The Things I Did For Mrs. Davey

Mrs. Davey's double

Totally Anglo and quite non-Indian by the looks, Mrs. Mary Davey was my Anglo-Indian class-teacher in section-B of class four at school. As of this writing, only two out of seven members of her family are alive. Luckily I was able to obtain important details about Mrs. Davey’s family from her eldest daughter, Noreen, popularly known as Papu.

Mrs. Davey’s parents belonged to an affluent Armenian Jewish family of Rangoon, Burma (currently Yangon, Myanmar). On the ground floor of the third block on Lahore’s famous lane 3 of Temple Road, my teacher lived as our next doors neighbour with her husband, two daughters (Noreen and Daphne) and three sons (Clayton, Adrian and Llewellyn). The inhabitants of Temple Road were jokingly called Roads Scholars.

Mrs. Davey’s sons and most boys within the radius of many miles—including yours truly—studied at the English-medium all-boys St. Anthony’s High School. Other noteworthy schools in Lahore were Cathedral and the Aitchison College. The former was nicknamed ‘kaddu’ or pumpkin school for reasons beyond comprehension while the latter attempted to educate the sons of horse-trading tent-pegging elites. The rest of the lads fell into the cracks of Centre Model or Don Bosco schools. Although the first choice for the fair sex was the Convent of Jesus and Mary, other likeable institutions were Queen Mary’s, Cathedral, Sacred Heart and Esena Foundation.

The stocky Mrs. Davey of St. Anthony’s walked with considerable effort and was thus instantly identifiable even from great distances. Fair-skinned, sporting short hair, with a front tooth or two missing; these were the physical attributes that made Mrs. Davey appear jovial even when she angrily foamed at the mouth. She always wore sleeveless dresses which exposed her fleshy arms to us skinny brown children w-ho felt intimidated by the superiority associated with white power.

My mother, herself tall and fair, made the Daveys feel so right at home that when the couple indulged in shouting matching, the poor husband dressed in cotton trousers and singlet (spaghetti straps), headed straight to my father’s home-office to mumble, “Woh pagal aurat phir hum say jhajra karta (that mad woman is again fighting with me)”. The husband was never taken seriously because he would not give up the bottle, and Mrs. Davey could not keep her sentiments bottled up. And my father, being an advocate at both the High and the Supreme courts, thought their entire case was like a message in a bottle worth tossing back into the sea.

Direct from the Shimla Pahari

Up In Smoke

Mrs. Davey’s husband, Clarence, was a lean bald man who worked at the USIS (United States Information Service or the ‘Umrikan Santer’) located inside the Bank Square on the Mall Road of Lahore. His father, a Catholic Welshman, worked for the telegraph office in India. In 1944, somewhere in that incredible country, Clarence met Mary and the new family decided to move to the Land of the Five Rivers: Punjab.

To us children Clarence Davey always appeared to be loosely hanging about the house reading voraciously and smoking ceaselessly. As fate would have it, while simultaneously smoking and reading Ernest Hemingway’s classic For Whom the Bell Tolls, he tucked himself snugly in bed and fell asleep mumbling, “And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”.

Fire, being nobody’s friend, soon filled the Daveys’ house with thick smoke that lazy winter afternoon. And quickly the fire engines of Shimla Pahari, their tolling bells not half as musical as those of St. Anthony’s church, appeared at the burning Davey doorstep. Someone promptly alerted Mrs. Davey at the school. By the time she arrived at the scene, the fire engines had already given the house the wash it richly deserved. The old furniture, the dusty carpet, a coughing Clarence Davey and his panting dog, all got a free bath. Television had yet to make its appearance in Pakistan but Clsdarence Davey’s negligence produced the greatest live show the neighbourhood had ever seen up to that point.

In his private moments, Clarence Davey always spoke about ‘going back home’ which, without any doubt, referred to setting sail for ole’ England. But in 1966, at age fifty-two and before being able to transport the entire family back, he sailed for his final abode.

What’s Cooking?

The first thing I experienced upon becoming Mrs. Davey’s pupil was her showering generous amounts of affection by assigning me a location in the classroom that enabled her to keep a special eye on this boy who lived next doors. I do not recall her ever hitting the pupils—corporeal punishment had not yet descended upon us—but she loved labelling every careless student ‘blooming good-for-nothing fella’. In those days we knew absolutely nothing about expensive branded apparel, hence, hearing a class-fellow being branded ‘blooming’ always produced smiles that were impossible to hide behind our little palms. I generally steered clear of trouble by doing pretty much what was required at school but the less fortunate who approached Mrs. Davey’s desk with incomplete assignments had their copybooks flung on the floor and from where they slid magically into the wide corridor as if carried upon invisible wheels. One morning when half the class was resting heads down, I was summoned by a smiling Mrs. Davey.

