This Saturday was a very pleasant day . It rained in the afternoon, and as usual, Islamabad after a rain on a summer afternoon, was the perfect place to just drive around, enjoying the weather. Therefore with my wife and my two kids in the car, I quietly stole away from the house, leaving my parents sleeping in their bedroom, knowing well that mom would make a fuss if she found out we were going out aimlessly on a drive with the children. I knew she would not understand that I was driven by the desire to share with my wife and children forty three years of memories of living in Islamabad.

So after making our getaway from the house in f-8/1, we found ourselves on the picturesque Margala road, running along the foot of Margala hills, on our way to the beautiful house in f-6/3, where I had lived for six years with my parents, two brothers and a sister, before we shifted to our own house in f-8/1.

As we passed by the house, I was a little disappointed to see that the house was now giving a different look from what it appeared in my memories. The walls and the gate had been raised, so that the garage, the verandah, and the garden full of roses of all colours, were no longer visible. Next we turned towards G-6/2, were we had lived for the first three years of our stay in this beautiful city back in mid-sixties. Again the house did not match my memories of it. The wall on which we used to spend a lot of time leaning or sitting on it had been raised, and it was difficult to tell my children, which was the room, I shared with my brother, and which was the drawing room. The gate was also higher.

It was obvious from the looks of these two houses that Islamabad was no longer the safe place it used to be when I was a kid and then a young man, back in sixties and seventies. Major crimes were almost nonexistent in those days. I remember, while living in the f-6 house in early seventies, when the political situation in Pakistan was quite fervent and stimulating, and we friends used to get together at someone’s house and discuss politics till late night. As a result I often used to walk home all alone late at night, reaching home with a worried and angry admonishing mother opening the door. It was difficult to convince her that the town was quiet safe even at night. Even now mother thanks Almighty Allah, that her anxieties about I being spoilt by keeping bad company never materialized.

After higher secondary school I left for Iran, after winning a scholarship to study for chemical engineering there, saddened by the fact that I was parting ways with my childhood friends. Even though I came back after getting my degree and worked here for five years, I was like a tree uprooted in a mountain torrent, and I could never renew close contacts with my old friends, because back in mid-eighties, I left the country again to obtain my Ph.D. from UMIST in Manchester. Meanwhile at the fag end of my stay in Iran I became disabled, and being disabled is a real handicap, when it comes to keeping close contacts with old friends. Probably part of growing up is setting up your priorities right and socializing with the right people. However, I too have come to terms with realty, and adjusted accordingly. Being physically disabled is no barrier in one’s desire to get ahead in life.

Thanks to the support of my wife, who has got excellent verbal and human relations skills, in the last one and a half years, we have increased our assets many times by hard work, and by using our wits, and are now financially in a very comfortable position, and looking ahead towards much more gainful ventures. I have learned from a lifetime of hard work and fighting against odds, that there is no limit to human potentials, one only has to dig deeper for one’s innate abilities, to discover hidden skills to deal with any particular situation. Only one must always be ready to learn new skills. I sometimes proudly tell my wife, that when I married her she was like an uncut diamond, and in the last sixteen years, I have cut and polished her to bring out the hidden abilities which were always there and she has worked hard to exploit those gifts, to our mutual benefit.

Sometimes we are ourselves surprised, how I, after spending a whole lifetime of research and studies, and she a teacher at a high class prestigious school have adapted to the job of building a house of our own, dealing with contractors, labourers, construction material suppliers, and people of a myriad trades, some educated, but most of them illiterate, having a set of values of their own and a standard of honesty, quite different from ours, and all this time we were both going to our duties as usual, and taking good care of the children alone, since we were living independently in a flat until last month. However I must admit we were helped on the way by many kind people without whose help, our venture would never have been realized. Our beautiful house is almost ready now, but after discovering those of our abilities we never knew about, the momentum of using our new-found skills to our advantage is too great for us to stop. However, we have decided to take a pause, reorganize to handle the added responsibility of taking care of my old parents, raise some capital, and then to go ahead. Meanwhile we are just taking things easy, and planning for our next enterprise.