Yaadish Bakhair: Sikander Ali

Sikander Ali of Hussainabad, Quetta

Yaadish Bakhair: Sikander Ali

My younger daughter comes and observes me as I wash and wax the car. She watches me quietly but keenly, disappears for a while and then returns. She performs this ritual many times and finally, when I am almost done spraying the rims and the tires, she asks me: “How do you do that? How can you make an old car look as if it was just bought from a new car dealer? ” I tell her that I like washing cars and that I learned how to do it long time ago, when I was a teenager. She continues with her query, “But where did you learn it, and who taught you to clean cars like that? ” And then I tell her that I learned it from one of my uncles who loved cars and who knew how to wash and wax cars. I tell her about my uncle Sikander Ali, who never tired of washing and waxing his cars-----he enjoyed it, even elevated it to an art form----- and who taught me that art, too.

Toyota Mark II, 1974

I have mentioned this uncle of mine before, in the context of cars when I wrote a blogpost on the cars of Quetta in the 1970s and 1980s. Sikander Ali was the youngest of the five brothers, younger than Sadiq Ali. He was a tall, handsome man with slightly curly hair and a temperament that was a carbon copy of, or matched that of his father (my grandfather), Haji Qasim Ali. Of the five brothers, he was most like his father in that department, unlike my uncle Samad Ali, who was the least like his father when it came to temperament. Sikander Ali, just like his brother Sadiq, was also a man of many friends, a popular personality with many tastes, including cars, music and movies. And most of what I remember about Kaka (uncle) Sikander are about these things.

Sikander Ali (third from left) with friends

I don’t remember if he ever finished his college education. For many years he was away from Quetta, travelling and working---more the former than the latter----in Europe. I vaguely remember my grandfather always asking my grandmother to ask Sikander to return to Pakistan so he could get married and join the family business, and to stop wasting his time in Europe. And return he finally did, by road, in his car: he drove his beloved sapphire blue Toyota Mark II all the way from Germany to Quetta! It was that Mark II, and the one that followed it-----a maroon beauty with plush leather seats and wood-paneled dash----that became, for me, the training laboratory, the main object of experimentation (under Kaka’s watchful eyes and supervision, of course) on my quest to learn and master the exquisite art of car licking! I started as his chotoo (assistant/sidekick) at first----doing the wheels and dusting the floor mats----but soon graduated, first to doing the glass parts and then to applying the thick coat of silica compound to the bonnet (hood) and dickie (boot) and finally spreading and buffing with carefully moistened fine cotton and silk-like flannel cloth. Those two surface areas of a car with the most paint, the bonnet and the dickie, were considered the most important and nobody was allowed to touch them without proper prior training. In the vernacular, they were called the “show” of a car or a truck. So, when I say it is an “art”, I am not kidding. Even my little daughter now realizes that. 

Sikander Ali (second from right) with friends

Talking of cars, one of my most vivid memories of Kaka Sikander is about these little crimes that he would get us, my elder sister and I, to commit for him. It was during the years when he was in in his early 20s, or maybe still a teenager. During summertime, when my father would sometimes come home early to take a nap, Kaka Sikander would ask us to steal my father’s car keys for him so that he could go for a drive to Hanna Lake, Urak Valley or Spin Karez with his friends. I clearly remember my father used to drive a mint green Opel then which he used to park in that Hussainabad street next to the rectangular electric pole. There were times when he, my uncle Sikander, would get into trouble. My father would suddenly remember some business to take care of in the city and would start looking for his car keys. But he would never say anything harsh to the uncle in the way of rebuke, apart from the cold silent look, probably because he remembered well his own little felonious escapades in my grandfather’s cars when he was my uncle Sikander’s age. 