“Haaa—haaa— ”, she exhaled over her prescription glasses, wiped them clean with a handkerchief and snapped, “Come closer, will you? I won’t bite you!”

I moved forward until I could smell her Indian Englishness.

Knowledge with Virtue

“Aaj mummy nay kya paka (what has mummy cooked today)?” she questioned.

I held on to my shorts—knickers, as they were called—as I imagined they were suddenly being pulled down by an invisible Jinn. Utterly ill-prepared was I to instantly and correctly answer her question because it involved knowing our kitchen’s geography and mother’s cooking history. But recalling what mother cooked most often, I replied shyly, “Aalu-gosht!”

I must confess that as a young boy I barely showed any appreciation for the subtle variations of aalu (potato) and gosht (mutton) which mother frequently cooked in a humble smoke-filled kitchen. If I felt disinterested in the menu—a frequent occurrence—I simply walked up to Regal chowk to feast on eatables that the street offered and which mother expressly forbade me from eating, namely: spicy dahi bara, hot samosas, or sizzling aalu ki tikia (potato cutlets). Since McDonalds—worthless plastic food—had not yet appeared on the scene to destroy youthful innards, I had blind faith in the nutritional value of my rebel’s menu whereas mother believed it had great nuisance value.

Mrs. Davey did not look particularly happy with my aalu-gosht revelation. For her Jewish- Armenian-Burmese palate some ‘blooming’ potatoes and chunks of mutton floating about in a broth probably did not produce the same mouth-watering effect as say chicken biryani or a roasted leg of lamb. But then pretending to love aalu-gosht she whispered in my ear, “Mummy ko bolo, thora sa hum ko bhejna (ask your mother to send me some)”.

The classmates seated nearby only heard a garbled version of her aalu-gosht request and later asked me during recess what Mrs. Davey meant by hollow ghost.

I was to discover very early in life that I was blessed with aalupathic abilities if not telepathic ones. Upon reaching home, I whispered Mrs. Davey’s secret demand into mother’s ear and found that that was precisely what she had cooked. With plenty of aalu-gosht about the house, mother dished out a generous portion for me to deliver with full protocol at my teacher’s doorstep.

Mrs. Davey was thrilled to be on the receiving end, smelled the dish deeply and said, “Mummy ko thank you bolna (convey my thanks to your mother)”.

The next morning at school, thanks to mother’s cookery and generosity, I became the apple—or perhaps an aalu—of Mrs. Davey’s eyes. Some times in the middle of teaching at the blackboard, she would turn to look at me and smile. I quickly learned to smile back. At least once a week, she would ask, “What’s cooking?”, and upon hearing an appetizing reply, utter with a twinkle in her eyes, “Lovely!”

This short dialogue dramatically improved my spoken English, and since I imagined that my scholastic future in class four depended on what I was able to deliver at Mrs. Davey’s doorstep, I made it my business to know each morning what mother planned to cook. Mother might have been secretly thankful to Mrs. Davey for it was because of her that a son had begun to enquire about home-cooked food, and that perhaps one day he would eat at home instead of lick his fingers in public at the food stalls of Regal chowk.

One afternoon, when I home-delivered aromatic mutton stew at Mrs. Davey’s she became as ecstatic as a whirling dervish and requested, “Mummy say bolo, thora aur bhej do. Sath mein chaar tandoor bhi lana (Ask your mother to send some more. And bring along four rotis as well)”.

On the double, I relayed the message back to mother’s headquarters—the kitchen—where I found her facing the stove slapping away rotis in the oppressive heat. Unpleased to the core she retorted, “Cook ME and then dish ME out to that moti mame!”

The Urdu word mame, since British colonial times, has been used exclusively to refer to fair English ladies; from this emerged the honorific title mame sahib. But the pet-name, moti mame, meant fat lady. It was not my mother who bestowed the title upon Mrs. Davey but rather her eldest son, Clayton. He was a skinny sharp-featured rebellious young man who refused to walk with his mother on the same side of the road as he felt his skeleton contrasted sharply with a huge motherly frame. He teased his mother by calling her names, and moti mame was a nickname that became more known than Mrs. Davey own name.

You are my candy girl...

Sugar, Sugar (as performed by the Archies)

Mrs. Davey was in the habit of having Pakistani tea in English style. Before noon each day she would command her favourite errand-boy, “Naseemullah, my boy, run to the tuck-shop and tell that Mushtaq fella to bring for me half a set of tea”.

