MERRY MEADOWS - Chapter 10 - Both imploding and exploding

My father, the late and greatly lamented Huzuruddin Ahmad, left no written or spoken brief for me to follow, except for his pronouncement that we had burnt our boats in India. So his Indian inheritance was out where I was concerned. Pakistan is where he had brought me, and Pakistan is where I’d have to do whatever it was I had to do. Moving to a third location never occurred to me.

The signposts that he left behind during his days in Pakistan, and which constituted my actionable inheritance, were quite unambiguous. Treat with great suspicion the easy routes in life, and embrace self-employment. That was one inheritance I couldn’t walk away from, driven by pure instinct for the most part.

For quite a while it was one big volatile mixed bag of anger, resentment and contempt that I barely managed to cope with. Thoughts of the injustices meted out to my family and me in the past kept intruding into my present, which in itself was full of people trying to short change me, and enslave me.

I was both imploding and exploding. Within this very negative dynamic I was blessed with two kids in quick succession, and then a third one came along. Now, more than ever before, I was entirely dependent upon the family inheritance to sustain me and my family.

I was misunderstood in the worst way possible. My ‘misplaced’ ego and pride were held responsible for my plight attributed to an excessive need for independence in what I did, and my refusal to bend and acquire a powerful patron. Not that I didn’t try, but it never lasted for very long.

Right through this torturous journey, I sought frequent refuge in the three oases of peace and tranquility that were part of my inheritance, and which I had grown up in, but which were considered by one and all to be the watering holes of the rich and powerful, adding to the contradictions in my public profile. So, the insiders would ask, what was someone who was flat broke doing playing golf and polo, and rubbing shoulders with the shoguns of trade, commerce and industry at the premier club in town for businessmen?

I let the family inheritance pay the club bills, knowing that in the absence of these perks I’d be all set to head out into the wilderness in search of a banyan tree, and that my religion didn’t permit me to do. I had to stay engaged, and find that opening, no matter how slender, that would fit my needs.

To the people I befriended and mixed with I wasn’t such an oddity, the landscape being fairly thick with the ‘lucratively’ unemployed, inheritors living off the fat of the land. While they may not have said as much to my face, I knew that is what they thought, and it didn’t help pacify the turbulence in my head.

Many failed businesses later, and given my chronic inability to enter the political patronage game and seek meaningful favours in return for bribes to those in power, I finally relented to family pressure and took entry level employment in a number of different established enterprises that paid me a fraction of what my needs were. If nothing else, to show the family that ego and pride weren’t the issues holding me back, though they were when it came to bowing and scraping in the course of earning a livelihood. The family’s enthusiasm about such employment was for me to have a settled routine to my day and to know where I was at, and their hope that I would finally find alignment with people that would last.

But these employments didn’t last long, six months on average. That was the amount of time it took for me to see beneath the façade, and not like what I saw. This existence pretty much took me through my thirties, and exasperated and exhausted my near and dear. In their eyes and to their minds nothing was ever good enough for me. Then two people whom I’d allowed to have a voice in my affairs casually suggested that I try my hand at writing. My maternal cousin and fellow housemate at Adil House, and my brother-in-law who was also for sometime a fellow housemate at Adil House, were both of the same view expressed at different times.

Merry Meadows - Memoirs of an entrepreneur