Dr. Abdur Rabb, Montreal
Published in the CanadaBdNews.com on February 6, 2011
(Click the + icon for bigger font and – icon for smaller font)
[After Bangladesh became independent on December 16, 1971, the Pakistani Government held the Bengalis working and living in West Pakistan as hostages to bargain for some 90,000 of their soldiers who were caught in Bangladesh and later moved to India. Some of these Bengalis succeeded in escaping from Pakistan in different ways and through various routes. I am writing the story of our escape to shed some light on the difficulties that some escapees had to face in fleeing that country.]
It was the end of 1971. I was working as the Director of Iqbal Academy, Pakistan for about a year. The Academy was located in Karachi at that time. East Pakistan fell on December 16, 1971. Right away I decided to get out of Pakistan as fast as possible. I often heard rumours that the Pakistani Government were going to take me and my family to a concentration camp any time. The thought of life in concentration camps probably for years sent fears to our hearts. I started making plans to escape from Pakistan without delay. I contacted smugglers and others for suggestions and help to get us out of that country. According to one plan, smugglers agreed to take us to Kabul through the mountains. I could not take that option. We had two young children: our son Hamid was nine years old and our daughter Shirin ten months. It was unthinkable for me to take that trip from Karachi to Kabul with my wife and two young children, part of the way by car and rest of the way through the rocky Hindukush mountain range perhaps on foot. The robbers could attack us in the mountains or the Pakistani security forces could arrest us and put us in prison.
The smugglers presented a second option to me. They agreed to smuggle us to one of the small states of the Gulf in a small boat. I could not take that option either. A journey by a small boat on the Arabian Sea? The boat could sink in a storm and we would all be drowned. Or, the smugglers could rob us of our belongings and just throw us in the sea. Nobody in the world would know what would happen to us. We could also have become victims of pirates on the open sea.
I started working on a plan to go out of Pakistan in a more regular way: fly out of Karachi in a commercial jet. But how? The then President of Pakistan Mr. Bhutto barred all people born in East Pakistan from leaving the country. He held all the East Pakistanis as hostages as a bargaining chip for the release of some ninety thousand Pakistani soldiers who were caught in Bangladesh and later moved to India. Early in 1972 he declared that a Pakistani could go to another country if he or she got a job in that country. I saw this as a great opportunity to try to get a job outside Pakistan so that we could leave that country. Now the big question was: how could I get a job outside Pakistan? Many times in my life I faced barriers that appeared insurmountable at that time. Every time that happened, Allah sent someone to pick me up by my hand and help me cross that barrier. The same happened this time too.
My maternal uncle living in Dhaka had a business partner in Hamburg, West Germany. Since it was not possible for us to communicate with anyone in Bangladesh, our relatives and friends there did not know if we were dead or alive. My uncle wrote to his German partner asking him to find out about us. On receipt of the German gentleman’s letter I requested him to give me a job in his company in Hamburg. I was surprised to have received a letter of appointment in his company within a week. I visited the West German Consulate in Karachi for a visa in their country. I was told that they needed to verify if the letter of appointment was genuine, and if the job that was offered was real. They also told me that they needed months to complete the process of verification. I came home disappointed. I could not wait for months. If we were taken to a concentration camp, it would be impossible to leave Pakistan.