When I heard the term ‘half a set’ for the first time I thought she ordered tea for the well-behaved half of the class but when Gul Khan, the tea-bearing Jinn, appeared with a small tin tray I knew she meant tea just for one. None thought it odd that our teacher consumed tea in class. But what I found strange was this: at the end of her lonely tea party, Mrs. Davey opened her cupboard, unscrewed a small glass jar and emptied the sugar-pot into it. I was able to see a pattern: on Monday the jar would be empty, by Saturday quite full, and then empty again on Monday. All that sugar was certainly going somewhere and Mushtaq, the tuck-shop owner, appeared to be the sweet loser in the battle.

Sugar was a hard commodity to find in those days hence, Mrs. Davey did not steal sugar but rather practised the same ‘doctrine of necessity’ that every military dictator (Mil-Dic) from our history has practised. For this story we need only look at General Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first Mil-Dic and martial law administrator (Mal-Admi). Having grown up in the ancestral fields of Rehana, he conferred upon his self the medieval grand title of Field Marshall, meaning, keeper of the king’s horses. But the public, always quick to respond, nicknamed him cheeni-chor (sugar thief) because his unelected government issued ration cards to the populace and increased the price of sugar from eight Annas (half a Rupee) to ten Annas per seer (approximately a kilogram).

Ayub, who considered himself and his colleagues superior to ‘corrupt politicians’, went on to debase democracy to the most ‘basic’ level, held a dubious national referendum, and boasted such enviable connections with Uncle SCAM Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah, the sister of Muhammad Ali Jinnah (founding father of Pakistan). State propaganda was able to convince the voters that Ayub’s election symbol (rose) had the ability to grow if it rained but that of the Mohtarma (lantern) was doomed to be snuffed out.

Suffice to say, the long and painful history of foreign invasions and martial usurpations of ‘bloody’ civilian’ rules in this entire region makes Mrs. Davey’s sugary naughtiness pale into such insignificance that it must be posthumously hailed as a brave attempt to conserve a scarce national resource: sugar.

Going Cuckoo

One flew over the cuckoo's nest

Returning to the story, all the three-storeyed flats in lane 3 on Temple Road had similar facades; they were built by a rich Hindu landlord prior to the genocidal Made-in-England partition of India in 1947. Right after entering into any of these flats, one landed in a living room with a 16-foot high ceiling, complete with two roshan-daans (ventilators). And it was always in the living room where Mrs. Davey gave me private tuition of a quality so fine it convinced my well-read father I could spank the British in English language.

My huge female Buddha-like teacher always sat on an upholstered sofa, and behind her on the wall hung something that truly fascinated me: a German cuckoo clock complete with sadomasochistic chains and levers. The marginally accurate contraption sometimes upset Mrs. Davey by cuckooing at the wrong moments—chiefly those during which she snoozed. Because it was the only time-keeper around, she never was able to smash it despite frequently swearing that she would. Instead, she would have me pull various levers that dangled below the ‘blooming thing’ and which achieved three miracles: the tic-toking restarted, the dead cuckoo arose from the grave, and the Earth resumed spinning on its tilted axis. The resurrected cuckoo’s soft cuckooing never failed to make my teacher happily sink back into the sofa for one more quick nap, and to deliver most of those English lectures while snoring sonorously. And while the fat cat slept, I sat quiet as a mouse, wondering how the cuckoo was able to live in a tiny wooden flat that was housed inside yet another flat on the greatest road of them all: Temple Road.

Snow White and the Dwarf

What deeply worried my school teacher was this: she was beginning to get old while I grew younger by the day. Since I had become proficient at raising dead clocks, Mrs. Davey cultivated one more hair-raising talent in me in order to reverse her aging process. Before imparting linguistic secrets in English, she would first have me take care of the cuckoo-clock and then stand me in the rear to hunt down all the white hairs I could find in her Armenian-Burmese-Jewish scalp. I turned white with fear doing that for the first time as I thought it might make her bleed to death right there on the sofa, and that a policeman from Mozang thana might handcuff me for stealing her precious silver hairs. But no such tragedy befell when I gave a long white hair my first vicious pull.

“Come on man, show that blooming thing to me!” she thundered for the evidence.

She loved using the word blooming. I produced the white proof and she threw the blooming thing on the carpet where her sleepy dog too saw it fall. And so, like many other things in life, I soon became adept at sustaining a younger look for my aging class-teacher. I might have been her best kept secret because had she mentioned me to other aging ladies of the locality, they might have whisked me away to do the same chore for them for free. And so the home-deliveries, the private tuition, the clock winding, and the pulling of white hairs continued as if I were marked to become the sugar-lady’s man-servant. Of course, my parents never discovered all the chores I performed for Mrs. Davey.

McPig (with French flies) anyone?

