The early fifties belonged to Faiz and Manto. At Government College Lahore, where I got entrance on "cricket basis" like my father, there was a number of amateur singers in our class who would render Mehdi Hassan’s guloon mein rang bharay ghazal in Scholars’ Garden, as I listened transfixed.

While at Arif High School, Dharampura, I had read Lail-o-Nihar edited by Sibte Hasan (and even got a letter published in it), Chattan by Shorish Kashmiri and Tarjumanul Quran by Maududi in parallel with Parwez’s Tulu e Islam. I got into GC on cricket basis, together with Sarfaraz Nawaz who later became Pakistan’s ace fast bowler, and was ragged as "first year fool" by Salman "Crusher" Qureshi whose poetry in Pieces of Eight I was to admire later.

In class 12, I and Khalid Afzal Ranjha -- today one of the top lawyers of Pakistan with a PhD from the UK in Company Law, and former Judge of the Lahore High Court -- started "versifying" in English. Sample: "How can I be gay/when you are away?" (Ranjha understandably denies it.) In the same class, my teacher Abdul Qayyum Jojo, the thespian inspiration behind the GC Dramatic Club, told me that my prose, as written in my exam sheets, was unreadable.

Getting into GC

Shoaib Hashmi taught me economics. I saw him being subjected to rehearsed harassment in class by Tariq Ali, Salmaan Taseer, Salman Peer and Shahid Rahman. I learned from Shoaib how to succeed in life non-confrontationally -- only I am not so sure about my success. Friendship with Shoaib endured across time as I shared a staffroom with him as a teacher before he left for the UK.

The other economics teacher was Prof Fizaur Rehman, later principal of GC, who taught us out of SM Anwar’s textbook presided over by the genius of an early 20th century economist, the great Alfred Marshall and his "marginal" philosophy, a concept that applies to everything human even today. I swallowed Prof Fizaur Rehman’s rather "socialist" thesis about capitalism’s waste -- why make hundreds of soap brands when you need only one? -- till I read Schumpeter’s essay on capitalism’s "creative destruction" on the rebound from my stay in Moscow as a student.

English verse or worse?

I wrote verse in English that I don’t want to see today. I got it published in the college gazette first and then The Ravi, most probably because I was on the editorial panel and no one could stop me. I wrote unreadable prose too. While I was thus wasting my time, Intezar Hussain was writing ethereal columns before getting out to pound the pavements of Lahore in search of places where he could drink tea with friends.

Lahore has a density disparity. While the city’s wealthy spread out into low density luxury housing developments, the poor and middle-income become more and more confined to an ever-densifying housing footprint within the city.

About my atrocious manhandling of the English idiom, my MA English class-fellow Neelam Shah rebukes me even today. I think my Urdu-Persian schooling was responsible for my going bonkers. I privately think Neelam deserved the academic Roll of Honour after the 1965 MA exams more than I did. (After standing first in MA, I taught at GC for another four years. One of my pupils in BA was Javed Ahmed -- later Ghamidi -- who arose from GC to become, to my lights, the greatest Islamic scholar of our times. I was his teacher in those days; today, I stand secretly in bayat to him in my heart.)

To compound Neelam Shah’s lament, I hereby plead guilty to writing, on average, a thousand words a day for a salary for the last almost 40 years. I could roast in hell forever for this act of evil rascality. I am probably ripe for a suo moto summons from the apex court for this sustained public offence probably responsible for the decline of English in Pakistan.

Greek mythology and

Sir Fazle Hussain

An unguided missile penetrating the library atop Sir Fazle Hussain Theatre, I didn’t know for the life of me why I read the complete works of Aristophanes after falling upon Edith Hamilton’s introduction to Greek Mythology. Other writers came off the Anarkali pavement: Eric Linklater, Peter De Vries, JP Donleavy, SG Perelman, John Updike and, less proudly, Thorne Smith. I acquired their complete works later in life and found their addiction irresistibly durable.

As a result -- mainly thanks to de Vries -- I became hooked on puns and palindromes which may have ruined my style. One palindrome, probably the world’s longest, ran like this: "Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas." (Of course it means nothing.) There was no one to tell me what to read.

I can safely confess today that much of what I wrote in my essay in The Ravi, titled ‘Death and syntaxes can’t be avoided,’ carried several plagiarisms from de Vries. I could not match the genius of my cousin Shahid Javed Burki who had been chief editor of the GC literary magazine many years before I became its Joint Editor, and was completely in thrall to PG Wodehouse before he abandoned physics, took up economics, stood first in the CSS exam and ultimately became a vice president of the World Bank.

GC and Zaman Park

I was more inclined to follow in the footsteps of my father who appeared in the group photo of the GC cricket team in the early 1930s. And my close relative from Zaman Park, Dr Jehangir Khan -- Majid Khan’s father -- who appeared in cricket and wrestling teams displayed on the walls of the College Hall.

Another Zaman Park relative Niaz Muhammad Khan was GC hockey star while featuring in the kabbadi team too. He was later captain of the national hockey team at the Helsinki Olympics. I saw another stalwart of Zaman Park, Brigadier (retd) Khaleeq Khan, declared the Best Athlete of GC, following in the footsteps of his elder brother, Farooq Khan.

Also read: The obscure saga of a mediocre -- III

I recall that while I was in Faisalabad on summer vacations a cousin of mine gave me the complete gilt-edged works of Charles Dickens. It was post-partition booty from an abandoned Hindu house. (Muslims predictably didn’t read.) That too, perhaps, gave me the stilted style I favoured at GC. Today, Faisalabad proudly doesn’t have a bookstore worth the name.

In addition to reading the wrong books, I apologise, if it’s worth anything, for wearing my father’s army drill boots to college clomping up and down the stairs in front of the English Department, and wearing ill-fitting clothes under the college blazer. "Ill-fitting" probably described me as a person.

To be concluded