The same day I wrote to the German businessman asking him to give me a job in their office in Tehran, Iran. Again, I received a new appointment letter that said that I would work in Tehran, but I would be required to go to Hamburg for training first. This time I went to the Iranian Consulate for a visa. Again very disappointing news. The gentleman in the consular section told me that no Pakistani was allowed to enter Iran; Pakistanis were not even allowed to use Iranian airports on transit. Later I found out why the relationship between Pakistan and Iran was so bad at that time. I was told that Pakistani Government feared that Indian Air Force could destroy the Pakistani fleet of bomber and fighter aircraft by a surprise attack. Since West Pakistan is very narrow from the eastern to its western borders, the Indian aircraft would need only a few minutes to reach the major military airports of Pakistan. To avoid that kind of disaster, Pakistan kept its most sophisticated fighters and bombers on Iranian airports across Pakistan’s western border. When the war between Pakistan and India broke out, the USSR persuaded Iran not to let the Pakistani fighters and bombers take off from Iranian soil. This explains why during the war the Indian planes had a free sky over Karachi and Islamabad, and probably over other areas of Pakistan. I saw the Indian bombers flying in the Karachi sky completely unchallenged by any Pakistani fighter. The Indian planes came, did what they planned to do, and flew back to India without encountering any Pakistani aircraft.
I did not lose all hopes of getting an Iranian visa. I saw the Iranian Consul General and told him our story. I also told him about my involvement in Iranian scholarship: I learned Persian at McGill University, wrote my doctoral dissertation on the great Iranian Sufi Abu Yazid al-Bistami, published articles in connection with the great celebration of the Shahanshah of Iran, had a number of great Iranian scholars as my teachers at McGill, and a great man of Iran Dr. Hossain Nasr was my good friend. I showed him a copy of all my publications including a copy of my book on Abu Yazid al-Bistami. The Consul General said, “You are one of us. We shall make an exception in your case. We shall give you a visa.” I heaved a sigh of relief.
I passed only one hurdle; there were many more very difficult hurdles ahead of me. As an East Pakistani I needed permission of the President of Pakistan to leave the country. How could I get that permission? Again, Allah sent someone for my rescue.
I started working as a young professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Dhaka in 1958. I was twenty two years old. The first class that I taught had about 80 students. A group of some 10 male students sat on benches at the rear of the class. These students were very naughty; they took the same set of courses, moved from class to class in a group, and made the life of their teachers miserable. As soon as they saw that I was a punjabi-clad young and timid professor, they started disturbing the class. However, very soon they realized that they could not do in my classes what they did in other teachers’ classes. I taught in the east and the west for more than 40 years; no student ever succeeded in creating disturbances in my classrooms.
These naughty students were very bright. They came from educated and rich families. Before joining the University they studied at good English medium schools and colleges. They did not need the benefit of teachers’ lectures in class rooms. They came to classes to have fun; and bothering teachers was one thing that they enjoyed. I think that another pastime of these students was chasing girls. Anyway, later in life these naughty students became leaders of our country. They became CSP’s, ambassadors, and politicians. Except for the ones in politics they are all retired now. Some of them still keep contact with me.
One of these naughty students was in Islamabad in 1972. Grandson of a former central minister of Pakistan, he had connections with important politicians of that country including Mr. Nurul Amin. Mr. Bhutto kept Mr. Nurul Amin as the Vice-president of Pakistan. My student took me to Mr. Nurul Amin and said to him, “ Dr. Rabb was my professor at the University of Dhaka. He is a good man. You have to help him and his family to get out of Pakistan.” Mr. Nurul Amin called the Personal Secretary of the President in our presence and said, “I am sending Dr. Rabb to you. Please have the President sign his document needed for leaving Pakistan.” The President signed the document the same day. I came to know later that my document was the last one that he signed for a Bengali to leave Pakistan.
Now another step. I needed Finance Ministry’s permission to buy four tickets and take some money in US currency with us. Again, it would be very difficult to get this permission without someone’s help. Hence I sought the help of my former teacher and colleague Dr. Professor Ghulam Jilani. He was the professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dhaka for some 25 years. But for his help since I joined his Department as a student, I would not have been where I am today. I shall discuss his contribution to my life another time.
