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| Zari Gul of Spinzer Beauty, Liaquat Market, Quetta |
"People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within."
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
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One of my better childhood memories of growing up in Quetta is of Eid days. While it meant all those things that usually excite a child on these two traditional Muslim occasions celebrated across the Islamic world twice a year---new clothes, new shoes, Eidi money from elders, going to the fairgrounds with friends, eating specially prepared food and all---it was also associated with some faces, the faces of much loved people many of whom are no longer with us. This post is about one such person whose presence in my life is not just limited to the two Eid festivals, but it is impossible to think of Eid without thinking of Zari Gul.
Zari Gul was a good friend of my father's. He was not just a friend. In fact, he was more like a brother to him and a dear uncle to all us kids. He belonged to an old Ghilzai Pashtun family of Quetta. A few years older than my father, their friendship stretched way back before I was even born, at least six decades old. The eldest brother of three, he was a well-known businessman and socialite in the city with his main office, or shop, situated in the city’s old Liaquat Market. Called Spinzer Beauty, it started as an electronics store, one of the oldest in the city ---the first double-sized store on the right hand side as we enter the market from the main Liaquat Bazaar--- but over the years it became a kind of headquarter for all his commercial and social, and sometimes political, undertakings.
My father tells me that they first met in the early 1960s. My father used to run a wholesale business dealing with grains, sugar, open tea leaves and ghee in Qandhari Bazaar. It was called Shirkat e Biradaraan (brothers). It all started then. Over the years, they became not only good business partners in the many business projects they ran together, from clothes and crockery (dinner sets) to dried nuts and food grains, from electronics and car showrooms to big government contracts, but they also became very good friends. Zari Gul, always meticulously dressed with his fine wool Karakul cap and glittering, bulky Seiko 5 and Rado watches, was then a small trader in goods that were mostly brought into the city from Iran and Afghanistan and sold in the small arcade style Quetta markets of which Liaquat Market was one of the oldest and the largest. In the beginning, he had his shop near the old fire brigade, off main Liaquat Bazaar. Then he used to deal in cloth, especially the Iranian synthetic mixed fabric popularly known as “summer” in those days. This particular fabric was known for its all-weather toughness and ease of maintenance when it came to washing and ironing. It was very popular in Punjab and Sindh.
One of the first lots of this fabric was introduced in Quetta by some friends of my father who were Anglo-Indians. Many of the Anglo-Indians---Tony and Andrew were the most well-known in the city and with whom my father had gone to school, as had many other Quettawaal then----were mostly employed by the provincial police department in those days, particularly by its traffic branch. It was either Tony or Andrew who was then stationed in Dalbandin and who brought the first big load of “summer” to my father and asked him to store it in one of his godowns. These godowns were located on a backstreet of Qandhari Bazaar, around the old chakla. I think they were either on Alibhoy Street or on Thana Road. To digress a bit, those godowns my father had bought at a discounted price from none other than Jamshed Marker. But that story for another day.
My father often recalls this episode of the Iranian “summer” fabric and his meeting with Zari Gul with much relish and he never tires of telling it to us. This is how he often tells it,
“One bright sunny day in summer, Tony arrived in his old jeepster at the Qandhari Bazaar shop and took out a 30-yard bolt (a ‘taan’ in the vernacular) of the Iranian fabric. He said he had truckloads of the stuff. He was not sure what to do with it, not sure if anyone would be interested in buying the stuff. I was also unsure but I took all the fabric and dumped it in the godown. Tony disappeared and almost a month passed. One day, Haji Taj Muhammad, who was also one of the tea merchants in the city, and a neighbor, came to me. I showed him the fabric and asked him if anyone would be interested. He promptly said ‘Zari Gul. Give it to him’. And that is how I met Zari Gul for the first time.”
The Iranian ‘summer’ became a cause and catalyst for the start of a beautiful relationship that would last many, many Quetta summers, would continue and grow in strength for more than six decades.
Zari Gul was a big fan of cinema, especially of the old western and action movies that were regular fare at the iconic but now defunct Regal Cinema in those years. My father tells me that for more than 15 years Zari Gul would buy four tickets for his three friends and himself for every new movie, and that often meant once a week. The four were, my father, Noor Muhammad Sarraf, the Lehri sajji wala (Aslam?? his name escapes him now) and Zari Gul. He would take us kids to the movies as well. I watched many memorable movies with him and my father, movies with such Hollywood luminaries of the day in them: Jack Palance, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Gary Cooper, Sean Connery, Paul Newman, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, James Dean, Yul Bryner, Charles Bronson, to name a few.
