The Marching Bells: A Journey of a Life Time

© 2011 Waheed Ud Din. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 4/26/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4415-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4414-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011904223

Printed in the United States of America

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DEDICATION

I am pleased to dedicate this humble work to my very dear daughter-in-law Milena, without whose persistent encouragement, I couldn’t have started and eventually completed this book on my life long memories.

Milena is the wife of my dear son Javad,

Sister-in-law of my dear son Imad and mother of my three beautiful grandchildren,

Mateo Waheed Din, Born May 3, 2001,

Sebastian Adil Din, Born June 26, 2003,

Sofia Ana Din, Born October 1, 2010.

May God keep them all under His protection and guide them to the path of the righteous on whom He has bestowed His grace and blessings. Amen.

Waheed Ud Din.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 The Pre-partition British Raj

CHAPTER 2 The Story of Lahore

CHAPTER 3 The Impressionable Years

CHAPTER 4 The Struggle for Pakistan

CHAPTER 5 The Post Independence Era

CHAPTER 6 The Clash of Cultures

CHAPTER 7 London to Pakistan by Road

CHAPTER 8 The Uncertain Times

CHAPTER 9 The Canadian Discovery

CHAPTER 10 The New York World’s Fair 1964-65

CHAPTER 11 The Four Memorable Years

CHAPTER 12 The Laszlos of Toronto

CHAPTER 13 My Oriental Rug Business

CHAPTER 14 The Promised Land

CHAPTER 15 My dear Friend Qazi Qayyum

CHAPTER 16 The New Business Ventures

CHAPTER 17 The Mirage of Hope and Family Intrigues

CHAPTER 18 The 9/11 and Our Middle East Wars

CHAPTER 19 My Hajj Pilgrimage to Mecca

CHAPTER 20 The Wars and Their Consequences

INTRODUCTION

I am pleased to share the story of my life with you and hope to take you along with me when I retrace my steps and read my story along the way. I hope and trust that you will find it interesting, informative and educational. In the process I intend to give a brief picture of the social and political climate which surrounded my life and had played an important role in my thinking and eventually molding my course of action. I faced many occasions in my life where my decisions drastically changed the course of history for me. I am fortunate that my spirit of adventurism and self confidence has, by and large, been a source of satisfaction for me in my actions. I have been a fairly quick decision maker all my life and do not go into deep and lengthy sessions of contemplation and brooding. I give a very serious thought and due deliberations to the situation at hand but will not delay making a decision if that is what is required on the occasion. During the course of my journey of life I have endeavored to chart out and set the goals for myself but did not hesitate to change course to accommodate and answer to the call of the time and compromise with the inevitable human weaknesses and the forces of nature and destiny. I also intend to touch on some incidents of personal nature which I always avoided to talk about with my dear ones including my parents and siblings. These incidents, undoubtedly, influenced my thinking and had a profound effect on my perception of things which came my way during my journey of life.

Before starting out and considering that I am a very private person, I definitely had second thoughts on whether or not I should really be exposing myself by undertaking this project which would certainly involve an honest and straight forward approach by me. Persistent and singlehanded encouragement of my daughter-in-law Milena persuaded me to record my life story, glimpses of which I had shared with my family off and on over the last fifteen years. Now that I am embarking on the mission to narrate my story, I would like this to be true to my character and honest in depiction to the best of my knowledge, ability and recollection. My old passports, which I still have in my possession, have provided me some very valuable data of my travels and visits to various places in the world which were exploratory and educational. Some of these places eventually became my homes where I lived, worked and raised my family. Other than Lahore, the city of my birth, London, Toronto and New York also have a special place in my heart for the unforgettable memories which had a great deal of bearing on the journey of my life.

I have a deep sense of emotional association with Lahore, where I have spent some momentous time and periods of immeasurable joy and happiness in the company of my friends and family. I have been a history buff all my life and the subject has always intrigued me right from my high school years. The period of Muslim rule in India, particularly the Mughal Period had an irresistible fascination to my mind. Lahore is more than a thousand year old city and when you are growing up there, you cannot help but see the History all around you. I remember, during my public school days, my father used to take us all to the tombs of Asaf Jah, Emperor Jahangir and Noorjahan and The Shalimar Gardens to play and spend the day in the company of his other friends and their families. A cook and his aides accompanied us and they would cook the meals and provide refreshments to us, all day long. During my high school days I kept up the tradition and continued to visit and enjoy all those historical places and some, this time in the company of my own school mates and friends.