Dr. Jilani lived in Lahore. I presented my problem to him. He then called the Personal Secretary to the Finance Minister to his house and told him, “Abdur Rabb is like my son. Please do for him exactly what he wants.” The secretary was Dr. Jilani’s friend’s son-in-law. I saw the secretary with my documents. When he realized that we needed permission to buy tickets for our journey from Karachi to Tehran via Germany, he said, “Your travel plans look likes a journey from Lahore to Karachi via the moon.” That means that it would be very difficult to get that kind of plans approved; but he had no choice. He was more or less ordered by Dr. Jilani to do what I wanted. He got the documents signed, and I returned to Karachi. I decided to leave Pakistan without delay. I set April 6, 1972 as the date of our departure.
Some people told me that the permission to go to another country was meant only for those born in West Pakistan. That meant that a Bengali could not leave Pakistan even if that person had all the documents needed for such a move. The Department, the company or the institution for which the person worked would not relieve that person from his/her duty. Hence I had no other choice than to escape from the country without the knowledge of the Iqbal Academy authorities.
The Iqbal Academy, a federally funded institution, devoted itself to research and teaching Muslim philosophy , theology , Sufism and modern developments in Islam—the areas of study in which Allamah Iqbal was interested. It was located in a posh residential area of Karachi. The first floor of the large building housed all the offices of the Academy, and the second floor was the residence of the Director. On the west of the main building was a smaller building the second floor of which was the residence of the bearers, darwans and the gardener. The entire compound including a large, beautiful and well-kept garden was enclosed with a 12-15 feet high wall. On the east was a large and high steel gate guarded by darwans 24 hours a day.
To escape from Pakistan we had to first escape from the Academy compound. Bearers and other people on the compound, high walls around the area and 24-hour guard at the gate were all very good under normal circumstances; but now all these created big obstacles in the way of our escape from the Academy. Further, there could have been problems at the airport. Hence I had to make all the plans of action with extreme care. If one link in the chain of my plans broke, the entire chain could fall, and my family and I could end up in a situation of disaster.
Two days before our departure I put our suitcases in my car under the cover of darkness and took those to a Bengali friend’s house. The day before our departure I went to the airport around 7:00 in the morning to meet the passport authorities there. I wanted to show them all our documents to make sure that all those documents were in order. I also thought that the officers who worked at that time of the day could also be working at the same time the next day so that, in case of any difficulty, I could talk to the same people. I met the supervisor passport officer sitting at the back of a large office some 15 feet from the passport counter. The gentleman was very friendly and courteous. The fact that I was the Director of Iqbal Academy, which the people of Pakistan held in high esteem, helped in my conversation with him. He saw the documents and said, “Doctor Sahab, since you have this permission signed by the President of Pakistan, you are a free man; you could leave the country any time you wish.”
That day, that is April 5, was probably the busiest day of my life. I arranged to finalize all the formalities of selling my car that day. For various reasons, I could not sell the car earlier. I used the money from the sale of the car to buy four airline tickets. Then I visited the State Bank of Pakistan in Karachi to buy $40.00 ($10X 4 persons) in US currency that we were permitted to take with us.
I came home at about sunset. Now I had to take my wife and the children out of the compound of the Academy. They all dressed themselves in black clothes to avoid detection in the darkness of night. They came down from the second floor and waited near the base of the staircase on the main floor of the building. I said to the darwan, “Please make a cup of tea for me. I shall guard the gate in your absence.” He went to the kitchen of the Academy located at the other side of the building. As soon as the darwan moved out of my sight, my family quickly came out of the Academy building and, according to previous plans, went to a Pakistani neighbour’s house across the street. Later that night they were driven to the house of a Bengali friend a few miles away.
Earlier in the day I asked a bearer to arrange a taxi for me at 4:00 next morning to go to the airport. The central Education Minister of the time was returning from Hong Kong by PIA that morning. Since he was my direct boss, it was necessary for me to receive him at the airport. At this point I faced a small problem. A bearer always went with me when I went somewhere for official work. Hence the bearer who ordered a taxi for me wanted to make sure that someone would accompany me to the airport. I needed to do a great deal of talking to convince him that I could go to the airport alone that morning.
