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            A member of the crypto-CSP mafia that has been under camouflage for several years past as the District Management Group or DMG wailed in a newspaper the other day, though anonymously, as was to be expected, that no tears were being shed over the demise of The Service.

He wrote that an “abrupt full stop” had been put in front of the careers of his tribal brothers, as if there were any unabrupt full stops. Obviously, this defender of the defrocked ones can’t be nobody’s guide when it comes to punctuation. Would a semi-colon have been found more acceptable? We can only wonder because in all the years past, the CSP-DMG mafia has run rampant page after page without comma, colon or full stop.

But since all things good and bad eventually come to an end, it was only a matter of time before the day of The Service was done. I stop short of saying ‘rest in peace’ because going by past record, who knows in what new form it may emerge from the woodwork. Dracula was simpler to deal with. One stake through his black heart and that was that.

The Service is a cat with not nine, but nineteen lives, so those who are getting ready to celebrate the much-awaited Day of Deliverance would be wise to wait a little and, under no, repeat no, circumstances remain unmindful of their backs because a long knife in that particular part of the anatomy is not the happiest of experiences. Wait and watch because The Service is perfectly capable of rising from the grave to stalk the land like the living dead did in that scary movie.

The man being blamed by The Service for its demise is no other than Gen. Tanvir Naqvi. The number of people who want to throw unfresh tomatoes at him is becoming alarmingly large. In every decade, there emerges a person who can be blamed for everything that has gone wrong or will do so. In this decade, it is General N. I am now waiting to read that the brown cloud floating over the subcontinent is the National Reconstruction Bureau’s doing. At the same time, one concedes that the now decorated Danial “Gorbachev” Aziz is quite capable of sending one up from his secret experimental lab.

Some years ago when everyone thought The Service was dead, I submitted that such reports were premature. Battle-scarred though it might be, The Service was not about to give up the ghost. In fact, I suggested, had John Keats been alive, his ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ would have featured not that Grecian youth chasing that maiden but The Service because in a fleeting world, it alone appeared to have unravelled the secret of the elixir of life and gained immortality.

Whenever The Service comes up as a subject, I am reminded of the great Sardar Mohammad Sadiq, the uncrowned king of Lahore’s roads and restaurants, who said in the spring of 1969, when no day passed without a dozen protest marches on the streets of Lahore against Ayub Khan, that if the CSP also staged a march, the police could take a break that day as the marchers would be lathi-charged by the Awam.

This time we will have to wait and see if Gen. Naqvi has actually been able to put The Service to eternal sleep or whether history is going to repeat itself like a bad PTV serial. For instance, when Gen.Yahya Khan shot out 303 of the stalwarts of The Service in one fell swoop – the one campaign that he won hands down – everyone thought that those left behind would take to their heels or cross over and seek administrative asylum in India. No such thing happened. The fallen chieftains were forgotten as soon as breath had departed their increment-laden bodies. Word went out to those who remained that what had been lost was a battle, not the war. And as the elders of the old imperial Indian Civil Service had prophesied, The Service rose from amongst the fallen and in a few years assumed more power than it had ever wielded in the past.

Years ago, I wrote a book that I dedicated to all living members of The Service in acknowledgment of what they had done to the country. It was reckless on my part to ignore the pleas of my publisher, a nice man and a friend, who tried to talk me out of this foolish act on the moving plea that he had a family to support and his children were of school-going age. It was no small miracle that he lived to tell the tale. Well that was a long time ago. Let us move into the present. Now that there is going to be no further recruitment to The Service, what is going to happen to what friend Farhat Mahmood Ph.D once called the serpent propagation farm, otherwise the Civil Service Academy on Lahore’s Upper Mall. Perhaps it would be turned into a stud farm by the enterprising Governor of the Punjab, Lt. Gen. Khalid Maqbul, who seems to favour tactics normally associated with charging bulls.

The Service was always conscious of what it considered its select, elite character and guarded its territory with the ruthlessness associated with SS guards in death camp watchtowers. Every attempt at infiltration of its territory was fought off with the same determination that the Russians showed at Stalingrad in the last Great War. Poachers were kept out and if they could not be kept out, they were liquidated. Its allegiances were tribal. It considered itself the chosen one; all else was irrelevant and inconsequential. The first frontal attack on The Service was made by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He abolished its name. I recall the times. The wailing of CSP spouses, led by that Bride of Deviant Rule, Attiya Enayatullah, could be heard as far as Alaska. However, we were all much too naive; we celebrated too early. In a few years, the CSP was back in full force, though this time it was called DMG.

Is this going to be any different this time? Watch this space.

            With the death in Delhi the other day of Indian vice president Krishen Kant, the only remaining high-grade Jehlum connection that remains in India now for us is that of the Gujral brothers, Inder and Satish. Whether the passing of the generation that retains memories of pre-1947 days will increase the chances of our two neighbouring countries coming together, or whether it will mean the snapping of the only possible bridges of understanding that the two could have had, remains to be seen. Going by the record of this generation over the last half a century, one is not exactly encouraged that what remains of it will make amends for what could have been . All it needed was political will and the ability to raise a wall between the past and the present and not look over the shoulder.

