Those who learn in school
Are none but money’s tools.
In heaven they will never dwell;
They will surely go to hell.

At first the mullah of Utmanzai had made a sweeping rule: parents sending their sons to the mission school would be excommunicated. Before Behram Khan, no villager had dared to risk the mullah’s censure, but the Khan was too broad minded to let them interfere with the education of his boys. The mullah muttered imprecations behind the closed doors of the mosque, but publicly they rationalized their loss. The Khan’s boys were pious, and hadn’t young Ghaffar learned the Koran by heart? There was nothing to fear. “Let the boys read English,” they compromised, “so long as they did not read the Christian scriptures; for the Christians have tempered with these books and it is no longer lawful for Muslims to read them.”

Ghaffar was happy to be part of the same school his elder brother had attended. He did not mind the mild indoctrination into Christianity and western especially British culture that all the students received. One of the questions that regularly appeared on examinations was to list the benefits bestowed upon the people of India by the Raj: the roads the British had built, with their high iron bridges; the magical telegraph lines that hummed messages through the passes to Delhi and down to Madras; the schools, of course, even though they thought Pushto too coarse to teach the boys; the railways that climbed the high, bare passes like iron serpents; the hospitals; the soldiers maintained the rule of British law and kept the marauding hill tribes from harassing its “settled” farmers. It did not occur to most British that Pathans would rather have had their freedom than telegraphs and iron bridges and the “rule of law”. Most Pathans as the Frontier war demonstrated preferred privation and hardship to servitude.

Ghaffar never forgot the dark, drained faces of the villagers who had returned from fighting the British droning that dreadful summer of the Frontier war. He had seen the fire beaten from their bright, burning eyes. After that it was not the same when his father took him to the village guest house. For a long time the men did not sing and there was no poetry. They drank tea and spoke bitterly of the English masters, and the boy heard hatred and fear in their voices.

But since then much had changed. The boy had grown into a muscularly Youngman, over six feet tall, and had made a number of British friends in Peshawar. He had come to respect the teachers in his school, and he admired the poise and courage of the British soldiers. Ghaffar was a born warrior – every Pathan was-and he recognized the qualities of a good soldier when he saw them.

He also admired Reverend Wigram-almost as much, in fact, as his own father. The missionary was a strict but generous man, and Ghaffar saw that although he was a foreigner from across the seas, he was more concerned about the future of these Pathan boys than their own parents were. An idea began to form in Ghaffar’s mind: why not stay on in the school and work for this good man?
But the Guides changed all of that.

The Guides, an elite corps of Pathan and Sikh infantry and cavalry stationed at Mardan, had a long history of distinguished service to the Empire. The sons of wealthy and influential Pathans and Sikhs were even given officers, commissions, which brought further prestige – and a chance for a glory. A guides officer was the equal of an Englishman! At least this was what Barani Kaka, one of Ghaffar’s servants and a lifelong friend, had been telling Ghaffar for the past year. The khan’s won was six foot three and weighed over two hundred pounds, Barani Kaka reasoned: the British would snap him up!

Ghaffar was in his tenth and final year at the high school. He was halfway through the matriculation examination of the university when he learned that he had been granted a commission and should present himself before the recruiting officer the following day. In his exultation, he walked away from the examination on the spot.
Barani Kaka was ecstatic, as was Ghaffar’s aging father. Behram Khan wasted no time in spreading the news to the guest houses in every village between Peshawar and Tangi. Ghaffar had joined the Guides!

After their last class, Ghaffar and Barani Kaka walked down to the Qissa Khawani Bazaar to meet a former schoolmate.

Peshawar had long been the terminus of the great carvan roads leading from Iran and Central Asia to India and the point of departure for passengers and freight sailing down the Indus River to the open seas. Its bazaar was a sprawl of narrow, curving streets of stalls spilling over with the wares of the Central Asian plains: silks, carpets, prayer rugs, precious stones, copper and brass ware ,bright colored shoes with curving toes and silk brocade, great swaths of cloth in shimmering colors, entire armories of rifles and curved daggers. Every street-the street of the Coppersmiths, the shoemakers, the Clothiers, the Storytellers, the Weavers-had its specialty.

