Letter From Lahore - August 2, 2002

Say, like me you live in Lahore, and have spent a reasonably blameless and blemishless life. And then, in the mail you get this fat envelope with the whacking big official seal of NAB‚ the National Accountability Bureau. And your whole life flashes before your eyes, and the earth falls away from under your feet!

NAB is the great bugaboo for all the misbegotten, see it is responsible for avenging all the shenanigans of the past, the kickbacks and the nepotism; and all the petty tyrants who have lorded it over us spend sleepless nights and days in abject terror of it. It has brought thousands to book, recovered billions, and hungers for more.

So a summons from it is like a bull from the Inquisition. The past flashes before you. I thought back of the time, 40 years ago, of life as a starving student, living on a stipend of £40 a month at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

And having finished, I took care to leave £1 and seven shillings in my bank account so it would remain on the books for whenever I went back. Does it rank as a secret foreign bank account?

I get concessions at all the bookshops because the owners are old pupils. Does that count as kickback? Fortunately, it wasn't a summons; more a polite invitation to come confer with them on strategy, and I breathe again.

It is not the only conference in town, and in others we are exploring new worlds in our obsession with names. There are four provinces in the country, see, and all four have their own High Courts.

Two of them, the Lahore High Court and the Peshawar High Court are name for the cities they sit; but the other two, Sind and Balochistan, are named for the Provinces. Some bright spark has noticed this anomaly and has initiated a controversy and public debate.

There are learned articles in the press, and heated partisanship at social dos, and the tune is that this is a typical example of open and blatant discrimination, and a heinous attack on equity and fairplay, and must be remedied forthwith.

Only trouble is, it is difficult to determine exactly who is being discriminated against. Is it Karachi and Quetta who have to house and keep the courts while they blandish the names of the provinces? Or is it the other two provinces which sit forlorn and unsung with nary a Court named for them? The debate promises to be lively.

We are busy with the other one. During the heady days of General Yahya Khan, when there was Martial Law, and he and his cohorts thought that meant the world was their oyster and painted the place red, there was this lady.

She treaded the corridors of power like a colossus getting a reputation as a great mover and shaker and wheeler and dealer with access to the cohorts and the chief. She died recently and it is nasty to be snide of the dead, or the living, but one was irresistibly reminded that she was universally referred to as 'General‚ Rani'!

My meaner friends have been wondering if it is a recognisable misdemeanor to be called by a rank you do not have. They do not know that her little offspring was pretty and pigtailed in school, and I took her ice-cream often because I did not have the heart to tell her that her friends referred to her as 'Lieutenant Rani'! But that may simply have been our thing with ranks.

***

Among the musicians of the 'Patiala Gharana', there was once a pair of brothers so wondrously gifted that people gave them the sobriquets of 'Jarnail Khan'‚ and 'Karnail Khan'.

General Khan and Colonel Khan. One of them once composed an opus in the Raag Adaana‚ which is a legend to this day. It is built round a verse of just two words which is Taan Kaptaan! The closest I can get to translating it is 'The Melody is Captain'! Marvellous, no?