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As the presidential election campaign begins to roll, the air is thick with accusations from both sides. The Democratic candidate, the Lincolnesque — at least in looks if not in deeds — Sen. John Kerry is attacking President Bush for having dragged the country into an unnecessary war and for his failure to revive the economy, while the White House is flinging blows, several under the belt, at the man it calls ‘Senator Flip Flop’, which as such names go, is the kind that will stick.

Sen. Kerry has changed his position far too many times on far too many issues, say the Republicans, to inspire any confidence in his judgment or ability to lead America. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto once described politics as a game of dancing but cautioned that the dancer must remain nimble on his feet. Good dancing and flip-flopping go hand in hand in politics, so Sen. Kerry hasn’t done anything that politicians from time immemorial have not been doing. So what else is new!

This political grandstanding will go on until November and if it is true that history repeats itself, then George W should lose as his father did, going down in history as yet another incumbent who failed to get re-elected. However, for the Pakistani community, one of the most talked-about events last week has been the first published interview of the late Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s daughter, Rubina Salim. Some of the things she told Afaq Khayali of Pakistan Post, New York, about who liquidated her father formed the basis of a news story I filed last week; but there are other things, things of a more personal nature, that she talked about that would be of interest to many people back home.

What sort of a person was Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, the man with the double handshake who walked his visitors to their cars and did not move until they had disappeared from view? He was polite to a point where it became suspicious. He was a good listener and could sit through long, boring presentations without batting an eye. I once met a journalist in London who used to hate Zia but had been raving about him after being received by the General on a visit to Pakistan. I was curious as to his change of heart and learnt that Zia has asked him for ‘advice’ on how to run the country. That had so tickled the man’s ego that he had gone on and on telling Zia how to do so. I asked him for Zia’s reaction. It turned out Zia hadn’t said a word. I am also quite sure he had not really heard a word. The hostile Indian press, in the end, was eating out of his hand.

Rubina Salim who often travelled with her father, said of him, “We as children were in awe of him because he had no patience with impertinence, but he never scolded us. But we could tell from the look in his eyes what he disapproved of. I never even once saw him angry. He never said a harsh word to anyone at home.” Asked about his daily prayers, she said while he never asked his children to pray, he would always say, “It is prayer time” and leave the room. Asked what her father thought of politics, she replied, “He would say, ‘What can I do? Whichever stone I turn, reveals nothing but filth. How can I set it all right?’” She said her father did not want any of his sons to be in politics.

Asked abut his personal habits, she said he went to bed late, rose early for prayers and went to sleep again for a couple of hours. His military secretary Gen. Mahmud Durrani told me that the General hated file work and would throw most files submitted to him behind his favourite sofa. After his death, hundreds of them were retrieved from their resting place under Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s instructions. Zia was greatly devoted to his daughter Zain, a special child. Once she asked her father after watching a movie about elephants for one. The next day, the Nepalese prime minister presented a baby elephant to Gen. Zia and Zain’s wish came true. She was ultimately persuaded to give the animal to the Islamabad zoo, Ms Salim recalled.

Ms Salim said it is not true, as some believe, that after Bhutto’s hanging, there were celebrations in the Zia home. “That is wrong. Our home was as sad as Benazir’s that day. My mother did not even know that Bhutto was going to be hanged,” she said. He never discussed his work as president at home. He was a studious newspaper reader, going over not only headlines but all the stories as well, marking the ones that interested him. He never found time to write anything, but used to say, Ms Salim recalled, that he would devote himself to just two things after retirement, his special child Zain and the book he would write.

She denied that her father enriched himself, saying his Pindi home was completed after his death. She said the family owned only two homes, one in Pindi, the other in Islamabad. Zia used to smoke Dunhills but gave up, promising himself not to smoke till he had held elections. Perhaps why he did not hold them in ‘90 days’, was because he did not want to restart smoking. Did he have any premonition about the air crash, she was asked? “None at all,” she replied. His favourite daughter Zain and his son Anwaar were to go with him to Bahawalpur, but since they had gone to bed late, he left them sleeping soundly.

Did he seek any family member’s advice on the hanging of Bhutto? “None of us knew the night before that Bhutto was going to be executed the next morning.” Did her mother ever ask her husband to let Bhutto go? “No,” she said, “never!”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

This is KL Saigal’s centenary year but not in Pakistan. This is not only a great shame but also a commentary on our boorishness and insensitivity. I asked Saeed Malik, the country’s most knowledgeable musicologist, whether a celebration could be organised and he replied with much sadness that it would need more than an individual to honour the memory of that great singer and entertainer.

