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Let me explain time to you,” Qurratulain Hyder once said to me. This was in the 1980s. How comfortable, she asked, was I with the 1960s? How distant did they appear in terms of years lapsing? “The 1960s feel like yesterday,” I replied. “Well,” she said, “That was a quarter century ago. So let’s go back, taking the same unit of time you are comfortable with, another 25 years.” To my surprise, if not horror, it struck me that we were in 1935. “And another leap into the past by the same measure,” she said, “and we are in 1910, with the First World War still four years into the future. That is what time is. That is how time goes,” she said.

She should have known, having written one of the greatest novels of the 20th century in any language on the same theme: time. I refer of course to Aag ka Darya. I always found it ironic that while, since the late 1970s no week has passed without some rubbishy and forgettable novel by an Indian writer writing in English (finding publication in Britain or the US), the work of a writer like Qurratulain Hyder, including her own superb translation of Aag ka Darya, has never been able to make the list.

In June 1982, she wrote to me from Bombay, “Tell me, how does one get published in Vilayat ? How did this boy get such a massive novel published from London/New York? [I forget what novel by a desi it was that I had sent her.] This is the sort of thing which has always baffled me about the Indo-Anglicans – or do you call them Pak-Anglicans? This cousin of mine, Khalid Hussain Shah, and his American wife, Linda, wrote a huge novel (Refugee) about our family’s migration to Pakistan. It was published from New York and also got rave reviews in the US press – ‘Mesmerising,’ etc.” In another letter later that year, she wrote in that delightful Urdu that was hers alone to write, “Having watched books by ‘ unt-shunt ’ types finding publication in the West, I had handed over to you a collection of my stories [in her beautiful English translation]. Well, it is apparent that nothing came of it at your end. I am two-thirds done with my translation of Aakhir e Shab ke Hamsafar . How can it get published in the West? [It wasn’t.] You try.”

The first time I saw Annie, which is what I always called her, was in 1960 or 1961 in Karachi, but I could not muster the courage to speak to her. There used to be a street that linked Victoria Road and Elphinstone Street (I prefer to use the old names, which nobody had any business to change). On that road, there used to stand the Capital Cinema, which had a wonderful restaurant on its first floor called Flamingo, which was always dimly lit and which had black steel furniture with colourful cushions. There in that cool, calm place I saw Qurratulain Hyder sipping tea with a woman friend. She was wearing a yellow sari and a spring green blouse. That I have never forgotten. Another 21 years were to pass before I could meet her. Why? Because there is a preordained place and time for everything. The year was 1980, and I was in Bombay and determined to meet, not the movie stars of my dreams, but Qurratulain Hyder. And I did. From that day on, our contact did not flag and we kept a correspondence going until May 1997. Thereafter she did not write with her right hand because of a stroke, but she learned to write with her left. She sent me a copy of one of her books with the inscription written with her left hand that said “ Bain haath ka khel, ” whose literal meaning may be “a trick with the left hand,” but which means “executed with the least effort.” Another book, her translations of some of her stories published in India – Street Singers of Lucknow – she inscribed to me in English in childlike lettering with her left hand. Can destiny come up with a greater irony than to divest a magical writer like her of the ability to write with her own hand?

People were always in awe of her because she refused to suffer fools and made it quite clear on the spot the reason why she did not. Some of my friends remain surprised to this day as to how I could even think of taking liberties with her. Everyone who was younger to her called her Annie Apa, but I called her Annie. And she let me call her Annie. When she asked me what I thought of her novel Gardish e Rang e Chaman , I told her I did not like it and told her why. I was forgiven, but also told that it was not necessary that I could understand everything. She also told me that there is a certain kind of spoken Urdu in UP that few Pakistanis would have the ear for now. Whenever I went to Delhi, which sadly was only three or four times, I always spent an evening with her. She would insist that I eat and eat gluttonously. She had moved to NOIDA, which is a relatively new settlement across the Jamuna river in Ghaziabad. She suffered one bout of ill health after another, but her sense of humour, her magnanimity and her lust for life never diminished. Her eyes gave her much trouble and in the end she used to read, what little she did, with a magnifying glass. One letter she wrote to me in May 1996 says, “My number is minus 18-19. All the best. The address on the letterhead [I had had some letterheads with her name and address printed and sent to her] is so fine that all I can read is my name. This letter I have written with the help of a magnifying glass.” I was shattered when I read that.

The last time I spent an evening with her in Delhi, she said to me, “I have to hear now with the help of an outlandish hearing aid, but for God’s sake don’t go advertising that with the slogan: Annie behri ho gai,” or Annie has gone deaf. “You know me,” I said.

Among her good friends in Pakistan, I would count Raja Tajummul Hussain, Dr Javid Iqbal, the late Ijaz Batalvi and Zia Mohyeddin. But she knew everyone and always followed what was going on in Pakistan, on the literary scene no less than on the political front. She was very sad when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed. She told me that a poor woman had come up to her and said, “ Bibi, ye Pakistani kaiasy log hain? Apnay Raja ko maar diya .” (Bibi, what kind of people are these Pakistanis?! They killed their Raja.) Annie was a great friend of Nargis. After her death, she wrote to me, “Yes, Nargis has left us all devastated. She was part of the times in which we were growing up – times now in the realm of mythology – (like Pankhaj Malik’s songs). Now when we watch those old movies on TV, they look primitive, but how magical they were in those days! But she – Nargis – died with great dignity and very gracefully. When she died she was a grand public figure. Extremely dignified she had become, but she never stopped swearing. This was a strange paradox of her personality. Once she told me that some exceedingly old people came up to her and said, ‘I have been watching your movies since childhood,’ (in the same way that some white-bearded elders inform me that they have been reading my stories since they were children). But in her we had a fascinating lady.”

