A Boy Called Granny — Part 2

Hollywood's response to the rise of television were the revolutionary widescreen colour film movie technologies of the 1950s: Technicolor, CinemaScope and Deluxe. However, the film reels of my school days need no fancy technology; they spin on neural projectors which beam the moving images on a mental silver screen. Everything is housed inside the theatre of my imagination and visualisation where I am the sole viewer.

In quieter moments and without Bluetooth ear-buds, I can also clearly hear the sounds from my past in true Dolby Stereo.

Special talents attract ‘special forces’

The above are dangerous admissions that could prompt the government to ‘use’ my talents to ‘serve the national interest’. I certainly shall not mind serving as long as the government displays fine taste by hauling me blonde-folded to a pink chamber with mirrors, and where men in black might ‘help’ mould the ‘free will’ using only that fizzy orange creation of the Nazis: Fanta.

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A few days ago, our government decided to tax the income of social media influencers who monetise clicks and likes on their channels. Those like myself could be taxed too for narrating past events that might secretly be aimed at improving the minds of the public through a reading habit.

Taunts from aunts

Mehmood Sial alias granny’s complete tale was far from told in the previous article titled: A Boy Called Granny - Part 1. We shall conclude it here in my 350th article.

Every class at St. Anthony’s High School of Lahore was a different movie with a new set of disciplinarian teachers who played their parts to tame new batches of prankster students in an historic school building raised at 3 Lawrence Road in 1900. The ever-present authoritarian doom and gloom miraculously helped the boys create their own boom of brotherhood.

In junior classes, a female teacher was also a grooming instructor who could publicly reprimand any boy for wearing shabby wrinkled uniform and having untrimmed or dirty nails.

The most popular taunt was a frontal attack on our mothers, “Does your mummy ever notice how you come to school?”

One preferred biting his nails to conveying the teacher’s insult to a mother fatigued by domestic chores.

Bowing one’s head was a traditional response to all derisive comments made by teachers. The word sorry was used perhaps twice a year. Outward silence meant a student had reached an internal boiling-point that only lowered once he criticised within his group a female teacher’s long claws and possibly the dirt underneath the nail-polish.

Once we became sufficiently senior, pulling up the socks, readjusting the tie-knots and buttoning up the jackets were expected to have become permanent habits in an impermanent world. To be or not to be full-set gentlemen was a probability question, so we were happy to be half-set gentle boys.

What's the story, morning glory?

The school’s morning assembly was a sober drama whose stage-curtain rose each morning when the entire cast appeared. These were the Irish Brothers of St Patrick (Patrician Brothers) in white robes with green sashes that swung as they walked, the indigenous Anglo-Indian suited and booted teachers, and hundreds of stunning stunt-boys in school uniform.

In the front row of the congregation stood a chorus of chosen ones who sang Pakistan’s national anthem. Since the lyrics were in Persian language, the flock in the rear merely lip-synced to the lyrics which it neither comprehended nor wished to. I was part of that front row cultural troupe but could only sing in unison if the rest did not change the original key (musical pitch) or not suddenly transpose it up a few semitones. My voice was changing.

At the conclusion of that ceremonious collective nationalism, Catholic students offered a Christian prayer with lowered heads, clasped hands and closed eyes to display devotion to the Principal in Heaven. Muslim boys only uttered aameen at the end, which seemed like the Christian amen and which in turn sounded like Amon (Amen) of the ancient Egyptians who worshipped Amun as ‘the hidden one’ (creator god of air and life based in the city of Thebes).

No sooner did the morning assembly end, someone deliberately crashed from the rear into whoever stood behind Mehmood ‘granny’ Sial. After granny took a hit, the ones in front too jolted and then protested. Swiftly, the prankster escaped, leaving others amidst a blame-game.

Each day a different bourgeois comrade took turns ramming into moneyed granny. Granny seldom reacted like an angry old woman because non-stop mischief was as natural to the boys as breathing in and out.

Daddy Sial

Historically, the influential Punjabi Muslim tribe of the Sials primarily occupied the Jhang district of Pakistan's Punjab province. Tracing their origins to ancestral Rajput or Jat lineages, the tribe established a powerful autonomous state during the eighteenth century before the rise of the Sikh Empire (1801-1839).

Granny's father was the prominent Professor Dr. N. A. Sial, a legendary pioneer in Pakistan's medical history. He served as the Head of the Obstetrics & Gynaecology Department at Lady Willingdon Hospital in Lahore and was one of the most influential medical educators of that era. He served as the Principal of King Edward Medical College (KEMC), Lahore from December 1969 to September 1971 and chaired its Academic Council. He turned Lady Willingdon Hospital into a premier, globally recognized center for maternal healthcare and training throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

The Sials lived on 3 Shannon Road, in a 4-kanal government bungalow facing the Canal Bank Road in idyllic G.O.R-1, off  Mall Road (Lahore). These government officers’ colonies, 1 through 5, housed very important persons since the British Raj days.

Inside granny’s cave

It was a hot summer evening. Granny had warmly invited me to his birthday party, a gesture that slightly increased the ambient temperature.

I asked, "Where are other class-fellows?"

He replied, "What others? You're my closest friend". 

The sprawling well-kept lawn and the interior of the house impressed me but what caused a serious sense of deprivation was granny’s very own room. At home I did not have a room of my own.

His study desk stared at me. At home I sat at the dining table to study.

His bookshelf laughed at me. At home, I stored all my possessions in just one shelf of a wall cupboard.

The books and the comics on his bookshelf made funny faces at me. By contrast, I mostly borrowed reading material from the school library.

There was a working train set on the floor that seemed ready to run me over. If granny were its steam engine, I felt like a guard waving a green flag hanging off an akhri dibba (brake van).

