MERRY MEADOWS - Chapter 6 - From overweight 'lout' to fighting fit

I had the privilege of attending Aitchison College as a boarder for three years. Aitchison is known for its excellence in sports, and has produced players of international repute like Imran Khan, who was then known as Imran Ahmed, and happened to be a classmate of mine.

For two hours every morning and two hours every evening, sports were compulsory for every student, with horse-riding, cricket and hockey as the top three that bred high levels of excellence, producing the likes of Imran Khan in cricket, Hasan Sardar in hockey, and Podger El Effendi in polo.

But for me and my roommates, all residents of Leslie Jones House, a different sport beckoned - playing truant! We invested considerable ingenuity and energy into this enterprise, and took some daring risks to skip sports, either hiding in one of the two towers that adorned our colonial era boarding house, or ducking behind the hedge, but mostly standing in line at the infirmary faking an ailment with the hope of getting an ‘excuse chit’.

So, ironically, Aitchison College had no hand in shaping my later day amateur level playing excellence in the game of squash, though it might have sowed the seeds of mental agility in circumventing established paradigms and the bending and breaking of rules.

It was once I had relocated to Karachi from Lahore, after completing what we then called Senior Cambridge, and discovered amongst other things the fairer sex, that I was seized with an obsession to get fit and shed the layers of fat acquired through regular binge engagements with the school’s tuck shop.

While it may have produced outstanding sportsmen, Aitchison also produced more than its share of ‘overweight louts’, often at the receiving end of the Khan’s cane. What the Khan’s cane could not manage to do, the fair damsels of Karachi succeeded in doing.

The Karachi Gymkhana Club and the Karachi Golf Club were the two recreational and sports facilities available to me. Golf I had taken a bit of a dislike to, having been forced into playing it under family pressure. Also, there was nothing else to do at the golf club except play golf, and eat, and eating was something I was consciously distancing myself from in my quest for shapeliness. The Gymkhana offered a much wider array of options that included a swimming pool, a favorite watering hole where girl met boy.

The Gymkhana was also next door to St. Patrick’s College where I had managed to gain admission, so it was a natural candidate for becoming my second home. Cricket was the main sport at the Gymkhana, with a lush green historic cricket ground bang center of the city.

I had tried my hand at cricket in school, but could never make it past being the water boy or score keeper, not the best way of spending one’s Sundays. Swimming, weight training, and running around the cricket field got me started in my quest for getting fit, and since the squash courts lay between the cricket ground and the swimming pool, I began turning up there as well.

Getting the squishy black ball to bounce was one heck of an undertaking, but the tennis courts were too far and invariably overcrowded, and the people who played squash were a boisterous and often rowdy lot that met with my approval. That’s how it all began, with the quest for gaining gallant knight status, and dreams of rescuing damsels in distress of which there was no shortage then in the city of Karachi.         

Pretty soon I was playing a tolerable game of squash, and as time passed I shaped up and became more confident in my exchanges with the opposite sex. Playing squash and training six days a week, with girls in the gallery cheering me on, I was quite transformed in short order, and when two years later I joined the Economics Department of the Karachi University, the first thing I did was sign up for trials to select the Faculties squash team.

As luck would have it I was the only person who turned up for the trials, and so made the team uncontested, and was also appointed its captain with the mandate of finding three other squash players to make up the team.

I did manage to find three other squash players; in fact I got a whole lot of freshmen to take up the game. Since the Gymkhana was an exclusive members’ only preserve, for purposes of combined training the Faculties team was assigned the National Sports Training and Coaching Center which boasted a solitary squash court. But it had a gymnasium and running track, and was near enough the university. The coaching center became the new hangout between 3pm and 6pm as we prepared for the inter-collegiate championships.

Merry Meadows - Memoirs of an entrepreneur