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Today marks the seventh death anniversary of my grandfather (dada). His was a very long and drawn out battle against leukemia, ultimately confining a man with boundless energy to a bed and a wheelchair. These are my memories of the man and the doctor.
There's much that can be said about him, but nothing stands out as much as the power of hard work, perseverance, and generosity. He was a doctor and a gentleman of the old variety- one that isn't made anymore.
He was born and grew up in Hafizabad, till he made his way to Govt College, and then to King Edward. After various stints as a govt doctor and a lecturer at King Edward, he found his way to the practice of a very prominent doctor in Lahore, eventually taking over the practice.
During this time he married my dadi who was the daughter of one of the most prominent doctors of British India. To this day there's a plaque outside the ancestral home which reads "Khan Bahadur". I'm told this was a title given to him by the govt of the day for his many services.
My dada was a part of that nearly extinct breed of Lahoris who could converse equally well in Urdu, Punjabi, and English, flowing from one to the other seamlessly. Not only was he an excellent physician, but could also hold a conversation on nearly every topic imaginable.
His room, which doubled as his study, was filled to the brim with books, magazines, and newspapers. He was a passionate reader of history, religion, philosophy, and Russian literature - his favorites being Tolstoy and Gorky.
When not reading, one of his favorite pastimes was calling out the stupidity of the Pakistan cricket team. Some of my most fond memories of us are of those countless hours spent sitting in front of a small Sony tv, watching every ball of a test match.
When I started watching football, he could tell who'd win within the first five minutes, and he was right more often than not. Very few of Alex Ferguson's signature comebacks took him by surprise.
As the only grandson, I like to think I enjoyed a special relationship with him (although my sister tends to disagree), and he arguably had a major hand in making me the man I am today.
But whilst this is how I knew him, for his patients he was the man who could take away their worries with two words. He made no difference between the house and the clinic, with the phone ringing all hours of day. His clinic was always full, with people from all over the country.
He never took a day off, and never took retirement. Even when he'd reached the age of eighty, he'often see upwards of fifty patients in a day. Whenever I asked him why he didn't take it easy, he always said he still had so much left to give and so much knowledge still to pass on.
His most remarkable quality however was that he never differentiated between his patients. He didn't care what car someone came in or what office someone held. In his waiting room, all were equal. And all acted equal. He was modest to a fault, and the most upright man I ever met.
His loss was felt not just by his family, but by the hundreds whose lives he had touched over the years. Since his death, not a day has gone by when I didn't wish i could still pick his brain for all the stories and experiences it held.
He was also, ironically, a chain smoker. The smell of a lit Benson was a permanent feature in our home. Perhaps my most enduring memory of his is when he came home from the hospital for the first time, the first thing he asked me to do was light up a cigarette for him.
That became a daily routine for us. I'd take him out on his wheelchair, while he smoked his Benson and told me stories of his jawani. I'd tell him about what fresh hell the boys had unleashed on the teachers in school that day.
(wow this became longer than i thought, but i suppose you forget these things if you don't talk about them)
P.S. Such was his dedication to medicine, all four of his children became doctors and dentists, and even my sister became a dentist. I can only wonder what he'd make of me and my work in the dev sector.
