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LAST weekend while all politically correct citizens were transfixed before television sets watching the hours-long proceedings of the British royal wedding, a bizarre mix-up of dates swayed my memories fifty years backwards.
Yes, the year was 1968 when a shoe shop situated at the then Elphinstone Street (today Zaibunissa Street) in Karachi had invited a select group, including a few journalists, to a reception.
The event was a celebration of the shop becoming the first ever commercial enterprise in Pakistan’s history to install air-conditioning for the comfort of its customers.
As I wandered around not knowing anyone personally, somebody raised a hand making a sign from the other end of the hall.
Then I saw a face I knew well. Today I don’t remember his first name for the simple reason that, given the vast difference between our ages, I had always addressed him as Mr Menezes.
He was a man of Goan-Portuguese origin, very individualistic by nature and not willing at his age to work as an employee for any organisation; he contributed to many newspapers his articles on various subjects, including horse-racing forecasts that were his specialty.
Once we were together he took me to a less noisy side room of the shop.
“Can you guess what this place was forty years ago?”
When I was unable to answer the question he raised his drink and took a swallow: “This used to be a bookshop. I came here a lot because one could read books like in a library and buy second-hand ones at very low prices.”
He continued: “Still very young and with no great means to afford new books, I came here fairly frequently to read them, even buy one now and then when I had some money.
“Another fellow who came regularly was an Englishman. As we were here together often, we nodded at each other distantly without really having a conversation. One day he saw me undecidedly turning the pages of an old copy of Dialogues of Plato. ‘You must read this book’, he said to me. Observing an expression of indecision on my face, he understood the problem and paid for it from his own pocket, offering it to me as a present.
“From then on we became good friends. He would occasionally invite me to have a cup of tea in a nearby café and once offered me an English translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince, insisting that I must read it if I really wanted to understand how politics works.
“I later learned that he was called T. E. Shaw and was sent as air corporal at the Royal Air Force base in Karachi. After a while I suddenly stopped seeing him and was told by the bookshop owner that Shaw had returned to England.
“A few years had passed and I had found a regular job as a newspaper reporter. One day I was shocked to learn that the man who was so kind to me was actually called T.E. Lawrence, the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an autobiographical account of his own legendary role as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.
“But this revelation came to me along with the sad news that he had died, only at age forty-seven, following a motorcycle accident in England.”
As Mr Menezes finished his story I looked back at him in disbelief. My own knowledge of Lawrence of Arabia was limited to the David Lean film I had seen about a year earlier. Then he flung another surprise at me:
“Do you know on what date Lawrence died in 1935? Same as today… 19th of May!”
I hope you won’t hold it against me if I kept thinking of Menezes and Lawrence of Arabia on the day of marriage between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, May 27th, 2018
