Honoring My Father - Part 1: Dedication, Studying Under Highway Lamps, New Homeland Haveli, 1947 Partition Legacy - IMRAN®
Christmas Day used to be my beloved mother's birthday, whom we lost too young in 1992. The time spanning December 21/22 in 2008 is when we lost my precious father.
When my friend Kyle recently shared his childhood memories of growing up in rural Kansas before electricity reached his family’s farm, it reminded me of my own father’s journey in Pakistan. Kyle’s story of kerosene lamps and battery radios resonated with me because my father too began life in places where electricity was scarce.
My father was a Partition‑1947 orphan. As a preteen, he survived a massacre of Muslims by Sikh mobs during a bus convoy from Jalandhar (now in India) to Gujranwala (now in Pakistan). Our new ancestral lands were about ten miles outside Gujranwala, in a village called Butranwali.
Even the family’s home, their village-landlord Haveli — a manor‑like house — had no electricity. Across the road stood a solitary tall electricity pole, one of few placed many miles apart along the single lane two-way ‘highway’ to Sialkot, a city still famous for its surgical goods and FIFA footballs. Behind the family Haveli were mud and brick huts where the farmhands lived, along with the fields and a twin‑bull‑powered mechanical primitive equivalent of a tubewell that irrigated the land before electric pumps existed.
While his brother and brother-like first cousins played, my father dedicated himself to studies. He would sit under that solitary lamp on the highway, studying late into the night. Each day, he rode his bicycle eight to ten miles to school in Gujranwala. His determination carried him far: he became a civil engineer, eventually rising to Chief Engineer in the Punjab Irrigation Department in the early 1990s, shortly before my mother passed away unexpectedly young, just before what would have been his retirement years to spend with her.
Today, Gujranwala has expanded so much that our ancestral Haveli and village are now bustling housing schemes. The Haveli actually stayed in the family, with my first cousin expanding his business into a real estate local empire. Even our family graveyard a short distance from the home still remains, a place where we pay respects to those who came before us and whom we will meet again one day.
(To be continued: how my parents’ focus on education shaped our lives, and how electricity defined both comfort and struggle in the towns where we grew up…)
© 2025 IMRAN®
PS I am in the AI industry, but have zero interest in people posting fake AI creations as real photographs. I do not mind using it to create infographics or images to accompany articles or blog posts. Since I do not have any photos of that time in my father's life, I used AI to create an image and then worked on it myself as homage to his dedication to which my family and I owe everything.
#IMRAN #Pakistan #autobiography #family #parents #electricity #history #India #Partition #Punjab #education #development