And even more fascinating was Annie, whom the world will forever remember as (in the words of my friend Sayyed Faizi of Vienna), “the Hazir Imam of Urdu fiction, Qurratulain Hyder). Rest in peace dear lady, for your like, we shall never see again.

President Pervez Musharraf and Ms Benazir Bhutto may not have much in common but one thing the two certainly share: the lack of a good rewrite man. While the president has to make do with his reclaimed press secretary and the army of hacks from the information ministry headed by the gentleman whose name rhymes with “ghallat-byani”, Ms Bhutto is trying to sell goods after her Abu Dhabi summit that the gentlemanly Farhatullah Babar and the ebullient Sherry Rehman are having a hard time doing.

Although everyone I know, including Charlie’s aunt, has had the pleasure of speaking to the Mohtarma or having been spoken to on her behalf, since she landed in New York, I confess that I am not one of them. Had that been otherwise, I would have shared the following with her and urged her to place some of her hard-earned money into the hiring of the rewrite person who produced the following masterpiece.

“Remus Rodham was a Famous Cowboy in the Montana Territory. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to service at a government facility, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Remus passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.”

This meister stueck was a rewrite of the following report: “Judy, a professional genealogical researcher, discovered that Hillary Clinton’s great-great uncle, Remus Rodham, a fellow lacking in character, was hanged for horse stealing and train robbery in Montana in 1889. The only known photograph of Remus shows him standing on the gallows. On the back of the picture is this inscription: “Remus Rodham; horse thief, sent to Montana Territorial Prison 1885, escaped 1887, robbed the Montana Flyer six times caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged in 1889.”

This being summer and the height of the silly season, we are under a steady invasion of visitors from the homeland. Some come and go silently, like ships in the night. One such ship was Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat, who spent several days in Washington but stayed away from what there is by way of the Pakistani press. I suppose one should not blame him; in his place, I would probably do the same. However, in New York he did meet the snow leopard that was hijacked from the Northern Areas and gifted to a New York zoo. I wonder if the leopard realises how lucky he is. After all, anyone handed over to the Americans is more likely to end up in Guantanamo than New York.

And, of course, there is the evergreen Mushahid Hussain Syed, who arrived in New York some days ago but where he is or what he doing, nobody knows. Even the eager-looking members of the party, of which he is secretary general, have failed to locate him, much less meet him. Attempts by some to ferret out information from a Washington-based member of the family have so far failed to produce the nugget that all seek.

A friend swears MH is in town to meet BB. “But why should that be necessary when she is on the blower with the General a couple of times a week? What is it that MH can convey to her that she hasn’t already heard from the horse’s mouth?” asks a sceptic. There is a theory that Mushahid Hussain is taking a breather before making another gallant attempt at hunting with the hounds and running with the hare. One who is close to MH says that he speaks up so courageously every now and then because, after all, he is a Syed. But then so are Sharifuddin Pirzada and Gen. Musharraf himself. It is all very confusing.

And as if there wasn’t enough going on, Dr Nasim Ashraf, also landed in New York a couple of days ago. He spoke at a meeting of the Pakistan League of America, which should not be confused with the Pakistan League of America USA. The first is rumoured to be “sarkari”, while the other is “ghair-sarkari”.

Dr Ashraf being the cricket czar should have expected to be questioned about cricket. Nothing happened during the meeting but when he was leaving, he was waylaid and asked why he had not resigned after the great World Cup disaster. “I did,” he shot back. “Then why are you still there?” Some people just don’t give up. “Ask President Musharraf,” he said before storming out, some say, in a huff.

Ask President Musharraf? Easier said than done these days, easier said than done.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Sialkot, my friend and classmate Rafiq Shah wrote some years ago, is a small town of about 160,000 odd, very odd, souls, and its length and breadth would give someone trying to swing a cat the biggest cramp in the neck. Sialkot’s oddities are many, for whose collation I am indebted to my friend and his acerbic wit.

The city is only about 120 km from Lahore, yet there is no direct rail link between the two. The two circuitous routes, one through that paradise of wrestlers and cholesterol capital, Gujranwala, take more time than can be considered reasonable. Sialkot, one of the world’s foremost manufacturers of sports equipment, has no airport, a result of every federal government’s quixotic thinking that, being so close to the border of Indian-held Kashmir, in the event of war, if taken over, it could prove a “security risk.” On the basis of that logic, the airport at Lahore should be bulldozed forthwith. However, the businessmen of Sialkot, far more enterprising than their government, decided to build one with their own money, something that should have been an example for the rest of Pakistan but, as was to be expected, hasn’t.

