When I was a teenager, my agemate Pukhtoon servant and companion told me one
day that he had befriended a soldier on duty on the Ravi bridge in Lahore and asked
me to meet him. So, one day we both bicyled to the bridge.
That meeting was the beginning of my lifelong craze to move among the military's rank-and-file. I still remember having said to myself after meeting the soldier that one day his commander-in-chief will be my friend.
That dream came true when the late General Zia-ul-Haq become the COAS. I never asked him for any personal favour even after he became the mighty president. When I proposed to him to set up a 'fair price shop' network in the public sector to provide relief to the general public, he asked me to do it in the private sector and that he would provide me the bank loan. USCP wasn't in existence at that time. I never availed his offer.
In-between, I had the opportunity of befriending the late Lt Gen Shams-ur-Rehman Kallue. His father Brig Fazal-ur-Rehman Kallue was a friend of my father. From the days of his captaincy till his death, our friendship lasted for 27 years. I used to meet him wherever he was posted but I couldn't meet him when he became the DG, ISI. On a visit to Rawalpindi, I phoned him but he was busy in some meeting. He was good enough to call on me at PC late at night but I couldn't come out of the convention that I was addressing at that time. I phoned him around midnight. He was leaving for Peshawar next morning at 6:00 am and offered to take me with him for a chit-chat. I politely declined because of a conflict of interest at that time. I used to call him 'a jewel of the army.'
When I planned the wedding of my youngest daughter, Brig Shaukat Yaqub Malik and his wife came all the way from Okara to Karachi to attend it. Begum Shaukat found the 2-day wedding program on the desk when she entered the room at the army guest house. She asked Shaukat if I were ever in the army. It was a meticulously planned wedding, moment to moment. Luckily it went through as programmed.
Excerpts from the autobiography 'Living Beyond Self' by Mumtaz A. Piracha
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