Forbidden Food

Then one day Mrs. Davey asked me to eat a little something at her house—very unusual considering it was mostly our food that frequently graced her dining table. What I got was a portion of a thin slice, pink in colour, and meaty in taste. When I swallowed it, my teacher smiled with an approving nod and sent me home early. And when I described for my mother what I was given to eat she shouted aloud, “Oh Allah, moti mame nay tumhein soowar ka gosht khila dia (Oh God, the fat lady fed you with swine flesh)!”

I suddenly felt Christian, then Jewish, and finally Armenian. Mother’s good neighbourliness and patience suddenly vaporized and she tried to re-convert me to being Muslim by inserting her fore-finger deep into my throat. The trick failed; I was unable to vomit the forbidden meat. It took until the next morning to flush out from my system the animal declared by the Lord as ‘unclean’.

Had this incident taken place in today’s utterly intolerant climate, the entire household of Mrs. Davey might not have survived the blitzkrieg of the Bearded Brigade. I do not recall seeing mother confront Mrs. Davey with rolled up sleeves but soon afterwards my visits to her house were put to an abrupt end. We never found out how pork, which was not sold in Pakistan, ended up in my teacher’s possession. All I was told was that Muslims, Christians and Jews were all strictly forbidden to consume it, and that Mrs. Davey had done to her student something totally uncalled for. Suddenly, I was back to being just another boy in her class who stayed away from her house, her clock and her silvery hairs.

Prime Sinisters

You too, Nehru?

During the Indo-Pak war of 1965, Mrs. Davey’s sons picked up a stray dog for a pet. Considering the officially-induced hatred Pakistanis displayed for Indians during that tense period and the Indian origins of the Davey family, the animal was named Nehru after India’s first Prime Minister. Then another son of the Temple Road soil, Ajji, picked up yet another dog and promptly named him after India’s second Prime Minister, Shastri.

While the ‘spiritless’ Indian army knocked at the gates of Lahore and risked being converted en-masse to Islam, and as our high-spirited soldiers dreamed of hoisting the star-and-crescent flag atop Delhi’s Red Fort, the boys at 3 Temple Road vented out their emotions on the poor dogs by garlanding them with old shoes and chanting, “Nehru kutta hai, hai. Shastri kutta hai, hai (down with Nehru the dog. Down with Shastri the dog)”.

Nehru was deeply touched by all those leathery medals and being smarter than Shastri, soon befriended a bitch-at-large befittingly named Edwina; the pack of ogling dogs were happily named Mountbatten 1, 2, 3 etcetera. Much later into adulthood I read about the alleged love-triangle of Indian history in which Lord Mountbatten did not mind very much if Jawaharlal Nehru addressed  Edwina as jaan (life) instead of the more appropriate bhabi jaan (dearest sister-in-law).

With or without Edwina jaan by his side, our own prime sinister Nehru roamed wherever he liked, ate whatever one fed him and slept like a log at the oddest spots. The Daveys owned him but he was the dog next doors, the dog that fully had his day, and everybody’s dog without a worthy pedigree. Although a depressing atmosphere of suspicion hung in the air during the 1965 war days, the intelligence agencies were able to clearly tell that Nehru and Shastri were not Indian agents. And we all saw Nehru bare the teeth and viciously scratch the ground when someone asked, “Nehru, do you wish to die fighting for your country?”

Nehru virtually dying for Edwina 'bhabi jaan'

An old gent who stood watching remarked, “Since Nehru has displayed anger over being asked this question; he is a foreign agent in dog’s clothing.”

A naked faqir laughingly remarked, "He is indeed on your side, and he will die fighting long and hard if you promise him a bit of coloured ribbon".

Later in life I found out that the naked faqir, wiser than many fully clothed onlookers, had actually quoted Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte on the subject.

Now that my hairs are greying I am inclined to agree with the naked faqir. Today one can see loan-defaulting politicians working hand-in-glove with conniving bureaucrats, businessmen with armed guards, trained at our expense ‘security personnel’ taking over businesses, and small bands of ‘al-CIAda’ extremists spreading themselves thin over this Land of the Pure.

Thinking about our own canine Nehru I wonder what the deceased could have achieved by merely barking in defence of Pakistan at the Canine United Nations. He was a creature of habit that always bravely barked up the right trees under which no other dog even dared to relieve himself. True, Nehru loved chasing after Chevrolet Impalas yet never bit any living thing half Edwina’s size. I do not know where they buried brave Nehru who warded off strangers and stray dogs that ventured into our neighbourhood. I would like to imagine he is licking his paws in dog-heaven.