My father was a hardworking lawyer by profession and my mother mindful about domestic expenditure. We certainly were not poor but that evening at granny’s, I suddenly felt needy.

Caught wearing a birthday suit

The next morning I was front page news in the classroom. The intelligence wing of the nosy brotherhood had taken an extraordinarily strict notice of my solo appearance at the birthday party.

During the half-break, I was invited to yet another party: the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Boyish Inquisition. There I was put on the rack, ordered to accept the honcho as my saviour and disown the ‘devil’ who had suddenly vacated some hellish abode to take up residence in granny’s body.

The honcho asked, “What did you have at the party?”

A rapid recitation of the menu oozed out of my lips as if I were a waiter at a cheap desi restaurant, “Chicken patties, Coke, fruit-chaat, dahi barey, a very nice cake and——”.

I was interrupted by an Anglo, “Enough, buggar man! Were there any girls there?”

“Yes, of course, but those were granny’s sisters.”

Twisted logic jumped up, “Just answer with yes or no. His sisters are girls, aren’t they?”

Morality responded with a high jump, “Yes but to me, all my friends’ sisters are like my own sisters. They’re girls later.”

Then someone intervened, “Let him go. We’ll see next time.”

Love thy (distant) neighbour

When a boy-group leader says, “We’ll see”, that usually settles over one, a very dark foreboding.

Most thought it prudent to wait for a year in order to make themselves eligible to receive an invitation from granny but a few impatient ones attempted to become immediately likable by him. Granny was perceptive; he did not like them in return. When the latter plan failed, a few who lived close to granny, took to cycling in the evenings through Shannon and Danepur Roads of G.O.R-1 where the two Sial sisters also rode their ladies’ bicycles.

It went on for a while until Dr. Sial noticed several 'loafer boys' peddling half-baked affection. He instructed his ferocious servant to 'get hold of whoever dared to tease the girls’. Nobody ever got caught; the servant was horribly obese and near-sighted.

Those class-fellows were condemned to finding only sisterly love on Danepur Road, so they stopped paying homage but not without first christening it 'Dame-Pur Lane' (a lane full of 'dames'). At school, the boys referred to young girls as 'dames' and older ones as ‘aunties’—the latter could be as young as twenty.

Farewell, my bluff

Watching granny leave the school was bonus fun. He always sat up front next to the chauffeur in a green Opel Kapitän (1959–1963) with a white top. That German behemoth seemed like a Rolls-Royce to us because the general public had decided to enrich the makers of cheaper and smaller Japanese Toyota Corona and Mazda cars.

Granny’s two sisters sat in the rear. Naughty class-fellows pretended to wave at granny but the sisters knew they were the real recipients of affection. They blushed, responded with discrete smiles and hid their faces behind open textbooks in their dainty hands. Granny never discovered the goings-on at the back; he always excitedly waved back at the boys as if receiving a guard of honour.

Being a neutral observer, I never waved because granny thought of me as 'not that kind of a guy'. It was rather hard, appearing almost pious and yet being a part of the stud-hood.

Later in life, excess passion benefitted only two of my class-fellows who starred as heroes in Pakistani Urdu movies; the rest became the audience that faced the silver screen and emulated until age sixty, Casanova, Don Juan or Rasputin.

Post-retirement and having reached high stations in life if not romance, almost overnight the latter types became tabelighi maulvis (proselytising Deobandi mullahs), holding tasbihs (rosaries), wearing shalwars high over fat bellies, displaying bruised ankles and foreheads, and sporting untrimmed facial hairs that dented Gillette's razor sales.

Granny, are you okay?

When old friends meet these days, they merely enquire about the whereabouts of this or that class-fellow. If the poor man is dead, they ask, "Oh no, how and when did he die?".

If the man is alive, then a failure to reconnect indicates that life, wife and children have chipped away something valuable inside.

Some of my best mates simply vanished after leaving school, some passed away quietly in foreign lands—mostly buried, at least one cremated—and only a few now within my small circle.

Many whom I traced after considerable effort, reacted coldly and showed no interest in reviving old friendships that went as far back as sixty years. It was a grave mistake on their part to think they could order friends online as if they were late night pizzas.

So, what became of granny? Granny too, like so many others, was never seen again after leaving school. Wherever he might be, I hope he is well, married with children and now getting his cheeks pinched by grandchildren, just as he did by his class-fellows at school. God forbid if his wife, after discovering his pet-name through my memoirs, should switch from calling him granny instead of darling.

END OF PART 2 (concluded)

This is the 350th article on this site.

💚

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2026

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To know more about my Urdu teacher, Mr. Nasiri, read:
As The Crow Flies
Stone The Crows

To know more about my science teacher, Mr. Fardy, read:
The Rocket Science Of Mr Fardy - Part 1
The Rocket Science Of Mr Fardy - Part 2

To know more about my class-teacher of four-B, Mrs. Davies, read:
The Things I Did For Mrs Davey

To know more about my English teacher of five-B, Miss Shama Utarid, read:
The Amazing T-Pad
The Rocket Science Of Mr Fardy - Part 1
As The Crow Flies

Disclaimer

The idea behind narrating details about female teachers is not—God forbid—to poke fun at them or display them as unworthy of respect and admiration. Far from it. Most definitely, all of them are deceased as of this writing or may be alive as respectable mothers and grandmothers. To pray for their departed souls or wish them good health is all I can do as their ex-student. Boys tend to always think and speak unlike how girls do. These biological and psychological differences shall always result in each gender being mostly poles apart. You are therefore requested to just enjoy the memoirs instead of raising objections over supposed political incorrectness.