            Krishan Kant’s family came from Amritsar but he grew up in Jehlum, living next door to the Gujrals. His father Achint Ram was a member, like Avtar Narain, former Indian Prime Minister Inder Gujral’s father, of the Hindu reformist movement, Servants of the People. Members were given a monthly honorarium of Rs 100 and two rooms in the Lala Lajpat Rai House in Lahore. It was the Society that sent Achint Ram to do the good work in Jehlum. All this and more is recalled in ‘A Brush with Life’, the autobiography of Satish Gujral, Inder’s younger brother, and eminent Indian painter. The book was reprinted this year in Karachi by City Press, the publishing house run by Ajmal Kamal who produces that superb Urdu literary quarterly ‘Aaj’.

            Achint Ram’s rented house, next to that of the Gujrals, had no running water, but since the Gujral home had a tap, it did for both. The father of India’s future vice president would carry buckets of water from the Gujral home to his several times a day. Those were simpler times and the sort of wealth and ostentation that we see today, were non-existent then, even among the rich. Satish recalls that Krishen’s mother spent hours washing her family’s clothes at their tap. Satish, during a summer holiday in Pehelgam, the site of the massacre the other day of Hindu pilgrims bound for Shiva’s cave at Amarnath, fell into the fast mountain stream called Lidder that runs through that lovely  resort and though he was fished out alive, his health took a downturn from that point on. He developed a fearful bone infection – and those were pre-antibiotic days – and then he suddenly lost his hearing, totally. His is a deeply heart-warming story of indomitable courage and hope and how given determination backed by talent, human beings can overcome almost any hurdle.

            Satish may have been stone deaf  - and is to this day - but he could paint and it was to the old Mayo School of Art at Lahore, today’s National College of Arts, that he was sent. His father would come from Jehlum every weekend to be with him, a journey that took four hours be train. Two other boys, bothers, who also went from Jehlum to study at Lahore were Iqbal and Krishen Ghai. After independence, Iqbal Ghai was to become known as the “ice cream king of India.” Mohan Singh Oberoi who founded India’s largest international hotel chain also came, like Satish’s father, from the little hamlet of Pari Darwaza around Jehlum. He lost his parents in childhood and grew up in abject poverty. Another boy at Mayo, junior to Satish by a year, later became the lifelong partner of the celebrated Punjabi poet, Amrita Pritam Kaur. His name was Inderjit but she changed it to Imroze. They have never been married and they have never been separate.

            In 1942, Satish who was born in 1925, left Lahore to go to Bombay’s J.J. School of Art. In that dream capital of India it was that he met young Zulfikar Ali Bhutto through Piloo Mody, Bhutto’s childhood friend. Satish recalls ZAB: “He was always nattily dressed in well-cut suits and matching ties. He radiated self-confidence … He was a great raconteur with an eye for minute detail … He quoted Jinnah as if Jinnah had spoken to him personally … We listened to Zulfi Bhutto in awed silence giving us an insight into Jinnah’s mind.” For Satish, all conversations were either written down or explained through hand gestures.

            Satish recounts the terrible events before and after partition in harrowing detail. His father was a close friend of Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan, who came from Pind Dadan Khan, but had a home in Jehlum. He first advised the local Hindus to stay, but when things got out of hand with the arrival of the tribal lashkars bound for the Kashmir misadventure, he agreed that they should depart.

            Satish also writes about Amrita Sher-Gil who was a great friend of Charles Fabri, the curator of the Lahore Museum (he moved to Delhi after 1947 where after some years he committed suicide). He had married Ratna, a Hindu girl from Lahore while she was a student at Mayo. He had enticed her by promising to turn her into another Amrita Sher-Gil, but that was not to be because there was only one Amrita Sher-Gil, the beautiful and tragic half-Hungarian, half-Sikh painter who died in Lahore  in 1942 the age of 28 and was cremated on the banks of the Ravi on a forlorn, windy day. Another Lahore painter, Roop Krishna, whose family owned the famous bookstore Ramakrishna and Sons in Anarkali, settled in London, never to return to India. He did not think much of Sher-Gil, telling Satish that he had once thrown Amrita’s paintings from the balcony of his flat above their Lahore bookstore. Is it not ironical that while nobody remembers Roop Krishna, the whole world acknowledges Sher-Gil’s genius.

            Satish went to Mexico on a Mexican government scholarship where he got to know the great painter Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, the daughter of a Hungarian painter and photographer. He was close enough to her to have Diego ask him to act as her pallbearer when she died at a relatively young age. He returned to India after a few years and has lived there since, turning out paintings, sculptures and designing some highly innovative buildings, such as the domed Belgian embassy in New Delhi.