Sialkot has its Iqbal, and it has Faiz. It is also the city of Asghar Saudai, the poet who wrote the stirring poem that became the rallying cry of the Pakistan Movement: “ Pakistan ka matlab kya hai: La Ill-aha Ill-lil-lah .” Sialkot also has its Fort that everyone calls the Qila, which houses the headquarters of the police, a library that was bombed by the foolish Indians in 1965 and the base of the municipal corporation that remains asleep much of the year. In Rafiq’s words, “To crown it all, right smack in the middle of it all, squats the ugliest man-made structure one can ever witness anywhere on the face of the earth, a so-called fortress which an idiotic ruler built by scratching earth from around this flat piece of land. It is a carbuncle on the behind of Sialkot, forever weeping and flaking, always in the way – a gargantuan monstrosity, an awful eyeful, an eyesore and a disgrace. And yet, incredibly, for over 2,000 years the people of this town have walked round this atrocity like mindless zombies, rather than having the commonsense to knock it down and be free of it once for all.”

The only thing my friend believes, as do I, that has enriched the lives of those who have lived in Sialkot in the last 125 years is Murray College, which the Church of Scotland founded in 1889. There is hardly a family in Sialkot from which someone or the other was not educated there. Among them were Iqbal and Faiz. The cultural debt owed to it is incalculable. Never have so many owed so much to so few. And yet this fine institution was “nationalised” – by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, of all people. Anything that the hand of government touches turns to ashes, and so it was in this instance as well. The college that used to be tended with such meticulous care and affection by those good men who only saw it in terms of service to the community, has gone to seed. When I visited it over ten years ago, I almost cried when I remembered what it used to be and saw what it had become.

Years later, my friend Akhtar Mirza described a visit to Murray College. “Everything has changed. The hockey ground is covered with uncut grass. The tennis courts where Prof CW Tressler used to play every other afternoon are like a tropical jungle. The chapel, which like all chapels always looked a little melancholy, now wears a forlorn and abandoned look. I walked through the verandas, touched the trees under whose shade on golden winter days birds with long red tails used to dance, but found only squirrels rummaging around for food. ‘Abandoned gardens are fated to get squirrels as their gardeners,’ goes the Punjabi proverb. And it’s true. That is your Murray College today.”

The missionaries who founded Murray College and ran it well into the 1960s were remarkable men. Rafiq said it best. “Scotland and Sialkot are like chalk and cheese. You may think long and you may think hard before you will find any one aspect in which these two regions may have anything in common. It is by an almost superhuman feat of the imagination that one can comprehend a small band of people born and bred in the comparative comfort of bonny Scotland, deeply moral and ordained to the Christian ministry, each one of them possessing an intellect of the highest order and educated to the highest levels of excellence in one of the five ancient universities of their country, to leave their home and to live and work without recompense except for what will be barely essential to keep their and their families’ body and soul together, 7,000 miles away beyond seven seas in a strange land to educate the people of a town so very different from theirs and not for one day or one month or one year but for 100 years. Living here, they must have missed hundreds of thousands of things of their country but none more so than perhaps the hills and mountains where they and their families were raised.”

The nearest in Sialkot to anything resembling a hill came into existence in the 1920s, in the name of Mount View Hotel, which had no mount and no view within miles of it. We also had a Greenwood Street, which was neither green nor was there a wood within 100 miles of it. In fact, it was the Anglicised name of the old residential area called Mianapura that continues to exist to this day, as does Greenwood Street. However, in the cantonment – where the rich and the idle have moved in the last 10 to 15 years – at a crossroads stands a large milestone that says Sialkot is zero miles from here (though it is not and never could have been) and marks the place where the hot and dusty plains of Sialkot end and the Himalayan hills begin. An inscription on white marble says: Yonder lie the scorching plains whence/Dust riseth as smoke from a furnace/The land whither ye go is a fair land/Of hills and green valleys and clear running waters. On a clear day, if you lift your eyes towards the hills, you see a breathtaking view of hills that lie between Jammu and the Vale of Kashmir.

It is said that wherever you go in the world, you will run into someone from Sialkot. And that indeed is true. Sialkotis speak Punjabi with a certain accent which is special to them. And they never shed it. Kuldip Nayar, the celebrated Indian journalist and one of the great proponents of peace and amity between India and Pakistan, left Sialkot in 1947, but 60 years later, he speaks with a pure Sialkoti accent. Perhaps it is different with the younger people. A second secretary at the Pakistan embassy in Washington, who is from Sialkot, is unable to speak Punjabi. Or at least, that is what she told me. What language she speaks will need to be investigated because didn’t Faiz Ahmed Faiz once say, “ Bhai, agar apni zuban na aati ho tau phir aur koi zuban bhi nahin aati ”?

This must be my lucky week although my astrologer friend, The Colonel, insists that given Mars and its present celestial placement, not much good should be expected by man or beast. Not until September 15 anyway, he adds mysteriously. He has also been after me to find out for him Gen. Musharraf’s hour of birth. I cannot say that I have not tried because I have, and discreetly as well, but it turns out that in the Islamic republic where no secret is a secret for more than five minutes, this one is. One more example of the exception proving the rule.

Be that as it may, as far as I go, The Colonel has to be wrong about the baleful influence of the red planet because I have just heard from a mysterious black princess from the even more mysterious land of Africa who is soon going to shower me with gold. She informs me that there indeed is a rainbow in the sky and a pot of gold where it ends. What is more, that pot of gold is now mine for the asking. There are just a number of things I have to do and that is no big deal. For that pot of gold, I will even jump from the rest and recreation centre at Attock Fort into the river that flows by its side. What Giselle — that being the name she has cooed into my ear — wants is much simpler. What is more, I won’t even have to jump into the river at Attock either.