In 1978, another Mil-Dic named CIA-ul-Haq descended upon the nation to teach her democracy and to stamp on human faces a boot for almost forever. Ever since his mango-flavoured departure on an American-built intergalactic spaceship that boldly went to a place where many Mil-Dics had gone before, luck has favoured militants who would rather blow themselves up wearing suicide dinner jackets than enter barbershops in Pakistan for very close shaves.

And so in 1977, unable to stand one more Mil-Dic, Mrs. Davey, age fifty-nine, passed away and joined Clarence Davey to become a teacher in God’s divine no-medium school. I imagine the heavenly tea-bearers are busy fetching her half-sets of tea, that there are mountains of white sugar at her disposal, all kinds of curries and permitted roasted meats present themselves the moment she thinks of them, her cuckoo clock tolls louder than the Big Ben of London, and that all of Mrs. Davey’s silver hairs are now transformed into tresses of 24-Karat gold.

Dedication

I dedicate this real-life story to the memory of my 'class one' class-fellow, Akhlaq Ahmed, who passed away after protracted illness on 18 November 2013. I lowered his body with my own hands into the grave but he can still be seen in that class one' group photo I have. Of course, he will live in my memory as long as I live.

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2014

References and grateful acknowledgements:

1. The first in the 'nostalgia series' of articles dealing with my childhood is The Amazing T-Pad
2. Unless you can genuinely proove otherwise, I coined the terms aalupathic, Uncle SCAM, al-CIAda, Mil-Dic and Mal-Admi, CIA-ul-Haq, and dog-heaven. Please give me credit when you use them.
3. Twenty-five killed in plane crash (making Ayub Khan the winner in the C-in-C lucky draw of the Pakistan Army) 
4. The Field Marshall From Beyond The Grave
5.  America welcomes President Ayub, 1961
6. Medieval jurist Henry de Bracton’s Doctrine of necessity: That which is otherwise not lawful is made lawful by necessity”. And Roman law maxim urged by Ivor Jennings: “The well-being of the people is the supreme law.”
7. I have no idea where the images of Mrs. Davey's look-alike, the fire-engine and the St. Anthony's logo came from. But thanks anyway.
8. Sugar-pot photo
9. German cuckoo clock photo
10. Pig photo
11. Angry dog photo
12. Henri Cartier-Bresson: photo of Lord Mountbatten, Edwina and Jawaharlal Nehru

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 we have possibly toned down our male attitudes when no crystal ball had shown us our future wives detest 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 wasting time HERE for? 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 on paper and bathed in perfume if one were in love, relentless texting and email 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. Lightning 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

Pied Pipers Out Of Hell

Pied Piper of Hamelin

Every earthly comfort is a test; we are surrounded by temptations. The Qur’an clearly warns us with the following verses about wealth, spouses and children by labelling them ‘adornments’, ‘tests’, ‘enemies’ because these temporary joys rank lower than the gifts awaiting all believers in jannah (heaven).

(18:46) Wealth and children are an adornment of this, world's life: but good deeds, the fruit whereof endures forever, are of far greater merit in thy Sustainer's sight, and a far better source of hope.

(63:9) O YOU who have attained to faith! Let not your worldly goods or your children make you oblivious of the remembrance of God: for if any behave thus - it is they, they who are the losers!

(64:14) O YOU who have attained to faith! Behold, some of your spouses and your children are enemies unto you: so beware of them! But if you pardon [their faults] and forbear, and forgive - then, behold, God will be much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace. (64:15) Your worldly goods and your children are but a trial and a temptation, whereas with God there is a tremendous reward.

Our children, our future

We rejoice when our children score much-hyped straight A’s in the British educational system, we proudly announce when they proceed abroad for further higher studies (indoctrination), we become sad but pretend we are happy when they decide to stay abroad to make more money than they would if they were in Pakistan, we break down and weep in private as senior citizens when the apples of our eyes decide to permanently make their fortunes abroad. Is there a more schizophrenic society in the world than ours?

Our precious children are bright because we feed and educate them through hard-earned money. But the elitist schools and many faithless parents prepare the youth to look westwards for solutions to all their problems; the entire system works to export them as ‘cooked and ready to eat’ produce of Pakistan. Once abroad, they either forget Pakistan entirely or pretend, after taking oaths of allegiance to foreign countries, that they are still loyal to Pakistan.

The current issue of people with dual nationalities wishing to vote in Pakistan is a serious one and needs to be understood fully. If one studies the citizenship oaths of America, Canada, or Australia, one will be shocked to learn that from taking up arms against other nations to spying are some of the ‘privileges’ couched in legal language. No matter what freedoms the inter-governmental treaties provide, one cannot simultaneously be the captain of two ships, or dine with God in the afternoon and wine with the devil in the evening. This is conflict of interest as one cannot be patriotic to two radically different systems. One’s motherland need not have two fathers.