            His portraits of Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Krishna Menon and Lala Lajpat Rai remain classic studies that bring out the true personality of the subjects. He writes that after painting Indira, he was commissioned to paint Jawaharlal Nehru who told him that his daughter was unforgiving towards those she suspected of harbouring designs against her, or of being a threat to her in any way. Nehru once asked Inder to let him see Satish’s portrait of Indira. Inder was reluctant and told Nehru that some people thought it showed Indira as a very determined woman with a sadistic streak. Nehru calmly replied, “That’s what she is.”

            He should have known. He was her father.

This is how it goes. Iraq is invaded, every asset including those chemical weapons are taken out — as are the Scud missiles that fall more on the home turf than the enemy. The Pentagon announces that the number of civilian deaths is “acceptable”

When people are worried, they sometimes tell jokes to get relief from that gnawing feeling at the pit of the stomach. Could that be the reason why spoofs of what a Bush invasion of Iraq would be like have begun to appear here and there? While the Big Chief of the Order of the Giant Grasshopper, struts about in jeans, baseball cap and half-sleeve shirt at Fort Crawford, Texas, the rest of us keep wondering what lies in store for us, given the fact that we have another two years plus of the man to live through. The other day he summoned his war cabinet to his ranch and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to guess at the scenarios they must have spun out.

Marty Jezer from Battleboro, Vermont, has laid out a script that, if made into a movie, could only be called ‘Next Stop, Baghdad’ (which like Saddam’s name no one here is quite able to pronounce). This is how it goes. Iraq is invaded, every asset including those chemical weapons are taken out — as are the Scud missiles that fall more on the home turf than the enemy. The Pentagon announces that the number of civilian deaths is “acceptable.”

Field Marshal Bush goes on television and declares that the Evil One is dead. The Iraqi army lays down its arms and asks for ploughshares, while the people throng the streets of Baghdad shouting ‘USA, USA!’ All over the Middle East, crowds are seen waving American flags. Since everyone loves a winner, even the Palestinians celebrate.

Jezer’s script two. The American bombs prove not to have been as smart as everyone thought. What was hit as a Baghdad military target turns out to have been the Chinese embassy. The terrorist camp, it is discovered, was actually a wedding reception. Another smart bomb is found to have hit not the government building it was intended for but a hospital. A UN warehouse is on fire because it was not an Iraqi ammo dump. Also hit in the bargain are a school, an apartment building and a hotel. Saddam is on TV and there is no sign of Osama bin Laden.

Inspired and angered by this, the Iraqi army decides to give the Americans a run for their money. It moves out of the desert and entrenches itself in the cities. Meanwhile, anti-American rioting erupts around the world. Tony Blair, that purring lapdog, is not much help because he is facing a vote of no confidence. The Europeans who were against the invasion anyway are all looking the other way. There is disquiet in the Pentagon and the State Department.

However, Bush or no Bush, war or no war, life goes on in this vast, fascinating country. Here is what took place recently in Missouri, President Harry Truman’s home state (the buck stops here). George Leroy Curtis, not a day short of 75, strolled into a bank in Harrisonville and demanded a cashier’s cheque (what we in Pakistan call a bank draft) for $200,000. He was carrying an antique, non-operational gun, but the manager did not know it. All he knew was that you don’t argue with a man pointing a gun at you. Curtis took the cheque to his bank in Independence, the state capital, put $29,000 in his account, picked up $5,000 in cash and had a banker’s cheque for $166,000 written out in the name of a car dealer. Not long after, he was seen driving off in a 40-foot luxury motor home with his 65-year old girl friend, her son and her two grandsons. Alas the family vacation did not last as the police picked up Curtis and party within hours.

“We’re still trying to figure this guy out,” was all an FBI spokesman would say.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that what Pakistan needs is not a General but a Colonel Syed Sanders Ali Shah

One thing about Pakistanis. They are perfectly happy with American junk food, if not positively in love with it; it is only America’s foreign policy that they can be impatient with. While foreign policy can be left to the wise men who hold forth on it and other weighty matters in the columns of our newspapers every day, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to talk about chicken, especially on the 50th anniversary of what Col Harland Sanders and the state of Kentucky gave to the world.

When the Colonel’s first chicken place opened in Lahore, there were those who said this was one engagement the Colonel or his ghost would lose, the people of the city being more partial to fried fish than fried chicken. Who could have said then that fish and chicken would come to co-exist? Perhaps those who say that Lahoris will eat anything as long as it is food and as long as it is fattening, are right. The Colonel’s chicken is fried with the skin on, a big no-no for those fighting cholesterol or trying to get in last winter’s paid of trousers. The corollary, on the other hand, is unthinkable. Chicken fried without the skin is a sacrilege. It is also uneatable. The Colonel’s chicken remains as crisp as his sharkskin suit. I am sure all he had to do when he got to chicken heaven was put on a pair of wings and a halo around his head. The white suit the chanticleer angels found perfectly in order.