Here is her message that greeted me this week when I clicked my email In Box open.

“Hello dear,” begins Giselle, “My name is Giselle Kwafu from Sierra Leone but residing in Ivory Coast in Africa. It is my desire to contact you on honesty and sincerity to assist me in transferring the sum of $2,350,000 inherited from my father late Mr KWafu. I am motivated in contacting you and hope to gradually build trust, relationship and confidence in you as I get to know you better. So please I want to know if you will be of assistance but first I want to get to know you better. I am willing to offer you $235,000 usd for your effort input after the successful transfer of this money and investment. Indicate your interest towards assisting me by sending your phone # and address so that I can communicate with you at any time.”

She writes with style.

Here is my response: Giselle dear of Sierra Leone and now of Ivory Coast, I know that you read Daily Times because that is where you got my email. My phone number is 420 420 420. I will remain awake till I hear you cooing to me on my long-distance line. Your voice will be music to my ears, especially since it will carry the tinkling of twinkling gold coins.

Mars or no Mars, this is not the only offer I have received. There is also an unexpected one from Iraq. It comes from Colonel Anaella G. She (or is she a he?) writes, “Hello Pal, I hope my email meet you well. I am in need of your assistance. My name is Col. ANAELLA G. I am a Military attache with the Engineering unit here in Ba’qubah, Iraq for the United State, we have about US$25,000,000 (Twenty Five Million Dollars) that we want to move out of the country. My partners Sgt. Paul Reeves and I need a good associate partner, someone we can trust to actualize this venture. The money is from oil proceeds and legal. But we are moving it through diplomatic means to a safe and secured location of your choice through Diplomatic courier service. But can we trust you? Once the funds get to you, you take your 20% out and keep our own 80%. Your own part of this deal is to find a safe place where the funds can be sent to. Our own part is sending it to you. If you are interested reply and I will furnish you with more details. Awaiting your urgent response. Your Buddy. Col. ANAELLA G.”

I am already taken with the Colonel because his partner in this humanitarian venture to help a total stranger like me is a Sergeant. Obviously, Col. G is a man who does not pull rank. I also love the way he addresses me. He calls me “pal” and signs off as “your buddy.” Since things happen in threes, my third stroke of good luck comes in the form of another email message marked “TOP SECRET.”

It comes from Mr Henry Wax (reminds me of House of Wax, the first and last 3-D movie that I saw many moons ago at the New Pearl Cinema, Sialkot). Friend Wax is from Burkina Faso. He informs me, “I got your contact from the Internet, while searching for an honest and trustworthy person, who will assist me to implement this transfer”, which I learn through subsequent paragraphs consists of a cool sum of $22 million that belonged to a customer of the bank where friend Wax works. The customer is dead and the money is in a “suspense account” with no claimants, since a Lebanese, who did put in a claim, died in a plane crash in Benin (what was he doing in Benin?).

My share of the loot is 40 percent. This business has to be kept under wraps, I am advised. Wax writes, “I expect you to keep this business strictly confidential and secret as you may wish to know that I am a bank official.” I am further told that the deal is final as long as “we maintain the confidentiality and secreceirity involved.”

This is great! Not only am I going to be a millionaire, but I have also learnt a word that does not exist in the English language: secreceirity. Anyone who does not believe it, only has to go to a dictionary.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

No one has a clearer perspective on Kashmir, or is more knowledgeable about the history and vicissitudes which Kashmir and the people of Kashmir have gone through, than Yusuf Buch. He arrived in New York at about the same time India took its complaint about what it called Pakistani “aggression” to the United Nations. He helped write many of Chaudhri Zafraulla Khan’s speeches during the great Security Council Kashmir debates. He also assisted Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (whose special assistant for information he became in 1973) in the writing of every major speech that he made on Kashmir at the United Nations. He returned to New York after a brief stint as Pakistan’s ambassador to Switzerland, and went on to work as one of the principal speech writers to two Secretaries-General of the United Nations.

Hamid Jalal once told me that the best pamphlet on Kashmir ever written was the one by Yusuf Buch, which he called India vs India. It contained no commentary, only several sets of Indian statements at different times, all contradicting each other. Buch has given Kashmir the gift of clear and logical thinking. Over the years, he has produced a series of brilliant papers, not to score points but to show that given goodwill and sincerity, it is possible to arrive at an honourable settlement of a dispute that has drained India and Pakistan and subjected the Kashmiris to suffering beyond endurance.

In a paper read last month at a conference on Kashmir, Buch pointed out that the issue is seen as one embroiled in a web of misunderstandings, some ancient, others new and willful. “We owe it to the thousands whose blood has consecrated the cause of Kashmir’s azadi to try and disentangle it in whatever degree we can,” he said. In his view, to call Kashmir a territorial dispute is simply to dehumanise it. And to go so far as saying that the dispute is not really about Kashmir amounts to saying, in effect, that Kashmiris are but a mythical people. When one assigns to Kashmir the sole character of being a contested territory, one has to answer the question: has it been depopulated? If not, are Kashmiris contesting it or are they shut out of the contest? If so, with whom and by whom?

The cliché of a power rivalry between India and Pakistan, which is a thoughtless journalistic invention, has played its own, hardly negligible role in blocking a clear understanding. It belittles India without magnifying Pakistan. Why should Pakistan take up a rivalry with a country almost seven times larger than itself in population and even more so in area? Indeed, rather than flatter Pakistan, the cliché perceives it as frozen and fixed in a perpetual, quixotic posture. Pakistan’s own human vitality, cultural background and strategic importance are by no means dwarfed by India’s size, but they can be disfigured by clichés of this kind. Pakistan has tried to hold fast to the pledge embodied in its very creation.

