Toshakhana of shame

My father got promoted and was made manager of a main bank branch in the city. With this promotion, he started getting an “entertainment allowance” which was meant to help bank managers cover the cost of tea or lunch for Bank clients. Salaries were not that high, and this allowance was also just around one hundred fifty rupees a month. Soon, some bank client family was invited for a lunch, and taking your guests to restaurants was not considered decent in those days. So now my mother had to prepare food, but she had a very serious dilemma. The bank allowance was for bank clients, but she and her husband will be sitting at that table too, eating the same food. She reached out to one of her teachers, who was also the wife of another senior banker colleague of my father. She gave a solution, which she may have been practising herself. She told my mother to prepare one or two dishes with her own money and then put everything on the table. Now food will be shared, and you will be able to eat food prepared with bank money too. That was the level of caution when using government resources, not centuries ago, as I am talking about the mid-seventies.

I know someone personally who was working in an international organisation, and his duty station was in Islamabad while his family lived in Lahore. He used to commute weekly between these two cities. In more than ten years, there were many official engagements in Lahore for which he had the legal right to get travel and daily allowances. As it was an international organisation, he could have made thousands of dollars as extra income if he had just exercised his legal right. But he never claimed it once, as he told me that he felt it was a conflict of interest because his family was in Lahore.

I met my teacher and thesis supervisor after many years at a conference. I invited her to dinner, and when I tried to pay the bill, she stopped me. She was working for a big philanthropic foundation and told me that they are not expected to accept free meals. She was not only my teacher, but as a mentor, she supported my work over the years, but she was very clear on that issue.

Something has terribly gone wrong with us as a nation, as all of our leaders, representing each political party, have the heart to justify their actions publicly. Even those who have been caught making eighty percent profit by selling these state gifts in the market while still in office don’t feel an iota of remorse or guilt. The sad part is that everyone of them had the means to pay the full price of these gifts, but still, greed does not leave even rich people alone. They are hiding behind a “law” that allows them to just pay a fraction of the cost of state gifts, but they don’t tell us if that law is fair. Was it fair to the remainder of the 220 million population who listened to their lofty claims of equity, equality and transparency?

Once, I had to buy something from the university bookstore at Stanford University. My office was more than a kilometer away. It was a hot summer day, and when I came back after more than two kilometers of walking, I realised that the teller had returned me extra money. I went back and explained and returned the extra dollars to the old lady who was sitting there. She looked at me but did not thank me or appreciate my honesty. She just said, “Your mother should be proud of yourself.” The same evening, I called my mother and told her that someone who lived ten thousand miles away and had never met her appreciated her. I wish other nations could say the same thing to us. “You should be proud of your leaders.” Is that too much to ask?

Published in The Express Tribune, March 25^th, 2023.

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