Village in Pakistan recalls fond memories of 'Mohna'

To the older residents of Gah Begal, a nondescript village 80km south of Pakistan's capital Islamabad, he was "Mohna", the bright and industrious kid who studied in the local Urdu-medium primary school before moving to Peshawar.

- Danial Kublai Khan

ISLAMABAD:

It was in Gah Begal, now part of Chakwal district in Pakistan's Punjab province, that former premier Manmohan Singh was born on September 26, 1932. His father, Gurmukh Singh Kohli, worked as a clerk for a dry fruits trader and his mother, Amrit Kaur, died when he was five months old, leaving him to be raised by his paternal grandmother Jamna Devi.

In 2009, when India was holding general elections, this writer travelled to Gah Begal as a young journalist for Dawn News Television, then Pakistan's only English news channel, since we were assigned to get as much exclusive content as we could. I'd recently gone to a friend's farm in Chakwal, where he told me stories about a small village that was once home to Hindus and Sikhs, who fled during Partition. My friend also mentioned the name "Manmohan Singh".

Muhammad Ashraf was 81 when I met him, with a toothless smile and holding on to his hookah as he sat on a charpoy, gazing at the motorway near his ancestral village of Gah Begal.

"If every man was as fortunate as my Mohna, the world would be a better place," Ashraf, who died in 2010, said at the time.

His eyes, clouded yet filled with the past, followed the cars rushing by but his heart was somewhere else - in the golden days of childhood. "Mohna", Ashraf said, was his best friend in school.