The whole night I was awake and very busy. As Director of the large Academy I had many responsibilities. I wanted to make sure that after my departure the people of the Academy would find all administrative and financial matters in order. Hence I spent the whole night in our bed room writing notes on various matters and left these notes on a desk easily visible to anybody entering the room. I also kept on calling the PIA office to ask if there were still four seats available for us on the Karachi-Paris flight at 7:30 a.m. The PIA officers insisted that I get the tickets endorsed by them. I could not do that because I feared that if our names were on the list of passengers on that flight, the Academy authorities could somehow come to know our plans and all our efforts would end in a fiasco.
Finally the dawn came. I wanted to make sure that nobody could discover our departure from the Academy before the aircraft actually left the airport. Hence I kept the mosquito curtain hung over our bed and the ceiling fan turned on so that if someone from the second floor bearers’ quarters looked at our bedroom, they would think that we were still sleeping. I also kept an aluminum pot outside the door of our bed room so that the milk man would not try to wake us up to deliver milk. The milkman knew that Hamid always drank a glass of milk with his breakfast before he went to school. I also locked the door with a latch from inside the bed room so that the people of the Academy would not dare to break the door to enter the Director’s bed room. The idea was to delay the discovery of our departure until the flight would take off from the Karachi airport.
The taxi took me to the house of my Bengali friend where my family spent the night. My wife heaved a sigh of relief when she saw me. The whole night she was weeping because she thought that the police, after having discovered our plans, arrested me and put me in prison. We arrived at the airport at 5:30 a.m. A Pakistani friend of mine who had a British wife came to see us off at the airport. My Deputy Director who treated me as his enemy and made my life miserable for the last one year also came to the airport. He wanted to make sure that I left Pakistan so that he could then get the dream of his life fulfilled: take the position of the Director of the Academy.
We presented our passports and all other documents to the passport control officer. He looked at the documents and said, “You cannot leave the country. You were born in East Pakistan.” I politely drew his attention to the document signed by the president of Pakistan permitting us to leave the country. He said, “That does not matter.” I looked inside the large room behind him and saw the supervisor officer sitting at his desk. It is the same officer whom I showed our documents the previous morning. I quickly walked to the desk of that officer and said, “Janab, do you remember me? I came to see you yesterday at about this time.” He said, “Doctor Sahab, how can I forget the Director of Iqbal Academy? Please sit down, sit down, and let us have a cup of tea.” At this point a strange thing happened. I do not know how it occurred to me that a cup of tea meant something else. I had money in my pocket. I emptied my pocket, gave the entire amount to him saying, “I do not have time to drink tea. My family is waiting at the passport counter, and our flight will leave soon. Please use this money to buy a cup of tea.” He shouted at the officer at the passport counter saying, “All is well with Dr. Abdur Rabb. Let him go.” The officer did not wait even for a minute; he stamped our passports and we went in the customs area where bags were searched by officers. There were many officers standing behind large tables. The travellers could go to any of these officers to get their bags checked. According to the instructions of the President of Pakistan, nobody was permitted to take money, gold and pictures out of the country. The customs authorities were especially strict about pictures to be taken out of Pakistan because some people smuggled pictures of the massacre in East Pakistan and got them printed in Western papers and magazines. These published pictures created serious problems for Pakistan in the international arena.
My wife had her gold jewellery that she received at her wedding. Naturally we did not want to lose that jewellery that had sentimental value. I also had thousands of pictures in slides. Photography has always been my hobby. I am now the self-appointed unofficial photographer of the Bangladeshi community of Montreal. The pictures that we were carrying were very valuable to me. It would be a great loss if I had to leave these pictures behind. Again I thought of a plan to try to save my wife’s jewellery and my pictures. I looked around and saw an officer with long beard and wearing a round and white cap. I felt that he was a devout Muslim. I decided to see him with our bags. I placed a copy of my recently published book on Abu Yazid al-Bistami on the bag that he was going to check first. He picked up the book and opened it. He said, “What is this?” I said, “A book on Bayazid Bostami (Persianized form of Arabic Abu Yazid al-Bistami).” “Who wrote this?” “I wrote this.” “If you could write a book on Bayazid Bostami rahmatullahi alayhi , I do not open your bags for checking.” The great Persian Sufi saint Bistami is highly venerated by many Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. The officer marked our bags with a chalk and we entered the departure lounge with a sense of relief.