Buch observed that the “malign thesis” of an innate, ineradicable hostility between India and Pakistan, which will supposedly survive even a settlement of the Kashmir dispute, has not only been contradicted resoundingly at the popular level, but it implies that the two countries, containing a large proportion of the human race, are in need of psychotherapy. The problem is at present covered in a haze which makes people wonder whether its settlement has come nearer or receded. This barren state of affairs has emerged from the respective stances of both the present governments of Pakistan and India. On two or three occasions, General Musharraf has thrown up suggestions which have had a misleading effect. General Musharraf likes to talk of an “outside the box” solution; surely “outside the box” does not mean contrary to principle. Pakistan has at least held fast to the inviolable principle that the solution of the dispute must conform to the will of the people of the territory, as impartially ascertained.

Buch said that Pakistan, unlike India, does not advance a primordial or proprietary claim: it makes its claim subject to the acceptance of the people of the land. No mythology is involved, no anti-people secularism, far less any irredentism; no hair-splitting discussion is required whether Pakistan should own a stand or a position or a claim. Second, while Kashmiris are grateful to Pakistan for the advocacy of their cause, the abandonment of that advocacy does not mean the extinction of the cause. It can only mean making a gift of the issue to non-state actors who will agitate it through an altogether different medium. In February 2006, President Bush made it a point to clarify that the United States supports a solution acceptable not only to India and Pakistan but also to “the citizens of Kashmir.” He thus upheld the position of principle which the United States had joined in articulating with great clarity in UN debates on the question of determining Kashmir’s status.

Buch rejected the view that the “new order” brought in by the war against terrorism had undermined the case for Kashmir’s settlement. The war on terror, he argued, gains more appeal if it is conceived and projected as a collective defence against terror, a campaign against irrationality, extremism and insensate violence. As such, it should not entail the perpetuation of injustices and supporting the strong against the weak. Neither the intellect nor the conscience of America will tolerate that it should degenerate into a defence of tyrannies and usurpations. Kashmir, he said, tragically illustrates the dire effects of the marginalisation of the United Nations and the bankruptcy of the resultant international system as far as peace-making and peace-building are concerned.

He rejected the view that the Kashmir issue has fallen into dormancy, arguing that periodic exhaustion should not be taken as enduring acceptance. Some soothing phrases heard from India call for not settling the dispute but embellishing the status quo, he noted. Under a futuristic gloss applied by talk of making frontiers irrelevant, there is the same old assertion of “What India has, India will hold, regardless of agreements and people’s wishes.” Borders cannot be redrawn, it is said. When were they legitimately drawn? If they are to be, in the Indian Prime Minister’s words, “just lines on a map,” they should be easily changeable in the interests of peace and concord. No matter how much those in power in Pakistan are ensnared by the word “self-governance,” the issue of sovereignty over Kashmir cannot be finessed or wished away. Nothing has changed what the paramount consideration in the quest of a settlement should be. The history of the dispute makes it extremely doubtful that a settlement, no matter how pleasing to the present leaderships of India, Pakistan and even the United States, will carry a stamp of genuineness unless it has a rational framework, rests convincingly on principle and is transparently democratic, Buch stressed.

By the time the Mohtarma leaves these shores in about two weeks from now, she would have been interviewed by everyone except Charlie’s aunt and the World Weekly News, which would in any case have ceased publication by then. The World Weekly News, I should mention, would have been granted an interview as well, were it not preoccupied with the suspected abduction by the FBI of Batboy and the reported appearance on New York’s Fifth Avenue of Big Foot dressed in a loose-fitting Banana Republic safari suit. He looked sharp, according to an onlooker, who, some say, made it up.

The leader of the toiling masses party has devised an intricate procedure that all who desire to speak to her are required to follow. It seems everything has to go through Sen. Farhatullah Babar in Islamabad who ascertains the leader’s wishes — which in the case of Western correspondents are always positive — and passes them on “for necessary action”.

For the last week or two our old friend Bashir Riaz has also been pressed into service and in the event of the Mohtarma returning to that nest in Islamabad from which she was twice ejected, he will be her outlet to the glitzy world of the ghaddar media. Last time, it was the foreign press that he shepherded. This time, his horizons are going to be broader, his outreach wider. Ataboy, BR!

A friend in New York who labours for more than one outfit from back home was present at the Mohtarma’s press conference the other day, having managed after two and a half hours to get to a rather strange address in Jamaica — the one in New York not the Caribbean — where he found forty people crammed into a room without airconditioning on a hot day, which was as good a way of testing journalists’ hardiness as any.

However, when the Mohtarma arrived, she looked fresh as a daisy on a spring morning. There was a glow on her face and some later swore that there was also a halo around her head (but you had to look carefully). She was relaxed and an angelic smile kept playing on her lips. Her New York Facility Jane, a lady known as Miss Candle, was with her, as were some heavy-looking gents who could easily have found work as bouncers at any club in lower Manhattan they chose.

