April 06, 2008

The book is an autobiography through which the author relives the first 30 years of his life

The Lahore office of Ford Rhodes Robson Morrow that I joined in the first week of April 1966 was located in a nondescript building in a side lane off the Mall, opposite the State Bank of Pakistan. It could be accessed from a narrow staircase that led up into a long room, where the articled clerks sat beyond it at the end lay another room where the manager Zafar Ahmad Khan had his desk. Zafar had also qualified from the UK and had been working at Ford Rhodes for about three years. A thin wiry figure with a small bristly mustache, he maintained his calm by puffing at a pipe. We became friends within minutes of my entering his office, where he had thoughtfully placed a second desk for me.

He introduced me to his staff — almost of all of them young graduates who had obtained articles and were hoping to qualify in time as chartered accountants. The two who remain prominent in my memory were Hamid and his companion Faiz. Hamid adopted the role of the office clown and in the end never qualified. I met him again 30 years later, by then he had joined a rating company based in Lahore.

Faiz was perhaps one of the most meticulous dressers I have ever met. With short-cropped hair, fair features and perfect teeth fully displayed during his frequent smiles, Faiz managed to look clean, crisp and starched at all times. No matter what time of the day it was, his shirts never sagged or creased. I lost touch with him after I left Ford Rhodes and the next time I enquired after him, I was told that he had found a lucrative job in West Africa, had moved there but contracted some tropical disease. He was returned to Lahore on a stretcher in a state of paralysis that proved fatal.

The diary I was given by Zafar at the office contained conversion tables from annas and pies into the newly introduced decimal paisas. It told me that a US dollar was worth Rs4.80 and a British pound Rs19.00. The first slab of income tax rates began where the taxable income did not exceed Rs1,000, in which case the tax leviable was Rs25. The highest bracket was where the taxable income exceeded Rs60,000, in which case the tax assessable was Rs25,320, plus 75 per cent of the amount exceeding Rs60,000. Earned income relief was 20 per cent with a ceiling of Rs6,000, and personal allowance Rs2,000. A trunk call from Karachi to Lahore cost Rs10 for a call of three minutes, and to Rawalpindi Rs3. Postal rates were 90 paisas for an air letter and 50 paisas for an aerogramme.

The three months that I spent in Zafar’s company from April until June were both a period of decompression and of education. He taught me to accept Pakistan for what it was, not what I wanted it to be. He also warned me against expecting anymore than it could give. When I chided a peon for not remembering the three things I had instructed him to do, Zafar explained that if the peon had been as intelligent as I expected him to be, he would have been sitting in my chair and not taking orders from the likes of me. There was a genuine compassion that radiated from Zafar’s calming temperament that imperceptibly enveloped those fortunate to work with him. I could not have been of much professional help to him in doing audits of construction firms like Cementation or contractors like Talihap Joint Venture involved in the Mangla Dam project, but he never let me feel that I was not a support.

He entrusted the firm’s main client — Shahnawaz Food Industries — to me. That questionable beneficence involved a stocktaking of their deep-frozen drums of fruit concentrate, kept in a large industrial refrigerator. The only way of counting the drums and not catching pneumonia in the process was to rush in, tally the contents, do as much as one could within four minutes, and then rush out into the heat to thaw.

Another client had rented an office in Gulberg’s mainly residential area. Inevitably the bedrooms converted into offices did not have enough space to store the company’s burgeoning files and so the staff used every available receptacle, even bathtubs. Close to the end of my audit I asked the accountant in charge for a particular voucher. He pressed ignorance, first of his knowledge of it and when I gave him its number, value etc of its very existence. ‘But how else could I have known its details if it doesn’t exist?’ I told him. ‘You couldn’t have seen it,’ he retorted. ‘We never show these vouchers to the auditors.’

Working as an employee in Pakistan rather than lording it as the privileged son of an industrialist proved a sobering experience. I learned to travel by rickshaw, eat at wayside cafes, and alter my accent so that I could be understood. For example, Hall Road became ‘Haal’ Road. I rented a small flat near the Canal off Jail Road for Rs300 per month. Its previous occupant Sajjad Haider, also a Chartered Accountant, had become engaged to marry the daughter of General Habibullah Khan, a former colleague of President Ayub Khan. Because he would now be moving to Peshawar where he proposed to set up practice, I took over his flat. I should have stayed with Mother but in my arrogance I wanted to assert my independence. I discovered afterwards that Mother had wept inconsolably when she learned that I would be living in Lahore but apart from her.
 

The three months that I spent in Zafar’s company from April until June were both a period of decompression and of education. He taught me to accept Pakistan for what it was, not what I wanted it to be.
 

The flat had beds and some rudimentary furniture. I decided I could live with them but needed bookshelves to accommodate my books on Indian Art. I employed an elderly cook named Hadi. I maintained meticulous accounts of all that I had received and spent, and from them I notice that I gave Hadi Rs80 as salary, the sweeper Rs10 per month, my daily expenses were in the region of Rs10 per month, my daily expenses were in the region of Rs5 per day (I was still a vegetarian). The largest outflow was on books, on some small manuscripts I bought from Goldsmith’s jewellers on Charing Cross, and on paintings and drawings bought from Bashir Mirza who had opened his first gallery in an old house owned by Mrs Nursat Bhutto on Kutchery Road in Karachi.