Saigal died in January 1947, and he is as much ours as he is India’s. A sweeter male voice there hasn’t been since, and now that most music in Pakistan is reduced to jumping jacks with guitars, few of whom can sing, there is not likely to be.

The music for Saigal’s last film Parwana was composed by that most melodious of music directors, Khwaja Khurshid Anwar. The leading lady was Suraiyya who died in Bombay earlier this year. At the time of filming Saigal was very unwell, a victim, like Saadat Hasan Manto, of uncontrollable alcoholism. Both of them died several months short of their 43rd birthday. Saigal was so ill by then that it was seriously considered more than once to abandon his final film but such a driven gentleman was he that he would not hear of it. Once he said, “If death comes, I will ask it to wait till I have completed the work.”

The celebrated music director the late Anil Biswas said of Saigal, “When Saigal entered the field, cine music, still in its infancy, was groping in the dark, trying to transform itself into an individual format of its own, a discipline away from the semi-classical, opera-oriented music that passed as cine music in the infant years of the talkies. Saigal took it to unprecedented heights. His voice, his accent, his power of expression, all served as a guiding star for the singing artistes of his time, and of the following times. There will never be another Saigal in this world.”

Biswas and Saigal became friends and colleagues at the Hindustan Record Company. Biswas came to the movies in 1935 as a composer and wanted to write for Saigal who was already a celebrity. His opportunity came some years later, but not quite in time for Saigal– and that must remain one of the great missed opportunities in music. He was asked to compose the score for a movie starring Saigal and Nur Jehan. According to Biswas, “I was selected to write music for these two unique voices. I even composed a few songs – when providence played its ace hand and took away Saigal. My dream remained unfulfilled.” The only living composer today who wrote music for Saigal is the maestro Naushad.

Many have tried to emulate Saigal’s voice but no one has been able get it right. Certain people, certain voices, certain monuments and certain paintings are one of a kind and not reproducible. There was only one Saigal, as there is only one Taj Mahal and only one Mona Lisa. CH Atma perhaps came closest of all, but, of course, he was still not the true Saigal. Barring a couple of songs that became hits, the last one in 1951 (‘Rauoon mein sagar ke kinaray’), little of what he recorded is remembered, while no Saigal song has gone stale or faded from memory. Surendra, who played opposite Nur Jehan and Suraiyya in Mehbub Khan’s Anmol ghadi (1946), also tried to do Saigal’s voice but failed. Even the early Mukesh tried to replicate Saigal but was wise enough to give up early. Agha Mubarak Ali of Sialkot, a most discriminating listener, used to say that Mukesh’s throat is made of cement. Mohammad Rafi took pride all his life in the fact that he had sung two lines as part of the chorus in the Saigal song ‘Ruhi, Ruhi, Ruhi, meray sapnoon ki rani’ from the film Shahjahan. When Kishore Kumar was asked by HMV to sing his version of certain Saigal songs, he refused, saying, “Let Saigal songs be enshrined in our memory as his songs only.” Saigal was the first non-Bengali singer whom Tagore himself permitted to sing his compositions.

Lata Mangeshkar said that when she switched on the radio she had bought with her own money for the first time, she heard the news of Saigal’s death. She threw away the radio. This must have been on January 18, 1947, the day Saigal died in Jullandhar, where his family had settled, though he was born in Jammu and kept contact with that city.

Saigal’s greatest film remains Devdas, made in 1935, in which he plays a man who loses his great love in life and tries to find solace in drink. Two of the songs, both written by Kidar Sharma (born by the way in Narowal) ‘Dukh ke ab din beetat nahin’ and ‘Balam aao basso merey mun mein’, are unmatched in their powerful emotional impact. The film was remade in 1955 by Bimal Roy (who was cameraman on the original) with Dilip in the starring role, but it failed to match the 1935 classic. The one made with Shahrukh Khan in the title role in 2002 is a slander and a joke.

Saigal ran away from home – his father was a tehsildar in Jammu and was disappointed by his son’s disinterest in education – and called himself Saigal Kashmiri for a few years. He first went to Simla when he was 10 and later worked there as a salesman for Remington typewriters. He also worked for a while for the local council in Delhi and left when he was refused the five rupee increment he had asked for. It was in Simla that he met the prodigy Master Madan. No one has had the range of Saigal’s voice. According to film journalist Nalin Shah, it “spanned from the base note as in ‘Bina pankh panchhi hoon mein’ from Tansen to the higher octave in ‘Prem ka hai iss jug mein panth nirala’ from President”. In Calcutta, where Saigal started out, he sang for great music directors like RC Bortal, Taran Baran and Pankaj Malik. In Bombay he sang for Khemchandra Prakash, Naushad and Khurshid Anwar.