This week has seen two big anniversaries in America. That of the King and this of the Colonel. Elvis Presley died 25 years ago on August 16, eight months short of his 42nd birthday. The Colonel whose face is as familiar to the world as that of the King, though for entirely different reasons, died at the age of 90 in 1980. He remained company spokesman and promoter of his chicken in folksy television commercials until the end. He was to the chicken what Plato was to philosophy or King Elvis Presley to rock.

The story of the Colonel’s Kentucky fried starts thus. In 1952, into Pete Harman’s burger joint in Salt Lake City, Utah, walked a white-haired, goateed acquaintance from Kentucky who offered to cook him a fried chicken dinner. So finger-lickin’ good was what the old gent had prepared (with 11 spices he assured him) that Pete agreed to make it part of his menu. The Colonel’s dish was an instant hit. Its fame spread quickly. Those were good times. Customers could take home 14 pieces of fried chicken for $3.50, plus mashed potatoes, plus rolls, plus gravy.

That was 50 years ago. Today, there are 12,000 Kentucky Fried eatries around the world with sales of $10 billion.

Now a little about the Colonel. He was a job drifter, having been at different times a railroad fireman, insurance salesman, steamboat operator, tyre salesman and service station manager. One thing he never was: a military officer. Colonel was a title conferred on him by a Governor of Kentucky. The Colonel said he had perfected his technique in the late 1930s while serving hungry customers who stopped at his service station in the Kentucky town of Corbin. He decided to launch into his big career when he was 62, for many the age of retirement. He crisscrossed the country in his car with his cookware, herbs and spices to whip up samples of his special recipe for restaurant owners.

A good deal of the chicken’s success was due to the personality of Col. Sanders. He looked the part of the old Southern gentleman in his trademark white suit without a wrinkle, his black sting tie and his homespun conversation. And what is the secret of the Colonel’s chicken? Though he did not take it with him to his grave, it remains secret. The recipe is locked in a vault at Kentucky Fried Chicken headquarters and only a handful of people, all sworn to secrecy, know the ingredients.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that what Pakistan needs is not a General but a Colonel Syed Sanders Ali Shah.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            Hanif Mohammad, whom Omar Kureishi named the Little Master, as he named PIA ‘Great people to fly with’ (sadly, no longer so), did several remarkable things during his time, including becoming the first man to play the reverse sweep in a test match. This strange and (to the bowler) maddening shot, executed by hitting the ball backwards towards third man without changing the grip of the bat, Hanif played during his classic innings of 187 not out against England at Lord’s in 1967.

            The bewildered bowler was Robin Hobbs, a leg-spinner, and Hanif played the shot three times during the innings. Hobbs had never seen it before and recalled years later how very surprised he was. Later, Hanif’s brother Mushtaq Mohammad played the reverse sweep frequently. I saw Javed Miandad play it in New Zealand during the 1992 World Cup. When I asked him after the match what he was doing, he replied, “Salay ka rhythm khrab kar raha tha.” The bowler was the off-spinner Deepak Patel. But Miandad, whom one Australian cricket writer called “a street fighter” is another story for another day. It is the Little Master who is at the wicket in this column.

            This being the 50^th anniversary of Pakistan having been given test-playing status in 1952 by the Imperial (now International) Cricket Conference, it is only apt that the achievements of a man who did more than any single individual to put Pakistan among the world’s leading cricket-playing nations should be recalled. A few years ago, Hanif wrote a fine book, an autobiography, with help from my London friend Qamar Ahmed and Afia Salam, the first woman in Pakistan to have written about cricket and with much knowledge too. I lift my bat to both for helping the maestro. Playing the game of the English and writing about it in their tongue may not always go together.

            Genius like murder will out, but both need help along the way. Hanif’s gift was so extraordinary that he would have played for Pakistan anyway, but tribute must be paid to the man – and Hanif does so sincerely and generously -  who first spotted this young Junagarh refugee boy’s talent and recognised its absolute uniqueness. The man was Master Abdul Aziz, whom Hanif calls “my guide and mentor”, a coach at Sindh Madrassah-tul-Islam, the Quaid’s old school. He saw Hanif score 75 runs in a school match and keep wicket. After the game, he came to him and said, “You batted very well. You are a natural cricketer. You must not play any other game. If you play only cricket, you will earn a name for yourself.”

He it was who got Hanif admitted to the Sindh Madrassah on a scholarship. Few know that Aziz had played in an unofficial test against Jack Ryder’s Australian team at Calcutta in 1936. His son, Salim Durrani, we know as the Indian test allrounder. Master Aziz would spend all that he earned on his students, buying them shoes, gloves, bats or whatever they needed. “For us he was like a father figure and like an angel. I have yet to meet anyone like him,” Hanif recalls.

