Thursday 12 September 2013

The Amazing T-Pad

High literacy under a tree
Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
—William Shakespeare, describing the second stage of Man in ‘As You Like It’

The one who introduced me to the amazing t-Pad was my mother’s only brother, a bespectacled man over six feet tall and a lawyer by profession. The exact year of this story is unimportant; suffice to say that Steve Jobs was still learning how to spell the word apple and humans had not yet learnt to camp outside shops to buy phoney temptations.

In those days, schools genuinely taught a thing or two, education had not become money-minting ‘information technology’, school-teachers never ran private tuition-centres, and the students lived happily ever after even if they secured less than straight A’s in examinations. 

This was when people received landline calls with great courtesy and noted down messages for those away from home, children played with each other for real, and street-smartness had not been assigned the rearmost seat in the theatre of life. In an era when industrialized nations had attained scientific prowess through education in their national languages, an elitist minority in the ‘land of the pure’ (Pakistan) ensured that Urdu emerged as the national language at the expense of richer regional languages. And George Orwell, having told revolutionary truths in his masterpiece novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, had already passed away and left us at the mercy of watchful Big Brothers obsessed with transforming the entire world into a Dystopia.

Strange ink-fellows

There were, in the ‘land of the pure’ two kinds of schools: Urdu-medium and English-medium. The Urdu ones meant for the masses used less glamorous teaching aids and sometimes taught in regional languages which, to the chattering elites, were ‘what domestic servants conversed in’. And the English ones produced future rulers who normally spoke English only within the school’s perimeter. The Irish Catholic missionaries who ran our school introduced paper and pencil to the students from the very beginning. A few years later when we bade farewell to innocent pencils, rubbers (erasers) and sharpeners to welcome the mighty fountain pen, some of us had still not seen what was designed to become less mighty than a sword: a ball-point pen.
Improving one's hand

Too young to know how the French writer, Marquis de Sade, derived pleasure by way of pain, we nevertheless turned our fountain pens—a modern pleasure—into menacing instruments to settle scores by staining our victims’ light blue shirts with dark blue jets of ink. No instruction manuals came with our writing implements; boys just knew how to unscrew the pen’s cap, hold the pen like a charging sword, and then rapidly jerk the nib in the direction of the intended target. Once the scapegoat reached home he received a severe reprimand from the laundrywoman: usually his mother.

Education was a serious matter. Because teachers loved copybooks filled with correctness, scribbling meant survival and failure led to instant corporeal punishment which was as readily available as oxygen to the lungs. To end up being inkless in class was the modern equivalent of having one’s mobile phone run out of credit or battery power. Those who habitually forgot their inkpots at home unashamedly begged for drops of ink in the middle of diligent pen-pushing periods. Instead of relying on audio-visual cues, every boy used extra-sensory PENception to tell when a brother was in need of ink. The donor, after mentally calculating how much one’s own ink chamber would last during the period, usually obliged by transferring an amount of ink that was directly proportional to the strength of friendship with the recipient.

Since all of God’s creatures knew how to go forth and multiply, our ink-chambers too competed wholeheartedly in the race for survival of the fullest. We were like air force pilots who performed air-to-air refuelling, we were ink-transfer artists who prided in returning home without soiling our uniforms or limbs with tell-tale ink marks. Later in life, only the bad artists amongst us faced domestic violence when they reached their homes with lipstick-stained shirt collars. The following episode will demonstrate how laughable our theoretical knowledge about the reproductive nature of life was at that tender age.

One morning, a teacher noticed two back-benchers ‘fidgeting about’ in the classroom. Angrily he waved his thin cane at them, “YOU two! Stand up!”

The aggrieved party stood up to protest, “Sir, he said that I was born when my father injected his ink into my mother.”

The whole class and the teacher produced roaring laughter because the teary-eyed complainant’s father actually owned a stationery shop.
Simca for the loveless

Such and other unmentionable anecdotes taught us one thing: throughout history the value of manly activity-based camaraderie ranked higher than womanly emotional sharing. How could have we possibly toned down our male attitudes when no crystal ball had shown us our future wives detesting us for unwrapping ourselves from around their fingers to sit with old school friends?

Moths around a candle

All young male teachers and the entire students’ fraternity blew their dickies and bonnets on the day the principal installed young Madame Shama Utarid as class-teacher of our naughty all-boys grade five. Always driven by her mother, our teacher’s means of transportation was an early 1960’s camel-brown Simca 1000 of French origin. There was no other Simca on the city roads and there certainly was no other quite like Madame Shama in the entire world.