Zari Gul, alongwith Dr. Afzal Butt, Ghulam Hussain, Safar Ali and Gullai and sometimes others like Rozie (Zari Gul’s relative and also a good friend of my father’s) and Noor Muhammad were regular guests at our house on Eid days. For my father, Eid meant visiting the graveyard, offering fatiha early in the morning and then spending the rest of the day with his friends. For us kids also Eid was incomplete without Zari Gul's visit. They, the friends, would visit our house just before lunch and would stay till late in the evening, often watching Hollywood movies and sometimes playing cards or just chatting and joking while sipping tea. A very social creature, Zari Gul also loved good food and good company, just as he loved fine clothes and expensive watches, very unlike my father who still does not care much for what he wears and eats. His special request was always for the salty mutton dish (namkeen gosht cooked in salt and black pepper or in garam masala only) that my mother used to make for them. That particular dish would always be placed in front of him and he would do the honors of serving it to others. I remember this clearly because I was the one who would usually do the running back and forth, from the kitchen to the guest room, or to the mehmaan khana, first serving the dishes and then clearing the dastar khwan.
Zari Gul was a good friend of my father's. He was not just a friend. In fact, he was more like a brother to him and a dear uncle to all us kids. He belonged to an old Ghilzai Pashtun family of Quetta. A few years older than my father, their friendship stretched way back before I was even born, at least six decades old. The eldest brother of three, he was a well-known businessman and socialite in the city with his main office, or shop, situated in the city’s old Liaquat Market. Called Spinzer Beauty, it started as an electronics store, one of the oldest in the city ---the first double-sized store on the right hand side as we enter the market from the main Liaquat Bazaar--- but over the years it became a kind of headquarter for all his commercial and social, and sometimes political, undertakings.
My father tells me that they first met in the early 1960s. My father used to run a wholesale business dealing with grains, sugar, open tea leaves and ghee in Qandhari Bazaar. It was called Shirkat e Biradaraan (brothers). It all started then. Over the years, they became not only good business partners in the many business projects they ran together, from clothes and crockery (dinner sets) to dried nuts and food grains, from electronics and car showrooms to big government contracts, but they also became very good friends. Zari Gul, always meticulously dressed with his fine wool Karakul cap and glittering, bulky Seiko 5 and Rado watches, was then a small trader in goods that were mostly brought into the city from Iran and Afghanistan and sold in the small arcade style Quetta markets of which Liaquat Market was one of the oldest and the largest. In the beginning, he had his shop near the old fire brigade, off main Liaquat Bazaar. Then he used to deal in cloth, especially the Iranian synthetic mixed fabric popularly known as “summer” in those days. This particular fabric was known for its all-weather toughness and ease of maintenance when it came to washing and ironing. It was very popular in Punjab and Sindh.
One of the first lots of this fabric was introduced in Quetta by some friends of my father who were Anglo-Indians. Many of the Anglo-Indians---Tony and Andrew were the most well-known in the city and with whom my father had gone to school, as had many other Quettawaal then----were mostly employed by the provincial police department in those days, particularly by its traffic branch. It was either Tony or Andrew who was then stationed in Dalbandin and who brought the first big load of “summer” to my father and asked him to store it in one of his godowns. These godowns were located on a backstreet of Qandhari Bazaar, around the old chakla. I think they were either on Alibhoy Street or on Thana Road. To digress a bit, those godowns my father had bought at a discounted price from none other than Jamshed Marker. But that story for another day.
My father often recalls this episode of the Iranian “summer” fabric and his meeting with Zari Gul with much relish and he never tires of telling it to us. This is how he often tells it,
“One bright sunny day in summer, Tony arrived in his old jeepster at the Qandhari Bazaar shop and took out a 30-yard bolt (a ‘taan’ in the vernacular) of the Iranian fabric. He said he had truckloads of the stuff. He was not sure what to do with it, not sure if anyone would be interested in buying the stuff. I was also unsure but I took all the fabric and dumped it in the godown. Tony disappeared and almost a month passed. One day, Haji Taj Muhammad, who was also one of the tea merchants in the city, and a neighbor, came to me. I showed him the fabric and asked him if anyone would be interested. He promptly said ‘Zari Gul. Give it to him’. And that is how I met Zari Gul for the first time.”
The Iranian ‘summer’ became a cause and catalyst for the start of a beautiful relationship that would last many, many Quetta summers, would continue and grow in strength for more than six decades.