Hanif caught Mian Mohammad Saeed’s eye at Lahore where playing for a combined schools eleven, he notched up 150 runs. Pakistan’s first captain sent for the lad from Karachi and gave him some advice that, to his credit, he never forgot. “Remember one thing. Never be boastful when you score runs. Never raise your collar and behave as if you are a gift from the gods. Always remain humble, respect people, respect the game and keep on playing even harder.” Another of Hanif’s mentors was that great patron of young players, Kafiluddin, the PWD’s chief engineer, who built the Karachi stadium and hired Waqar and Hanif, the latter as road inspector, so that these struggling lads could play cricket. It is time, Kafiluddin was honoured by Pakistan’s cricket establishment. The least it should do is to the National Stadium, Karachi, after him. Kafiluddin came from East Pakistan. After Gen. Musharraf’s apolgy in Dhaka, this is the next decent thing we can do.

It was Skipper Abdul Hafiz Kardar who insisted on Hanif’s inclusion in the first unofficial Lahore test against Nigel Howard’s MCC team in 1951. Hanif opened with Nazar Mohammad and was involved in a first-wicket stand of 96, out of which he made a patient 26 runs. His defence was impregnable, though there was no shot in the game that he could not make. Hanif was the first batsman to get a hundred in a test played in Pakistan. This was at Bahawalpur against India. Hanif’s record-breaking 337 runs against the West Indies lasted, contrary to what Wisden records, 999 minutes. He was at the wicket for three and a half days. Layers of skin under his eyelids were burnt through by the strong Caribbean sun. He had faced some of the fastest men  cricket had known, including the fearsome Gilchrist, and he had not flinched, playing without a helmet.

The only person for whom Hanif has harsh words – and deservedly so – is Javed Burki who was made captain for the 1962 England tour because his father was a General. It was a disaster. Burki it was who introduced each player to the Queen at Lord’s with a string of the filthiest Punjabi swear words. Writes Hanif, “He was raw, rude and arrogant, and by the end of the tour had lost a lot of friends.” He was severely censured by a committee set up by the Board to investigate the tour, but nothing happened to him because of who he was. It is a shame that he continued to play for Pakistan until 1969. The reason given at the time as to why the 23-year old Burki was being appointed captain (the great Imtiaz Ahmed was in the team) was that as he had been educated in England, he would be able to make speeches expected of a captain. Hanif records wryly, “I don’t recall him making any at all.”

The only comic relief on that tour was the manager, one Brig. Ghaziuddin Haider who shouted from the gallery during a test match after the Pakistani paceman Farooq had bounced one past the English batsman Parfitt. “What a googly!” When correspondents asked him if any of the Pakistani bowlers “threw”, he thumped his chest and declared proudly, “All my bowlers are good throwers.” He told Nasim-ul-Ghani, the night watchman who had saved his wicket in another match, and was preparing to go in to resume his innings the next day, “You stay right here. LLet Burki go.”

But why lament 1962. Forty years later, we have a General heading the cricket board and enough faujis in his retinue to raise a company, except that this outfit will fight not the enemy but the game of cricket itself.

In Washington, scientists have turned an ordinary chimpanzee named Frank (no he is not the next finance minister of Pakistan) into a genius who plays the stock market, and knows more about computers than, say, Dr Ata-ur-Rehman

One thing is more or less certain. Iraq won’t get invaded during August. No, it is not a prediction from Gypsy Mama Rosa of Rockville, Maryland, but two-plus-two-makes-four logic. And it is simple. Fortress Bush on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, is without its current occupant who has gone off for a month to Crawford, Texas.

Though he will remain master of his ranch and commander of all he surveys there and beyond, he would be occupying himself with business more pressing than war, such as chopping wood, riding horses, playing golf, saying howdy to the locals, swatting grasshoppers the size of sparrows and barbecuing.

When you are in Texas, it is said, the rest of the world recedes into the distance. Let’s all hope, therefore, that by the time Bush comes back from his month-long “working holiday”, he will have been persuaded to leave it to the people of other countries to change or overthrow their governments, even if those governments are headed by such men as old Saddam Hussain.

But there is more to life in America than George Bush and his Rough Riders. There is this doctor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who must have been a Pakistani in an earlier life because what he did is one hundred percent Pakistani. He left a patient on the operating table so that he could deposit a cheque at his bank. David Arndt, an orthopaedic surgeon, the State Board of Medicine said, left the patient with an open incision in his back because he remembered that he had a cheque to deposit (hopefully the cheque bounced). The Board observed grimly that Dr Arndt had posed “an immediate threat to public health, safety and welfare.” The doctor was away for thirty-five minutes. He left behind a surgeon who wasn’t quite sure what to do. The patient lay anaesthetized during the procedure he was undergoing to restabilise his spine. He must have been born under a lucky star because he survived.

Dr Arndt’s licence has been suspended. If by any chance Dr Arndt is reading this, he should take the next plane to Pakistan and I guarantee that inside of a year, he would be rolling in millions, besides having become the president of the Pakistan Medical Association. A Pride of Performance award would come his way before long. Such talent as Dr Arndt has exhibited is quickly recognised and rewarded in Pakistan.