She ended up living up to her first name which meant candle in Urdu language. Daily she fended off fifty moths that pretended to be good students but in reality only craved for her fragrant proximity. The naughtier ones regularly used the Ma’am-I-do-not-understand-this trick, which required Ma’am to alight from her high desk, walk right up, bend over dangerously and attempt to explain innocently what we already knew. The principal stayed unaware of the fact that our beloved teacher had unintentionally turned a regular class into an imaginative crush factory.
Knowledge with Virtue

The boys used Royal Blue ink while all the teachers used red; I switched to green. From behind the stack of copybooks placed on Madame Shama’s desk, when she smiled I knew my handiwork had unveiled itself before her all-knowing eyes. Her frequent ten-out-of-ten tokens of admiration always arrived with golden stars of encouragement affixed to my copybooks, while her red artistic signature beautifully complimented my green efforts. And thus, through the miracle of my green ink I became her favourite student within a remarkably short span of time, and which turned my envious class-fellows into little green Martians.

During summer morning classes some of our less loved teachers resembled dreamy-eyed Buddhas—courtesy the sleep-inducing lassi (milk and yogurt cold drink) they gulped at breakfast. While pretending to be alert to our mischief, the illumined ones kindly permitted some to absent themselves from the class under the umbrella of the pen-wash excuse. The sages amongst us had already concluded without sitting under Banyan trees that like all human beings, pens needed washing too. The water-coolers, located at a central location in the school’s vast compound, facilitated staying away from tedious learning for almost ten full minutes—a great luxury considering that the single authorized half-break lasted a miserly fifteen minutes during which we chatted while playing, and visited Mushtaq’s tuck-shop for samosas (fried local patty with potato filling) and chilled small Cokes that burst open with loud pops.
Simca for the elites

The ritual of repeatedly filling the pen with water, pumping out the gradually diluting ink and then watching it enter the drain was more relaxing than practising yoga. This frolic sometimes ended abruptly when a temperamental teacher suddenly appeared in the rear and shouted into our sensitive eardrums, “WHAT are you doing wasting time HERE? GO BACK to your classroom AT ONCE!”

We dutifully acknowledged the command with a barely audible ‘yes sir’, and then prayed silently to an Authority much higher than the school’s principal, “I hope you fall down the bloody stairs, SIR!” None of the sirs ever tripped or fell, and which proved they were being protected by God’s senior guardian angels.

Uncle gifts me a t-Pad

It was a time when the written word reigned supreme, real letters required the use of ink upon paper and bathed in perfume if one were in love, relentless texting and e-mail had not sounded the death-knell for the postmen, and cultural invasion and mental slavery had not yet encouraged students to sell kidneys in order to buy costly communications devices. LED was an acronym for love-emitting darling, the interactive touchscreen was always the face of the beloved, family-men never lost small fortunes buying rapidly changing mobile phone models, and every child appeared happy-go-lucky. They were truly wonderful times.

For this story I derived the term, t-Pad, from an Urdu word: takhti. This was a plank nearly a quarter of an inch thick, made out of long-lasting Sheesham (tahli/Tali/ٹالی or Indian Rosewood), measuring about ten inches in depth by twenty inches in width, and sporting a pentagonal handle at one end. When Urdu-medium schoolboys fought bloody after-class battles, they swung these planks at one another without restraint. And just like today’s electronics devices, a takhti too required certain accessories: light-grey coloured lumps of clay (gachni), a pen made out of thin bamboo sticks, ink crystals, and an inkpot.
Shape of the takhti

One summer afternoon, my uncle brought me the above articles and sat down to show what to do with them. “Your Urdu handwriting needs improvement”, he pronounced the judgement while cleaning the t-Pad.

Had he been alive today, he might have cringed seeing touchscreens, peoples’ robotic expressions, their inability to correctly spell full words, and the shameless labelling of all good things in life as ‘old-fashioned waste of time’.

Then my uncle placed a lump of grey clay in a bowl, poured some water to liquefy it, and with a rag applied it to the t-Pad using careful horizontal strokes. “Go and place the takhti in the sun to dry”, he commanded while shaping with a knife a thin bamboo stick, “This is your new qalam (pen).”