Few know that Aftab-i-Mausiqi, Ustad Fayyaz Khan, on a visit to Calcutta asked to listen to Saigal and sat there entranced. When it was over, the great ustad said, according to Pahari Sanyal, “We have been singing for generations in the family, but we could never dream of being like him. He is such an effortless singer.” He then offered to adopt Saigal as his shagird and Saigal accepted joyfully. A formal ganda-bandhan ceremony was held a couple of days later.

My father Dr Noor Hussain knew Saigal, who sang many Bengali songs but only two in Punjabi, which I have on a 45 rpm record. They are ‘O sonay saaqya’ and ‘Mahi naal jay akhh lardi kaddi na’ and they are not easy to find. There is a KL Saigal Memorial Trust in India but there is nothing in Pakistan by which he is remembered. He never lived in Lahore but he loved the city and once Pran Nevile, the once-and-forever Lahori who lives in Delhi, recalls he sang for the people of Lahore in the old Minto Park. Pran recorded his memories of that evening some years ago, saying that Saigal just walked on to the stage, sat down on the floor with a harmonium and a tabla player and began to sing. He needed no orchestration and if you listen to his great numbers, you will find hardly any instrumental accompaniment.

Are there people in Lahore who will commemorate this great artiste’s memory? Syed Babar Ali, perhaps, or maybe Hayat Ahmed Khan? Or come to think of it, why not Gen Pervez Musharraf himself, who, I am told, not only likes music but when in the mood can carry a tune? Let it be his contribution to India-Pakistan amity.

No one can watch Osama, a shattering film about Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and not feel a surge of anger at those who helped that brutal and retrogressive regime to take control of a war-ravaged country, nearly half of whose population was forced to flee, only to find itself rotting in refugee camps in neighbouring countries. Every time I hear or read someone like General Hamid Gul extolling the virtues of militant Islam and its merciless enforcers, I wonder how anyone can revel in the emasculation of an entire society in the name of a distorted interpretation of a religion whose name means peace. The day of reckoning for the midwives of the monster that the world knows as the Taliban has not come because they remain protected from scrutiny. But come it must if we are to cleanse our souls and accept responsibility for the sins that we helped get committed in the name of Islam.

I never thought I would find myself in agreement with President George Bush on any point but I agree with him that people should see this nugget of a movie from a country where until recently it was a punishable offence to watch television, take pictures or listen to music.

Written and directed by Siddiq Barmak, this stunningly photographed movie whose honesty and directness give it the impact of a documentary, is the story of a young woman and her mother who has lost her husband during the Soviet occupation and who makes her 12 year old daughter dress as a boy so that she can find work in the Taliban-ruled dictatorship where women have been locked up in their houses and female education forbidden.

Osama is the first film to come out of Afghanistan and what a debut its filmmakers have made! It is a shame that in 56 years we have been unable to make even a single film that should convey to the world the political vulgarity of military rule that we are fated to endure. Osama communicates the lechery and cruelty of the Mullahs who took over Afghanistan with the help of their friends and financiers who should remain nameless since we all know who they are.

The Taliban stalk this short movie like a blood-thirsty ogre. The great merit of Barmak’s masterpiece lies in its understated treatment of events that send a chill down your spine. The brutality and intolerance of Taliban rule is conveyed in image after image, simply and powerfully. Unremitting awareness of those turbaned men in their four-wheel drive vehicles is the terrifying backdrop of this movie. It is not graphic in its depiction of Taliban cruelty, but the impact of what is left half-stated, or implied rather than declared, hits you like a hammer.

We are made to live life as it was under the Taliban, when even the sight of a woman’s bare ankle was enough to have her severely and publicly reprimanded, if she was lucky, and physically punished, if she was not. The Taliban banned everything, including sports, but found uses for the Kabul stadium where they stoned women for adultery, chopped the limbs of wrong-doers and killed people by firing squad for ‘offences against God’, in the process arrogating to themselves the right to decide what is sinful in the eyes of God. The movie should convince everyone that the most sinful of men are those who practise cruelty in the name of religion and have the vanity to play God.

The heroine of Osama, an angelic child by the name of Marina Golbahari, whom her mother gives the name Osama — which is one of the movie’s devastating ironies — finds work as a milkseller’s assistant but is rounded up with other boys for religious education. One of the Islamic lessons physically demonstrated by a mullah is the right way to purify your body after an emission. Osama’s camouflage is not good enough and she is found out.

