The childhood that bullied me

I was born in a village in Pakistan. My family moved to Jampur when I was small, and I was admitted into a government school there for what I think was a few days. I do not remember the lessons. The only memory I have is of children being beaten by teachers, in the name of discipline. I got some of those beatings.

We did not stay long in Jampur. My family moved to Multan, the city I would learn to think of as home, and we settled in a small mahalla called Diwan Da Bagh. It was a lower-middle-class place. There were leather factories nearby that drained their soiled water and animal skins into the streets. The smell that comes back to me when I think of those years is leather and street water in summer.

This is the part of my childhood I rarely write about, because it does not flatter the man I have spent twenty years building. I was bullied in school for what felt like the entire span of class two through class five. The bullying was the kind that gives you new names you do not want. The names included Chacha and Timepiece. The other one I will not put in writing on a public site. The bullying left a mark on my personality that took the better part of a decade to undo.

What I want to put down honestly is that my parents could see what was happening. They did not have a vocabulary for what to do about it. They did what their tradition told them to do. They renamed me. I was originally named Kashaan. By the time I was three or four I had been renamed to Zeeshan. By six or seven I was renamed again, this time to Waqas. The name stuck.

The renaming was a kind of prayer. My parents were not picking the right magic name. They were trying to give me something to hold onto when nothing else was working. The first name had not produced a healthy child. The second name had not brought a path. The third name was just the one that happened to be there when the path eventually arrived. None of the names changed my luck. The people who picked them, did.

The school where the bullying mostly happened was Razi Public School. The first true memory I have of going to school as a school is of Razi Public. My father, Shafiq Khan Pitafi, also arranged for me to be tutored privately by Miss Meena, who was the daughter of the school’s principal. On my first day with her, she asked me to recite the table of two. I told her I did not know the table of two in Urdu. I knew it only in Saraiki. She told me to recite it in Saraiki. I did. That is the first thing I remember about being taught.

I want to pause on that detail because I think it matters more than the bullying does. The teacher who shaped my first lesson did not insist on Urdu. She made room for the language I had brought with me. I have employed several hundred engineers in my life since then, and the version of me that hires the way I hire was first taught how to be hired by Miss Meena, asking for the table of two in whatever language I had it in.

The other thing I want to put down honestly is that the home around the bullying was not unhappy. My father was a progressive man for his time. My mother was the calm in the home. We did not have luxury. We had food and prayer and books, and the parents who picked me up after each year of school and decided what to do next. By the end of class five, what they decided was that I was being destroyed at Razi Public, and they were going to move me.

The move was to Multan Public School, which had recently opened and was modeled on the famous Catholic colleges of the country. I joined the first batch in 1986. The school was full of the most affluent children in South Punjab. Sons of high-ranking army officers. Sons of landowning families. Sons of doctors. I was the boy from Diwan Da Bagh, with a stutter of confidence and a school record that said I had failed three subjects.

I lied to my classmates for years about where I lived. When they asked, I named a posh area of the city. By the time my family moved to a better house in Gulgasht Colony, the lie had already become a habit. The shame was the deeper thing.

I tell you this because the rest of the journey, the part where things turn around, does not make sense without the part where things were going badly. Every founder profile I read in business magazines starts at the moment the founder discovered their thing. The decade before the discovery is condensed into a sentence. That decade is where the work was done. The discovery is the easy part.

If you are reading this and you have a child who is being bullied in school and is failing in class and is lying to other children about where they live, what I want to tell you is that the only thing that worked for me was a parent who did not give up on me when nothing else was working, and a teacher early on who made room for the language I had brought.

You do not need a heroic intervention. You need someone who keeps holding the door open. The child finds the way through. The door has to stay open.

Mine did. I will tell the rest of the story in the next chapter.