He drew on the t-Pad wide horizontally lines suitable for Urdu text using a pencil and a foot-ruler, poured some water over the black ink crystals placed in a dawaat (inkpot), dipped the bamboo pen in it, and carefully wrote alif in Urdu (‘A’ in English). To my untrained eye it only looked like a vertical line but then he showed me how to properly shape it by varying the pen’s angle. Being able to write beautifully was soon going to land me in serious trouble.

Daily I sat under my uncle’s watchful eyes to master the upright alif with a pen whose screeching over the t-Pad produced sounds fit for horror films. The complexity increased with the introduction of each new alphabet, and I finally began to appreciate the manual dexterity, concentration and patience required for calligraphy in Khatt-e-Nastaleeq (Persian-Arabic script).
Calligraphy

By the second week I had mastered the first three alphabets: alif, bay, and pay (A, B and P). My uncle rewarded me with a kulfi (traditional ice-cream covered with crushed almonds and beaten silver foil), “Here are four Annas. Fetch two kulfees from the kulfi-wala; one for you and one for me”.

There was no shame involved in slaving for a snack. More lessons and kulfees followed and by the end of the summer vacations I could write complete sentences on the amazing wooden t-Pad. This made my uncle happy too; his eyes lit up one evening but it turned out those were his thick spectacles which reflected the light of a 60-watt incandescent bulb that glowed without a shade on the discoloured wall.

Although I frequently protested to my mother about not getting enough time to play outside with the neighbourhood boys, what terminated those daily khuskhati (artful writing) lessons were two consecutive inglorious incidents. First, during a fight and in true Urdu-medium fashion, I cracked open the skull of a fellow with my wooden t-Pad. My mother shielded me successfully from my uncle’s wrath.

Second, a girl living next-doors inspired me to praise her lips and eyes in an ‘inappropriate’ calligraphic letter that was personally delivered to her on our common rooftop. Lightening always strikes the poor; she played the return-to-sender trick on yours truly. The generously perfumed communiqué boomeranged directly to my father’s bureau, and which made him promptly decorate my left cheek with a five-pointed medal of dishonour: a reddish imprint of his stern hand.

With such a life-altering experience under the belt, I swiftly put myself on a path less calligraphic in nature and bent over backwards to shower much-expected seriousness on unfinished homework.

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2013


I gratefully acknowledge using the images from:
http://www.starfieldobservatory.com/Nambour/Schooling.htm
http://www.philseed.com/simca1000.html
http://ucapusa.com/lost_marques_simca.htm
Child in a field (graphite on takhti,by Manzoor Ali Solangi)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Learning_Arabic_calligraphy.jpg

44 comments:

Anonymous said...

Refueling the ink and jerking the nib brought back some good memories! Great article Tahir, posted to my FB wall. Bunty

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Thanks but please DO NOT re-post (copy/paste) this article anywhere. Whoever wishes to read it must be directed to my site.

Unknown said...

This is by far my favourite article! Penception nice word. An iphone application is named that.
You should write more articles like this.

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Thanks for liking the article, Avid. Literature takes plenty of precious time to create; newspaper articles demand much less. I write when it 'comes to me'.
It happens frequently in the universe that two people think the same thought without having any connection with one another.
Apple is a corporation, whereas I'm an independent thinker who has nothing whatsoever to do with the elitist gadget called I-Phone.
PEN-ception is my own creation which sprang in my mind from the word PER-ception. The abbreviation, ESP, gave me this idea. Now, Apple must live with it.

Anonymous said...

sometimes : ) you produce amazing pieces of literary art

Anonymous said...

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

'MA' buddy,, thanks for the appreciation. I hope you're satisfied with my level of 'education'?
:)

Anonymous said...

This is simply beautiful, if I am allowed to give the title, it would be "AMAZING T-PAD & SIMCA", after all T Pad amaze us now, and SIMCA amazed us then. Isn't it ?
Naeem

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Thanks for being here, Shah jee! I hope you pass on this PEHLA PYAR (presence here) to the rest of the bunch at home. After all, I can't let you enjoy this piece all by yourself.
Watch this space for greater amazement!
Cheers. :)

Anonymous said...

What a brilliant and amazing piece of writing ! Your article is out of the ordinary as well as humorous and I really enjoyed reading it.
You have given good description of Takhti and Qalum. I still remember my father taught us to write takhtis when we were in primary school and we did write Takhtis to improve our writing , and did lot of Khuskhates for learning Urdu letters and learning Arabic.
You are right; Education was a very serious matter in those days. Nowadays Education remains just a business in Pakistan. The short cut to earn more n more money by showing day dreams to innocent people.
In today's world, the benchmark for excellence is education. Moreover, if a country has a distraught academic infrastructure, the chances to survive in current competitive world are petite. The illiteracy rate in Pakistan is alarmingly high which calls for critical attention.
If we don’t revamp our Education System, we might just end up with a generation of unyielding and utterly confused conformists with no sense of how to get around in the world. We will have lots of unhappy, incompetent doctors and engineers but few genuine leaders, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, lawyers or athletes. And what kind of a society would that be?