Hung by her wrists in a well, where she wails for her mother, she is produced before an ‘Islamic’ court and awarded to the old mullah who already has a couple of wives and several children. He takes Osama home and next morning, he is shown washing himself according to the ritual he demonstrated to the boys. That’s where the movie ends. For some time, nobody rose from his or her seat in the small Virginia cinema where I saw the movie. And that said it all.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Are we reaching a point where our society is broadly divided among those who read Urdu and those who don’t? I know any number of people who have never read an Urdu book, and do not remember a single Urdu verse except what they can recall of Faiz through the good offices of Mehdi Hasan or Farida Khanum or Iqbal Bano and, horror of horrors, Munni Begum.

Some people might remember that in his first public meeting at Lahore after taking over as president, ZAB recited a line from Faiz, getting it nearly right (Urdu poetry not being quite his thing), which made Intizar Hussain write the day after in Mashriq, “We would have been very happy had what Bhutto Sahib recited come to him direct from Faiz Sahib, but we fear the likely source of this literary insight is Farida Khanum.”

ZAB once said there were two distinct groups in his cabinet, the Urduwalas and the Angreziwalas. In the latter group were men such as J Rahim, Abdul Hafiz Pirzada, Rafi Raza etc, while the vernacular crowd was led by Maulana Kausar Niazi. None of the three gents in the first group could read Urdu or showed any desire to do so. Consequently, they remained unaware of all that appeared in the Urdu press, except what came to them through hearsay which was often inaccurate or loaded with disinformation if not misinformation. The divide was never bridged, though in the person of the late Khurshid Hasan Mir, who made some superb translations of Faiz, such a bridge did exist. But since it lacked the feudal support pillar that Pakistani politics requires, it soon came tumbling down.

But that is a tale for another day. Every now and then I come across something in an Urdu newspaper that most of our Angreziwalas will remain unaware of, which would be a pity. The other day I ran into something by Abbas Athar, the true successor of that master of the light column, Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat.

Abbas Athar’s column appeared in an Urdu newspaper from New York that I pick up every time I go to a Pakistani grocery store in search of spices and those familiar homeland sights, sounds and smells. From this point on, it is AA (not to be confused with Alcoholics Anonymous).

“Historic disclosures from the Punjab chief minister” runs the caption. Let us see what those “historic disclosures” are.

“The Punjab chief minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, addressing a historic public meeting in Rawalpindi, made the historic disclosure that Gen Pervez Musharraf has freed Pakistan from the difficulties surrounding it. He also said that a ruler like him has neither ever come our way, nor ever will. He also made the equally historic disclosure that once the Chaudhry family calls someone a friend, the commitment is lifelong.”

Both these disclosures, though on the mark, still call for an explanation. The first disclosure says that Gen Musharraf has extricated the country from the difficulties that were surrounding it. If “difficulties” means Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, the phrasing ought to be changed so that it becomes comprehensible. Everyone will immediately understand if it were to be said that Gen Musharraf had removed the country’s difficulties, the difficulties being Nawaz Sharif and Benazir.

Pervaiz Elahi is Punjab’s intellectual chief minister, hence his fondness for word jugglery. In the past Lahore was once blessed with an intellectual mayor by the name of Chaudhry Muhammad Hussain, whose wisdom and intellect have gone into legend. But in sheer intellectual brilliance he is no match for our popular chief minister, whose sayings, there can be no doubt, will become proverbs. Since Pervaiz Elahi is polite, he has refrained from naming Nawaz and Benazir, merely alluding to them as “difficulties”. Actually, once the difficulties exit the country, the country is out of its difficulties. In their presence here, various difficulties could arise, such as difficulties about the referendum, difficulties about free and fair elections, difficulties about genuine democracy, difficulties about the birth and breeding of the Q Muslim League, to name just a few. One can say that a whole sea of difficulties was enclosed in these two containers that have been physically removed from the country. Thus in one sweep, Gen Musharraf has taken Pakistan out of its difficulties.

The second disclosure says that there has never been a ruler like Gen Musharraf, past, present or future. For a moment, Zia-ul-Haq comes to mind, but there is no comparison. Zia only pushed the Bhutto family out of politics to make alliances with its enemies; Gen Musharraf’s achievement lies in the fact that not only has he thrown out two popular leaders from politics but from the country itself. He has also secured parliamentary majority for a party that could hope to win not many seats in a free election. Here are some of his achievements: an increase in poverty and unemployment; a dubious referendum; divesting NAB of its given responsibility so that it could organise the Q League; exposing the real Dr Qadeer; treating the press much like Maula Jat would treat Noori Nat; and so on. Obviously there has never been a leader like him.