My aim of writing this book is not only to record my memoirs but also to paint a picture of some of my ever lasting impressions about the social, political, historical and cultural heritage I have been a part of in my growing up years. For the benefit of the reader and for the sake of my own personal pleasure, I am taking the liberty of inserting some of those impressions in my biographical narrations which have left an everlasting impression on my mind. I am proud to say that in my early college days, I was a part of the political awakenings of the mid-forties in India. I believe that my active participation in the political activities of the time had a great deal of impact on the history of the Sub-continent which resulted in the eventual division of India into two independent states. I am a man of very humble character but something inside of me tells me to say that without my tireless work in the Indian elections of 1945/46, the goal of Pakistan might have shifted to an unknown future. Here I am only trying to say that as a member of the Punjab Muslim Students Federation, I worked with my other fellow students in the political campaigns of the Muslim League Party which resulted in the overwhelming victory of the Party, both in the province of Punjab and at the Center. This wouldn’t have been possible without the untiring campaigning work of The Punjab Muslim Students Federation. And I was an important part of all those political campaigns.

I hope my sharing of thoughts with you on the subject will add to your knowledge of the history of the creation of two independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, with a total population of 400 million people in the sub-continent of India. This was indeed, the greatest news of the time when almost 20% of humanity won its freedom from the British Imperialism. This proved to be the beginning of the end of the British Empire in the world.

LIFE IS SOUND AND ACTION. To narrate this phenomenon for the story of my life, I have picked, The Marching Bells as title for my book. My selection of this title was inspired by my ever lasting memories of the village life back in the old country. Even though I was born and raised in a city like Lahore but as a college student I worked in the villages of Pakistan during the days of Indian struggle for independence from the British Raj. After the partition of India I had numerous opportunities to visit friends in the country and observe life first-hand as it rolled through the not so busy daily routine of the country life. The sound of bells emanating from the marching cattle herds and the caravans of bullock carts and camel carts and the ever so present waterwheel in the village life toiled by musically circling bullocks around the well with chiming bells around their necks still continues to inspire my thoughts. Those sounds of the bells were an unending manifestation of life in the country.

CHAPTER 1

The Pre-partition British Raj

My name is Waheed-ud-Din. It is all one hyphenated name. My father’s name was Shams-ud-Din. His father’s name was Mian Muhammad Abdullah and his father’s name was Muhammad Sakhi Joo. So you see, there is no such thing as the LAST NAME in my family’s known history. This was not unusual in the society I had been brought up in. The name you were known as, was the name you were given at the time of your birth. My father named all his sons after his own rhyming name like, Moin-ud-Din, Waheed-ud-Din, Saeed-ud-Din, Zaheer-us-Din and Jameel-ud-Din. My three sister’s names are Khurshid Begum, Zahida Begum and Rashda Begum. The name Begum is really a respectable title which is usually used at the end of a woman’s name. My younger brother Saeed and my older sister Khurshid are no longer with us. May God rest their soul in peace.

I do, however, have a family name which for some reason, has not been used in my family. My father used to tell us that we are all Rathores, a Rajput martial race from Kashmir. Our family name Rathore was always there for us to take as the last name but none of us were encouraged to do so. My father also used the name Mian before his given name and I am not really sure, where did that name come from when he had already told us that we were all Rathores. On occasions I had thought of adding the family name of Rathore after my given name but hesitated to do so as my first ever passport was issued to me in Lahore in my given name only. The passport continued to be renewed in the same name and I never bothered to rectify my initial error.

