The British ran some excellent boarding schools on hill-stations in Northern India catering mainly to the children of British residents and first generation Anglo-Indians with an odd Harding or Halifax from the aristocracy thrown in. The very few Indians, WOGs (Worthy Oriental Gentlemen) as they were called, had to stick together. They couldn’t afford a Hindu/Muslim divide.

By the mid 1930s and 1940s that started to change. Day-schools began to appear. Politics from the countryside tickled in. The clamour of “Inqilab zindabad (Congress) and Pakistan zindabad (Muslim League) began to filter in.

K.C. Panth was the leading day-scholar rooting for the Congress. His father was the Provincial President of the Party.

In the forefront from the Muslim league were the Alvis. Ata’s father Dr Illahi Alvi headed the Muslim league. He owned almost everything in Nainital including the only Indian cinema house. Indian boys from Sherwood and St.Joseph’s college got free entrance to the matinee show; that is if they could sneak out after lunch.

All that ended in 1947 when Dr Ilahi left for Pakistan. Most Muslim boys who had the wherewithal also left. Of the five Indians in my class (7th standard), three were Muslims. They were all gone except for myself.

My family had hit hard times. My elder brother Capt. Mahmood Rizvi (Dufferin: 1929-31) died at the tail end of the World War II. My father had died a few months before that.

Those days, servants were brought in from the village lock, stock and barrel with their families and would be attached for life. The most important one for me was the “coachwan’s” (coachman’s) family. His wife was my ‘nanny’, who had breast-fed men and raised me upto boarding school age. We had become a very large, unwieldy clan. Going to Pakistan was out of question.

My parents had died. My nanny, “Amma” to me) had also died. My only attachment was to an aging, striped grey hound. With my peers from school all gone to Pakistan, I felt cheated. Somehow, going to Pakistan seemed way out and it became my obsession.

By 1952, I had moved to Kanpur and was taking flying lessons at the Hind Provincial Flying Club. I had also joined the Christ Church College. This was the Diamond Jubilee year of the College. A big show was organised, a sort of farewell for Rev. R.G. Slater, our principal. The two-day athletic meet was the prime event. A large trophy for the athletic champion was to be presented at the Convocation.

I became the Diamond Jubilee athletic champion and was already flying aeroplanes which was enough to get to any teenager’s head. Soon I was walking on air, brimming over with confidence, ready to go to Pakistan.

A train from Kanpur to Monabou and on to Kohkrapar (Pakistan) was leaving soon. No travel documents were required. Alas! I had no place to go to in Pakistan and then ofcourse there was the question of money.

Mr Azhar, a pretty nosy member of the staff, found an answer to both these problems. He knew that there were sufficient funds remaining in my account at the Flying Club while I wasn’t aware of this. If I could send in an application signed by Mr Tikkoo, our Chief flying Instructor, he could manage a refund. No one would know, I could also stay with his older brother, already in Pakistan.

The catch ofcourse was that I would have to foot the travel expenses of his younger brother Hyder and take him along too. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. My dream of going to Pakistan was coming true.

So it was late on one dark August night in 1952, when I quietly sneaked out of my house with a suitcase packed with a few clothes, my log book (flying record) and my spikes which were my good luck charm.

I was soon cramped in with Mr Hyder in a third-class train compartment bound for Monabou. After a whole day and night, we arrived at the Pakistan border.

My three-month winter holidays were spent in Malihabad (Lucknow) the home of mango gardens. I would gather all the urchins in the neighbourhood and with improvised flags made from banana leaves superimposed with a crescent and star, we would march from garden to garden. I had never really seen the Pakistan flag.

And now at Monabou, right across the border, I saw the real thing; the Pakistan flag fluttering on a flagpole in all its glory. I was completely overwhelmed. Quite mindlessly I ran across the sand towards the flag and sure enough was soon overpowered by the Indian border police.

I took boxing lessons and our motto at, “certa bonum certamen” (flight the good fight) very seriously. I easily got the better of a policeman or two and was soon cooling my heels in the Monabou lock up. My only fear was of being located, hauled back home and my dreams of going to Pakistan down the drain.

I was there for a week. My exercise regime every morning included a long head stand (the sheesh aasin). The constable in charge saw something very spiritual about this and began warming up to me. Soon a rapport was created and he finally came up with an offer of seeing me across the border for a charge of Rs 200.

For me this was a fortune. But I had no choice. Eventually my meager holdings which were banked in my shoes were reduced by Rs 200 and I crossed over the Pakistan border after paying my first bribe.

Mr. Hyder by then was long gone. I was in Khokrapur by myself, all of my seventeen years and five months, with nothing but a suitcase and no place to go to; the happiest man in the world just for being in Pakistan.

The routine required that I proceed to Mirpur Khas.

There, on the main street stood two rows of “charpais” offered at eight annas apiece for the night. While I was making the payment someone shouted; “mohajir idhar”. Quite certain that someone else was being addressed and dog-tired, I ignored the call. Heading for the nearest “charpai” I was off to the land of Morpheus in no time.

My room at home, though a little untidy, always had a comfortable bed with a clean bed-sheet and a warm glass of milk always waited for me. A poster of Captain Marvel (a comic-book hero) and the picture of Terry More (a Hollywood heart-throb) in those days, gazed from the opposite wall. A lurking thought of turning back was immediately brushed off. How could I be so ungrateful?

That was my fist night in Pakistan.

In the morning on a news stand, I noticed the ‘Dawn’, considered a treat in rural India. The front page carried a picture of refugees: “mohajirs” they were called. I knew then that the man who had shouted “mohajir idhar” the previous evening was infact addressing me.