When my father sailed from India to England in 1924, bound for Oxford University, he literally sailed—the ship had a boiler and a screw, but if the wind blew right the crew would also hoist up a sail to save on coal. Returning home in 1930, having succeeded in the exams for the Indian Civil Service, he snoozed as the boat eased into Bombay Roads, tired perhaps after a farewell party on board, the passengers in fancy dress—the strictures of class and color relaxed by the solvent of travel. Waking, he found his mother leaning over his bunk, her tears of joy falling on his face. He had returned gilded, empowered. The thousand men of the Empire’s Indian Civil Service ruled over a population of three hundred million, and he would rule alongside them.

There he is, the profile like Valentino, nicknamed the Sheik by the girls he romanced in England—skin toast-colored, dressed in soft clothes, tweed suits, two dinner jackets kept in rotation. He stood among the vanguard of his race and class, Indian friends from Oxford or London, from Aitchison College in Lahore, who were systematically gaining control of the shining administrative machine that the British had so capably built, their youthful triumphant swagger tempered by humor. Heirs to that great fortune, they thought themselves poised to wash away the colonial stain and build a prosperous nation. Given a free spin in a time machine, I would like to have been with my father then, in undivided India, as he sat in a canal rest house adjoining some village in his district, drinking his single nightly peg of whiskey, tired from the day’s work, order maintained or restored, justice done—in bed by nine, the heavy winter bedding fragrant with dust.

If I am nostalgic for my father’s youth in the districts, however, it is as much for his lighthearted pastimes as for his administrative labors. In Pakistan today, rich and poor live under threat of violence, the sons of governors and generals are kidnapped and kept in holes underground, just as the sons of ten-acre farmers are held. As a district officer, he roamed uninhabited wastes alone, indulging a passion for riding cross-country. One year—this is one of the many stories he told me—posted along the Indus, he developed a sportsman’s fascination with mugger crocodiles, which were to be found in great numbers basking along the banks of the river, and which were reputed to lure maidens into their scaly arms, and certainly did occasionally dine on a fisherman. The difficulty lay in the fact that the mugger would, if not immobilized by the first shot, flip itself into the water with its tail and disappear into a burrow nestled under the riverbank, never to be found. The first shot, therefore, must sever the spine at the base of the neck or the tail, paralyzing the animal. My father used a .220 Swift, a rifle with a small, fast bullet, thrown in a flat trajectory.

As he was busy in those days, hearing cases in his capacity as a magistrate, he fashioned an arrangement to mix business and pleasure. The pleaders, plaintiffs, and defendants would be instructed to meet him at a certain place along the banks of the Indus. There a large flat-bottomed barge, ordinarily used for carrying buffalo, camels, and the occasional wedding party across the river, would have been requisitioned for the day. The court, twenty or thirty strong, would embark, my father sitting on the foredeck at a desk. The barge would cast off and float down the river, guided by men with poles.

My father would knit his brow in concentration as the pleaders began. Suddenly, Mughla, my father’s notoriously unceremonious hunting guide, would roar from his lookout at the bow, “Gator time, boys!”—or, rather, “Pai chamak di hai!” The pleaders faltered, the injured and injuring parties sat down on the gunwale, crossed their legs, smoked cigarettes, chatted about village affairs. My father leapt off the boat as it touched shore, gun in hand, and made a long detour around the sandbar where the mugger lay, balancing its extreme wiliness against its cold-blooded craving for a hot sunbath. Soon, the boat-bound crew would be treated to the sight of their reverend judge’s bum wiggling above the bushes as he crawled into his emplacement. Kawhong! boomed the .220 Swift, its report echoing over the water, and, if his aim was true, Mughla would rush forward, splashing and paddling as he went, to lay hands on the twitching beast.

Now the rivers are polluted and dying, the government forests cut down, groundwater failing. Pervasive corruption has battered all the instruments of governance into hideous shapes. I remember my father, gone these twenty-five years, thoughtful as he concluded this story of Mughla and the crocodiles. He waved his hand vaguely toward the back of the house, where the go-downs contained all sorts of odd lumber, steamer trunks, bric-a-brac from houses sold long ago, his mothballed fancy-dress costume. “I had a complete set of crocodile luggage made from those skins,” he recalled, offering me a generous slice of almond cake from the tea tray. “If it hasn’t been lost, it must be lying there somewhere. But probably someone has carried it away.” ♦