I have a little story to tell about the system of names in the society I grew up in. Given names were considered to be your good names and if anybody needed further identification, your father’s name was added at the end of your own name. My father would thus be identified as Shams-ud-Din S/O Mian Muhammad Abdullah. But then I have seen people using their family names either before or after their given names. Some people have two family names also which they use one before and the other after their given names. My maternal grandfather was known as Sheikh Ghulam Rasul Butt. Ghulam Rasul was his real given name but then he was a Sheikh and a Butt too. Similarly my father-in-law had two family names also. He was known as Mirza Nawazash Ali Khan. Mirza and Khan were his family additions. If you are not already confused enough, let me add something else for you to think about. In numerous cases where people had only one family name which they wished to use as part of their full name, it was not considered necessary to use it after your given name. It was fairly common to use it before it, like Khawaja Abdul Rasheed or Malik Bashir Ahmad. Khawaja and Malik being family names. I could understand how confusing it would be for a Westerner to pick out the family name from the full name, but believe me it would not be difficult or confusing at all for me to distinguish one from the other.

The official record of names in the books of the government were maintained in the alphabetical order of the first appearing name, may it be your family name or the given name. If you used your family name at the end of your name, your family name would be totally ignored for record keeping purposes both public and private. My name would thus go under W and my father’s name would go under S. In the old country, people would call me, Mr. Waheed or Mr. Waheed-ud-Din but never Mr. Din. Calling me by Mr. Din would be in bad taste and would not be appreciated. I have recently noticed that my younger sister Rashda has been using her father’s name at the end of her’s, looking like Rashda Shams and not Rashda Din. So much about the name business.

I was born on January 1, 1930 in the undivided India, in the city of Lahore. At the time of my birth my mother had some serious health problems and my grandmother (my mother’s mother) took care of me and brought me into her own house from the hospital. As luck would have it, my grand-parents’ house became my permanent abode right up to my college days, even though my mother had fully recovered after a few weeks of my birth and had returned to her own house.

My grandfather Sheikh Ghulam Rasul Butt (my mother’s father) was in charge of the house. He, in his younger days had helped his father, Sheikh Abdul Rehman in the publishing of a newspaper by the name of PATAY KHAN which later changed its name to LAHORE PUNCH. My grandfather’s dad was famously known as PATAY KHAN on account of his ownership of the PATAY KHAN newspaper. The name passed on to my grandfather. My mother and her four sisters, in their younger days, were popularly known in the Lahore social circles as the PATAY KHAN girls. The name PATAY KHAN itself had become synonymous with power and influence in Lahore, the capital city of the Punjab province. The newspaper, for some reason, ceased printing and my grandfather took a very responsible superintendent’s job in the Punjab governor’s office in Lahore. The only thing that I remember about the newspaper is the huge pile of old editions stored in a room in my grandfather’s house. The collection however, mysteriously disappeared from my eyes in a matter of months to make room for the growing family. My older brother Moin however tells me that he still has a bunch of old editions of Patay Khan and Lahore Punch in his possession in his own publishing house in Lahore. Moin’s business goes under the name of, Maktaba Moin-ul-Adab, Urdu Bazar Lahore. Moin is not only a publisher and a bookseller, he is also a writer and an author of some 17 books in Urdu Poetry and Prose under his pen name, Hazeen Kashmiri.

Without making changes to what I have already written above, about my brother Moin, I am very grieved to add that brother Moin passed away in Lahore about an hour ago. While I was in the process of uploading my manuscript to the publisher, I received a telephone call from my younger brother Jamil, giving me the sad news that Moin died of a sudden heart failure in the early hours of Saturday, January 8, 2011. He has left behind his wife for 55 years, 2 sons, 3 daughters and 15 grandchildren. May God rest his soul in Peace.

I am talking about the thirties of the last century when there was British Raj (rule) in India. The British had been effectively ruling the country after taking over the Indian capital of Delhi from the last remaining Mughal emperor Bahadar Shah II. They had subdued the war of independence of 1857 and had exiled the emperor to Burma where he had died a year later. The British continued to administer from Calcutta till they declared Delhi as the new capital on the occasion of the coronation of King George V in the Durbar held in the Red Fort, Delhi in December 1911. For centuries, Delhi had been the capital of the Mughal Empire and all the other Muslim dynasties before them for over eight hundred years. The British now appreciated the wisdom of ruling from the center rather than the east of the country. Being coming from a cold weather country the British detested the scorching heat of the plains in summer where the temperature soared to over 110F. While still in Calcutta, the viceroy and the commander-in-chief spent some of their hot months in Simla, which was almost a thousand miles away. Now that they had relocated their capital in Delhi they decided to make Simla the summer capital of India and shifted their essential personnel and books and records there for the duration of the hot season. The electric generating plants had been installed in the major cities of India but the air-conditioning system did not seem to be available even for the high echelon of the ruling elite. Had it been available, I have no doubt that Simla would have been out of the picture.