We were very tense while waiting for boarding the aircraft. Suddenly we heard an announcement on the loud speaker of the airport that the departure of our flight to Paris would be delayed. My wife and I looked at each other’s face and saw a dark patch of cloud covering our faces. The Iqbal Academy office opened at 8 a.m. If the people of the Academy discovered that we were gone, the airport is the first place where they would look for us. If we were caught fleeing from the country, the consequences could be disastrous. Soon there was another announcement that said that the departure would be delayed only by 45 minutes.
We were tense throughout the flight. PIA is like a piece of Pakislani land. All the laws of Pakistan were applicable to the aircraft. If necessary, they could perhaps arrest us in the aircraft and bring us back in Pakistan. We did not get off the plane at Cairo Airport where the aircraft stopped for an hour or two. We feared that the Egyptian police could arrest us at the request of the Pakistani authorities.
The plane landed at Paris in the early evening. Finally we felt that we were genuinely free when we put our feet on the French soil.
What happened to us during the next three weeks was horrible. The situations that we faced were so strange that if we did not experience them ourselves we would find it difficult to believe that they had actually happened to someone.
We had a relative living at a small place some 20 miles west of Dusseldorf in West Germany. We shall call him by a fictitious name: Mr. Hasan . A chemist by profession, he married a German woman who was working in the cafeteria of the British Armed Forces base nearby. For our present purpose we shall call her Carol. We planned to go to their house and stay there for a few days to plan our next move. Our goal was to go back to Canada where we lived almost seven years from 1963 to 1970. Professor Dr. Charles Adams, the Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, was my professor and advisor of my research. He was also a saintly person. I wanted to get his advice for our future plans.
We took a flight from Paris to Dusseldorf. It was around 1:00 in the morning when our taxi arrived at the place of our relative. He and his wife lived in a flat in a high-rise building in a large field of the countryside. We rang their door bell. On the intercom system Mr. Hasan asked who we were. We identified ourselves, but nobody came down to open the door for more than half an hour. Finally they both came down to the door. Carol, dressed up to leave her house, was screaming and shouting at her husband. There was blood rolling down both the cheeks of her husband. In a state of fury she scratched her husband’s face with her fingernails. She came out of the building and said to her husband at the top of her voice, “I do not accept Pakistanis in my house. I am going to my mother’s house never to come back. I shall divorce you tomorrow morning.” The commotion outside the building was so ugly and loud that I thought that hundreds of people living in the building would be awakened from sleep. The taxi driver who waited all that time was stunned by what was happening. Carol left in the same taxi that brought us there. Mr. Hasan then said, “Where can you go at this time of the night? Since my wife has already left, you stay with me tonight. Tomorrow you will decide where you shall go.” We had no other choice than to accept his suggestion. We had no money. Most of the $40- that the Pakistani government permitted us to take was spent on the taxi fare. We were also half dead as a result of tension and sleeplessness of a few days and nights, and the fatigue caused by the long journey from Karachi to the house of our relative in West Germany. The children were in such a bad shape that it was difficult for me even to look at their faces.
The next morning Carol called her husband on the telephone and said, “I have taken a room at the Air Force barracks. I am willing to come back home if the Pakistani family moves in to that room.” We gladly accepted the proposal. We did not want anybody to suffer for our miseries. Moreover, beggars do not have the right to choose. We needed a place, with or without beds, to stay for a short period. We moved to the Air Force barracks in the afternoon. Carol came back home after work that evening.
