Daily Times

Hats, it is all about hats. There was a time when no ‘gentleman’ would be seen in public without a hat. In our part of the world the ‘Sola Hat’ (solar hat?) was everywhere. Policemen wore it, bureaucrats wore it, engineers wore it, anybody that ever ventured out in the sun wore it. I remember distinctly how some 60 years ago, my late father would get into his summer weight woolen suit, put on his sola hat and get onto his bicycle and toodle off to his clinic in the Lahore heat. A few years later when his practice was a bit more established he moved up to a motorised bicycle, and the sola hat stayed on. It finally came off when he could afford a motorcar for his daily commute.

In the 1960s, felt hats were quite fashionable in Pakistan though ordinary folk still hung on to their sola hats. Quite a few Indian and Pakistani films had heroes, and even a few female leads going around in felt hats. My father had a few of those hats, and I remember at about the age of 10, I felt sufficiently with it to wear a felt hat to school. Unfortunately, while waiting for the school bus on the roadside, a gust of wind came out from nowhere and blew the hat off my head, into a neighbouring puddle of water. That was the beginning and the sudden end of my hat-wearing days. During the 1960s regular felt hats were still quite popular among the foreign travelled crowd, or at least the wannabe foreign travelled crowd. But the sola hats lost their allure when motorcars started replacing bicycles. And of course wearing any hat on a motorcycle was fraught with embarrassing possibilities.

One of my favourite hat stories is from the late 196s. King Edward Medical College (KE) cricket team was playing against the Law College cricket team in the University Grounds. In those days there was only one law college in Lahore. One of the spectators from the KE side was sitting on the bleachers wearing a wide brimmed hat. It wasn’t quite a ten-gallon hat but it was impressively large. One of the players/spectators from the Law College side came up to the chap in the hat (not to be confused with a cat in the hat) and asked him: “Are you from Texas? Where is your horse?” I don’t quite remember how that question was answered but I do remember that the KE team lost badly. Law College had a pretty good team that also included a player who went on to represent Pakistan in test cricket, and the hat questioner went on to become a famous TV personality.

The Fab Four and President John F Kennedy can be blamed for putting hats out of fashion. So by the time I hit the United States circa 1971, nobody really wore hats anymore, at least not in the New York area where I lived and worked for the next many years. Baseball caps and hoodies did not become popular until much later. So I spent most of my time in the good old US of A without wearing hats of any sort, though I did buy a waterproof rain hat and a few Panama hats, the latter to be worn during the Sunday baseball/softball games I attended that my children played in almost every weekend during summer. I still have a couple of Panama hats forlornly hanging in my closet. But my rain hat was swiped by my eldest son when he went off to college.

Here I must admit that as a surgeon I have had to wear an operating room cap during work hours for more than 45 years. During all these years I was often seen going around with a hat head. What is a hat head, you ask. Well, put on a well-fitting cap over a regular haircut, and at the end of the day, your hair will be all squished down. Operating room personnel who are very particular about their hairstyles instead of the cap prefer to wear a loose ‘bouffant’ hat that covers the hair without compressing them.

Here is another sort of a hat story. During my years working in the Mayo Hospital in Lahore, many of my female house surgeons did not want to wear the operating room (OR) cap. They felt that their very stylish and beautiful sequined hijabs embroidered with gold and silver thread served well enough as OR head covers. I had to disabuse them of that peculiar thought, and make them understand that just as they could not wear street clothes in an OR they could not wear hijabs carried in from the street in the OR either. But they could replace hijabs with the OR caps that would cover their modesty as well as a hijab, and if removing the hijab might reveal unwanted stuff, they could cover the hijab with an OR cap. And no, I will not go into how I handled the burka and the hijab/niqab (veil) situation in the OR, suffice it to say that it was complicated.

Hats but not sola hats have made something of a comeback. And more recently, we have started seeing a few hats even in Lahore. Yes indeed! The intrepid chief minister (CM) of the Punjab, once known for wearing dashing gumboots has now developed a new source of sartorial splendour. He is now often seen wearing a hat. I have not examined the hat so I will not venture a final diagnosis, but it looks like a leather hat that one normally sees in the southern states of the US. In short, it is indeed a Texan type hat. And yes, every time I see his picture wearing that sort of a hat, I have this irrepressible urge to ask him: sir, are you from Texas? Where is your horse?

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians of North America (APPNA)