When a journalist asked for an interview for an Arab television reporter of his acquaintance, while Ms B looked on beatifically, Miss Candle put him in his place by informing him that the Mohtarma’s interview requests had to be routed through Islamabad. It turned out that this has to be done in the form of an email to friend Farhatullah Babar who after ascertaining what the Leaderene would wish and when and where, runs up to the top of his house, grabs hold of a reliable carrier pigeon, ties a little note to his right leg and flings him into the air, wishing him a safe trip.

The long-distance pigeons have been trained to be especially watchful when flying over a certain set of buildings in Aabpara where sharp-shooters from the Invisible Soldiers Inc. have been known to take pot shots at bird on the wing, cowards, wouldn’t you say! If friend Babar’s computer is not down, it is email all the way. Of course, I don’t believe a word of this but that is what I was told. Experience has taught me to discount nothing when it comes to the party of gharib awam and CEOs of offshore companies.

In the middle of writing this, I learnt of the spanner Gen. Musharraf appeared all but set to throw into the works: the Emergency. There are lessons in this for those who would wish to learn. Lesson one: do not underrate a man who wears a uniform, holds a gun and rides a tank. Two, next time Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain says something, pay attention. For the last one year, has he not been periodically dropping big, bold hints that an emergency could be clamped in the higher interests of the nation. Therefore, those who said the Chaudhry is out of the loop, better get to a washroom double quick and remove all that egg yolk coating their faces.

The question is where does this leave the Daughter of the East and the deal that everybody said was all but done? Moral: don’t play footsie with bridge players like Gen. Musharraf because you will be finessed when you least expect it. I don’t want to get a shiner from the party faithful, but, brothers, the Lady stands compromised. Maybe Inspector Malik of the Order of the Double Cross can advise her what to do next.

As for A to Z, he is happy in his Madison Avenue highrise apartment and as he looks out of the window on the crawling humanity hundreds of feet below on terra firma, he twirls his moustache and finds that God is in His heaven and all is right with the world. As for that ranch in Florida, let it pass.

And last but by no means least, had the Sharifs not filed that writ to return, the toiling masses party and the marching soldiers club would not have had their nuptials all but derailed.

But it is impossible to keep up with stuff these days. It seems one call from the Warrior Princess in Washington on Thursday night has done what did not look possible five minutes earlier. So what is next? I challenge any bookie to provide odds. In the meantime, it is over to My Lord the Chief Justice. Play it again Sam.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Pakistan’s misfortunes have been many, but the manner in which the state has dealt with some of its best must remain partly responsible for our plight. Take the case of Brigadier FB Ali, who should have become the Pakistan army chief. Instead, he was charged with treason and sent to prison for five years. Once he was free, he departed for Canada to make a new life. And what was his “crime”? He was one of those conscientious and patriotic officers who helped get rid of Yahya Khan.

About seven years ago, Brig Ali published an account of those events, but given our present situation, it is important to recall his testament. He began by regretting that neither ZA Bhutto, who set up the Hamood ur Rehman Commission, nor any succeeding government was prepared to execute its recommendations, or even to make them public. In 1971, he noted, Major General Shaukat Riza, one of the finest officers to serve in the Pakistan army, vehemently disagreed with both the military strategy adopted and the policy of excessive use of force against East Pakistan’s civilian population. He was promptly removed from East Pakistan, as was Major General Khadim Hussain Raja later, for similar reasons. Many officers, such as Lt Colonel Mansoor ul Haq Malik, refused to participate in the violence against civilians and other unethical military conduct, even though there were very strong feelings of revenge among the troops because of the atrocities committed by the Mukti Bahini.

The Yahya regime, Brig Ali wrote, was not established and propped up by the Pakistan army, butbrought into power by a small group of generals and top civil servants.It stayed in power because of the strong tradition of discipline and obedience in the army.It further consolidated its position by promoting its own henchmen to senior positions while removing those who would not go along. The rest of the officer corps watched with increasing disgust as the regime wallowed deeper and deeper in its quagmire, while leading the country to disaster. It is either not well-known, or it is often forgotten, that it was the Pakistan army that removed the Yahya regime.

Brig Ali pointed out that Major General Rao Farman Ali, who was exonerated by the Hamood report, was a key member of the Yahya regime’s Election Cell, which used extortion, intimidation and bribery to try to ensure a victory for the Jamaat i Islami and other religious parties in the 1970 election.He told Brig Ali, “I was a dove, but when the doves lost out I became a hawk and showed them that I was the most hawkish of them all.” He also became one of the principal architects of the plan to use force in East Pakistan. General Tikka Khan was fully involved in the use of military force in East Pakistan, though the Report remained silent about his role. Brig Ali wrote, “The war was initiated by Pakistan on December 3, 1971 with a few very limited attacks. The army’s General Headquarters (GHQ) had given strict orders that nothing was to be done beyond this; all the requests of local commanders to be allowed to exploit the success of the initial attacks were firmly rejected. It appears that the Yahya regime started the war in the West just to put pressure on the international community to intervene and impose a ceasefire in East Pakistan. This did not happen, and after a few days the Indians recovered from their initial disarray and began to push into our territory. There was total paralysis in the command on our side: GHQ gave no orders, while the field commanders were content to sit and wait for directions from above that never came. The territory we lost in West Pakistan was given up without a fight because the army was not allowed to fight by its commanders.”

