I had first met K.M. Kaiser (KMK) when I had gone to China in 1956. In the absence of Sultanuddin Ahmed, who was the Ambassador, KMK was holding the fort of our embassy. He and I had become great friends. KMK was now Additional Foreign Secretary, and soon after the guns had been silenced and a ceasefire come into effect, he telephoned to tell me that I had been chosen to be a part of the Pakistan delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, and I should start packing my bags. I told him that I was an employee of PIA, and before accepting I would need to get permission from Asghar Khan. “No problem,” he said. He would talk to Asghar Khan himself. I must admit that I wasn’t particularly thrilled.
I had gone to the United Nations the previous year (1964) to assist the Foreign Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. This assignment had come about in a somewhat romantic fashion. I was in London with Nur Khan and Jimmy Mirza. As I came down from my hotel room, the two of them were sitting in the lobby of the hotel. Nur Khan showed me a telex he had received, which said that the Foreign Minister wanted my services to be put at his disposal for a United Nations’ session. This came as a complete surprise to me, though Nur Khan did not seem convinced. I told him that if he had any doubts, I would not go. “That’s my decision,” he said, but I felt that he was pleased. More than that, when he finally gave his approval, he told me that I may have to do some entertaining and I could draw the money from our New York office.
I had met Bhutto in London and we had travelled together to New York. I had a friend, Ali Khan, who was a senior executive with Newsweek, a wonderful man and generous to a fault. He had an apartment off Park Avenue, and he handed me the keys and went off to live with his girlfriend who he married ultimately. Col Ismail, who was our Defence Attache in Washington DC, had come over and he moved in with me. In lieu of rent, he had to make coffee in the mornings. All I can say is that it was a new experience for me and I helped to rewrite a portion of Bhutto’s speech, and had included a paragraph describing the continuing hostility between India and Pakistan as a form of madness. But the highlight of this visit was that I was able to get tickets to see the play Dylan, with Alec Guinness as the Welsh poet.
It was impossible to get tickets for the play. It was a sell-out for months. But I had telephoned Hank Helms of our advertising agency Fuller, Smith & Roses. Hank had told me to ask for anything, even the Brooklyn Bridge but not a ticket for Dylan. But he had managed it. The play was about the lecture tour that Dylan Thomas had undertaken of the United States, a triumphant and a destructive tour. Dylan tells his wife Caitlin: “I have fornicated a continent with my voice.” But he was drinking himself to oblivion. When I had gone to Swansea in 1962, I had been taken to a pub and told that it was Dylan’s ‘local’. It had become a tourist attraction. John Arlott had known Dylan Thomas. They had both worked at the BBC and John, too, had been a poet. Both had the power to use words, a ceaseless flow of images and magical pictures with words as the building-blocks.
Bhutto was staying at Hotel Pierre that overlooked Central Park. New York had a charm of its own, and in those days it was safe to walk its streets at night. In fact, it was two cities, a day-city and a night-city. And it was a city that left you alone and yet, one was never lonely. After two weeks, I told Bhutto that I had had enough of the United Nations and I returned to Karachi.
This time, I did not make it. KMK rang up and told me that Asghar Khan felt that it would be a waste of time for me, and that nothing would come out of talking about Kashmir in the United Nations. KMK said that he had been quite shirty. I went to see Asghar Khan mainly to tell him that my going to the United Nations had not been my idea. He seemed not to be in the best of humour about the conduct of the war. He repeated what he had told KMK, but then relented and told me that I could go for two weeks and he would give me a letter for Bhutto where he would set out his views. I called KMK, but he informed me that my name had been taken off the list and he was damned if he would go back to Aziz Ahmed again. I was not particularly disappointed. There wasn’t much joy in being a part of a supporting cast.
Asghar Khan had now settled into his job. He decided to visit East Pakistan. His views on East Pakistan differed from the conventional wisdom that it was a sort of colony or protectorate. He was also someone who was much admired in East Pakistan and considered a straight-shooter, and one who did not speak with a forked-tongue. I was to accompany him. Also, Masud Mahmud, Director of Tourism, no better example of a square peg in a round hole.