American mouse-trap

Under no circumstances must parents allow children’s minds or bodies to be hijacked. The entire Pakistani nation is a family that must be physically guarded by the armed forces, and who in turn must realize that the country was dreamt by a poet-thinker and not by a military-man, and it was carved on the world map by a lawyer’s efforts and not by a judge or a bureaucrat.

What purpose does it serve any state organ to place itself on a high pedestal and beyond public reproach? If true Islamic laws were to be implemented in Pakistan, would they permit contempt of court or defamation proceedings to protect the egos of the judges and the soldiers?

By bringing the corrupt to account (be they politicians, judges, generals or others), the Pakistani judiciary will indeed be able to apologize to the nation for legitimizing numerous military dictatorships so loved by the 'democracy' exporters of the world.

Seed-killers

Recall how the death of Arfa Kareem (14 January 2012), at age 16, brought grief and unity to Pakistanis. Arfa, who died naturally, was the youngest Microsoft IT person in the world. She was a Pakistani computer prodigy who, in 2004 at the age of nine years, became the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP). Bill ‘Microsoft’ Gates regretted her exit out of the ‘Windows’ of life.

But who is Bill really? The world’s top billionaire-turned-philanthropist, Bill, and his wife Melinda Gates run a foundation that ‘helps’ the poor with a simple covert formula: no poor must remain alive in Africa. They encourage the starving Africans to give up subsistence organic farming and sow instead GM crops (genetically modified organisms) which are designed to destroy the environment as well as humanity through slow poisoning. Bill owns 500,000 shares of the killer American chemical company, Monsanto, that created Agent Orange, DDT, Aspartame, PCBs, dioxins, BGH (bovine growth hormone), and GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

Users of the Windows operating system must know that Bill Gates and his wife Melinda are strong advocates of Monsanto and work diligently for the pharmaceutical industry (Big Pharma) by funding global vaccination programmes under the guise of ‘better health’—notice how seldom is the term ‘immunization’ used.

What they are vaccinating us all with is now an open secret of the global killer organizations that propose to ‘maintain humanity under 500 million with perpetual balance with Nature’. This idea, engraved in stone by the anonymous builders of the Georgia Stones of USA, proposes to ‘save Mother Earth’ through various global depopulation plans of putting to sleep the teaming billions.

Despite the fact that there is enough food to support fifty billion human beings on God’s green Earth, we are sold the lie that claims ‘over-population leads to global hunger’. For now, it appears that only the poor will die protecting their homes and children from the invasive interventions in education and health sectors; the rest will fly off to Canada, England, England, USA, or to whatever country grants them citizenship.

Monsanto’s patented technology seeds cannot be saved like natural seeds. The company enslaves poor farmers who end up borrowing money from banks to pay for the killer seeds and to later mop up failed crops. Each year the poor must buy new seeds and pay not only for expensive chemical treatments but also dish out royalty for using Monsanto’s wicked products.

Thousands of farmers across India and other countries have committed suicide because of GM seeds whose produce is unfit for human consumption. Many countries have resisted Monsanto’s overtures while some have resorted to class-action lawsuits; the weak unlucky ones simply get sucked into this agricultural black hole.
Monsanto is also active in Pakistan and wants farmers to grow genetically modified cotton and corn. Its executives are extremely well-paid and who ensure their mouthpieces frequently assure our sleeping leaders that ‘it is safe’ to sell our souls to Monsanto when it is just the opposite. Notice how the quality of available fruits has dropped in Pakistan; our organically-grown produce is being exported for dollars while GM products are imported to ruin the national health.

Wherever the multinationals are opposed, they turn their guns on the ‘resistance’. On 18 October 2012, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, where since March 2011 more than 70,000 people have been killed in the pseudo ‘conflict’, issued a law banning GM food to preserve human life. We need people like Indian female scientist and anti-GMO activist, Vandana Shiva,and organizations such as Organic Consumers Association because Monsanto chases after poor organic farmers with their ‘seed police’ and lawsuits. Read about Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser’s fight with Monsanto, and watch the David versus Monsanto video of the legal battle to understand what is truly going on under our dining tables.

Terrorized New World

In 1961, the always blunt Prince Philip co-founded a charity called WWF (World Wildlife Fund); his other partner in the ‘sustainable development’ fraud at the United Nations was Julian Leonard Huxley. Prince Philip’s opinion about death—whose real meaning we shall shortly see—is:

“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”

Aldous Leonard Huxley the author of ‘Brave New World’, had a brother: Sir Julian Sorell Huxley who became UNESCO’s head for the Eugenics programme. His race improvement racial supremacy idea successfully entered Adolf Hitler’s head who transformed covert American aid—thanks to Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush—into bullets and bombs.

