I do not know whether Murree’s Lintot restaurant still exists. On that day, however, it served us excellent breakfast in its balcony. It was there that the news of Nehru’s illness caught up with us. He died at the precise moment when the Sheikh set foot in Muzaffarabad. The thought uppermost in my mind was that the capital of Pakistan-held Kashmir was not the best place to to be in at the time of Nehru’s passing. But what followed stunned me.

The huge crowd that had assembled to welcome Sheikh Abdullah instantly turned into a mourning mass. Every man, woman and child, hands raised skywards, was praying for Nehru. Some of them were crying. No one touched the elaborate wazwan laid out. Suddenly, there was commotion at a short distance. A tall man was shouting my name, beating his head with both his hands and cursing his “black tongue”. It was Hafeez Jullundari. As he apologised to me profusely, Sheikh Sahib arrived to calm him. Instead, the two embraced each other and sobbed.

Agha Shaukat, a Pakistani official, drove Prem Bhatia (my guru and then Delhi editor of Indian Express) and me back to Rawalpindi. On the way he stopped at a roadside dhaba and insisted that we must have tea. A trickle of people from a nearby village turned into a torrent. They all offered us condolences, adding: “He was a great man”.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then Ayub’s foreign minister, placed a PIA plane at the disposal of those of us who had assembled at his house. Its crew, overworked because it had flown in from Gilgit, could not have been more courteous or considerate.

... contd.