As for the popular chief minister’s claim that the friendships of his family are lifelong, that too is correct. As witnesses, we can cite two former prime ministers, Mohammad Khan Junejo and Nawaz Sharif. The moment Junejo lost his ministry, the Chaudhrys joined Zia-ul-Haq and Nawaz Sharif. As for Nawaz Sharif, he was the leader of the Chaudhry family until the night of October 12, 2000 but a stranger as the sun rose on October 13. Allah alone abides.

The nearest thing I can think of that would compare with Martha Stewart’s fall is the sight of that colossal statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Baghdad after the city fell to what we are assured were its American liberators.

To those who do not know who Martha Stewart is, let me say that from how to bake an exotic cake, to what a proper flower arrangement on a proper dinner should be, to what clothes should be worn when to how to make Christmas ornaments out of ordinary materials, she was the last word. She was the goddess of good taste and she was a billionaire and a self-made one. She overcame several major setbacks in life, including the break-up of a 29-year old marriage, but she never let any of that get her down. She did not waste her time, nor suffer fools nor exhibit fake modesty. She presided over a vast empire and she turned the most humdrum ideas into money-spinners. Her television show at the height of its popularity was watched by millions of adoring Americans, mostly women. She wrote bestseller after bestseller, all in the “how-to” category. She chose K-Mart, a glorified dime store, to sell a range of products that bore her name and the yearly sales of those goodies averaged a billion dollars.

And now she is down and though she still has her loyal supporters and fans, it is generally agreed that she is done and over with. Martha Stewart does not think so but maybe that is a brave front she is putting up. She has been found guilty by a New York court on all four counts on which she was tried by jury. The basic charge is insider trading. Shorn of its legal mumbo-jumbo, she has been found guilty of having profited from insider information that other shareholders of the stock she sold before it crashed the next day, did not have. She is to be sentenced in a couple of months and she is almost certain to go to jail.

Martha Stewart may be a loyal American, but she is in the wrong country. She should have been in Pakistan where she could have had all the insider information she wanted and been free to turn it into cash. And she would not be going to jail, as she is here, but laughing all the way to the bank, which, it should be added, would have earlier advanced her billions of rupees without collateral on the express assurance that it was money she was never expected to return. She would also have been offered a cabinet post and decorated with the highest honour the Islamic Republic confers on worthy citizens duly cleared and recommended by the dozen intelligence agencies that form our not-so-invisible government.

I recall a phone department linesman in Lahore asking as the Watergate scandal raged what exactly President Nixon had done. When told that he was accused of having had his opponents’ premises bugged, the man nearly had a heart attack. “These Americans are crazy. I have just finished placing bugs on four or five telephones as instructed by the office. And I am just a poor linesman,” he said.

Martha is down because of US Code Section 101 or “material misrepresentation to the federal government” that she violated. She could have violated 101 such provisions in Pakistan and still remained queen. But what is happening this side of the great Atlantic waters is that comedians and talk show hosts are making fun of her night and day. There are cruel jokes about Martha’s newest project: doing up her jail cell to make it both attractive and liveable.

The only thing Pakistani about the Martha Stewart affair is that her best friend testified against her. Mariana Pasternak provided the damning detail that nailed Ms Stewart. Ms Pasternak was a freeloader with a history of unpaid bills, as pointed out by Tina Brown. She owed money to her contractor and when she was out with Martha, her friend picked up the tab. Obviously, she was going to plunge the dagger into her best friend’s back. There can be little doubt that in an earlier birth Ms Pasternak was one of us.

It is also a very Pakistani thing that those whom Martha Stewart did no harm ever, appear most eager to see her in the slammer. Such is life.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Khalid Khan, whom everyone in Sialkot called Khalo, never played an inelegant shot in his life. He was a natural stylist, much like another great cricketing Khan of the family, Agha Mumtaz, who in his time played for NICA or the Northern India Cricket Association, which represented the areas that make up today’s Pakistan. Khalo’s brother, Jehangir Khan “Jango” phoned one morning from Texas which he is visiting from Lahore to say, “Khalo has died in Karachi. I didn’t know who else to share this with in America.”

It is always a particular image of those you have known that remains filed away in the mind’s album. As I ask Jango the usual questions beginning with when, where and how – as if that would make any difference – I see Khalo arriving early one brisk and sunny winter morning at Connley Park, Sialkot, many years ago. His spotlessly white shirt and trousers are set off by a natty blue blazer and around his neck he has thrown a raffish, polka dot silk scarf. He is home for a few days, on leave from PAF, and he is going to be playing the day’s match for City Club, which is captained by his redoubtable uncle Abdul Hamid Khan, bowler of extraordinary off-breaks – though the action is suspect – who would say, “Anyone who bowls a lesser off-break than mine, is no bowler; and anyone who bowls a bigger one should be sent to the lunatic asylum.”