I had known Masud Mahmud vaguely. He had once come to our Friday Night at Air Cottage, but he had been lost in the crowd. But I had known of him as a police-officer who had made the headlines in the famous Ibrat case, and he had gained some notoriety in the way that he had interrogated Ibrat’s wife. I don’t think that compassion was his strong suit.
The Dhaka Press Club had invited Asghar Khan for tea. In the afternoon of the day, my public relations officer, Moinuddin Choudary, informed me that the Press Club had specifically told him that Masud Mahmud had not been invited. He had been the Superintendent of Police when a student had been shot dead during the language riots. I conveyed this to Asghar Khan. He didn’t say very much except that he would ask Wing Commander C.S. Khan, his personal aide, to inform Masud Mahmud.
However, at the tea, I found Asghar Khan to be somewhat frosty towards me. When he was leaving, he asked me to accompany him. We sat in silence for a few, tense moments and then he said that Masud Mahmud had told him that I had engineered to have him de-invited. I was flabbergasted, but before I could say anything, C.S. Khan, who normally offered no opinion, plucked up the courage and asked to be heard. He told the Air Marshal that Shamsul Huda, the Deputy-Director of Tourism, had told him (C.S. Khan) that Masud Mahmud had told him that he was going to tell the Air Marshal that he (Shamsul Huda) had been informed by the Press Club that I didn’t want Masud Mahmud at the tea and he would have to back up his story or he would sack him. Shamsul Huda had told C.S. Khan that he was not willing to do this, more since he was a friend of mine.
Asghar Khan heard this silently. I asked the driver of the car to do a detour and drop me at my hotel. I was working up a slow-burn but kept quiet. I got off at the hotel and decided that I would return to Karachi the same evening. I packed my bags and went to the airport. I sat in the small restaurant that was on the first floor. I remember that the restaurant had poor lighting and I sat in semi-darkness. I was not so much angry, as I was hurt. I thought about resigning, but that would have handed victory to people like Masud Mahmud. But then, as they say, it’s rough in the big time. I chose to take a charitable view. Some people can’t help themselves. This was the only hiccup in my association with Asghar Khan, and neither he nor I ever mentioned the incident.
The 1965 war seemed to have put a strain on the relations between Ayub Khan and Bhutto. Rumours had started that Bhutto was beginning to lose influence with Ayub Khan, and that the Americans, too, were not happy with him. They saw him as being a bit too nationalist and a little too pro-Chinese.
Bhutto had come to Karachi and he telephoned me, and I went to see him at 70-Clifton. He was down with a touch of flu and his spirits were low. But he gave no indication that anything was seriously wrong. He merely admitted to being a little cheesed-off. He made no mention of Tashkent. Actually, it was a pure social call and he asked me, as he always did, whether he could do anything for me. I told him that I was happy enough where I was, but he had looked, not so much a troubled man but an uneasy one, someone who had had his wings clipped or was about to have them clipped.
Yunus Said had been close to him and I mentioned this to Yunus that our mutual friend seemed to be in deep waters. “These things happen in politics,” he had said without too much conviction. Yunus was one of those spectators who saw more of the game.
Although, I was no longer handling advertising, Asghar Khan asked me what I thought of Hobson, Bates, PIA’s agency. I told him that they had done a good job. He felt, however, that a change might be a good idea. Also, that the slogan “Great People to Fly with” had outlived its utility. I did not agree, and I suggested that the next time he went to London, he should go and see the agency and meet some of its key people. He agreed.
On his next trip to London, he asked me to accompany him and I set up a meeting with Hobson, Bates.
The meeting was a disaster. Colonel Colin Gray was at his Sandhurstworst. He made the presentation and started off by saying that the agency was now having to deal with PIA’s Second XI, and from then on he could do nothing right. I saw the unhappiness on the faces of his colleagues who knew that their goose was cooked. Later, I told Colin that he had sounded patronizing and blimpish, and like a District Commissioner during the British Raj.
The mistake he had made was that he had claimed that the agency was losing money on the PIA account. “If you are losing money, why the hell do you want to keep the account?” I asked him, angrily. He mumbled something about being misunderstood. “I rather think that you have dropped a crucial catch.” I was right. Asghar Khan had not been impressed. Hobson, Bates had done an outstanding job for PIA. But it had become history.