Meanwhile in Washington, scientists have turned an ordinary chimpanzee named Frank (no he is not the next finance minister of Pakistan) into a genius who plays the stock market, and knows more about computers than, say, Dr Ata-ur-Rehman, our science and technology minister. What is more, Frank has just been accepted into a major state university. “I feel safe in saying we have actually created the world’s smartest chimpanzee,” according to Dr Anthony Metaxas, head of the project that boosted Frank’s brain power (why don’t we get him to work for a while for Gen. Tanvir Naqvi so that he can ably finish what the General started).” Frank has made more than $25,000 at the stock market and he can type at phenomenal speed. In short, this is the chimp we have long waited for. I promise that if Frank is brought over to NRB, he would pose no threat to the position currently held by Danial “Gorbachev”Aziz.

And last but not least (kindly note my utterly non-Pakistani omission of the definite article before ‘least’), there is a report on the Internet that the CIA has recruited two dozen Haitian immigrants who are using voodoo dolls and spells to strike at Osama bin Laden. Voodoo, the Agency believes, can get Osama in the deepest cave and the remotest mountain hideout. The project was given the go-ahead by the President who is said to be utterly fed up with the CIA’s failure so far to locate OBL. It is believed that Osama is extremely jittery nowadays and has been mistaking mosquito bites with voodoo needles.

Well, as they say, all is fair in love and war, especially war.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            I neither recall now when I first ran into Fakhre Humayun, nor when I met him last. One thing is certain. I had come to know him before my much longed-for escape from the so-called Class I job I had landed myself in after one of those ridiculous competitive examinations where you are asked during the viva what the ingredients of toothpaste are. Finally and to my great delight, I was where I had always wanted to be, a reporter of the ‘Pakistan Times’, the only English newspaper in the city of Lahore, where, according to Miss Marie Miller, a young English woman of my acquaintance, it was her fate every morning to read it, along with eating boiled eggs. This was in 1967 and nobody had heard of cholesterol. You ate what you pleased and lived ever after.

            Fakhar – because of the “izafat” lodged between his first name and his last, was either called Fakhre Humayun or just Fakhar. He worked on the other side of the old building on Rattan Chand Road where our newspapers were housed. This is how it was laid out. When you walked into the Progressive Papers Ltd or PPL as we called it, despite our colonisation by the National Press Trust (which was neither national nor did it have anyone’s trust), and went straight past the stairs, you found itself where the rotary presses were. If you went upstairs, on the landing to the left was the office of our works manager Rafaqat Ali, and upstairs to the left was ‘Pakistan Times’ or PT and the monthly Sportimes. If you turned right, that was ‘Imroze’ territory, our sister newspaper which, everyone agrees now, as then, had come like a gust of fresh air to the windowless world of Urdu journalism. It also pioneered things that are now taken for granted, for instance, a separate literary section every week.

            Fakhar worked for ‘Imroze’. He had come from Sahiwal which was then Montgomery, as Faisalabad was Lyallpur. This was in 1960, He was to stay there for the next fifteen years. Unlike PT which came out before independence at the express wishes of the Quaid-i-Azam (it is not the only thing we have killed that he had brought into being), ‘Imroze’ began life soon after the establishment of Pakistan. Those who crafted this newspaper into the finest that Urdu journalism had known were no ordinary men.There was Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat and Ayub Ahmed Kirmani and Zaheer Babar. Another of the newspaper’s stars was Hamid Hashmi who died when the PIA iaugural to Cairo crashed while landing. With him died many fine journalists, men like A.K. Qureshi, head of the Associated Press of Pakistan, Abul Saleh Islahi, editor of ‘Mashriq’, and Irfan Chughtai, chief reporter of ‘Nawai Waqt’. Also on that aircraft was Gen. Hayauddin, chairman of the National Press Trust. The legendary PIA stewardess Momi Gul also perished on that flight.

            Fakhar, whose father Faiz Mohammad Khan was a judge, came from that colourful and talented stock that we know as the Pathans of the “bastis” or settlements around Jullandhur. After retirement, he decided to settle down in Montgomery where Fakhar spent his boyhood and where he got to know and befriend Munir Niazi, a Pathan from Hoshiarpur, that poets’ poet Majeed Amjad, Shamim Rizvi of the ‘Pakistan Times’ and Khalid Butt, the evergreen public relations wizard. At ‘Imroze’ with Fakhar were Munnu Bhai, Akmal Aleemi, Abbas Athar, and, of course, the seniors, Abdulla Malik, Hamid Akhtar, Hamid Jehlumi and Haider Ali.

