On the evening of August 14, 1947, “the Karachi Club, hosted a grand independence banquet (800 covers were laid) where the cities crème de la crème jostled to felicitate the Quaid”, as Pakistan’s first leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah was known. So began a letter by Mohammed Aziz Haji Dossa that ran in Dawn earlier this week. The newspaper, like the nation it serves, was founded by Jinnah.
From the Dawn website, I couldn’t figure out whether the letter, titled “Remembering Ruttie Jinnah”, was part of a continuing debate about Jinnah’s Parsi wife, but Dossa included a reference that will delight jazz lovers. He quotes a portion of Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya’s compilation The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia to remind us that “Ken Mac, the musician and conductor who performed at the Cricket Club of India in Bombay, had been flown by a special Tata Airlines plane to perform at this special event”.