Five weeks ago the ‘sleepy’ garrison town of Abbottabad was thrust into the international limelight. A week later on what happened to be Mother’s Day I wrote my obligatory column on OBL. As I sent off my column, a thought kept pestering me about the city of Abbottabad that had nothing to do with OBL. The thought as I figured out eventually was about my mother and Abbottabad.
A young woman named Aisha — the daughter of Ilam Din, an ‘overseer’ stationed in Abottabad — passed her matriculation examination from the Govind Girls High School in that city in 1936. She was the first girl in her family to matriculate but that was not the end of it, she then went on to Glancy Medical School in Amritsar, a city in central Punjab, to pursue a medical education where she then passed the licentiate examination (LSMF) in 1941 and became the first woman in her family to become a doctor.
In 1943, this young woman broke with tradition and decided to marry one of her classmates from medical school and after marriage she left British India for Iran where her husband, my father, was employed by the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). In 1951 when Dr Mosaddegh, the prime minister of Iran, nationalised AIOC, all its employees were advised to leave Iran. She along with my father and the three of us returned to what was now Pakistan.
On return to Pakistan, both of them worked in the village/town of Kabirwala in southern Punjab for a year or so. My first memories as a child are from that time. I remember vaguely a compound we lived in that had a cow tied in it. There was no electricity and the ‘fans’ were a broad sheet of cloth hanging from the ceiling that was pulled by a servant sitting outside the door with a string tied to his feet. We soon came to Lahore where I along with my siblings started school and my father joined King Edward Medical College to complete his MBBS degree.
My mother never practiced medicine too aggressively but she did have a clinic in our home in Lahore. And she also delivered most of my cousins born during those years. I do not remember seeing my maternal relatives during that time but eventually they turned up one day and we started seeing them quite often. I did not realise it then but I now understand that my maternal grandfather passed away and so my mother’s siblings were able to see her. And that started my introduction to Abbottabad and a village called Havelian where my mother’s family now had their homes.
We as a family started to spend our summer vacations every so often in Havelian. A part of the stay in Havelian always included visits to Abbottabad, a town that my mother had an abiding love for, a love that I finally discovered the cause for many years later. Our yearly visit to Havelian taught me, a pre-teenager, some important lessons about life.
My mother’s family owned ‘jandars’ or watermills and I would often just walk from my grandmother’s home to these watermills. I learned the value of solitary walks and the value of solitude. Another interesting thing I learned was that during these walks, if I saw somebody walking towards me, both of us would start calculating when the other person would be in earshot and who then would be the first to loudly say ‘Assalam-O-Alaikum’ (peace be upon you), the traditional Muslim salutation. And no, I was never worried about security even though I would be walking alone on lonely roads.
One of the most pleasant things was to just sit next to the watermills and watch the river on one side and the water falling out of the mills on the other side and the women that would come to the river to fill up their utensils with water and the water-sellers with their donkeys who would fill up as many containers as their donkeys could carry and then take them back to the village to sell the water.
My father, running a busy private medical practice in Lahore, would accompany us for only a short time. And a visit to Abbottabad was a part of his stay in Havelian. We would hire a ‘taxi’ that was usually an early 50s model Chevrolet and drive up to Abbottabad. We always had lunch in a restaurant called Mona Lisa; why it was called that remains a mystery. My mother’s affection for Abbottabad was obvious and she even prevailed on my father to buy some land in Abbottabad to build a house some day.
My mother had open heart surgery in 1981 and after that lost interest in many things, including Abbottabad. Her children had all left for the US and eventually the land my parents had acquired in Abbottabad was sold off. I left for the US in 1971 and returned to Pakistan more than 30 years later. By that time my mother had passed away. I did not think much of Abbottabad after my return. But the happenings of last month brought many of those memories back.
So now when I think of Abbottabad, it reminds me not of OBL or the military academy that produced its own set of ‘heroes’ but rather of a young woman who passed her ‘matric’ examination from a school in that city 75 years ago. Along with many other women like her she had an ever extending effect on the future generations of Pakistan. These mothers are the unsung heroes of this country who passed on the value of education and independence to their younger siblings, their children — especially their daughters — and to their extended families. But for women like her, perhaps Pakistan today would be much worse off than it is. And of course I would not be sitting here writing this column either.
The writer has practised and taught medicine in the US. He can be reached at [email protected]