I was born in the village of Hamoka on May 7th, 1893, at 4 a.m. This is a village on the west bank of the Jhelum River, twenty miles down from Khushab and about thirty miles, as the crow flies, from our home village, Nurpur Noon. According to the family custom, my mother went to Hamoka to give birth to her first child in the house of her mother. Most customs have a good reason behind them. On an occasion like this, the presence of the mother with the young daughter must be a source of great courage and confidence. This must have been so in the case of my mother, who was only sixteen when I was born. The only religious ceremony for a newly born baby is that the Imam of the Mosque comes very soon and recites the call to prayers into the ears of the baby, “Allah is great and bears witness that Mohammad is His Messenger.” The child’s name is usually given by the eldest member of the family. In my case Malik Hakim Khan asked his young son Malik Sardar Khan, aged eight, what my name should be and, since a family guest, Raja Firoz Khan of Ahmed Abad, opposite Bhera, had only recently stayed with Malik Hakim Khan, he liked this name, so he blurted it out and others liked it too and I became Firoz Khan and my mother added “Mohammad” to my name for good luck.
In 1902 my father decided that my brother Ali and I should go to school. Therefore, we were sent to Bhera town, ten miles away, where there was a public school like the grammar schools of England. It was financed by the Government and went up to the tenth class. There was no boarding house, so we lived in a building belonging to Malik Hakam Khan Noon, the head of our family. His son, Malik Sultan Ali Noon also went with us and so did his grandsons, Malik Mohammad Sher and Gul Sher, from Kot Hakam Khan village. We used to come home on our poise on Saturdays and go back early in the morning after I had picked up my uncle Sultan Ali Noon from Sardarpur Noon, a servant walking behind me shouted, “Snake, snake, snake.” My pony had stopped to urinate and as it started walking a snake was pulled out by a stick and killed. In the summer many a bullock, cow and buffalo were killed by snake bites when feeding out in the fields. Today somehow or the other we do not seem to see so many snakes.
My mother observed strict purdah and even when I was at school at Bhera, only ten miles away, and fell ill with high fever, she did not come to see me. I was only eleven years, old and my father was away in service and he too could not visit me for about thirty days. Eventually, he did come and I was happy to see him and recovered quickly thereafter. I probably had typhoid fever and must have been on my way to recovery after thirty days when my father came, but in my childish mind, the reason for my recovery was that my father had come to see me. It is a pity that nowadays many parents lead such busy lives that they do not have much time to see their children while they are at school. Typhoid is a terrible disease and I am talking of 1902-1905, but I am sorry to say that conditions are not much better today.
The streets of Bhera town were narrow and dirty with open drains and the latrines were on the roofs of houses and so is the case even now after fifty years. We have to thank the Almighty for giving us the hot sun, which kills a great many germs. The sub-soil water of Bhera town is sweet and most people have wells in their houses for drinking purposes, so epidemics are not easy to spread through infected water. There are so many germs we come in contact with in one form or another that we develop immunity, which is not the good fortune of the Europeans who come out East.
Not far from our village is a village called Sheikhupura, near Bhera Town, where the hakims have been famous for generations past. They were always called to our village to treat members of our family. They alone had the privilege of going and seeing our womenfolk. Other men were not allowed to go inside the Zanana. Every March a large crowd gathers at Sheikhupura for bleeding. This is a practice which has been kept up from time immemorial. The superstition is that by letting the bad blood out of your system, you become a healthy man.
