In class 12, I had two class fellows in economics whom I admired: Zubair and Tariq Sultan. They were simply brilliant and handled the subject with great ease even as I struggled. Zubair I met later in life when I called on him at the IMF headquarters in Washington DC. He was pleasantly magisterial in his diagnosis of a perennially ailing Pakistan economy. Tariq Sultan I grew to treasure as a hardnosed, honest civil servant who shone in every department he joined till they had to make him chief secretary of the province. I had a sneaky affection for him because he was a good cricketer before he joined GC.

At the cricket nets in the University grounds, my captain was Zafar Altaf -- I didn’t last long under his stern discipline -- at whose feet I sat a lot of times later, as a maverick civil servant who knew his agriculture better than anyone else in the country. His equally brilliant brother was president of the Speakers’ Union at GC and later joined the civil service like him.

Class fellow Salmaan Taseer, in whose newspaper Daily Times I wrote editorials for nearly a decade (2000-2009) and grew to cherish his secular ideals, had a great father in MD Taseer, probably the single most gifted genius of all-round talent in the 1930s’ literary movement. Shahid Rahman, who married an extraordinary Ravian, Samina Hosain, was the son of a very learned judge of the Supreme Court, Justice SA Rahman.

Tariq Ali’s father was the foremost Left intellectual of Lahore in those days, gifted with flawless speech.

The gilded youth of GC

These were what the Victorians called "gilded youth", sons of great fathers who probably did as well as they, if not better. I saw Tariq Ali speaking better than his great orator father Mazhar Ali Khan at the Young Speakers Union debates. (I wrote a column in Khan’s weekly Viewpoint for a number of years: I had grown to respect the man’s intellect and integrity when he called at the Pakistan embassy in Moscow under Ambassador Jamsheed Marker -- another demigod in my personal pantheon -- while I was a long-suffering third secretary there.)

The poetasters of GC -- myself, Athar Tahir, Alamgir Hashmi -- had their day finally. Taufiq Rafat arrived at GC with Kaleem Omar in tow. Taufiq looked at my verse. He was steadfastly encouraging; Omar was brutal and on reflection honestly accurate. Taufiq was a poet of wisdom but he was essentially a pagan who celebrated nature. He was the big poet. He wrote a play in verse in which I actually acted, directed by Farrukh Nigar Aziz.

Rafat lived in his poems because he was strictly non-judgmental. He stayed close to the senses and let them give their verdict. He was not obsessed with transmitting a message of any kind because that would fall in the category of judgment. He lived a life without final conclusions, creating pathos and beauty by refraining from imposing on us any moral assessment of the object he was looking at.

Taufiq Rafat at GC

He accepted the flux of time but not the ideologies that tried to arrest it. He was rewarded for this impartiality of the soul with a freedom that few poets of our time have achieved. His nostalgia for the past was not based on any values that have been robbed by time; he simply noted the passage of a way of life that was no more. What moved him most about transition was death, the death of those he had known, of people who lived without bearing the doubtful burden of being acknowledged by society as great.

Apart from Dr Imdad Husain, who was the best teacher of Shakespeare in our day, and Shoaib Hashmi, the person I was most affected by, was Abdul Qayyum aka Jojo who often helped me avoid taking the bus by giving me a ride in his Volkswagen from the Canal to GC. He lived in Mian Mir across the canal from Zaman Park where I often visited him, at the same time snatching the bonus of seeing Safdar Mir "Zeno," once a teacher at GC, who shared the same roof, buried in his books. (Later when he built his own house in Scotch Corner he showed me an entire upper floor housing his grand library. I was so overawed I never told him that I had a scrapbook of his articles in The Pakistan Times where I was to follow him in due course of time.)

Jojo and Shoaib Hashmi

Jojo took me to hotels I hadn’t seen from the inside, and introduced me to his friends who, it appeared, came from all walks of life, including those who owed him big money but never paid up. He was a great actor and his renditions in GCDC’s English plays are stuck in my head. He was a perfectionist. After seeing me in a debate he told me I was not meant for public speaking. (I thought I had done rather well but looking back I think he was right.)

Shoaib went to the UK for higher studies and on his return started teaching economics again. GCDC was revived and much was learned by rustics such as me in his circle of friends. Jojo and I used to land up in what appeared to me a one-room second-floor apartment at Safanwala Chowk. Can you believe that I had my first good kabab then, because Safanwala Chowk was the first "food street" type of place to take on the "feeding frenzy" of the calorie-crazy Lahori male? I became an admirer of Saleema Hashmi, and have endured in that state beyond my 70 years.

The last thing she did was get me appointed to GC’s South Asia Institute endowed by a Hindu from France who once lived in my neighbourhood in Mian Mir. The institute, nicely built where there was once a gymnasium -- where I remember hanging forlornly from a cross-bar as a first-year student under the baleful gaze of a PT officer -- may one day see the light of day. PS: I recall Riaz Kayani, later a judge of the Lahore High Court, firming up his very pronounced biceps in the gymnasium, after which he could sprint faster than any of us in the adjacent tennis courts. My friend-for-life Hayat Khan was the other tough guy whom I secretly hero-worship to this day.

Also read: The obscure saga of a mediocre

Sad-looking?

Was I sad-looking? I think not, but I think my handsome friend Tarique Farooqui was. His sadness was cosmic rather than causal, which might have rubbed off on me because we were often found trudging the GC slope together. In 2006, I called at his large "preserved-heritage" house in New York where he had retired after a brilliant career at the UN; and guess what? He took me to his lair in the cellar and played the murderously sad 1950s songs that I simply could not take because of the desolation they invoked. I think he was the sad bloke infecting me, but he might think the opposite. He was in BA Urdu and not very happy under the tutelage of Prof Qayyum Nazar whose tongue was often more sandpaper than human flesh.

GC was already in decline in those days despite such great Ravians as Tariq Ali, Waseem Sajjad, Imtiaz Javed, Aamir Aziz Syed, Saeed Haroon etc. It attracted crowds of enthusiasts from the city. I can say that the old alma mater still had the afterglow of the Raj about it. However, the infrastructure had started to go. Then came the sudden, all-round decline because Pakistan was more interested in war and conquest than the apparently more humble pursuit of education. It was not until the principalship and vice-chancellorship of Khalid Aftab, a namesake relative close to me because our fathers too were namesakes. Now Pakistan is once again financially belly-up, but thankfully GC University will likely survive.