Brig Ali recalls, “On December 17, Yahya Khan announced the acceptance of the ceasefire. That evening I handed in my resignation from the army, in acknowledgment of my responsibility (shared by all other senior officers) for having silently acquiesced in the takeover and maintenance of power by these corrupt, self-seeking generals who had brought the country to this sorry state. The next day, on December 18, I was stunned to learn that Yahya Khan had no intention of leaving; instead, he announced that he was going to promulgate a new constitution. There was a real danger that Yahya Khan might use troops to quell the public outcry. I became convinced that the regime had to be clearly told that it no longer had the support of the army and must go.”

He tried to persuade his division commander to send such a message through the GHQ, but he hesitated to take such a step. On December 19, Brig Ali could wait no longer, and took over effective command of the division. “Our position was that the regime should quit and hand over power to the elected representatives of the people, and that all those incompetent and corrupt commanders who had led us into defeat should be sacked. Colonels Aleem Afridi and Javed Iqbal went to Rawalpindi with a message from us for Yahya Khan: he should announce by 8pm that evening his readiness to hand over power to the elected representatives of the people.” After realising that he no longer enjoyed the army’s support, Yahya resigned.

Bhutto took over but “made no attempt to purge the armed forces of the rotten layer at the top.” In fact, he acquiesced in Gul Hassan’s removal of a few remaining upright and competent generals, namely Riza, Ihsan Malik and Raja.In August 1972, Brig Ali was retired along with five others who had been involved in the removal of the Yahya regime. Ironically, they were publicly accused of having engaged in a conspiracy to prevent the elected representatives of the people from coming into power in December 1971. A bunch of younger officers, frustrated that the incompetent and the corrupt had gone unpunished, began to vent their anger and frustration to one another. They also approached Brig Ali. “Matters had not gone beyond the serious discussion stage when a traitor in our midst, Lt Colonel Tariq Rafi, betrayed us to the generals.”

Early in 1973, a large number of army and air force officers were arrested and tried by court martial at Attock and Badaber.In spite of their superb defence led by Manzur Qadir, who was assisted by Ijaz Batalvi, Aitzaz Ahsan and Wasim Sajjad, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. All the accused were convicted and many given long prison sentences. Aleem Afridi and Brig Ali were given life terms. The tribunal was headed by Major General Zia ul Haq. He was released after the Zia coup. “I sit in a faraway land, and it is but rarely that I view the events of the past unfold as if on a dim stage.Sometimes the side curtains move, and it seems to me that in the shadows there, I catch a glimpse of the grinning face of History’s Black Jester,” Brig Ali wrote.

In 1989, as the movement against Indian rule in Kashmir erupted, at about the same time, there came to birth an information and public relations operation, first in the United States and then in several other countries. Much water has since gone down the Jhelum and today’s Pakistani position on Kashmir is not what it used to be.

While Pakistan has shown flexibility and expressed its willingness to consider solutions other than the failed ones it has traditionally pursued, India has remained tethered to its old stand on the issue, namely that the State is an integral part of India and while normalisation is welcome — such as resumption of travel and trade between the two parts of the disputed State — any transfer of populations or territory is not on the table.

The most that India may be willing to concede today is to let the Line of Control become the permanent border. The confidence-building measures taken in recent months are steps in that direction. The United States welcomes a settlement along those lines and, in fact, has been quietly working behind the scenes to bring the two sides closer to burying the hatchet.

However, the information and public relations network put in place nearly twenty years ago to lend strength to the peaceful uprising in the Valley, remain unaffected. It is business as usual. Often, while state policy has moved in one direction, the network has moved in another. Today, it has outposts in Washington, London, Brussels, Toronto and perhaps in places one knows not about. What is curious about the network is that every one of its operational heads is either a card-carrying member of a certain right-wing religious party or a fellow traveller. It is the same party that declared the Kashmir “jihad” in 1948 “haram”.

One area of activity of the network has been Kashmir conferences, held in one or the other Western capital. These conferences, mounted at great cost, have been a waste, having failed to move Kashmir even by an inch towards a solution. And yet they continue to take place. It is almost always the same people who get invited to them, and they say exactly what they had said the year before. These gatherings have also taken to issuing ponderous “Declarations” at the end of their talkathons. London, Washington, New York and Brussels have all had Declarations on Kashmir associated with their names. Have those who have the power to change things and bring the agony of the Kashmiri people to an end taken any notice of these Declarations? Hardly. So for whose benefit are these tiresome declamation contests being staged?

According to Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai, head of the Kashmiri-American Council and the more recently formed Kashmir Centre in Washington, “a durable solution of the Kashmir problem demands flexibility; sacrifices and concessions not only from the people of Kashmir but from India and Pakistan as well”. Haven’t the people of Kashmir made enough “sacrifices” that more are being demanded of them? And what “concessions” are they being asked to make? Dr Fai does not specify.

After the Washington conference ended on July 27, several of the delegates were flown, of all places, to Montevideo, Uruguay, for another conference — and another Declaration. Uruguay is so far that it takes more than fifteen hours to get there from Washington. But why Uruguay? For an answer, let’s turn to Dr Fai.

In a July 31 statement, he states that on November 5, 1965, Ambassador Reyes of Uruguay, as president of the UN Security Council, said that the dispute between India and Pakistan over the State of Jammu and Kashmir involves people who make up one-fourth of the population of the world. Therefore, the Kashmir issue concerns the whole of Asia.

