Signalian
PDF THINK TANK: CONSULTANT
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2015
- Messages
- 10,608
- Reaction score
- 305
- Country
- Location
Going through my old albums, I suddenly come across one that makes me stop in my tracks. Risaplur Days, it says, and I smile.
Oh, what a treat!
This is from twenty or more years ago when as a college student I had participated in a debating competition at Risalpur. I flip through the album and a few photographs fall on my lap. I squint at the one taken from a distance, showing a few faces sitting on the hammock-like seats of a C130 aircraft. “Who are these people?” I try to recall their names but fail. Ah! Sweet memories. And I flip some more until I find my favorite one. It’s a photograph of me wearing an officer’s cap, and posing with ten other girls doing the same. Grinning like we had hit jackpot, and eyes sparkling with a sense of crime for stealing those caps from God knows where, we all look like monkeys soldiering in a boot camp. What happy times!
Then there is another one of us posing with a Squadron Leader who, poor guy, looks like he has swallowed gum which is now stuck somewhere down his throat. Squished between rows of over excited college girls his expression is just that… Priceless!!!
I recall we had found Mr. Priceless walking briskly along a pathway one dark night in Risalpur. Not knowing much about uniforms and ranks, we marked him as our target and followed him on his trail. Mr. Target looked all serious and purposeful, not taking anybody’s nonsense and going from one mess area to another with all the sternness in the world when suddenly he found himself confronted by a dozen of us sizing him up. “Hmm. This is the time to take revenge for all those cadets stalking us on our nightly strolls,” we each thought to ourselves as we narrowed the circle around Mr. Him. Not knowing what he had done to deserve this, Mr. Squadron Leader very respectfully asked us if we were lost.
“No Sir,” we said, “We just want an autograph.”
Not sure how he had acquired his newly found fame, and yet not letting go of the propriety expected of an officer, Mr. Squadron Leader first tried to dissuade us from Mission Autograph, but soon accepted defeat and offered us an alternative: A photograph instead of an autograph! “Alright,” we said, thinking of our supervisors about to catch up on us, and quickly gathered around him to pose for a photo. Click, and the memory was captured for yet another life time, but soon to be forgotten in the present moment then.
Or so I had thought. For I had never imagined I would meet Mr. Priceless again. In fact when he came face to face with me two days later, I almost considered myself dead, because he was going to be my pilot for the complimentary ride each one of us received on our very own aircraft with our very own pilot.
But to my surprise, Mr. Priceless was very serious and very polite almost as if he had no clue who I was. “It was very dark that night and there were so many of us,” I thought with relief, “of course he doesn’t remember my face.” And swish we went up in the air and swoop the little aircraft did something up there. “Umm, you know what, I am not a big fan of flying,” I told my pilot feeling a little queasy. “No worries, the fear goes away as soon as you are the one flying the aircraft” said my pilot with a poker face as he held up his hands in the air. “What??” I looked at him in horror. “Am I flying this aircraft?” My heart sank and so did the aircraft (or so I thought).
“Do you want me to take a photograph?” My pilot asked as polite as ever.
“Did he say autograph?” My heart sank even further. “Is he going to kill me now?” I tried to read his expressions. And swoosh something happened and suddenly we were upside down, but just for a split second. “O My God, this man remembers me and he is surely going to kill me now.... Or am I the one doing the killing?” I wasn’t very sure because my pilot’s hands were still in the air.
Now we must remember that those were the times when the hard-core feminism had not touched most of our Pakistani hearts as it has now, and flying was still considered a manly pursuit. In fact those were the years when women in the Pakistan Air Force were few in number and still a novelty. I still remember the faces of all five of them we had met at the Risalpur Air Base that year, and how those brilliant women were mostly considered objects of wonder rather than inspiration. And yet, despite my inability to reconcile with the idea of a woman flying an aircraft, in that moment of crisis I did justice to myself and smiled as if I owned that little thing.
“I will show Mr. Priceless,” I thought. “I will show him how to fly an aircraft.”
But before I could put my words to action, the ride was over and we found ourselves landing.
“You won’t believe what just happened to me,” I told my friends. “Our Mr. Squadron Leader was flying me today and he almost killed me.”
“This can’t be,” said one of my friends. “Because Mr. Squadron Leader was MY pilot today and I think I almost killed HIM.”
“Why? Did he offer to take your photograph too?” I asked.
“Of course he did,” said my friend, “and he also put the plane on auto pilot and acted as if I was the one flying the aircraft.”
“O My God, Mr. Squadron Leader is a ghost,” I gasped. “How else do you explain him being in two aircrafts doing the same things to two people?”
We quickly ran to the others to share our findings.
Soon our story was talk of the town and spies started pouring in from our enemy, the boys’ camp, to help us add fuel to the fire. Our initial interrogation with the boys revealed that our Squadron Leader was not only a ghost but a really good one too, because half the debater’s camp had reported the same sequence of events having happened to them. The swishing of the plane, the hands-in-the-air trick, the offer to take a photograph slash autograph, the upside down action, and zoom the landing of the plane.
“But why is Mr. Squadron Leader doing this to the boys?” one of us asked as we regrouped to compare notes. “The boys never stopped him for an autograph. His fight is surely with us girls.”
“Maybe Mr. Squadron Leader is a serial ghost. Like the one who spooks people in a series,” offered somebody from a corner.
“But how do the boys know our Mr. Squadron Leader?” asked somebody else. “They never saw him. How do they know it’s the same guy we are talking about?”
Now this made us stop and think. And made us think really hard.
There was silence for a moment, as each one of us contemplated this point. The night grew darker than before, a twig crackled somewhere in the distance, we could hear the crickets stop chirping as the silence grew denser and deeper.
And suddenly a sound made us jump out of our skins.
It was the sound of a thousand steps walking towards us. We held our breaths and looked towards the dimly lit bent in the road ahead of us.
“Look,” whispered somebody from another corner. “It’s the ghost.”
And there it was! Emerging from the shadows, with the sound of the steps, our very own Mr. Priceless, the Squadron Leader, followed by a dozen or so faces that looked exactly like him. One after the other they emerged in the semi darkness, Mr. Priceless and his look alikes, and one after another they passed by us.
We watched them in horror, holding on to our seats, not saying a word, as they passed one by one, and one by one they disappeared again in the shadows around another bent in the road just behind us.
And the sound of the thousand steps echoed long after they had vanished from our view.
The silence grew longer as not a peep was heard from the spell bound audience, and then somebody whispered as if woken from a dream.
“It’s the uniform,” said the voice.
“They all look the same in the uniform.”
The writer is a columnist, an Oxford graduate and an English language teaching professional.
Email: adiahafraz@gmail.com
Mr. Priceless
Going through my old albums, I suddenly come across one that makes me stop in my tracks. Risaplur Days, it says, and I smile. Oh, what a treat! This is from twenty or more years ago when as a college student I had participated in a debating competition at Risalpur. I flip through the album...
