jumpingfish

“Do you remember when your father died?”

“Yes,” my father said, looking up with wide eyes. “That was two days before my master’s results came in. He never got to see them.”

“That was May 1950,” he added. “My father was very old. In his 80s at least, perhaps more.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“My mother lived a long time after that,” he said. “She died after I came back from Saudi Arabia. That was in 1986.”

He was quiet again.

“Her father was very old. When I was in high school, he was still alive.”

Now my father’s eyes got wide again, and he held his hand in the air.

“Her father was very old … perhaps 100!”

And now he was quiet again.

“Yes … ages were long on both sides of my family.”

We wanted Abdul Khaliq to go to school . We wanted him to go the the same school I had gone to. To the government high school that was taught in English. But the headmaster said no. He said there was no room.

We decided to take our case to the Secretary of Education, because you see the headmaster was Hindu. So I got a train ticket to Bareilly. A first class ticket to try to set things right.

When I got to the train, there were two British soldiers in the first class car. They saw me and told me to get out. I showed them my ticket, but it didn’t matter to them. I tried to insist, and one of the soldiers hit me. So I left the car.

The trainmaster at the station said that there was nothing he could do. He gave me a second class ticket. And I got on one of the second class cars.

You see all these things were going on in the country then. Such hatred. Such prejudice. But now, the Secretary of Education was a Christian.

I explained our request, and he approved. He signed a paper and gave it to me.

So I returned from Bareilly. And I showed the headmaster the paper admitting Abdul Khaliq. There was nothing he could do. He had to admit him.

The dogs walked around the yard a bit, sniffed the balmy air and went back inside.

It was dark. I couldn’t see my feet in the shadows. I stood there in the warm night letting my eyes adjust.

A breeze came up. It blew thru the branches of the pine tree and made that lonesome sound that wind makes when it blows thru the branches of pine trees.

The sound made me look up.

You see, I like that pine tree song. It stirs memories of years long gone. So I looked up from where I stood under that pine tree and watched the branches sway. I listened to the music, and my mind swam in reverie.

Then the moon passed out from behind the tattered clouds. It chased the darkness away and showed me the path back into the house where the dogs were patiently waiting.

In his fifth and sixth years at Aligarh, my father worked on his master’s degree. After that, you could do research, but it took years to get a doctorate. My dad wanted a doctorate.

Sometime near the end of his sixth year, he was offered a scholarship to study at Forman Christian College in Lahore. But he had a problem.

You see my father had applied to be a tutor to the Agha Khan’s grandchildren in Switzerland. Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah, Agha Khan III had been chancellor of the university, and evidently an Aligarh student was going to be chosen as teacher to his grandchildren.

My dad’s problem stemmed from the fact that the chairman of the Physics Department, a certain Dr. Gill, was also involved in choosing the tutor from the list of applicants. And Gill knew about the Forman scholarship offer. So not only were his prospects as a tutor bleak, but his future as a physics student was also evidently at risk.

Gill must have been upset, because he demanded that my father provide a guarantee that he could and that he would pay back two to three months of his Aligarh scholarship.

As we sat in his living room, my father explained his quandry.

“My father was dead,” he said, “and my mother didn’t have the money to pay.”

All he could do was give his word, but that wasn’t enough for Gill. My father’s friends didn’t think this was right. They told him to talk to his professors and to talk to the dean.

“The dean listened to my story,” my dad said.

Evidently the dean spoke with others at the university and concluded that the right thing to do was to release my father and let him go to Forman, because it was clear that Dr. Gill’s anger at my father was going to be a problem.

So in the end he left Aligarh Muslim University. He left India and went to Forman Christian College in Pakistan.

As for his application to teach the Agha Khan’s grandchildren, that was out of the question.

“If things had been different,” my father said, “the current Agha Khan would have been my student.”

Update: The opening sentence above suggests that my father didn’t finish his Master’s degree at Aligarh. That’s not the case. During his fifth and sixth year, he worked on and was awarded his Master’s.

1. Black Hat

Colonel Heather taught chemistry at Aligarh Muslim University. My father sat in the front row when classes began.

“He used to call on me,” my father said.

“Even back then,” he said, “there were people who were envious if you were smart, if you knew the answers. (I think you have this now.)”

And you see, my father was smart. He knew the answers. Colonel Heather was clearly aware of this and called on him in the front row. So seeking to avoid the scorn of his fellow students, my father moved to the back.

But this did no good. Colonel Heather would still call on him.

“Black hat!” he would shout, pointing to my father in the back, seeking the answer to some question.

“We all wore sherwanis at Aligarh,” my father explained. “And I wore a black hat that was stained from the oil we used to put in our hair.”

2. Final Exam

For the end-of-year lab exam in chemistry, the students had to analyze some salts.

I picture them standing at the counter with test tubes and beakers and solutions of stuff, trying to figure out what was in the sample they were given. I imagine that there was a time limit on the test, so they were all in a rush.

My father was doing a desiccation when he dropped his sample and broke the glass on the floor. His analysis was ruined.

Colonel Heather came up to him and put his hand on my father’s shoulder. “Damn!” Heather said, “What did you do!?”

“But Heather must have put in a good word for me,” my father said, “because I got good marks, anyway.”

Because Heather knew that my father knew the answers.

Update: I got the Colonel’s name wrong. His name was Haider, not Heather. Perils of oral history. My bad.