April 13, 2003

CALL it an article, a column or a semi-autobiographical note. Call it what you may, but let me explain the title, Diary of a Vagabond. You, my dear reader, are totally justified in objecting to it, as vagabonds do not keep dairies, dispatch clerks mostly do. Frankly, I was at complete loss as to what the title should be, and then I remembered the Diary of a Madman. Lo and behold, the problem was solved. Like Nutha Singh and Prem Singh are one and the same, madman and a vagabond are also one and, thus, the same.

Let me spend a bit of time going into the root cause of this madness that went into the making of the vagabond, and how did it all start. Where did this travel bag come from? From my blue-eyed six-foot father who could have been a heartthrob of the fifties no less than Gary Cooper if he had migrated to Hollywood. But, alas, he had a humble farming background of limited means. He ploughed fields, looked after the buffaloes and almost daily swam across the romantic river Chenab to deliver a breakfast of lassi and tanur ki roti to his father, who use to tend his buffaloes and cattle in the greener pasture of Bela, where Mahinwal in the days gone by did the same for his Sohni.

My father then swam back and walked a mere ten miles to his school to pursue his studies. My grandfather’s tribe of Tarar Jats always looked down upon him for allowing his son to be educated, as Jats had no business to study, only the Mullahs and the Hindus opted for such a low profession.

My father, Chaudhry Rehmat Khan Tarar, was in love with nature. Give him a handful of soil, and just by smelling and feeling it lovingly he would tell you whether it belonged to Punjab or Sindh, and had the capability of growing sugarcane, cotton and fruits with equal competence. An ear of wheat, a bud, a flower, a butterfly will send him into ecstasy. He wrote more than two dozen books about horticulture, and published a monthly agricultural magazine for over 30 years till he almost went bankrupt.

Once on his way to Srinagar where he was cultivating dahlia flowers, he saw a hillock which was totally barren. Just by smelling the soil he knew that it could give birth to vegetation, so he single-handedly, like a madman, planted seeds of flowers on the whole length and breadth of the barren hillock. And by the next spring, passengers travelling towards the vale of Kashmir could not believe their eyes as the barren hillock, by some miracle, was covered with flowers of all the colours of the rainbow.

From then onwards, it was called ‘the flower hill of Chaudhry Sahib’. Before I cross over into eternity, I wish I would have an opportunity to set my dim and aging eyes on that hillock, the ‘flower mountain’ of my father.

Sorry, I know I have rambled on and on about my father, but, then, he was a father, and every father is to be rambled on. I inherited that love of nature and freedom of spirit from him, but could not inherit his humble nature and greatness. He had sown in me the seed of adventure and the love of the wild.

In 1956 — almost half-a-century ago — the first opportunity came my way to test my mettle. Do I declare myself that ancient? Let’s face it. I am that ancient. The venue was that fabled Government College, Lahore, where I got admitted not because of securing high marks in Matric, but due to my faulty, but fluent English which was the end result of my watching — naturally without my family’s permission — almost thirty English-language movies every month.

On one of those days, we saw behind a mess of wires on the board a notice typed on a vintage typewriter, salvaged from the debris of World War II, no doubt. It read:

“Kishan Gunga Valley Expedition

“The Govt College Hiking and Mountaineering Club is planning to take an expedition to Kishan Gungy Valley in Kashmir and scaling the summit of Ratti Gali peak, via Abbottabad and Kaghan. We will be pleased to consider the applications of such volunteers who are physically fit and do not shy away from the dangers of adventure. Kindly contact Khawaja Sahib for further information.”

Now this Khawaja Sahib was a burly, rather elderly, physical instructor who took pleasure in torturing us students by ordering us to do push-ups and such other things wherever we had the misfortune of coming across him. So we avoided him like plague. I, needless to say, hadn’t then the faintest idea as to where this Kishan Gunga Valley was, but if it was in Kashmir, it was somewhere near my father’s ‘flower mountain’. So I had to go.

The next day, rather hesitantly, I presented myself to Khawaja Sahib. I was encouraged to see other volunteers there too. He ordered us to stand in a line, and then, to our utter surprise and shame, he told us to strip. Being a decent soul, he allowed us to keep our underpants on, but how many in those days wore this ‘uncomfortable, senseless attire’? None, I am afraid.

The expedition was still a long way off, and if this was the beginning, I wondered if it would be worth .

Mustansar Hussain Tarar will be writing for the Magazine every fortnight.

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