Zari Gul was a big fan of cinema, especially of the old western and action movies that were regular fare at the iconic but now defunct Regal Cinema in those years. My father tells me that for more than 15 years Zari Gul would buy four tickets for his three friends and himself for every new movie, and that often meant once a week. The four were, my father, Noor Muhammad Sarraf, the Lehri sajji wala (Aslam?? his name escapes him now) and Zari Gul. He would take us kids to the movies as well. I watched many memorable movies with him and my father, movies with such Hollywood luminaries of the day in them: Jack Palance, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Gary Cooper, Sean Connery, Paul Newman, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, James Dean, Yul Bryner, Charles Bronson, to name a few.
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| Bibi Nani, Bolan. Zari Gul (second from left), my father. Rozie second from right. |
Zari Gul, alongwith Dr. Afzal Butt, Ghulam Hussain, Safar Ali and Gullai and sometimes others like Rozie (Zari Gul’s relative and also a good friend of my father’s) and Noor Muhammad were regular guests at our house on Eid days. For my father, Eid meant visiting the graveyard, offering fatiha early in the morning and then spending the rest of the day with his friends. For us kids also Eid was incomplete without Zari Gul's visit. They, the friends, would visit our house just before lunch and would stay till late in the evening, often watching Hollywood movies and sometimes playing cards or just chatting and joking while sipping tea. A very social creature, Zari Gul also loved good food and good company, just as he loved fine clothes and expensive watches, very unlike my father who still does not care much for what he wears and eats. His special request was always for the salty mutton dish (namkeen gosht cooked in salt and black pepper or in garam masala only) that my mother used to make for them. That particular dish would always be placed in front of him and he would do the honors of serving it to others. I remember this clearly because I was the one who would usually do the running back and forth, from the kitchen to the guest room, or to the mehmaan khana, first serving the dishes and then clearing the dastar khwan.
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| Zari Gul (wedding ??) |
After I left Quetta, Zari Gul and friends continued with the tradition of the Eid day gathering at our place, but over time, especially when some in the group passed away and when the many vicissitudes of life started taking their toll on others, the gatherings became less regular with fewer and fewer members. I would make sure to visit him whenever I was in Quetta, but every time I met him and witnessed the same Zari Gul with his warm and smiling face, I also sensed in him a kind of aloofness or, to use a better word, an unease or even anxiety that seemed to be always growing and eating him from inside. I knew some of the causes for that state of distress which mostly had to do with the many business projects--- especially in real estate and construction--- he had got himself involved in. This information mostly came to me from my father and his other friends, but because I had moved away from Quetta and was not in touch with him on a regular basis like in the old days, I was not privy to the whole problem. Things went downhill for him from thereon.
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| Zari Gul with friends. |
Sometime later, after my last meeting with him during his difficult and anxiety-laden years, the news of his death reached me through my father. He did not use so many words, but just said to me, "Zari Gul is gone!" and then went quiet. And I knew very well then what that silence meant. We both knew, he more than I. In that sad silence were buried more than five decades of friendship, many years of brotherly and fatherly love, of caring and generosity, of innocence, loyalty, simplicity and sincerity that were the traditional values embodied by not only men like Zari Gul, but they represented and meant old Quetta itself. They were values and virtues that cut across all barriers of language, ethnicity, religion or sect. The ugly, dividing walls, the rigid fences of bigotry, that have now been erected with the bricks of distortions and the mortar of hypocrisy did not exist then. These are the pathological distortions and corruption of all that once was true, good and beautiful in old Quetta.
Eid day comes every year and I usually make the salty--peppery mutton dish for my family, for my wife and daughters. As we sit to eat, I silently recall the old days in Quetta, the gathering of my father’s friends at our house, the cooking and the eating, the B-grade western and action movies on the Panasonic VCR, the black and green tea, the bandaar and loud laughter of men coming from the guest room and, above all, the happy face of Zari Gul enjoying his favorite dish with his good friends on Eid day. I whisper his name and smile as I chew on the salty meat.
Yaadish Bakhair. Khuda Biyamurza marhoom Zari Gul ra.
Eid day comes every year and I usually make the salty--peppery mutton dish for my family, for my wife and daughters. As we sit to eat, I silently recall the old days in Quetta, the gathering of my father’s friends at our house, the cooking and the eating, the B-grade western and action movies on the Panasonic VCR, the black and green tea, the bandaar and loud laughter of men coming from the guest room and, above all, the happy face of Zari Gul enjoying his favorite dish with his good friends on Eid day. I whisper his name and smile as I chew on the salty meat.
Yaadish Bakhair. Khuda Biyamurza marhoom Zari Gul ra.
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