I worked on two fronts: get some work in Germany for a short time so that I could feed my family, and accumulate funds to carry with us so that I could satisfy the requirements of the Canadian Immigration Department for visitors’ visas. At that time a Pakistani or Bangladeshi could arrive at the airport and get a visitor’s visa there. One only needed to have sufficient funds to pay the expenses during one’s stay in Canada.
I went from place to place looking for a job. Finally I was offered the job of a labourer to repair roads. I went to the German office for a work permit, but to no avail. In desperation I went to Bonn where the German Foreign Office was located. There I met the gentleman who was the German Consul-General in Karachi in 1971. As the Director of the Academy I met him in Karachi more than once. He said, “Even the President of West Germany cannot give you a work permit. You will have to go out of this country to apply for that permit.” Once Carol came to know that I was trying to work in Germany, she took me to the German office a second time and pleaded to the officers for my work permit. Believe it or not, she had a selfish motive behind her action. She told me that she would get a work permit for me on condition that I would pay her half of what I would be earning.
A few days after we moved to the barracks, a military police of the British Air force came to our room. Someone living in the barracks complained to the military police that “some illegal Pakistani refugees were hiding in the barracks.” That according to the military was a serious offence. Hence the military police came fast on a motorcycle to oust us from the barracks. He brought Carol with him. He entered our room and said, “You must get out of this place right now.” I said, “Please give us a few minutes so that we can put our belongings in bags.” “No”, replied the officer. “What shall I do with our belongings?” “Throw the stuff out through the window, and pick it up from the yard.” Yet I started putting our clothes and other personal items in bags and, while doing so, told the officer who we were and why we were there. Having heard our story the officer changed his mind and said, “You do not have to go. You can stay here as long as you wish.” I thanked him for his kindness and said, “We already ordered the taxi which was coming from a long distance. We shall leave the barracks.”
Here is what actually happened. The day we arrived at her house, Carol went from her house directly to the Air Force office and asked for a room to stay because “I divorced my husband; I need a room to stay.” The fact that a “bunch of illegal Pakistani refugees” moved in that room proved to the authorities that she lied about divorcing her husband. Hence they decided to fire her from her job. Now that the military police officer found out about our plight, she said to Carol, “We shall give your job back to you. Take this family to your house. We shall give you a day’s leave with pay so that you can take care of them.”
Since the day we moved to the barracks, I started writing letters to my Canadian and American friends to help us meet our financial needs. An amount of money that I left behind with an American friend in 1970 now proved very useful. My friends were sending money and that made Carol crazy. She could never believe that anyone could help another person with money. Once I accumulated a large sum of money, she decided to take all that money from me. First she threatened me saying that if I did not give her that money, she was going to call the Canadian Embassy in Bonn to say to them bad things about me. She thought that if the Canadian authorities knew bad things about me, they would not let us enter Canada. This method did not work. I was sure that since I did not do anything wrong, the Canadian Embassy would never pay heed to her complaints against me. Then she threatened to kill all four of us. At this point I had no other choice than to give her all the money that I received from North America. Our nine-year-old son was very much shocked when he learned that I had given her all our money. My wife was also weeping profusely. All the efforts that we made and the sufferings that we went through were going to end in a disaster; and now our lives were at stake. I did not know what I could do in that situation. I went to the priest of a Church nearby and told him the story. I wanted to make sure that if we were killed, somebody would know who killed us and why she did it. I also kept our passports in the custody of the priest.
We were passing the darkest days of our life in West Germany. In Pakistan we received death threats; but there something could be done about it. We were given 24-hour police protection. In Germany we were living with a woman in her own house, and she wanted to kill us. How could we protect ourselves? Early in the morning of April 29 Carol wet to visit her mother and told her that she had taken all our money. Her mother was furious with her. She said, “That is not your money. Go back to your house right now and return the money to its rightful owner.” She came home and said, “I shall return your money to you on two conditions. First, I shall deposit the money in my bank account, withdraw it from the same account, and then give it to you. By doing this I shall be able to claim deduction on my income tax for helping refugees. Second, once you start earning money in Canada, you will send $300- to me every month.”