“The roots of Education are bitter, but the fruits are sweet”. Aristotle.
Laila

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Thanks, Miss Laila, for clarifying your point of view. You almost wrote an article there!
Anyway, I always say what needs to be said in the most truthful yet good-humoured manner. Pity the people who miss all the points I've made here; it's their loss, not mine.

rimmel said...

Brilliant!

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Rimmel 'paiyan', thanks for being where not many men have gone before. Oh, your potent brevity is 'brilliant' as well.
Khush keeta ae baadshaho!

Anonymous said...

I am very passionate about Education, as I am associated with this field for the last two decades.
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world," said Nelson Mandela. Yes, it's true. Not just Nelson Mandela, but many other leaders have repeatedly focused on education to make a difference. With education, you can transform a person's life, which, in turn, empowers him or her to inspire others.

A fellow who does things that count, doesn't usually need to stop to count them.
~ Albert Einstein

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Hilarious! The following bits actually made me laugh out loud:

- We dutifully acknowledged the command with a barely audible ‘yes sir’, and then prayed silently to an Authority much higher than the school’s principal, “I hope you fall down the bloody stairs, SIR!”

- This made my uncle happy too; his eyes lit up one evening but it turned out those were his thick spectacles which reflected the light of a 60-watt incandescent bulb that glowed without a shade on the discoloured wall.

Very well-written. Bravo!

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Thanks for LICKING this, 'Bravo'!
What you admired are hand-made gold nuggets and there are very many of them in this piece if you were to read it again (and again).
Stay tuned for more fun. :)

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

translation of our school motto as explained to me by Brother Cele was "knowledge with virtue"

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Anonymous,
The Latin Word Scientia has many meanings, mainly: knowledge (for the scholar), science (for the technocrats), and skill (for the daily wage-earner).
Science is knowledge which we derive from observing God's Laws ('Nature'). Then we use these laws and call them our own inventions and ideas.
Anyway, KNOWLEDGE seems like a better translation.

Anonymous said...

i posted a comment on this article, but it has been taken off. What upppppppppppppp !!!!!!!!!!!! Anyways , good write up. WHAT UPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP !!!!!!!

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

I don't remove comments unless they're abusive. Sometimes people think they've posted something when in reality they have not pressed the right buttons!
Always check that your comment is VISIBLE here before you move away from the blog.
I don't know what comments you left here, please recall them and re-post. Thanks,

Aamer Iqbal said...

Keep penning mate! Your post took me down memory lane to the morning assembly, the too short fifteen minute break, samosas and the delight of being away from class on an excusbale pretext. We never had proximity of Ms Utarid, only wondered at the Almighty's creation.

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

I welcome you to the damp club. What's up, Doc?
I hope you recover from the shock of this back-to-the-future article and try to 'ghalat karo' your 'ghamm' by downing two 'samosas' and a Coke right away.
By JOINING this site as a member and then commenting on it as a try-hard Ant-Honian, you've left the rest of the turtles far behind. None of the other smooth talkers took the trouble of doing what you've done. Well, they can go have their picnic in the woods all by themselves now.
Despair not, you now know my class-teacher through this narrative. May God have mercy on all who were in that class with me.
Cheers.

Anonymous said...

I remember Ma'am Khan was very elegant and nice. She use to live right next to the Plaza Cinema and opposite to Civil Lines in that huge residence on Queens road. Her house boundaries use to end by Taj Din Latoo wala on the Lawrence road. Very decent teacher not glamorous like Ms. S. Utarid but very attractive. At school all teachers were very nice. How can we forget, the general assembly, Right next to the Principal, Kiley, E.O. Leary, Breen, Golden a line of teachers conducting the classes in the assembly. Mr. Fahdy the in his 2nd world war salute, Mr. Hassan Gandhi Jee tilting his neck towards right just like a kite having a kunee problem, Mr.Bakshi the hill jul in the back of the class and not to forget Mr. Rizvi the negative/ positive in his usual whites keeping an eye on all of us. Chaudhry sahib's hair oil smell use to give a certain bouquet to the whole place. AWESOME!!!!!!