            Fakhar was an immaculate dresser. When I close my eyes I see him in a brown check  Harris tweed jacket, complete with leather patches at the elbows, a silk handkerchief shyly peeping out of his breast pocket, a Sherlock Holmsian pipe sticking out of his mouth. Although Qurratulain Hyder once told me that anyone who smoked a pipe would, on examination, turn out to have something the matter with him, there was nothing the matter with Fakhar. He was upright and self-contained. And being the Jullandhari Pathan that he was, he took no nonsense, no matter what quarter it came from. He was friends with everyone, but with his editor, Zaheer Babar, he never got along and the two were always skirmishing. However, it is a tribute to the great institution set up by Mian Iftikharuddin that you could continue working in the newspaper without quite being on speaking terms with your editor. The PPL culture was one of tolerance and the house philosophy was ‘live and let live.’ How else can one explain the presence in what most people called a “surkha” institution of a diehard Khaksar like Syed Shabbir Hussain Shah, his brother Syed Sarwar Shah and Gardezi, one of our shifts-in-charge who was more Jamaat-e-Islami than Maulana Maudoodi himself (whose nephew incidentally worked with us, but he was a leftist).

            Fakhar also  had a car, an old car but a car nevertheless. I never saw it stranded on the road, unlike “Judge” Maqbool Sharif’s Moscowich which was more off the road than on it. It was at ‘Imroze’ that Fakhar met and married Sajida, who was one of several women who worked for PPL (among them Mariam Habib “Apa Jan” and Farkhanda Qureshi, and in later years the late Talat Ahmed “Talli”). His first foray into this area had failed to click. I left PT in 1972 to work for Mr Bhutto, but Fakhar stayed until 1975 when he moved to London. I caught up with him there in early 1976. Sajida had come with him and none of them was doing anything. I got Sajida a none-too-well-paying job in the press section of the Embassy where I was head honcho. I was forced out after the 1977 coup but Sajida stayed, though no more than a year.

            Their early days in England were difficult but Fakhar lived through those times with his usual aplomb. Miss Moneypenny who smiles on few journalists (unless they belong to the Lifafa School) finally smiled on Fakhar. He set up a small grocery business that flourished into three large stores. Always a man of style, he got himself a Jaguar which he would drive around London and the countryside, wearing a rakish hat and smoking a pipe. Life was good. He had also finally made contact with his son from his first marriage whose mother had disappeared with him to America.

            But as Akmal Aleemi, Fakhar’s friend from ‘Imroze’ days, often says, “Nobody is going to get out of it alive”. It was what John Wayne called the Big C that got Fakhar. He died on June 30 this year in London. Another victim of Lady N (no not Naadan Nadira but Lady Nicotine). He asked Akmal, a few days before he died, to write his obituary. “Let all my friends remember me,” he said. I am told Munnu Bhai and Abbas Athar have already paid him their tributes to which I, in sadness, add mine.

The heat has been unbearable. It is quite amazing how hot Washington can get and how uncomfortable. A good deal of what Americans call “hot air” blows about this town the year round, anyway, thanks to the presence of thousands of politicians of all kinds and persuasions, not to mention the vast bureaucracy that actually rules the roost and calls the shots.

Then there are the holy warriors of the Bush administration, led by President George Bush himself who is blind to all colours except black and white. His world is divided between those who support Terrorism (with a big T) and those who fight it. T.S. Eliot said Dante and Shakespeare divide the world among themselves: there is no third. In Bushland, you either have good guys fighting Terrorism or bad guys who practise or back it: there is no third. I sometimes wonder if Bush knows who T.S. Eliot is. Rather unlikely, wouldn’t you say?

Every second person you run into these days, asks just one question, the vaporous heat notwithstanding: will he or won’t he? This, of course, is shorthand for whether Bush will or will not attack Iraq to bring down Saddam Hussain. I might mention in passing that the man whom this administration wants to be obliterated, not tomorrow but yesterday, is the man whose name no American politician, member of the cabinet, television talking head or thundering congressman can pronounce correctly. I mean if they want to remove him from power, they should at least do him the courtesy of pronouncing his name correctly. Everyone calls him Sudd-um. Poor guy. So totally misunderstood and so utterly mispronounced.

Such is the atmosphere radiated around the country by the Bush Brigade of Holy Warriors that even to ask two simple questions would be considered a conspiracy against the American Way of Life, patriotism and mom’s apply pie. Question 1: How is it US business to overthrow the government of a sovereign country? Question 2: How exactly has it been established that Saddam or Sudd-um is poised to unleash weapons of mass destruction against the United States? If possession of chemical weapons alone is sufficient evidence of terrorist designs, then the list is long because several dozen countries possess them. India for one. The evidence against Iraq planning a terrorist invasion of the United States is about as strong as the evidence of New Delhi poisoning the drinking water supply of every American. But in Bushland, such logic is heresy. Minimum punishment? Obliteration with a Daisy Cutter mounted on an F-16, if that is possible. I don’t know, I am not a military man.

My money, though, is on the Iraq invasion going through. If someone is running a book on this one, I am willing to place my ten bob, odds notwithstanding.