I accompanied Carol to her bank, took the money and directly went to the closest travel agency. I feared that Carol could change her mind about letting us go. Hence I decided to leave West Germany the same day. I got four seats in flights from Dusseldorf to Montreal via Zurich. We arrived at the Dorval airport at about sunset the same day. At that time the travellers could choose an immigration officer from among many of them for inspection of documents. I saw an older officer who looked very kind. I asked the gentleman if he could see us. He said, “I am busy now. You will have to wait if you wish to see me.” I happily agreed to wait. In the meantime a woman officer was passing by the area where we were waiting. She asked if we were taken care of. I said, “No.” Then she asked if we would like to come with her. I agreed. I thought that it would be difficult for a woman to deport my family with two young children, especially if she heard what we went through. She did not ask any questions. She said, “You were here for seven long years. You must have many friends in the city.” She put stamps of visitors’ visas on our passports, and wished us a pleasant stay in Montreal. We called our old friend Mawlana Aftaf Ahmad from the airport. When we were coming to Professor Ahmad’s house by a taxi on highway 20 east, I felt that I was breathing the air of real freedom for the first time.
We needed food and shelter. After two days of stay at Professor Ahmad’s house our old friend Dr. Nurul Islam invited us to stay with him. He was living in a one-bedroom apartment with his wife and a young daughter. We were four people. Hence a total of seven people lived in that one-bedroom apartment for almost three months. Mrs. Islam had to take care of her new-born baby; yet she did everything possible to feed us and make our stay at her place comfortable. We shall never be able to repay our debt to Dr. and Mrs. Islam. I would like that my children and grandchildren always remain grateful to Dr. and Mrs. Islam for what they did for us.
The day after we arrived in Montreal, I unexpectedly met Dr. Adams on the street. He asked me to go to the immigration office and apply for permanent residence status without delay. I did exactly what he asked me to do. The immigration officer who interviewed us said, “Have you seen the ads in the metro trains that show the pictures of ideal immigrants who have contributed a great deal to Canada?” I answered in the affirmative. Then he said, “I think that one day we shall be able to use your pictures to exemplify ideal immigrants to this country.” I do not know if my family and I are ideal immigrants; but we certainly have tried to be useful to our adopted country.
My wife and I both received work permit. I started working as a dish washer in Ben Ash Restaurant on St. Laurent Blvd. I could not keep that job for a long time because the manager of the restaurant somehow found out that I had a doctorate degree. A friend of ours named Mr. Jilani found a job for my wife at a leather factory where she worked for almost three months. In August we received our permanent residence status and moved to Ottawa to join a teaching position at the Department of Religious Studies at Carleton University. Professor Ron Nettler of the same Department, who was a classmate of mine at McGill University, brought me to his Department. Mention should be made that I received a job offer at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University in Boston; but I could not avail myself of that position because, according to the American Immigration Department, “a man of your qualifications and experience is not needed in the United States at this time.”
I shall conclude the story of our escape from Pakistan and the events thereafter with some comments about Carol. This woman was illiterate and mentally unbalanced. She definitely did not represent the German people. She married a “Pakistani” man, but she never had a child because she refused to carry a “Pakistani” man’s child in her womb. She never allowed her husband go to East Pakistan to see his relatives because she heard from someone that Pakistani men can marry more than one woman. She was convinced that if her husband ever went to visit his old country, he would marry another woman. It is only a person of her background and unbalanced mind who could do what she did to us. We must not think that German people are like her. Every country, every community has good people and bad people. Fortunately the overwhelming majority of people are good. It is only a few people who are rotten apples in a large basket. Unfortunately Carol was one of those rotten apples. We should remember that we could not have come out of Pakistan if the German friend of my uncle did not give me a job in his company.