Bhera was a small town with a population of five or six thousand people. It was on the banks of the river Jhelum because, before the British came, the only safe mode of travel was by river and towns on their banks were important, especially to the merchants. But after the British built the roads and railways, these towns, dwindled and lost their importance. In the whole district of Shahpur between 1900 and 1912 Bhera was the biggest town. I remember one day, riding through the streets back from the village I noticed a man treading the dough for rewrites with his dirty feet in a basin, with his hand on a wall. Rewires are sweets; children like them very much because they are like toffee, very brittle and covered with oil seeds. Another man had reached the second stage of the dough preparation; he had moulded the dough into a very thick rope and, holding the two ends of it was striking great force against the mud wall on the top of a wooden peg and then pulling it down, thus elongating it; again he took it off the peg and holding the two ends, repeated the process. The wall was filthy and the flies were in millions. After that, I took such a great dislike to these sweets that I never ate them any more. I also remember passing along a very narrow street along with my cousins on horseback. We were very frightened of going through that street even though it was a shortcut to our house in the town, because there lived in one of the rooms in the upper storey of a building a lunatic, unshaven, with a long beard. He used to peep out of the narrow window, about two feet wide and shout at the passers-by at the top of his voice. Our servants used to assure us that we need not be frightened of him because he was tied up with iron chains. He was stark naked. The room was a small one and his food was thrown to him and his room was cleaned by a sweeper as he would clean the kennel of a dog. There were no lunatic asylums in those days; every family had to take care of their patients themselves.
The most powerful persons in the city were the police sub-inspector and the tehsildar, but the most influential person was the doctor and after him came the headmaster. There was one schoolmaster who used to teach mathematics and had the reputation of being very hard on the students who did not do their sums. To punish them he would put pencils between their fingers and press them hard or pinch their ear-lobes with his thumb and finger. The boys used to cry and weep. But no one dared to complain.
At the end of the summer, the river used to drop suddenly and the inundation canal, which came out of small creeks of the river, used to drop and the owners used to dam up these creeks to bring late water for the late watering of the cotton and the sowing of wheat. One year I took about three hundred tenants to Bhera for this purpose. They used to accept no cash because they felt they were partners in the water, but they had to be fed well, morning and evenings, which cost a lot of money and they enjoyed this little holiday near the most important town of the district with beautiful shops. We put sandbags at the bottom of the creek and dumped earth sand and bushes at the top to complete the embankment quickly. Two or three instances connected with this incident come back to my mind. There was one man who would not allow our men to take earth from his land and thereby held up the work. The tenants, who were about three hundred in number and quite tough, started shouting, “Let us bury him in the embankment and nobody will know.” On hearing this he disappeared and the embankment was quickly completed!
The tenants and labourers used to leave their clothes on the river bank and one day a man said that he had left six annas (six cents) tied up in the corner of his loin cloth and somebody had stolen them. Everybody thought it was a terrible disgrace and the thief must be found, but there was no way of finding the culprit. But my valet, who was an old man, made me do the following. He made me put on fresh clothes after a bath and made me say my prayers and sit on the prayer mat with a rosary in my hand He built a halo around me by telling the others that I had inherited some holiness from my grandfather, who was buried at Mecca! He took my handkerchief, soaked it with my scented hair oil and hung it with a rope from the roof of a dark room. There were two doors to this room and he told everybody that everyone was to go in from one door, touch this handkerchief and come out from the other, and none but the thief’s hand would stick to it and that if the thief threw the six annas underneath it, no harm would come to him either. He stood at the exit door and smelt the hands of everyone. The thief did not touch the handkerchief and therefore my valet knew who the thief was, but he had thrown the six annas underneath the handkerchief out of sheer fright.
Another incident took place when Hindu men and women used to go to the river for their morning religious baths. The women were fair and as one of them sat down in the bushes, a young tenant of mine could not control himself and she had to shout for help. Other tenants ran up and the culprit, who had actually done no harm, was brought to me. I beat him with my cane as hard as I could and when he could not stand the pain any longer he ran into a jungle where we could not catch him. I sent him back to the village, which was a great deprivation because he missed the holiday camp. He was also put to disgrace and his father was very angry with him. But this raised my prestige and honour in the town very greatly amongst all the shopkeepers and when I returned to town in the evening on horseback from the river, all of them, who originally did not take much notice of me, got up and saluted me with smiles because I had saved the honour of a daughter of the town. I confess I liked it very much.
Dewan Chaman Lal from Bhera was a member of the Central Assembly when I was a minister in the Punjab. He was a lifelong friend of mine.
To be continued …
Zahid Mumtaz