Khalo goes in at number four – that niche of some of the game’s great performers – and the scoreboard, which actually is a simple makeshift affair serviced by starry-eyed boys on the lam from school, can’t keep up with him. He seems to be able to hit the ball at will wherever he fancies. He lobs a couple over the heads of both mid-off and mid-on (a fielder never feels sillier than when that happens), follows it with a sizzling square cut or two, and then hooks a short and rising ball ferociously and it goes singeing the grass all the way to the square leg boundary. He doesn’t stay in there long, but what of that; he has delighted all those who have watched him, some like me for the first time, and he has over 50 runs to show for twenty or thirty minutes at the wicket.

The Khans of Sialkot were all cricketers and, like the Mohammad brothers, appear to have learnt how to play with a straight bat while still in their mother’s womb. This must be genes at work, otherwise how does one explain their natural flair for cricket? Feroz Khan of Beriwala Chowk, who sired the Khan brothers – Javed Maqbool “Boola”, Khalid Khan “Khalo”, Tahir Khan “Taro” (he was into pigeons not cricket), Hamid Khan “Hamo”, Babar Khan and Jehangir Khan “Jango” – was no mean cricketer himself in his youth. His cousins – Agha Mumtaz and Agha Sarfraz – played representative cricket. Agha Sarfraz, who has become a mystic now with a large following of devotees, was an accomplished leg break and googly bowler who could hit the ball hard and high going in at number eight or nine.

All three of Khalo and Jango’s maternal uncles (Aziz Khan, Hamid Khan and Aftab Ahmed Khan) were cricketers. Hamid Khan, who never married as it would have interfered with his chess and cricket, was at Murray College about the same time as Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Aftab, who died about 10 years ago, was at Murray College, Sialkot, where he caught the eye of that legendary patron of sports Col Muhammad Aslam of Islamia College, Lahore, who immediately brought him to Lahore. It was there in 1935-36 that Aftab spearheaded and won for Islamia College its historic encounter with Government College, scoring a scintillating hundred and capturing a dozen wickets with his leg breaks and top spinners. He was carried on the shoulders of ecstatic student supporters all the way from the University Ground to the Islamia College. He later went to Aligarh University and helped it beat the formidable Punjab University to win the Rowlinton-Baria Trophy. He also played for the Maharaja of Patiala Sir Bhopinder Singh’s personal XI for several years.

Khalo played cricket for Murray College in 1941-42 and scored an unbeaten 250 in a muffasil semi-final against Ludhiana, falling just 30 runs short of the Punjab University record and only because his cousin Mushtaq Mirza “Shako” (a great hitter), who was the team captain declared the innings closed without realising that given another ten or twenty minutes, Khalo with runs flowing from his bat, would have gone past the magic individual record total of 280. It was again Col Aslam who picked up Khalo and brought him to Islamia College, Lahore, where he joined the team which included Abdul Hafiz (he took the name Kardar in 1948), Zulfiqar Ahmed, Imtiaz Ahmed and Zafar Ahmed aka “Zafri Gadda”. One philosophical observation I would like to quote that Col Aslam always made after a defeat was, “That is one defeat less for the future.” It was Farooq Mazhar who told me about it once when reminiscing about the great colonel.

Khalo made the Punjab University team and played for it in 1944-45, no small accomplishment because more than half of his mates were to play for India and Pakistan, not to mention the Ranjhi Trophy and the Bombay Pentangular. Khalo being young, handsome, musical and fancy-free, in the opinion of his father was “at risk” in Lahore, as he might take to the big city’s wicked, wicked ways; so he had him moved to the Prince of Wales College, Jammu, where the cricket patron was another great collector of young talent, Prof Sheikh Rashid (who was to be killed in the 1947 Muslim massacres in the state). After the Partition, Khalo joined the Pakistan Air Force and played for the Services XI – as did Kardar and Imtiaz – against the visiting MCC.

Jango Khan tells me that he once asked his uncle Hamid Khan – Mama Hamid to them all – which had been Khalo’s best innings. Hamid Khan took a long drag at his cheroot and said, “It was in 1942 and we had taken the City Club team to Amritsar to play in the Amritsar Tournament where Khalo scored a hundred, hitting Munawar Ali ‘Manny’ Khan imperiously all over the place.” Manny Khan who played for Pakistan but not for long was the fastest man to come up after the great Mohammad Nissar. In 1942, Hamid Khan reminisced, Manny Khan was the fastest bowler in India.