The King of Reggae, Bob Marley: The Uprising

When Sikander Ali returned from Germany, he was a head-to-toe flower-power hippie: long hair, the bell-bottoms, the colorful psychedelic shirts with foot long collars and the Ray Bans with the elephant ear lenses. But above all, it was the music that he brought with him on the black-and-orange 90-min and 120-min BASF and Scotch cassette tapes and the 12-inches 33 rpm vinyls or LPs that most betrayed his equally colorful and psychedelic years abroad. For many years, even after we moved to our new house in Hajiabad, off Toghi Road, I was still listening to those tapes and LPs loaded with the hit songs of such 70s soft rock and disco luminaries: Bee Gees, Boney M, John Travolta, Earth Wind and Fire, Oliva Newton John(Grease), Eagles, Smokie, Super Tramp, Roger Whittaker and, yes, the great Bob Marley (his Uprising album with The Wailers). These were all Kaka Sikander’s music from Germany and Denmark. They were his favorite singers, especially Bob Marley, that undisputed king of reggae. But the name of one singer of the golden age of soft and middle-of-the-road rock that was the 1970s, Al Stewart----in particular his two mega hit singles “Year of the Cat” and “On the Border,”----has become forever etched in my mind as the quintessential Kaka Sikander reminder. I have often wondered how intriguingly strange it is that many of us recall the past, both people and events, through songs and movies. For me, Al Stewart and his “The year of the Cat”, an excellent song with the typical 70s combination of rock guitar and rhythmic drum intro that melodiously glides into the equally fluid voice of Al Stewart singing his poetry, forever means Sikander Ali, my late uncle. Period.  

                               

Al Stewart's:       Year of the Cat

Al Stewart's:       On the Border

For many years Kaka Sikander was our school pick-and-drop man. He would pick us up from school late afternoons and drive us home, sometimes obviously not happy with that chore that his brother, my father, had assigned him. It was understandable: any wild young man obsessed with fancy cars, wild rock music and possibly girls, would not be happy doing such a routine, boring job. I have already hinted at his temperament, which, like his father’s, was a bit on the volatile side. But that was also what made this lively and spirited man unique among his brothers, so different in many ways, but still similar in many others. Sikander Ali was not the man that you would want to mess with.

(Kaka) Sikander Ali

Sikander Ali died in January 2018. I met him during my short visit to Quetta in December 2017. We had coffee together two days before he suffered a terrible, fatal stroke. While sipping coffee, I recalled Al Stewart and the Toyota Mark II and he was completely surprised to hear that, to the extent that he went completely silent for what seemed like hours only to return from that stupefied state with a sad, broad smile, saying only this: “those were the days, they were real times. Weren’t they?” 

My daughter has invited some of her friends over and they are playing with their toys in the room next to my study. They are just doing kid talk when suddenly I hear a friend of her say “cars…gas station…car wash…”. She is telling the others about how funny it is to sit in the car while the car gets shampooed, wiped and dried by mechanical tentacles in the coin-operated car wash at the gas station. And then I hear my daughter’s voice, telling them: “You know, we have never been to an automatic car wash. In fact, my father has never taken his car to a gas station car wash all his life.” The friend who was talking earlier says, “Really? Then how come his car is always shiny and looks like a brand new car”? “He washes and waxes it himself, with his own hands. He had an uncle who taught him how to do it long long time ago” replies my daughter.


Yaadish Bakhair.
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Note: The people that I write about in this Yaadish Bakhair series were all too human, just like the rest of us: frail, fallible, imperfect. The attempt here is not to paint them as super-humans, or to elevate them to the angelic realm of perfection, but to shine a light on one, two or some aspects of their multi-dimensional personalities. These are mere fragments, or fragmentary sketches, about the subject personalities the way I saw and knew them, and the way I now remember and write about them. These are not whole biographies. How could they be? Yes, there is choice involved since we cannot do without that when we engage in any discourse, of this type or any other variety: a story told is always another one ignored. Others may see things differently and may wish to draw their own conclusions and sketches.

For more:  Hussainabad: The Place, the people and their values

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