The two youths turned onto the Street of the Silversmiths and stopped in a small tea shop where they could see the pure white minarets of the Mahabat Khan mosque. From these towers the Sikhs, during their bloody reign, had hung Pathans-two every day-as a curb to intrigue. Crowds of turbaned men with bears were milling in front of the mosque or sitting in tea shops, sipping dark qahwa tea sweetened with sugar and buffalo milk and puffing contentedly from clay pipes.

From out of the crowd a tall, uniformed Pathan stepped up to their stall, his combed hair glistening, his mile wide. It was their old schoolmate, now with the Guides. Ghaffar, taking in the crisp khaki uniform and the close-cropped Western-style haircut, asked him to sit down. They ordered cups of tea and started to talk.

Before long they heard a sharp, nasal voice: “Well, I’ll be damned!” Two English officers from the Guides were staring at Gaffar’s friend’s hair. “Really!” one of them snorted contemptuously. “Why, you damn `Sardar, Sahib,-you fake Englishman! So you want to be an Englishman, do you?”
Gaffar’s hand leaped toward his friend his friend’s to check the attack. No Pathan would let such an insult go unanswered.
But his friend did not move. The English officers turned away without waiting for a reply.

Ghaffar looked at his friend. His head was lowered. What could he have said? No Guides officer could speak to an Englishman with disrespect-not, that is, if he valued his commission.

Ghaffar turned on Barani Kaka, trembling with anger. “You told me that a Pathan Guide is the Englishman’s equal!”
Barani Kaka tried to calm the young khan, but to no avail.

Shortly after, Ghaffar refuse his commission. He had the feeling that he had rid himself of a curse – and just in time.
At home, however, Behram Khan fumed. Ghaffar had thrown away an opportunity denied to all but the most capable Pathan boys. Well, he decided, the boy would rejoin. Not even his wife could persuade him that his son had acted from deep principle.

This time Behram Khan would not listen-his son would rejoin.

Pressed, Ghaffar wrote his brother in England. The choice, he explained, had been obvious. He could not serve the British government because it turned brave Pathans into slaves-and offered the risk of getting insulted into the bargain.

Khan Sahib had always admired the courage of his younger brother. He would not have done the same thing himself, but they were different. He wrote their father that Ghaffar had done right: no man should be made to suffer dishonor and disrespect. It was reasoning that any Pathan could appreciate. Behram Khan relented. How could he hold out against the pleadings of his wife, the thick-headed righteousness of his youngest son, and now the polished arguments of his eldest? Ghaffar could go on with his studies.

Ghaffar Khan began the next term at in Islamic school in Campbellpur, on the other side of the Indus River. He wanted to learn Arabic. But the dry, hot climate of the Punjab did not suit him. He left Campbelpur and enrolled in a mission school at Aligarh, in the centre of northern India.

Near the end of the term, he received a letter from his father. The reverend Wigram had persuaded Behram Khan that ghaffar should follow his brother to England. He was a good student of geometry; he could live with Khan Sahib and study engineering. The reverend would make all the arrangements.

England! The boy could not believe his eyes. And to live with his brother! His father sent him three thousand rupees to get himself ready to go. His passage was booked on a P. & O. liner that would leave in a few weeks.

Ghaffar hurried home. In the prescribed manner, he went to his mother to ask her permission to go. But at the first words, he saw her hands clench and her eyes fill with tears. “Not my lost boy!” she said in a whisper. No.
Ghaffar argued with her. “Look at our country, Ma. Innocent people are dragged to the courts and men who have committed no crime are put to death. No body’s life is safe here. In England I can learn ways to challenge these bed laws.”

No. Not the lost son. The mullah has told her that a person who goes to a foreign land never return to his native home.

“But it will be only two years-and I’ll be living with my brother!” No. One son, the mullahs said, had already gone from her to the unbelievers, land, and he would never return.
“Ma, I won’t come to any good if I stay here.”

No. They would marry an English girl, as his brother had, and become a Christian, a stranger to his own people.
No.
Khan’s strong shoulders slumped. The stricken face of this woman, who was closer to him than any other person on earth-who knew him better than he knew himself-was enough. “All right, Ma,”
He could not build his future on his mother’s sorrow. “All right. I’ll stay.