Dr Abdul Wahid Soomro (MNA Pakistan Peoples Party)

There was a naughty boy,
And a naughty boy was he,
He would not stop at home,
He would not quiet be.– John Keats

There are so many memories of those days gone by, that it is almost impossible to be coherent about them. Suffice it to say, that as I was seven years old when Salmaan was born, I ‘brought him up by hand’, as did Pip’s older sister in Great Expectations. He took his first wobbly steps under the supervision of myself and our best friends Bonnie and Deepak Surjit Singh in Simla in the 1940’s, with much applause to accompany the feat…

After that momentous wobble, Salmaan, or Billoo, as he was then called, grew into a chubby toddler with curly hair, luminous sparkling eyes and ‘a cupid’s bow mouth’, as he himself described it. As for the nickname Billoo, he grew to hate it, and eventually got rid of it by refusing to answer anyone unless they addressed him by his given name.

The Simla days saw Salmaan grow from a baby wearing smocked outfits into a rosy cheeked rascal in knickers. He was very much in the company of his aayah from Jammu, Mai Soma by then, as I was going to Simla’s Christ Church School, with scarcely any time for either him or my flaxen haired sibling Mariam, who was also rosy cheeked, but with a belligerent look to her eye, which boded ill for all those who crossed her.

From Simla we moved to Delhi, where our father was now Deputy Director of the Labour Department, after having worked in the Government of India’s Anti-War Ministry in Simla. Once again Salmaan was a little boy who was there but not really there, as he was under the supervision of Mai Soma, that formidable Jamvaal of Rubenesque proportions, which were much appreciated by the male visitors who came to our colonial-style bungalow at 48 Lodhi Road. The more visible and audible member of our trio was Mariam, whose eternal cry was, ‘Main ne bhi jaana hai,’ whenever she saw me leave on one of my excursions with my cyclist gang. She also wormed her way into the hedges in our garden which were hollow, and could be turned into rooms in which to play ‘House House’. But Salmaan remained aloof from all this terrorist activity as he was simply too little. However he certainly made his presence felt when he succumbed to a severe ear infection which would have killed him had it not been for the newly-invented penicillin drug which saved his life.