Khalo was also highly musical and sometimes after a match, he would sing using the bat as a tabla and some handy object to strike up the beat. Nazar Mohammad, also an accomplished singer, was also known to put his bat to the same ingenious use. Jango Khan tells me that in the last years of his life, Khalo would spend a lot of time hanging around musicians. He settled in Karachi but loved Sialkot where he was born and where he had grown up. It was a city he would return to every other year. They buried him in Karachi, but there can be no doubt that his soul hovers above the old Connley Park as it was in the early 1940s on early winter mornings with the night’s dew still on the grass and the crisp sound of perfectly-timed shots played in the middle of the bat echoing through the air.

There is one thing Stephen Cohen has said more than once when talking about the current thaw in India-Pakistan relations that remains perhaps the truest of observations on the subject. He is convinced that unless the process now underway were to be personally led and supervised by Mr Vajpayee and Gen. Musharraf, the bureaucracies of the two countries will see to it that it proceeds no further and withers on the vine. On this one I concede game, set and match to Prof. Cohen.

Last week I ran into a living example of his observation. Now that the winds of peace are seen to have begun blowing across our unfortunate, strife-infested Subcontinent, with delegations going to and fro and Indian cricketers about to land in Pakistan, you would think a change would have occurred in the attitude of suspicion with which the functionaries of the two governments view each other and those belonging to are linked in some way to the other country. Not so. Not at least at the Consulate General of India in New York. There, the Cold War continues unabated and anyone and everyone who is even remotely linked to Pakistan is to be treated as a potential spy, saboteur or perhaps a personal representative of Chotta Somebody, India’s poster boy for terrorism who, New Delhi believes, is living it up in Karachi, courtesy the ISI.

This is what happened. Dr Amjad Hussain, a heart surgeon of repute from Toledo, Ohio, who has lived in this country for nearly forty years and been a citizen for close to thirty, sent his passport and that of his wife, a born American citizen, to the Indian Consulate in New York earlier last month for a visitor’s visa. Every year, he goes to Pakistan to visit his beloved city of Peshawar about which he published a marvelous book some years ago. This time he was going to spend one week in India on his way to Pakistan. First, because he wanted to show his wife, who hasn’t been too well in recent years, the Taj he once promised her, and second, he was to deliver a lecture each to medical students at the Chandigarh and Amritsar medical colleges.

Dr Hussain had downloaded the forms from the Indian embassy website which also informed him that for a certain fee he could apply for a 10-year visa, which is what he did for his wife and himself. The turnaround time, the website assured him, was about a week. Not so, he soon found out, because when the passports did not come back for two weeks and a half and his departure date in a complicated itinerary got closer, he phoned the Consulate and was given the usual runaround by a vice-consul who called himself Mr Sharma. An increasingly nervous, but normally laid back, Dr Hussain made three more calls to New York and was told when he last called that his “case” (it is amazing how quickly you become a ‘case’ in India and Pakistan) had been sent to New Delhi for “clearance.” “Clearance,” as everyone knows in India and Pakistan, is a no, no, no and a no again. The Indian and Pakistani home ministries and all the less-than-pretty establishments that work under their draconian control can only be improved if they are entirely abolished. In the words of Munir Niazi: Iss shehr-e-sangdil ko jalla daina chayye: Phir iss ki khaak ko bhi urra daina chaiyye (This stone-hearted city should be burnt down and its ashes scattered to the winds).

A day or two after Dr Hussain’s last conversation with Mr Sharma, the two passports were returned, alarmingly stamped with the words ‘Visa applied for’, which everyone knows means ‘visa denied.’ Why would someone who has been a citizen of the United States for thirty years, who has published books and who writes a popular column every two weeks for a large Toledo newspaper, should have to be “cleared” with New Delhi is beyond the comprehension of any rational human being. Mr Sharma (long may he blight the lives of Pakistani visa seekers) is typical of the bureaucratic mindset of India and Pakistan. Stephen Cohen is right. It is either Vajpayee-Musharraf or it is down the tubes for us.

A call to the Pakistan embassy’s personable second secretary Imran Ali, a former akhbarwala, produces the assurance that never in his three years and a half here has he referred the visa application of an American citizen of Indian origin to Islamabad. Since he is a former akhbarwala, I believe him.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

She was the last of the great singing stars after Nur Jehan and she too is gone. Suraiyya, who broke into movies in the early 1940s as a child star – much as Madhubala and Nur Jehan had done – lived a quiet life and not much was seen or heard of her after she made her last film exactly 41 years ago. She could have gone on for many more years, but she chose to step out of the limelight.