Julian hailed from a noted family and worked as an officer with the British Intelligence. He was very highly awarded for his pro-Darwin evolutionary outlook and population reduction theories. Julian resigned his chair as professor of zoology at King’s College London to work with writer H. G. Wells who wrote in 1940 in his book The New World Order:

Georgia Guide-Stones, USA

“Countless people, from maharajas to millionaires and from pukkha sahibs to pretty ladies, will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by the frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it.”

During his lectures in America, Julian advocated Britain’s involvement in WW-II. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was pro-war but Hitler tried to prevent destruction through King Edward. Oddly enough, Edward married twice-divorced all-American ‘common woman’ Mrs Simpson and instead abdicated the throne. A few weeks after Julian’s lecture tour, Pearl Harbour ‘just happened’, America was dragged into WWII, and lucky Julian became UNESCO’s first director general in 1946. A racist to the core, he was one of the signatories of the Godless evolutionist Humanist Manifesto. Also read the Eugenics Manifesto of 1939 which he signed.

Killers in white coats

Surely, the devil is in the detailed agendas of global organizations. Today, the family in particular and societies in general are directly threatened by the ruling globalists whose wombs are either barren or produce worthless fruit. The imams (prayer leaders) or the tribal leaders in Pakistan continue to persuade parents to avoid giving polio vaccines to their children for reasons given in this article. But to tackle such road-blocks, the globalists pay influential political figures and media personalities to promote vaccination campaigns. But with rucksacks full of dollars coming in, do not be surprised if even the opposition begins to crumble. Money will buy anybody—well, almost.

2007-2012 Air-Power statistics

Polio is not the common cold that one might catch if another person sneezed. 144 reported Polio cases in 2010 should not cause alarm bells to ring in Pakistan. What alarms the de-populators is that not enough people are dying. When 212 pilgrims died at Makkah despite being vaccinated, did the Arabian authorities take the kind of emergency steps we are undertaking?

More people die in road accidents each year, should we stop building cars and roads? At its January 2012 meeting, the Executive Board of the World Health Organization in ‘recognizing the fragility of progress, and the importance of finishing eradication declared polio eradication a programmatic emergency for public health’. Their Emergency Plan (effective from May 2012) placed ‘emphasis on the aggressive application of lessons learned in India to the remaining polio affected areas within an emergency context.’

The WHO officials have repeatedly threatened ‘Pakistanis to be banned from travelling abroad if their country fails to control polio’. But their threats produce more refusals in the resistance belt of Wana-Waziristan-Afghanistan, and encourage beatings, abductions and killing of some from their 220,000 strong vaccination staff who are out to ‘target 34 million Pakistan children under five’.

As of this writing, the WHO is airing plans to not only force-inject our children but also to re-vaccinate them upon arrival in countries they land in. The Polio target countries are Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria (all with abundant natural resources). This article does not condone extremism but what needs to be understood is that our children are being force-vaccinated by the government instead of being forced-fed with healthy food and forced-sent to decent schools. Polio vaccination workers are being attacked and killed while ‘doing their duty’ because the foreign Pharaohs are bent upon killing our firstborns by ensuring that a diseased and sterile generation replaces the current one.

There is enough food for every human being on the planet; only the distribution is wrong. The World Food Program claims it is ‘Fighting Hunger Worldwide’.

Note that the weapons of those who wish us dead are: dangerous chemicals in ‘processed’ food, carcinogenic diagnostic dyes extracted from ‘nuclear waste’, prescription medicines with dangerous side-effects, genetically-modified seeds and killer vaccination programmes that claim to ‘save’ us.

This giant octopus has a million arms and its idea of fighting hunger is to eliminate the hungry through debt enslavement, economic collapses, takeovers of natural resources, brain-drains, artificial famines and sponsored wars—the age-old formulae now in a ‘new improved’ package. To top it off, all the guilt for the world’s current ills—fake ‘global warming’, for instance—is placed on the public’s shoulders. The secret programmes continue unabated because almost all governments are signatories to these swindles of the millennium.

Those who have read George Orwell will recognise that the World Food Programme is designed to create famines and the World Health Organization to promote diseases and death through spread of manufactured viral pandemics and epidemics. Their fear mongering keeps us away from organic food to instead crave for chemical-laden products manufactured by multinational food companies. Within a generation, people have turned to branded bread, milk, and water. Gone are most good things in life. Cancer and heart disease are on the rise everywhere but ironically the cures are not radiation and poisonous chemotherapy. Healthy food is the real medicine; one need not breathe the last in a cancer patients’ ward.

