Tales From Yore

My grandfather was a little boy, when his father passed away. Financially they were not too badly off, for there was some income from the inherited land. However, without a father’s hand to guide him, it did not take him long to spend most of his inheritance in youthful pursuits. Whatever was left, he spent in getting his two daughters married, with the pomp and ceremony that his status in society required.

My father was the third of his children and the eldest of his three sons. By the time he was of school age, the family kitty was empty and the lands were mortgaged to the hilt. He was a good student and my grandmother scraped and saved, to send him to the local school. He finished the eighth grade, but the high school was in the next town and there was no way they could afford to send him there.

There were not many employment opportunities in the village for his qualifications. Farming was out, because the moneylenders controlled most of the ancestral land. Returning after another day of futile search for useful occupation, he found his mother anxiously waiting for him.

‘ThakkiN kaka, eh pshorN chithi aiye eh, rab kher kare sehi’
[Look son, there is letter from Peshawar, hope every thing is OK]. The letter was from his cousin – a major in the British Indian army – inviting him to come to Peshawar.

By this time the family fortunes were in a bigger mess, so he decided to make the most of this offer. In Peshawar after doing some odd jobs for a while, he saved some money and opened a small shop in the cantonment selling books and stationery to the soldiers of the army units stationed there. He was modestly successful and was able to send some money home, to help his family in the village. Since his younger brother had no interest in school and was running wild, he brought him to Peshawar to help him with the shop.

The soldiers of the British Indian army were recruited from the villages and for the most part were not literate. The officers, who were mostly British, had little or no knowledge of the local languages and less of the scripts used. As such there was always a communication problem. The army had initiated a system of what was called Roman Hindustani. That is the written script was the English and the language was, what most of the conscripts understood.

A JCO approached my father with a business proposition. He had written a book to teach the soldiers this Roman Hindustani in simple steps and wanted my father to publish it. The idea was good and if successful there was a chance of making good money. However, the venture was very ambitious and would stretch his finances to the limit. He decided to take the chance and borrowed and scrapped together enough money to fund the project.

After a lot of hard work, the book was finally published and a thousand copies of the book were delivered to the shop to be sold. Then disaster struck. The Second World War started and all the army units were ordered to move to the war fronts. No body had time for education any more. The timing couldn’t have been worse. A total of three books were sold and fiscal ruin stared my father in the face. The lenders didn’t care less for his misfortune and wanted their money back. My chacha added to the troubles by blaming my father for his ambitious nature. ‘Wadda paraku! Kitaban chhapan chalye, hoon roti de ve lalley peh gai ne.’
[The big scholar! Was going to be a publisher and now it is going to be even hard to make ends meet.]

The war, which had brought my father’s business to the doors of bankruptcy, was changing other things around. There was a shortage of various commodities, because most stuff was imported from England. One such commodity was paper. The Governor of the frontier province decided to allocate paper quotas to the direct user, so as to stop black-marketing. He asked his secretary to provide him with a list of companies that had consumed paper in the previous year. This worthy came up with a list of two companies, who had published books in that year. One was the British company, Orient Longmans Publishers, having published hundreds of books, worldwide, and the other was Attar Singh Kahan Singh Pustakan Wale with one book published and three copies sold. The Governor ordered that quota of paper be allocated to the two companies equally.

The rest is history. My father’s company was the only source for paper in the frontier province for the duration of the war. This also set him up, as a publisher.

My father died in 1985. After the end of the world war he had moved his business to Rawalpindi. At the time of partition he moved to India, and had to restart from the scratch. However by the time of his demise the business had expanded to six outlets covering every part of the country, and was the main publisher and supplier of text books and other educational material to the Indian Army.