By Owais Mughal
Being away from Pakistan for ten long years, I have missed many small things which I always used to take for granted. One such small thing was the joy of writing with a fountain pen.
A Fountain pen was first patented in US in the year 1884 but since then writing with it has become a lost art. I have shopped around for fountain pens in US and the cheapest ones I have found cost around $15 and they writes so bad that Pakistani ‘Eagle’ brand can beat then anytime and anyplace. Eagle is an international brand but their product in Pakistan was one of the best or at least it feels like it after all these years of nostalgic memories.
Twenty years ago a Pakistani ‘Eagle’ used to cost around rupees four. I preferred to write Urdu with Eagle because its nib was not that fine. For writing English, I had a ‘Made in China, ‘HERO’ brand pen which was priced around rupees eleven. Then there were some really cheap fountain pens which gave wonderful Urdu writing. One of them was ‘RAJA’ (The Prince) fountain pen which cost around a princely sum of rupees 2 only. Another cheap fountain pen was ‘Dollar’ which also cost around rupees three.
I had my Raja pen’s nib cut at an angle (Z-nib) to write the ‘Nastaleeq Urdu’ script. I never mastered the art of writing ‘Nastaleeq Urdu’ or calligraphy but it was fun to at least try writing it.
We used a ‘z-nib’ fountain pen to write Sindhi also. I remember that some of my class fellows used ‘z-nib’ to write complete exam papers of Sindhi. They however, always struggled to finish the paper in time too.
For those of us who graduated high school from Sindh Board may remember that one question in Sindhi ‘salees’ (easy) board exam was about writing a Sindhi poem in ‘khush-khat’ (good hand-writing). This question was repeated every year and everyone practiced very hard in it to score some sure-shot marks. I used a ‘z-nib’ fountain pen to write that poem.
Somehow improving hand-writing has always been a big deal in Pakistan’s school system. The generation before mine used to write on a washable wooden board (takhti) and used ink-dip calligraphic pens for Urdu. We didn’t use ‘takhti’ but up to grade X we were not allowed to use ball-point pens as it was supposed to destroy our hand-writings. This strict rule relaxed a bit in Grade XI and XII but I 
remember a certain teacher in Grade XII used to throw ball-points out of the class window if he saw anyone writing with it.
Writing with ball-points and markers for the past many years made me crave for fountain pens so much so that on a trip to Taiwan in 2003, fountain pens were the first and the last shopping I did. I now proudly own a collection of fountain pens and I write with them whenever I crave.
Today while editing this article I practiced my Parker again and copied this ‘sher’ (A poem verse) on a white sheet of paper. While my hand-writing is no way close to good or calligraphic my pen however is a perfect Urdu scripter.
Hopefully on my next trip to Pakistan I’ll buy a few more fountain pens.
Owais Mughal grew up in Karachi and is an Electrical Engineer now living in St. Louis, Missouri.
I definitely think that the writing with a fountain pen is much better. I miss fountain pens here too and you get a cartridge. I used to have my favourite ones and I assumed that some were more luckier too. Parker ones are quite good and if you really want to spend money then it is waterman
Before I moved to Canada, I used to run a stationery shop in Karachi and at one point we used to sell a lot of fountain pens. But slowly the number of people using fountain pens started to go down and most of the population moved to ball pens. What a pity! Writing with a fountain pen is a great experience.
I started using the fountain pen, when i was in grade VI. i still remember our hands stained with blue ink in the begining. I used more Wing Sung pens which was a Chinese brand. Dollar was the famous ink in those days !!!!
Oh what a relief I had when I could write with a Ball pen, specially a fatter one…I hated the slow motion, stylish writing that you can accomplish with the fountain pen. I cared more for speed and what was being written….but our teachers were obsessive about this, as you all know….I have broken a ton of fountain pens in my day, trying to write faster and faster…
We used to use a “Z” Nib (Point) fountain pen, made by some Pakistani company to write Urdu headings…only for extra points…
I was shocked the first time I saw a fellow student wipe excess ink off the pen by running it through his hair
Apparently it was not such an unusual practice.
Bilal, Yes I remember those yellow ‘Piano’ ball-points
They were/are very light weight and we could’ve filled more pages in descriptive exams if we were allowed to use them instead of fountains.
Fountain pens were also used to throw ink at eachother during intra class conflicts
I went to school with Nazis who demanded that i only use fountain pens and never touch a ballpoint. I found the practice rather lame as one keeps running out of ink, getting their hands dirty, bending the nib etc.
For me, the keyboard is mightyer than the sowrd.
My mother might still have some of my school uniform shirts with big ink blothes that somehow never washed away (even when the ink was marked washable). I also remember how writing with a ball point to tak enotes (when fountain pens were the only ones ‘allowed’) was considered rebellious. And those of us who sneaked in yellow colored PIANO pens were considered ‘cool’. And Parker, whch most people only had if someone gifted it to them, was kept unused until special occasions arose. My mom gave me one when I was admitted to a college in the US, thinking I might need to write with more expensive pens now that I was going to ‘Wilayat’.
Nice article!