The man who walks miles and miles — to teach

32 year Shaista Khan, a graduate, 6 days a week would set off from Ziarat Town at 6.00 AM, ring bell in Zezri at 8.

I met him on a walk through the junipers. It was a right delightful walk of about five hours from the hill resort of Ziarat (near Quetta) to the valley of Zezri. Through sweet-smelling thickets of juniper, we walked where the forest floor was rich with grasses for the rains had been plentiful since spring. Up a ridge and down into a narrow gorge, then up again and down on the far side until the houses of Loi (Greater) Zezri were visible in the shadow of the knoll they call Tor Skhar — the Black Rock.

Shaista Khan was the master of the schoolhouse in the precinct of Orazha — a sprinkling of huts spread over a wide area — but a good way from the nearest houses, nestling in a valley between two ridges. It was a simple hut with its walls of juniper logs and juniper bark roof set in a small clearing. In front, a little to the side of the hut, the teacher sat on a chair with a desk and spread out in front on a blanket on the ground were a bunch of girls and boys poring over their books. To the left of the pupils, the national flag hanging limply on its pole in the absence of a breeze declared this a government school.

I went up and asked the master if I could have five minutes with him. Shaista Khan flashed an impish smile and said I could have ten. Indeed, as I left him about half an hour later, it was this waggish smile and the jaunty air he flaunted that I found very endearing. He seemed the kind of man you could entirely trust, someone you would like to be friends with.

Of the Sarangzai sub-clan of Kakars, 32 years old and a graduate, Shaista Khan had been a teacher for eight years in 2007 (when I met him). I imagined he would be a native of Orazha or some nearby village. But he was from Ziarat town. Six days a week he set off from home at 6.00 AM the same way we had come to ring the bell at eight. For the next four and a half hours he taught before returning. That particular morning he had walked through pouring rain.

I wheedled him about the difficulty of having to walk to work and back, hoping for him to whine. But Shaista Khan said something that brought tears to my eyes. ‘Someone has to do this work and fate has bestowed the responsibility upon me. I look upon my vocation as a responsibility to these young people.’

How many of us in Jinnah’s Pakistan would look upon our salaried work and that, too, in such adverse conditions, as a responsibility that we would not willingly shirk? Shaista Khan was a man truly remarkable. It surely is persons like him who keep this country going.

There was another school some ways away in the same valley, Shaista Khan said. But the master there, obviously not of the same mettle as our man, had not been attending his duties. My query regarding the other teacher’s absence was met with a smile and silence. I persisted and Shaista Khan parried the question with the information that an old student of his was looking after that school. His was only a primary school, that is, up to the fifth grade. After that the boys went off to the middle school at Ziarat, but in this strict Pashtun culture, the girls were then confined to the home.

This good man privately coached those of his girl students who wanted to carry on. Since Orazha was a village of poor people, Shaista Khan sometimes even had to purchase his students’ books for them. One such girl student, having finished grade nine, the highest for a girl in the area, was now the unpaid teacher in the school. The teacher, the government-appointed skiver, played truant.

I coaxed him to get him to bad-mouth his delinquent colleague. But not a word came from him. Just his jaunty smile. So here is a true hero of Pakistan that we do not even know of. Banish the notion that Shaista Khan will ever be acknowledged.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th, 2012.