Inspired by Krishan Chander"s book titled "Meri Yaadon Kay Chanaar"Like any other life, mine too has been full of ups and downs, triumphs and defeat, pride and humility, guilt and repentance, happiness and misery. People are not born good or bad. They are what the events and their companions shape them. But if one were to view his life in retrospect, he would know what he gained and what he couldn't, what he learned and where he burned.
I was born in 1981 in the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Karachi to a middle class, moderate family. A year after my birth came my second brother who I would, for the sake of anonymity, call Fred. The same year, my dad, who is a professional accountant, got a job in Dubai.
Now I don't remember much of what it was like until I was 4 years old. My parents were all by themselves in a country that was alien and strange in every sense of the word. Unlike a lot of my maternal and paternal cousins we were not pampered by our grand parents and aunts and uncles. Now that I think about it, I am thankful to Allah (SWT) for the parents he gave me. Driving license is not easy to get in Dubai. And my dad did not get one for 3 years. My mother was not a driving kind at all and she is still not.
When I turned 4, i started making friends in the neighborhood. The earliest ones that I made were both Indian Muslims. One of them was Cameron and the other Ryan. That was the year when me and Ryan started school. My first day at school was an interesting one. No one went to drop me off. I was made to wear some strange clothes, called uniform, and handed over to Adnan bhai, another neighbor who was much older than me, and made to board the bus. Adnan bhai showed us (Ryan and me) to my class and introduced me to my first teacher Mrs. Madhu. Thus began my journey of enlightenment.
Unlike schools in Pakistan, this was a true English Medium school and being in Dubai, the ethnic and cultural diversity was phenomenal. There were Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis, Brits and Yanks. 2 years later Fred was admitted in the same school. Now I started a year ahead of my age whereas fred started at the right time.
Those years of blithe I will always miss. We would come home in the afternoon and my mom would make lunch and stuff us. And after that would put us to bed for an hour's nap. My dad use to come home for lunch too. Back in those days, Dubai use to close down for 2 hours for lunch and it was pointless to sit in the office. In the evening, my dad would head back to work whereas me and Fred would go out and play with our friends. Our entertainment came from picking on our lungi-clad watchman.
I still got a very vivid memory of when me and Fred went out to play and found our other friends in the front yard of a deserted house. They were plucking the fruit from the tree. We, obviously too young to understand what the fruit was, joined our friends and thought it would be a good idea if we could take home some and see what becomes of it. So we started stuffing them into our pockets. Out of nowhere comes the lungi-guy and chased us out of there. Little did he know that he was a moving target. We took cover in another yard and pelted him with the same fruit for which he had chased us.
Summers were wicked in Dubai. Most of the families would go to India or Pakistan in Summer Vacations. We did too, to endure long hours of load shedding, noise and air pollution. Carefree that we were at that age, we would hardly mind the landmark characteristics of Pakistan. We would play with our cousins, hang out with mamoo (my mom's only brother) and be pampered by our aunts and uncles.
It was one of these summers that I got to know my my paternal grand dad. He retired from SBP the same year I was born as a deputy director and went about teaching maths and biology to the less privileged kids in a mosque near his house. He stuck to this groove until 2002 when he met an accident which I will elaborate upon in some other post. All in all, he was a modest old gentleman who didn't speak much.
It was the summer of 1985 that we came to Pakistan and this time the intentions were to settle here for good. My mom got us admission into same lame ass school behind the old exhibition road. My father went back to Dubai to wind up[ things there. In November of the same year came my third brother who I would call Nash. And immediately after that my parents had a change of plans and they thought the time was not yet right to move into Pakistan. Really, grown-ups are weird most of the times.
Once back in Dubai, we went about our usual business. The same year we got a Bengali Molvi Sahib. This was another character we loved to pick on. Everytime he showed up at our place, he would break a branch of tree from outside our house to discipline us and before leaving, would hide the same under the sofa for the next day. It took us a couple of days to figure this out and then things started getting funnier. We would behave well when our parents were around and would make him sweat and run (literally that guy would chase us around the house) when our parents were not home. We tried everything on this guy like water guns, locking him in the toilet.............. I miss those days. I miss that Molvi Sahib.
