The way it was: Some inimitable characters
Mian Ijaz Ul Hassan
Some of the boys at our school dressed as girls could easily have made the
Kinnaird girls feel jealous of their looks. Aitchison was a strange place in
those days
There was only one promise that Ziaul Haq kept, that was not to keep any. It was
Aristotle or was it Longines, who said that a dramatic persona should be
consistent in character. That if it was in a man’s character to be
inconsistent then he should be consistently inconsistent. Zia was not a
fictional character but a nightmare, otherwise he could have been cited as a
superb example of consistency for being constantly deceitful.
Since women are considered inconsistent the wise Greeks used boys to act on
their behalf. I wonder when a woman was inducted for the first time in
Elizabethan theatre. In most all-boys schools, even today female characters are
portrayed by males. I remember at our annual school swimming gala, Javed Saigol
dressed himself as Anarkali and Rasheed Toru as a Mughal maiden. They created a
flutter in the hearts of their schoolmates. It was awfully nice of them to let
their close friends kiss them once on the condition that their makeup was not
ruined.
Mr Moyene Najmi the art teacher had acquired the services of a make-up artist
from the film studios through his younger brother Pervez, a well-known actor of
the times. After the fancy dress event, I saw Javed and Rasheed dash off to
their rooms to change for fear of being molested by friends. Some of the boys at
our school dressed as girls could easily have made the Kinnaird girls feel
jealous of their looks.
Aitchison was a strange place in those days. There were these boys, as already
mentioned, who with a little blush-on could have “launched a thousand
ships”. There were some from Southern Punjab in the junior classes, a few of
them believed to be even married, who shaved hair off their legs in order to
merge with the other boys of their class. Ali Quli Khan stood at least a foot
taller than the rest of his class. He could run the hundred yards in hundred
paces, while others of his class ran it in two hundred and more.
The successive repetition of this awesome spectacle finally convinced the
college sports authority to introduce the height rule. The new rule meant that
in spite of an athlete’s registered age, if he was taller than the prescribed
limit, he was to be automatically moved up into a higher category (clearly, one
can’t entirely rely on a woman’s fond memory about her own and her son’s
age). The school took a just and necessary precaution that no one dashed across
the finishing line leaving others struggling fifty yards behind.
I remember Ali feeling a little sheepish about his height. What an advantage he
had in serving aces on the tennis court where the height rule could not be
enforced. It is such a pity that there was rampant favouritism even in those
days. While Ali was penalised for his height, the weight rule was not applied to
Syed Shaukat Hussain, who was the fattest and fastest athlete of his class.
Why must girls always want to ape boys? In the colleges for women, girls played
the male roles just because the boys played the female roles in theirs. I
believe Musarrat Hameed was considered a great male star. She played the lead
role in a number of plays staged by the Lahore College for Women. Her
contemporaries think she was best as Charles Condomine, the hero in Noel
Coward’s “Blythe Spirit”, that was directed by Miss Promilla Thomas with
advice from Mrs Urmila Sirajuddin. Recently Musarrat rather proudly informed me
while sipping coffee that the college girls “showered” kisses on her cheek
each night after the play ended.
Tanveer Ahmed Khan our distinguished retired foreign secretary was without doubt
a great teacher of Drama. While some other teachers at GC inflicted notes on the
students, Tanveer Ahmed Khan infused a passion for literature. Who really cared
for Carlysle, Dryden or The Eminent Victorian — Gorden of Sudan, Lytten
Strachey, Florence Nightingale and who was the fourth eminent one? Chaucer’s
“Canterbury Tales” were a source of great amusement especially when our
teacher who never recovered like some others from having been to Oxford, read
the old English text presumably with an impeccable fourth-century pronunciation.
Habib Ullah Tarrar, a gentleman from the mofussils of Hafizabad, was so inspired
that he proceeded to Leeds to study English Phonetics. It is quite astonishing
how he can improve upon our former GC professor, when it comes to reciting
Chaucer. Chaucer’s metrical secret was lost to the late English poets. They
continued to spell like him but had forgotten how he spoke. Amateurs, often
misread “Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote”. They do not understand
Chaucer’s pronunciation of final -e and -es, his rules for elision or his
accentuation of French words. You should hear how Habib reads Chaucer. Other
students of the batch of 1961 preferred to read a modern English version of
Chaucer. It was much easier to keep pace with ribald tales, without being bogged
down deciphering words with their peculiar old spellings. For example Chaucer
takes a gibe at gentlemen of Aitzaz Ahsan’s profession: “No — wher (where)
so bisy (busy) a man as he ther (there) nas, And yet he seemed bisier (busier)
than he was”.
No offence meant to Aitzaz because he played with a straight bat at school even
when he stood shorter than the stumps.
Pervez Masood after reading Chaucer never remained the same. It has been almost
forty years but he remembers all the pertinent episodes of Chaucer’s
naughtiest tales. Whenever I spot him at golf taking a player aside, muttering
something in his ear with a smirk on his face, I know that he is not discussing
a moot issue about the game but sharing something more basic.
Fuad Ali Butt, another golfer is an affable man, with a superb sense of humour.
Unfortunately at golf he can be quite unpredictable. Frequently he likes to
throw his spare weight around. I don’t believe it but they say that on one
occasion Butt sahib got so infuriated with his caddy, because he was missing all
his puts, that he finally flung his putter in the caddy’s direction, which got
stuck in the branches of an acacia tree. When after repeated attempts the putter
wouldn’t come down, Fuad first pleaded with the caddy and then tempted him
with visible cash, to climb up the thorny acacia and get the putter.
The caddy refused to oblige because he feared he might be thrashed with the same
iron after it had been retrieved. No one really knows how the iron was finally
dislodged, but the last thing reported was one Fuad Ali Butt running after the
caddy, who managed to save his hide by disappearing over the club boundary wall.
Butt sahib was infuriated. He would have loved to twist his neck. Under the
circumstances when the villain had slipped out of hand he shouted after him,
promising to do the unmentionable, which no one had ever seen or done before. In
spite of his nasty temper many people are actually quite fond of Butt sahib.
Nusrat Ali Shah from Jhania Shah, a former federal minister, now a well-dressed
gentleman leisurely prowling in Islamabad once observed, “Actually Fuad is not
a friend but an addiction”. A rather unsympathetic way of expressing
friendship wouldn’t you say?
When Syed Iqbal Hussain lost his Scottish kilt (much less in value than Fuad’s
putter) that he had acquired from near Dundee everyone sympathised. Iqbal hails
from Shergarh who likes to flavour accounts of his personal achievements. For
the private amusement of his friends he likes to encourage them to believe for
having done things, which may not entirely be of his own doing. Above all Iqbal
is scrupulously honest and correct. He is so punctilious and proper that the
head office Habib Bank at Karachi conspired to get him out of their way by
appointing him the Bank’s Balochistan chief. But more of that later.
Prof Ijaz-ul-Hassan is a painter, author and a political activist