Nur Jehan and Suraiyya came together in the runaway musical hit Anmol gadhi which was released a year before the Partition. One of Nur Jehan’s duets with Surendra (who could best be described as “Johnny One Note”) became one of her most celebrated hits – Awaz dey kahan hai. Suraiyya and Nur Jehan did not sing a duet, which is a matter of regret. Of the movie’s dozen songs, seven were sung by Rafi, Suraiyya, Shamshad and Surendra, the rest by the incomparable Nur Jehan.

Suraiyya once said, “I never considered myself a great artist – certainly not a good singer, with no training in music at all. I sang because in those days it was the vogue for heroines to sing their own songs. I do not know why people liked my voice.” Her words sum up her modesty, simplicity and decency. Even at the height of her fame, she remained humble and unassuming.

As in the past, I am indebted to my friend M Rafiq in England for providing me details of Suraiyya’s life and career. She was born Suraiyya Jamal Sheikh in Lahore on 15 June 1929. Her mother’s brother was a bit player in Bombay and when she was just one year old, her family, made up of father Aziz, mother Mallika and grandmother, moved to Bombay. Suraiyya never returned to Lahore because she had no association with the city of her birth. And that, of course, remains a great pity. Few of the great stars from Bombay who had their origins in Lahore ever returned to it after 1947. In part the blame lies with the pig-headed bureaucrats of the two governments who have ensured that travel between India and Pakistan remains all but impossible.

In 1941, when she was 11, Suraiyya’s uncle persuaded the strict and orthodox family to let her play a small role as Baby Suraiyya in Taj Mahal. She had no training in music but in her next film Station master in 1942, Naushad had her sing in two choruses with Rajkumari and others. The same year she sang solo for him in Nai duniya (Boot karoon main polish babu), which she followed by acting in Tamanna, with music by KC Dey. In 1943, Khursheed Anwar had her sing a duet with Satish and a song on her own.

She acted and sang for Anil Biswas in Hamari Baat (1943). She was barely 14 and she had arrived. She achieved some prominence in K Asif’s Phool in 1945 with music by Master Ghulam Haider, for whom she sang three songs. She paired with the immortal KL Saigal in three films: Tadbir (1945), Omar Khayyam (1946) and Parwana with music by Khursheed Anwar. The movie was released in 1947 after Saigal’s death. With Anmol ghadi, she had come into her own and was at her peak in AR Kardar’s Dillagi in 1949 in which she sang 11 of the 13 songs, with Rafi singing the other two. From then on, almost all the films she made became hits as did her songs. In a Raj Kapoor movie, she asked for and was given Rs 50,000 as against Rs 40,000 paid to Nargis. That was a lot of money for the times when a rich man was called a ‘ lakhpati’. From 1958 on, her career began to peter out, a combination of the rise of Nargis and Lata Mangeshkar.

Suraiyya’s story is one she shares with many artistes with greedy families. It was her family that ruined her chances of marrying anyone, as it was Madhubala’s tyrannical father who ruined her life. In 1949, when she was the reigning box office queen, she appeared with Dev Anand in Shayar and it was not long before they were together again in Jeet, followed by Afsar in 1950. The two fell in love but met with resistance from her family. That notwithstanding, she announced her engagement in Movietime, the leading film magazine of the time. Dev Anand bought her an engagement ring which her grandmother threw into the sea from her apartment window. The affair threatened to create a communal riot and professional pressures joined with those of her family and Suraiyya broke off the engagement.

A producer made her swear on the Quran that she would not marry Dev Anand. Suraiyya kept her word and went one step further by not marrying at all. There was another episode, but different and somewhat comic. In Phool, her co-star was actress Veena’s brother Shehzada who took to parking his car night and day outside her apartment building. The police were sent for but it could do nothing as he had broken no law. After two weeks of it, Jaddan Bai, Nargis’s mother, arrived on the scene and took the besotted Shehzada to the apartment where he met Suraiyya, who begged him to leave her alone. She was also said to be in love with Gregory Peck who met her when he passed through Bombay.

She was deeply interested in languages and always had her nose in an English book. She was also an adept dancer and loved to play badminton and paint. She divided her time between Bombay and Lonewala where she had a bungalow and where she often went. There is a Suraiyya Road in that town. Her last film was Rustum sohrab (1963) after which she lived the life of a recluse and although she appeared at award ceremonies occasionally, she never sang again. She was well respected by the industry and would appear and even play in charity cricket matches. Her smile always remained the smile of a shy young girl. She was still a star when she died, but a star from another sky.

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