I had retained my interest in art, perhaps as an antidote to the aridity of my professional work, and as I knew that I would never be able to find miniature paintings of any quality comparable to the few I already possessed, it seemed logical to me to consider collecting the work of modern Pakistani artists. My first attempt was not encouraging. My cousin Abida Hussain had returned from her studies at Monteux and Florence, and at her house I was introduced to Professor Shakir Ali, then principal of the National College of Arts, and to his vice principal Mrs Abbasi Abidi. Abida had brought back with her from Florence a sketch that Pietro Annigoni had made of her. He had noticed, as I had, the similarity between Abida and a beautiful London socialite Patricia Rawaling whom Annigoni had painted as La Strega or The Witch. He obliged Abida by doing some sketches of her, the best of which he retained; giving her the one that she felt did not do her good looks full justice.

One Sunday morning, Abida invited me to her house to meet Professor Shakir Ali and Mrs Abidi. They wanted her to see his house and studio at Sanda Road. From Abida’s house in FCC Gulberg, we all drove down the Mall, past the Punjab Secretariat and turned into the driveway of the principal’s residence. The huge white building provided a perfect setting for Shakir’s paintings and his minimalist bachelor life style. His drawing room reflected the recent discovery by his NCA students of Swati craving motifs, and his dining room had stark black wrought iron chairs and a matching table. The glories of the house were the white walls populated with Shakir’s own large canvases. At the end of the central corridor hung Man, his homage to his favourite poet Rilke, and on either side of the corridor hung others that I was to become more familiar with time. That morning one particular painting caught my eye. It was Shakir’s dramatic version of Leda and the Swan, a vivid representation of a supine faceless Leda being ravished by a white swan, its fluttering wings curved like scythes. I asked Shakir sahib how much he was asking for the painting. He looked at Abida, and applying the same means test to me, he replied: ‘Rs5,000’. I fell back into an insolvent silence.

A few days later, I visited the National College of Arts and was shown its library, a motley residue of damaged books dateable to a period when the librarian had last taken an interest in it. Many valuable books published in the 1930s that I might have coveted had they been in better condition, were irretrievably vandalised, their reproductions torn out and their pages dog-eared through inconsiderate usage. Out of a sense of generosity, I suggested to Shakir sahib that the college could perhaps benefit from my own collection of books on Indian Art. It may have been modest but it had the advantage of being up-to-date. I invited Shakir sahib to have dinner at my flat so that he could see them for himself and make a selection. The evening passed off uneventfully, at the end of which Shakir sahib deflected my offer by proposing that instead of my donating my collection to the College, it might be safer for the books if he was to refer any student who needed to consult them to me for help. Some time later, when Shakir sahib and I came on more informal terms, he confessed that the only reason he had accepted my dinner had been the expectation that as I had been a UK return, he could be sure of getting some whiskey. Instead, he discovered to his disappointment that I neither drank alcohol nor ate meat.

Despite these initial misunderstandings, we became friends. When after seeing my collection of miniatures, he suggested that I might like to catalogue the Lahore Museum collection of miniature paintings, I initially declined his offer. ‘I know very little about miniature paintings,’ I told him.

‘That is more than the people in the Museum do,’ he replied, and left it to B.A. Kureishi, the chairman of the Lahore Museum to decide. At Shakir-sahib’s behest (he being a member of the Museum Board, his opinion carried some weight) Kureishi sahib invited me to meet him. I took along my small collection, carrying it in a wooden box covered with red raw silk that I had made for them during a free evening in London. Perhaps the maturity of my choice had appealed to him, perhaps the fact that I had met and seemed to know Bill Archer at the Victoria and Albert Museum impressed him, perhaps it was my name-dropping familiarity with the various collections in Europe, or perhaps it was a recognition of a spirit in me once latent in him, before he became a bureaucrat. Whatever the reason, he agreed that I should be allowed to catalogue the museum’s collection. I would not be paid for my labours but it was understood that the museum would publish the result if it was up to standard.

I resigned from Ford Rhodes Robson Morrow, surrendered my flat and moved in with Mother in her sprawling insecure house. I borrowed a bicycle from Fateh Din (our cook), and began my daily pilgrimage to the Museum. It was midsummer by then. The space allotted to me by the museum director Mr Taqi Kazmi, a part-time deputationist from the Education Department, was a corner of his own rarely used office. The walls were lined with books, for the room doubled also as the museum library, and above the bookshelves hung paintings that were too large or too British to be displayed in the galleries. They consisted of copies of the State portraits of King George V and Queen Mary done at the time of their coronation in 1911. I was given a desk covered in green baize, a chair, a copy of S.N. Gupta’s Catalogue of the Paintings in the Central Museum Lahore, published in 1922, and a trunk containing the miniatures themselves, hinged on large buff sheets of thick paper. The custodian looked relieved at transferring his charge, for my arrival enabled him to resign from the museum and migrate to Canada.

Gupta’s catalogue had a limited utility. For one thing it listed only those paintings that were on display in the museum’s showcases forty-four years earlier. During that period the museum had acquired almost as many paintings as Gupta had listed. These were listed in a handwritten sheet of paper pasted in each relevant section of Gupta’s catalogue. More significantly, following the division of the museum collection in 1947, one third of the paintings had been sent to the East Punjab Government in India. These were identified with the mark ‘E’ denoting East Punjab.
 

Excerpted with permission from
The Counterfoils of My Years
By F. S. Aijazuddin
Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore
ISBN 969-35-1837-7
304+16pp. Rs750
 

F. S. Aijazuddin is a chartered accountant by qualification and has had a varied professional career in both Pakistan and UAE. His other works include When Bush Comes to Shove and Other Writings and Lahore Recollected: An album