahore. I was admitted to a ‘tat’ school in Masti Gate, near Begum Shahi Mosque. From my home, I used to walk to the Talab, then around it in a clockwise half circle to the fort road, go past the Barud khana Bazaar, past the Akbari Gate on the left, and descend a bit on the right to my MC Primary school that was located behind the Maryam Zamani or Begum Shahi Mosque, (I have written an article about the current pathetic state of this mosque in the 14th Oct 2016 issue of this magazine.) Occasionally, I would take a different route; i.e. turn right on the Pani WalaTalab Bazaar, turn left into the Masti Gate Bazaar, go past Kucha Jamadaran and then turn round the Begum Shahi Mosque to the school. These roads appeared quite wide at that time, the only traffic being bicycles, Tongas or Rehras with an occasional Vespa scooter or a very occasional motorized four wheeler carriage. Walking to school a kilometre or so away wasn't a novelty because most of the children in that era did that. My father soon realized that the school didn’t impart any education and would adversely affect my studies. His search for a compatible but better school took him to another MC School in Papar Mandi Bazaar, on the right side of the Shah Alam Bazaar as one walked from Rang Mahal Chowk to the Circular Road. This school was better organized, had desks and the teachers were regular. I passed my class V from here with good grades but without learning a single word of English. continued in Part II This article appeared in the weekly The Friday Times on 9th Dec 2016 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