The lying mainstream media

Every day the mass media disseminates untruths about the polio programme instead of providing us with details about these efforts. Our children belong to us and only we, the parents, should make informed decisions when given truthful choices. Only in a Communist country does the State own children and forces official abortions. Those who mistrust western efforts to ‘civilize’ and ‘sanitize’ us surely know from reliable sources what the education-mania (mind-control) and health-scare game is all about. Bird-flu, Dengue-fever, polio, and now measles, how much more germ-warfare will they wage to make us very ‘healthy’?

If uneducated tribal fighters are considered ‘threats to regional peace’, how shall we rate the over-educated manipulators that dwell in the capitols of the world and pose much greater threats to humanity? Five out of seventeen Euro-Zone countries are on the verge of total economic collapse but do the banks care if the people protest? Instead bankers roam about freely and crooked politicians bail out usurious collapsing financial institutions.

Who is ultimately right, the bearded bunch that wears shalwaar-qameez suits or the clean-shaven ones in Italian suits? The scriptures are full of details about the destruction of the corrupt who always wrestle with God by adopting evil ideologies penned by Satan himself. The average wage-earner has nothing to do with what is wrong with the world today. The fault lies not with the one who tills his land to provide sustenance to his family but with those with all the power at their disposal bent upon destroying the whole planet.

Drones from our 'friends'

When the government leads one to war and death it is considered ‘national duty’ and ‘necessary sacrifice’ but when an individual or a group warns the public about clear dangers, he or she is considered an ‘actionable threat’ as ‘enemy of the State’. 

What is worse, being an enemy of an insane State or opposing Divine Laws meant to hold societies together? Keep in mind that even God’s Prophets faced ostracising, suffered verbal abuse, mental torture, beatings, exile and assassinations. Revealed religion is the record of official atrocities committed by ancient governments; it also foretells how the pattern will be repeated and then opposed by the masses. The real reason Godless states hate religion is because it is an organising force to be reckoned with.

Now pause to think: the mass media can help change this world overnight but why does it choose to side with well-paying devils, the NGOs and the covert agencies? And what business does impressionable Malala Yousuf Zai have hobnobbing with high-ranking globalists and dancing to the tunes of various foreign pipers? As already outlined in my three previous articles (see footnotes), Malala is the child bait. Her father has already been rewarded generously by the Crown. Rising from the slums of Swat, Ziauddin Yousuf Zai, is now the UN special advisor on global education and lives in Birmingham as a guest of the Queen. His daughter, Malala, will address the United Nations on 16 July 2013; she is sixteen years old now.

Notice how bombs explode in our mosques, how the faithful are scanned and searched at their entrances, how they are frightened by brain-eating amoeba that ‘lives in fresh water used for ablutions’. The only ones to benefit from the unsafe water scare are the bottlers of ‘safe’ drinking water—a multi-billion Dollar global industry that wants to own all rivers and springs by declaring that ‘water is not a basic human right; it is food fit to be managed only by businessmen and corporations’. All this is designed to frighten one into submission at home and glued to the television. But will this rotten scheme last forever?

The future: drones

Satan has taken upon himself to act as if he is the sole distributor of God’s Grace upon the ‘best form of creation’ (ahsan al-taqweem). Humans have always tended to listen more to the devil than to God, as evident from the pre-civilization case of Satan versus Mankind. Are there sensible minds amongst the real Taliban who can see why blowing up schools helps only our enemies? Alas, we are surrounded by the likes of Mir Jaffer and Mir Sadiq who brought an end to the stiff resistance movements of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula and Tipu Sultan against the East India Company’s meddling into Indian politics and economics.

Only a fool would ever believe what the government says. Have you ever wondered what our leaders discuss at high-level conferences relating to finance, environment and trade under the garb of ‘national security’ or ‘official secrets’? Those who believe that history ‘just happens’ and that there are no conspiracies behind key events, may skip reading this article and instead switch on their 60-inch television sets.

Finally, the following verse of the Qur’an should provide solace to peaceful ones and serve as a warning to all war-mongers:

(5:64) “…every time they light the fires of war, God extinguishes them; and they labour hard to spread corruption on earth: and God does not love the spreaders of corruption.”

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2013

References
For photos copied from various sources, I thank the original photographers.
Throughout my articles, I have used Dr Muhammad Asad’s brilliant translation: The Message of the Qur’an
Kids Rights roster of speakers
Also read my articles:
Malala Yousuf Zai: Genius Or Mouth-Piece (part-I)
Malala Yousaf Zai: Attack Of The Babbling Tongues (part-II)
Project Malala: Famous Lost Words (Part-III)
Warning To Pakistani Parents
Right Burqa, Wrong Lips
Look Ma No Pants