The last few weeks, however, have been weeks of Maleeha Lodhi farewells. She will be on a plane bound for London the day this column is in print. She has had a good innings here and she has done well. While no one is indispensable, she will be missed.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

            Had Saadat Hasan Manto been alive, he would have written a story about Shahnaz Kausar as moving as his immortal tale about Bishen Singh, the mysterious resident of the Lahore Lunatic Asylum, who wanted neither to live in Pakistan nor India but Toba Tek Singh, the town where he was born and where he had grown up. I am merely a journalist and can only tell in plain words the story of this young woman, a single mother with a small child, whom the Indians prefer to keep in jail and the Pakistanis, her countrymen, out of their land that also happens to be hers.

            I am indebted to my friend, the Indian journalist Mannika Chopra who learnt about Shahnaz Kausar during a recent visit to Jammu and wrote about her in the American newspaper, ‘Boston Globe, recently. Truth is not only stranger than faction but often more moving than fiction. Here is Shahnaz Kausar’s story.

            She told Mannika, whose family incidentally comes from what is now our bit of the Punjab, that it took her no longer than a heartbeat to decide to end her life by jumping into the river, a tributary of river Jhehlum, because she could no longer take her husband’s family’s constant taunts about her infertility. So on a sunny October morning in 1995, she walked towards the river from her village of Haryan da Bagh, tehsil Sumani in district Mirpur, Azad Kashmir, and jumped in.

            “Before I jumped in the river, I said to it, ‘Please kill me.’ If I had died that would have been easier. My life would have been over. Now I feel that I am being punished for wanting to kill myself, which in Islam is considered to be a sin,” she told Mannika.

            But Shahnaz did not die. She floated down the tributary which took her into the Indian part of Kashmir where she was fished out by a border guard in the Rajouri district of Jammu. She told the guard that she was from Pakistan but she wasn’t a spy. After spending a few days in a rural hospital, she was produced before a magistrate who sentenced her to a year in prison for having entered the country “illegally”without a passport or visa. She was also fined a couple of hundred rupees, money that she did not, of course, have. In line with the majesty of law, as interpreted by courts in India and Pakistan, her term, therefore, was extended by three months. She was moved to a jail in Poonch where in January 1996,  she was raped by a warden.

            She told Mannika, “When it was happening, I didn’t want to scream for help, because I thought the warden might kill me. And then I thought that even if I shouted, perhaps being a Pakistani, nobody would come.” She did later summon the courage to complain to the warden’s seniors as to what had happened and the rapist was suspended from his post. It was said he would be tried but there is no evidence he was.

            And then a strange thing happened. Shahnaz found that she was pregnant. She was offered an abortion which she refused. She gave birth to a girl child she named Mobin which means clear, distinct and bright. “The best memory of my life is connected to its saddest event. It was the worst possible way to have a child, but I felt fulfilled at the same time,” she told Mannika.

            Shahnaz served out her sentence but no one told her that she was now free. How word of her predicament got out is not clear, but an Indian NGO, the World Human Rights Protection Council, found her a lawyer, the Jammu-based A.K. Sawhney, but he was unable to secure her release. She was transferred to Jammu jail where she has been held since. In Agust 2000, fresh charges were filed against her under the Indian Public Safety Act. She was tried one more time and sentenced to another two years in prison.

            Her lawyer said the Public Safety Act charge was laughable because it implied that she was connected with the Kashmir militancy. He wrote several times to the Indian External Affairs ministry in New Delhi about Shahnaz’s plight but there was no response, while the Pakistan High Commission, as was to be expected, to whom he also wrote, replied that it could not comment “until it had reviewed the matter further.” So from a woman with a small child who was being unjustly held, she had become a “matter” that had to be “reviewed further.” An official told Mannika that in the past year, the Indian authorities had made three attempts to send Shahnaz back but each time she had been turned back at Wagha because her daughter Mobin was an “Indian citizen.”

            And why was she being kept in jail? Because she was a Pakistani citizen without valid papers who could not be sent to a home for those with nowhere to go. S.S. Ani, an Indian official, told Mannika, “It is not an ideal situation for her, but under the circumstances, it is the only option.” While her husband has refused to even acknowledge that Shahnaz ever existed, one of her brothers who works in Saudi Arabia has petitioned the Pakistan embassy there several times but without luck. The former ISI chief who represents the Islamic Republic in the Kingdom has obviously more important things to do, such as write inane articles in newspapers.

            Meanwhile, little Mobin who was born in captivity and has never seen the outside of a jail is escorted to a local school by a policeman whom she calls “Policeman uncle”. When the day he done, he brings her back. Mobin is a bright child and can sing the entire English alphabet. “She will be the only one among her cousins who would know English,” her mother says proudly. When Gen. Musharraf went to Agra, in the first flush of what looked like détente, an immediate exchange of prisoners was arranged. Shahnaz and Mobin were among the six chosen to be returned. However, when their turn came, the Pakistani border guards said that while they were willing to take the mother, who was a Pakistani citizen, they could not take Mobin because her father was an Indian.

            Like Kashmir, the fate of Shahnaz Kausar and little Mobin who can sing the entire English alphabet, remains unresolved.

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