My grandfather

The dawn of September 6 this year will see Mehmood Ahmad turn seventy nine. It has been almost twenty years since his retirement.

Just twenty years back, the male students of Dyal Singh College were like energised electrons, colliding with every wall during college, from politics to poetry and cricket before finally sitting for their annual exam. Those were the days when public institutions were the finest available and no boy considered paychecks and prospects, because living in the moment was more engaging. His job was to teach politics.

Political Science was kept to the British, since Pakistan's politics became a wrestling match. The Constitution was more malleable than a copper wire. The territory was ready to collapse like a palace of dominoes. The theatrical parliament was interrupted by the military. Only corruption persisted.

In the 1990s, when private institutions sprouted in Lahore, Prof Mehmood found himself teaching in a private school. The school was located in a house and each classroom was a bedroom with an attached bath and a closet.

Unlike Dyal Singh College, the school had girls. It offered a foreign degree and western culture pricked it. Every now and then a girl would arrive in the class and sit closer to a boy than she should even with her brother.

But most girls were equally ambitious; more disciplined, scored higher and had better hand writings. In fact, a group was known as the 'flawless group', girls who never made a single mistake in their papers. In mid-year, perfect grades rained down. Seven, eight or even nine As. The more tuition you could afford, the more A grades you could score. What bothered him was the mechanism with which they planned their life. All of them would be supreme professionals. But there was no Bhagat Singh in sight, or Manto's talent or Quaid's vitality visible; only well-paid bankers, accountants, doctors and engineers. The thought of his grandkids turning into this was discomforting.

Yet, the real shock came when he actually met his elder son's children. They were not pseudo Americans -- they were real Americans. Forget Punjabi, the children spoke Urdu worse than monkeys, refused to eat the parathas their granny cooked, called them garbage and were rushed to the nearest McDonald outlet by their anxious parents. They had a foreign passport, alien language and ideals; there was hardly any wisdom in entangling oneself emotionally with them.

It was a relief to see his younger son's children. Though residents of Canada, they spoke Urdu, read the Holy Quran and visited Pakistan to absorb the value system here.

His Pakistani grandchildren were being trained at a super elite American School. Though they lived close by and talked in Urdu, their class was much higher than his own. It was as if they were brought up in an island in Pakistan. They had deviated so much from him that he couldn't understand them. The best option was to love them blindly.

After sixty years of dedication in the household and the kitchen, his wife's mental faculties had started diminishing. It was not that she one day woke up without remembering anything. It was a slow muddling-up of the events. Confusing the bills of the tailor with the driver's or forgetting to add salt in the dinner and sometimes going to the market to buy a particular thing and ending up with another one. The only viable cure was that Mehmood Ahmad intervened in the household and took matters in his hand. And this had caused a wave of anger between the two because the wife felt deprived of her rights. Matters are aggravated because she refused to acknowledge that she was unwell. She also had arthritis and had spent hundreds of hours and a truckload of cash to find a cure by hakeems, not knowing that it's incurable.

Life had two rewards for Mehmood Ahmed in his old age. One was his pension, which was sufficient for him to quit the job to help his wife cut the vegetables. And the second one was his reading habit.

Every time upon starting a new book he would think it's his last one. But the next time he opened a new book, he could still read it. It's a pity Pakistan didn't publish books with a larger font-size for the oldies. Like the westerners do.

Life seemed like a long avenue of loss, by now. The cost one pays for outliving them. He had no picture of his mother and her face was becoming vague, already. He had lost so many friends and family that he now related each year with a death. His life was becoming more and more expensive because of the number of pills he took.

When his first tooth was removed, he bid it an affectionate farewell for it had been in his jaw for seven decades, longer than most marriages in this world last.

His eyesight was succumbing to glycoma and every now and then he crossed the road at an inappropriate time.

When a traffic-policeman stopped him, he considered quitting driving. Before he could explain, the policeman intervened:

"Excuse me, Sir! I am your student. I stopped you to say Salam."

This was another reward he had forgotten. The hundreds of students he had trained, who were out in the world with his ideals, the invisible bits of information and impressions imprinted on their minds and serving humanity. What made him go on was his fervour for reading, politics and the fact that he was and will remain independent.

This piece was first published in September 2008 in The News.