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.
A yahoo news of today:
A Scottish school says fountain pens boost performance:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061210/ap_on_hi_te/ap n_fountain_pen_lives
Naveed, yes, I have a little piece I once wrote on the Dollar Pen. Actually, a very specfic model of Dollar and Eagle; the transparent one. Let me see if I can dig it out. Will see if our editors will tolerate two posts on fountain pens.
lol Owais..I remember those “Ink Removers” that would destroy pages fater pages…
Naveed, I agree with you…I love the keyboard too, typing faster and the outcome much cleaner…
The ink remover I remember was a ‘50 paisa’ bottle. It was probably some kind of bleach formula. It just turned the ink to invisible white color while destroying the page underneath too.
In the spirit of Dollar and Eagle pens…Do any of you remember white mark out pens that erased the blue ink? I remember that they were messy and if you squeezed the pen too hard the white liquid would ruin the page… My nemisis through school!
I do remember Dollar 777 and Chinese WingSung too. Dollar was very good for writing Urdu.
Wiping ink with hair was a common practise. When there are no tissue paper napkins around then the choice of cleaning a leaking pen gets limited to wiping it with hair.
I was never a big fan of the fountain pen. Still am not. Hd to use it but my hand writing is still bad. But I do remember rubbing it on my hair becasue I always ended up with leaky pens and that was the easiest way to get the ink away; use your hair as a mop!
No one has mentioned DOLLAR pens which competed with Eagle. There used to be model names like Dollar 777 which had the wide “nib” so it was more suited to Urdu than English. Getting regular thrashing from teachers as my fingers were always tainted with ink marks…one teacher called me “parchoon kee dukaan”, so untidy was my work. At college where ballpens were allowed, I found my productivity increase manifold and hence the real beginning of my love affair with writing urdu. See the khulasa (life sketches) of Mir, Ghalib, Momin etc had to be 8+ pages long. So we used to buy the best roller pens & time ourselves as to how many “supplementary” exam books we would be able to fill on the actual day of exams
On a complete tangent, I find that I can type faster than I can write with a pen. Like reading printed material having taken a backseat compared to reading off the computer display, the pen has also lost its past glor to the ubiquitous keyboard. But may be that is is only me