But that was 42 years ago. Senor Reyes now rests in the lap of God. And so perhaps does Kashmir. One is only therefore left to wonder where the next Kashmir conference will take place. The North Pole perhaps before it melts.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

When I read Dr Ayesha Siddiqa’s book on the vast commercial empire that our army has built for itself and the wide range of benefits that its general officers in particular, and others to a lesser degree, have managed to derive by dint of their service, I was no longer sure if it is the same army that my two brothers, both now gone, had once been such proud members of. By the time they left, they had begun to feel disillusioned because of the creeping materialism that had begun to replace the Spartan values once associated with the profession of soldiering.

My brother Bashir Ahmed, who rose to the rank of Brigadier but put in his papers after having been unjustly ignored by an establishment that had begun to rot at the head, died more than four years ago. He lies in a simple soldier’s grave in a cemetery in Lahore’s Cantonment, where he was joined by his wife Riffat on July 21, 2007. When Bashir left the army he was just under 52, and between then and his death 26 years later, he struggled to stay financially afloat. No-one offered him work that he was more than qualified to do, having taken his MA in political science and a diploma in journalism from the University of the Punjab in Lahore in 1946. If time were to be rolled back, he would perhaps have liked to accept Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s offer to join the newly-founded Pakistan Times . He passed out from the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) in the first graduate course, called that because so many of those commissioned held graduate and post-graduate degrees. His post-army life was one of white-collared austerity. It was only near the end of his life that he was able to build a modest house in what was then an extremity of the Lahore Cantonment. He and thousands like him do not figure in Dr Siddiqa’s book because they were soldiers, not speculators. Where is the army that Brigadier Bashir Ahmed joined? That is a question which troubles me as, I am sure, it troubles many others, including simple soldiers like my brother.

My other brother, Saeed Ahmed, would not recognise today’s army as the one he joined in the early 1950s after passing out of the Engineering College, Mughalpura, Lahore. He was sent to Loughborough in England for six years of study and training, and he returned as a highly accomplished electrical and mechanical engineer. Wherever he was posted, I would visit him and find him living in rented housing or army-provided barrack-like accommodation. I never heard him complain or envy those who were able to get plum postings because there was somebody up there looking after them and theirs. In 1971, Saeed was in Dhaka running the large Electrical and Mechanical Engineering workshop. He became a prisoner of war, like 80,000 others, and spent the next two and a half years in a camp near Ranchi. He never overcame the humiliation of surrender, and when he finally returned some time later, the army sent him home, as it did thousands of others. This was Colonel Saeed Ahmed’s reward for serving his country. He continued to struggle to earn a living wage till his last illness and death. When he died, he was living in a rented house in Lal Kurti, Rawalpindi. He would not have made Dr Siddiqa’s book either. I want to know where the army that my brother Saeed Ahmed joined and served in with such distinction, is today.

When Bashir died, I wrote a small tribute to him and to other soldiers like him. I would like to quote some of it: “The army that my brother Bashir Ahmed, who died in Lahore on January 21 2003, joined and served is not the army that holds the country in its vice like grip today, under the command of a man who wants to be chief of staff, president and the supreme power-wielder for life.

“The old army now only exists in the memories of those who once proudly wore its uniform. These men were content with very little: their salaries were meagre and their work hard. They did not question orders nor peddle influence to get comfortable postings. When they were asked to go to far-flung places, where even clean drinking water was a luxury, they did not grumble. They went willingly, leaving their young families behind. Many spent a lifetime in service without ever having the good fortune of being posted in a large city where they could have lived the good life.

“One joined the army for old-fashioned reasons such as service to the country and the defence of its borders. Today, when you hear those words you flinch because of the new values the army has come to be associated with. In those days, you wore your uniform with pride, and it was enough for you to be known as a gentleman and an officer, in that order. Honour came first – the honour of your regiment, of the larger family of men in uniform of which you were a part, and the honour of your country and nation.

“You were taught to respect your seniors no less than those who were your equals and your juniors. The army looked after your basic needs and gave you a sense of security. You knew that if you needed help, it would be provided. If you required support, it would be forthcoming. You did not need a word put in on your behalf. Your rights, your obligations and your entitlements were clearly laid down, clearly understood and accepted. When you joined the army, you willingly turned your back on money and a life of luxury that you could perhaps have had, or at the very least hoped for, had you chosen another profession. You hoped that if you worked hard enough, passed your courses and sailed through your promotion examinations, you would one day – perhaps, and with luck – be sent out on a foreign course. It was assumed that merit alone would determine who would move ahead and who would remain behind. If you deserved it, the odd hard luck case notwithstanding, you came by it.

“You made your way up slowly. Some who were cast aside, as sometimes happens in life, either chose to keep serving or put in their papers. When they came out on ‘Civvy Street,’ they struggled. The pensions that came to them were token sums. If their children were still in school or college, it was only through backbreaking work that they managed to see them through. Not everyone managed, but they did not complain. Their years in the army had given them the strength to rough it out and to survive, their chin always up, head held high. I am sure there are many officers in the army of today who serve in the old tradition and share the old values but the general culture of this most honourable of professions has changed. And it has not changed for the better.

“Bashir left just a few simple instructions. He wanted his old unit to bury him [that it did with exemplary efficiency and devotion], and he did not want his face to be shown to those who would come to mourn. I suppose he wanted them to remember him as he was before illness and the march of years overtook him. He now lies in a simple army graveyard in Lahore, along with many of his old comrades who, like him, lived to mourn the loss of a way of life they loved.”

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