The hill station of Simla is situated in a mountain range of Himalayas about 7000 feet above sea level and only 220 miles away from Delhi where the day temperature did not exceed 75F in the middle of summer. It was a very agreeable refuge from the burning plains. Simla was located in the British province of Punjab with the capital in the city of Lahore. The British governor of the province was, in no way going to be left out in the smoldering heat of the plains. It was thus a routine practice that the capital of Punjab also shifted to Simla, about 200 miles away from Lahore, The high temperature in Lahore during summer also hovered around 110 degrees except during monsoon months of July and August when it would cool down a little but become uncomfortably humid.

As mentioned above, my grandfather had a supervisory job in the Punjab governor’s office and it was a routine for him to accompany the governor to Simla and spend the summer hot months in the hill station. Most of the clerical staff in the governor’s office stayed in Lahore while the supervisory personnel went with the governor to Simla to carry out his management directives. My grandfather had provided to him a comfortable house in Simla by the government where he would invite all his family members to come and stay with him for the hot summer months.

As mentioned above, at the time of my birth my mother faced some serious medical problems and I was entrusted into the care of my grandmother who still had a young unmarried daughter living with her in the house. My grandmother and my young aunt Masooda took very good care of me. I got so lovingly attached with them that my parents decided not to disturb the relationship and let me live with them as long as my grandmother and I wished to do so. Living in Simla for the summer with my grandmother provided me opportunity to know my own mother well as she always spent her own hot summer months with her parents in Simla.

The house where I lived with my grandparents in Lahore was a three and a half storey house with a 20’ X 20’ opening to the sky in the middle, for air, sun and rain. The upper two floors had a nice four foot high wooden railing with about four foot wide corridor leading to all different rooms. There was no toilet plumbing or even electricity in the house except for the city water line which supplied water, only during certain hours of the day. There was water running in the pipes from day break to nine in the morning, from 12 to 2 in the afternoon and again in the evening hours from 5 to 8.There was a general practice to keep water stored in a few big storage samawars for use during all hours of the day. Having city water available in the house was considered a luxury and not everybody could afford the cost of having water pipes brought in from the main city lines. For their water needs people would normally fetch it from their neighborhood mosque wells or even had well dug up inside their house. Every couple of blocks you would find a mosque in the city fully equipped with a water well and an adjoining water shower cubical for anybody who cared to take a shower. My grandfather had, however installed a water pipe outlet in the porch of the house on the ground floor for the needy neighbors to have their buckets filled during water hours of the day. There were always small boys and girls with buckets in hand and taking their turns at our water tap.

By the time I was three, my grandfather had retired from the civil service and was drawing a handsome pension from the governor’s office. It had been his general practice to take care of the odds and ends in the house and be in charge of doing all the grocery shopping in the company of a young boy servant about 13/14 years old who would carry the stuff home from the bazar. We had another two woman domestic servants in the house, one to help my grandma in the kitchen and the other to do the cleaning and washing in the house. The young boy lived permanently in the house while the women would return to their places after completing their days work. They were all properly fed and clothed by the house and were given a fixed amount of money every month as salary. If there was any special occasion in their house, they would ask for extra monetary help and my grandpa would whole heartedly oblige. He always seemed to have funds available from his obligatory annual Zakat (Charity Fund).

My grandfather had a younger sister who lived in Delhi with her family. Her husband was a trader of horses and had a stable full of animals close to his house. My grandpa loved his baby sister who really was closer in age to my mother Miraj and her older sister Zeenat. She visited him and the family every so often, travelling by train from Delhi to Lahore by an over-night journey. Her husband visited Lahore only on special occasions like a marriage or a death in the family. I liked that man for his great sense of humor. He was a first class businessman and a good organizer. A marriage in the house is a big affair which goes on for almost a week. Marriage dates for my uncles could not be fixed unless it was ascertained that the Delhi couple was available to attend. Whenever they visited Lahore, it was natural that they would stay in our house and the house was really big enough to accommodate them. My Delhi big aunt’s name was Zara and her husband was Noor Muhammad. When Noor Muhammad was in the house on a marriage occasion, all responsibility of the ceremonies vested in him. My grandfather would tell all the contractors and servants to take their orders from Noor Muhammd.