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Thanks for your one-word ('awesome') comment, anonymous. Are you trying to write an article on my blog?
Just tell me what you liked here, did you laugh out aloud, did you day-dream? What?

Anonymous said...

No, the anonymous is not writing an article on your blog!
TGH, you were among those school-mates whose penmanship was and still remains superb. The writing skills we all acquired from the teachers of this great institution are enough to make fun of them.
We meet through write-ups on the blog-but we can not converse. At times I am amazed with the speed of the modern world and communication among our classmates. Highly commendable!
Your this article brought back memories that lie scattered on the stretches of our common home-town in the "land of pure". Our stint together was enjoyable. A group of friends having fun all over the place. I hear echoes of the laughter that once marked our gatherings. So, I used the word "awesome" to describe your article about S. Utarid and the school.
You bring so many sweet memorable joyful incidents from the yester years back to all of us. You know the days of coconut candies, dutch toffees and dark chocolates. I get in to a good mood for a bit if not longer. Impact is great.

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Receiving more than a one-line response or being dished out constipated appreciation never feels quite right--at least not in my copybook!
Thanks for recalling names, places, animals and things from the past--they're all in my mind and will appear in future articles. Writing a book about those 'times' wouldn't be a bad idea I think.
Stay well and pass on my website's link to other goofy and sleepy school-mates.

Veronica Fox-Landes said...

Brilliant! You inspire... educate and entertain with excellence.

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

I accept your compliments with gratitude, VFL. Thanks for reading.

Anonymous said...

Education is the most important step to bring up a society . RK Nayar

Momin Qamar said...

Hi, this is Momin. I'll read this gem tonight. Cheers!

Unknown said...

Tahir sahib, a very nice read! Keep it up!

Unknown said...

This was a beautiful insight into your life. I appreciate the time it took to share this piece of 'you'. <3 -Mermaid

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Thank you AM/Mermaid: I've already spent half my life experiencing things and the remaining half will go by writing about it all.

Unknown said...

lovely,nostalgia at its peak,I was remembering my school days and enjoying the good old school days,cheers keep it up

Nosheen Sajjad. said...

Owww soo beautiful article MA SHA ALLAH. I was not only reading but visualizing each & every line uncle,takhti, kulfi, banyantrees, inkpens..... Each line opened the locked doors of my childhood memories... & after a long very long time visit the palace of memories closed for centuries..... ❤

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Noshi, thanks for dropping by. We all have so many stories to tell. So glad you enjoyed reading AND visualising. Stay well.

DrMonk40 said...

My brother Jehangir was in mr Fardys class in 1954 and related an incident in which a classmate of his sprinkled ink on his suit as he walked past him…
I thought that it was a very bad thing to have done…

mr and Mrs Baksh taught in the B section and munshi ji was our drawing teacher…..brother Henderson and brother Ritchie also were there…
Mrs Braganza would be playing the piano a lot of the time…
Miss Frazer was admired by every one..

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Dr. Monk40, thanks for dropping by.
Boys will be boys. With so much caning going on, sprinkling ink was certainly student retribution if not divine wrath.
I can see Bro. Henderson in my class-1 photo. I didn't come across Munshi Jee or know Bro. Ritchie and Mrs. Briganza. I suppose you were very serior to me at St. Anth's.
I see that you haven't joined my blog as a FOLLOWER member. Please do so right away. If you let me have your email address via the blog's email address, I could add you to my mailing list.
Stay well.

M Arsalan Butt said...

This is a very beautiful article, full of memories. I feel myself go in that era while reading this. The class room, inkpot and pen. Then T pad which use to improve writing skills. Ma'am Shama is also an interesting character. I liked to write most of the teaching Alif Bay Pay on T Pad. In short this is a very simple description of past written by you.
Irshad uncle no doubt a tremendous personality with full of knowledge.

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Arsalan, many thanks for taking the trouble (and pleasure) to read and comment. Do encourage your children to read it too.
By thinking fondly of our MAMOON, we indeed honour him. He's smiling at us in heaven, wearing his thick glasses.
😊

Awais Wyne said...

Thank you for taking me to my childhood days at school and at home. Narration was so good that I could actually see things happening in front of me. Congratulations for such a nice write up.

Tahir Gul Hasan said...

Awais mamoon, thank YOU for reading, enjoying and then commenting on the article.
We are all young children in our hearts but circumstances, education and our jobs sometimes change us drastically.