Organizing a reception for a few hundred guests was a big job to handle. There were special cooks and their assistants to handle the food part while tent contractors took care of the tents, chairs and gas powered lamps. A day before cooking, butchers would slaughter the sheep and goats in the open court of the house, skin the animals and cut the flesh and bones into pieces according to the needs of the chief cook. Dessert part of the menu was always a Firni, cooked with rice flour and milk and sugar. It was cooked the night before and stored in individual serving disposable earthen saucers. It would be interesting to note that we had disposable earthen saucers in India long before the paper cups and plates became part of the Western life. By the morning the firni would stick firmly with the earthen saucer which was turned over each other as a couplet for better storage and service in large quantity. At the dinner time everybody sat on the carpeted floor facing each other with about 2.5 foot wide and 12 foot long floral cotton serving runner sheet between them. Hired help was never enough to serve the food and there were always youngsters of the family available to help out in time of need. There were no hotels or reception halls in the city and everything was done in and around your own house. Next door neighbors were always happy to extend their help and provide accommodation for the reception in their own living room areas.

My grandfather’s main interest in the house after retirement was in his own little classroom which he had set up to make sure that all his grand children completed their homework properly. He was a very strict and a no non-sense man by character and none of the children would dare fool around in the class when he was around. His other passion was in his prayers which he would observe at the proper hours of the day and night. In Islam there are five daily obligatory prayers but my grandpa went a step farther and said his prayers six times a day. After the tradition of the Holy Prophet, he prayed at Tahajad time also which is a couple of hours before sunrise. My grandpa never went to a mosque to say his prayers except for weekly Friday afternoon prayers and the two annual EID festival prayers. If you do not already know, the first Muslim prayer of the day is held at a few minutes before sunrise and the fifth and the last, an hour or so after sunset. My grandpa’s other interest in life was in the flying of pigeons. He had about a dozen pairs of domesticated pigeons which he kept in a wooden coop on the top open floor of the house, safe from the house cats. Early in the morning he would feed them and let them fly away and watch their acrobats in the air. He was a good trainer and would make the birds sit on my head and shoulders and take the feed from my hands. I loved to play with them and watch them with my grandpa to fly around. The coop was left open during the day and in the evening he would take a count and shut the cage for the night. On rare occasions he would find a bird missing but come back to his nest the following day.

Knowing that my grandpa was a Tahajad praying man, one would automatically think that the man was a strict tradition observing Muslim and would not indulge in any worldly entertainment business. But this was far from the truth. He was an avid cinemagoer and would not miss the debut of any new picture in town which usually started on a Friday afternoon. Needless to say, he never missed his weekly Friday afternoon prayers and would rush back from the mosque to get ready for the cinema. Lahore had a flourishing movie making industry, second only to Bombay, and new pictures were coming out all the time both from Lahore and Bombay for playing in the picture houses which seemed to be everywhere in the city outside the city walls. McLeod Road was the broad way of cinemas where most of the high class houses were located. My grandpa never took his wife or daughters out to the movies and would in fact forbid them to go out and see a picture. I know that the ladies of the house had ideas of their own. They would sneak out on an excuse to join their sisters, cousins and friends to see the special shows in the morning hours, held especially for women only.

My pre-schooling was done in my grandfather’s class while my older brother and sister were already going to their public schools. It might be interesting for you to know that even at that young age, boys and girls had their separate schools and there was no co-education system right up to the college grades. There were excellent but separate colleges for boys and girls, only because the society would not tolerate to have it otherwise. Mixing of the sexes was a taboo both for the Muslims and the Hindus who were a good part of the population structure in the province. For post-graduate studies like masters and education in the professional fields like medicine and engineering, co-education was the only way to go. I remember that during my post-graduate M.A. studies in the Punjab University, we were a total of fourteen students, out of which eight were girls and six boys. We all sat around a long rectangular table with the teacher at the head table. Even though it was a mix class yet the boys and girls always stuck with their gender and sat on either side of the table separately