Where is Sips ?

OCTOBER 1997 - With Mahmud Sipra you never know what’s coming next, but although we had on some occasions discussed the ‘London Return’ operation, it was still a jolt that he had decided to fly into British airspace once more and present himself to the authorities for the caper that shook the Bank of England over a decade back. I wonder if the Queen’s visit triggered it off or if his world getting smaller and tighter by the day. Perhaps we’ll never know.

To the world, Sipra, but to some of us, Sips has had an extraordinary innings which shows every sign of continuing with more twists and turns than the road to Khunjerab Pass. He has done everything and anything, charmed thousands, notably women, among them some very sensible ones, cooked up deals that never came about and the ones that did, invariably left some people angry, frustrated with slightly empty pockets. He has done advertising, that mad and emotionally exhausting profession, made commercials, set up extravagant state-of-the-mad-art studios, signed up leading ladies of the starlet variety and then never completed the grand projects for which they were hired and fed the golden dream. He has, in an earlier career, gone into shipping and shipped all kinds of things, some of which apparently never arrived. He has been the man behind the film about the horses from Khyber that also never arrived and when the dust settled, the hotel where Sips had lodged in great style, was left with some embarrassing accounts to sort out.

His capers have spawned hundreds of stories, some of them bordering on the incredible but almost all are strokes of genius, though admittedly the kind that cost someone somewhere, something. But then Sips is incorrigible and has functioned on the basis that since there is a fool born every minute, it is possible that there is also someone who can reaffirm that the fool is the fool. In other words, if you were prepared to be taken for a ride, Sips obliged. A gifted speaker with a fine accent, Sips can sell you any dream. By the time it has turned into a nightmare, Sips has moved on to the next dream. His persuasive and hypnotising way of setting up the deal has had the same effect on hard boiled business tycoons and soft boiled ladies. Both sides fell for it each time because, and this is my opinion only, he sold them what they wanted sold to them. To women who were no stars, he sold stardom. The line of fillies, fresh off the trees and from the other side of the track, who made a bee-line for his polished and inspired act, is a long line and many women whom one cannot name, fell for the story, hook, line and sinker. There were a few, perhaps even two who went along with all the hype and allowed themselves to be used, because they genuinely cared and loved him. Those too must remain nameless. As for the business tycoons, Sips delivered now and then, but by and large, he did not and extravagant promises in the end were truncated and nailed together to provide some solace to the investors who had pumped in rather large sums of money into projects that were not ever going to get off the ground.

But as things got tighter and tighter, the inventive genius that Sips is, stayed ahead, just barely, but ahead. While the line of debtors grew and while the standards of these assorted ladies and gents fell gradually, the tycoon replaced by the irate ‘paan’ shop owner, Sips carried on, in style. If he was fazed and at the end of his tether, he kept it to himself. The stories about the deals Sips sold to people are legendary, starting with the one where he sandwiched pictures of a dance party in Karachi in the ‘70s and snared his first wife, to the much-quoted fur story of New York, the scrap-bearing ship that ‘sank’ in the Atlantic but whose crew including the Skipper’s poodle, ‘miraculously’ survived, the grain that never arrived to the chagrin of the Iranians, the BBC team that was filming his life in a restaurant in Lahore where Sips and friends resided for countless lunches and dinners courtesy of the excited owners who were going to become ‘famous’. These and dozens of others, each bearing the signature of a highly fertile imagination and a gift for selling anything to anyone, form a volume that needs more space than the 800 words my editor allows me.

Sips has many enemies no doubt and many people whom he has wronged. He has ‘borrowed’ money from friends without the least intention of paying it back, he has set up people and made commitments he had little intention of keeping. In between he has seduced any amount of women with fantasy dreams and each time he has bounced off blithely from situations where most of us would simply keel over. The British episode is the latest. He spelled it out last year, the whole bit. Looking back at Pakistan for perhaps the last time (as he boards the British Airways flight - Sips is great on details), the arrival at Heathrow, the trial at Old Baileys, the cell and his copy of the Guardian daily. Sips had worked it out. Now he seems to have gone and shot the commercial. He told me he’d get five years but then he would walk out a free man. We will all have to wait. If he is indeed in the slammer in London, rest assured, Sips is hard at work, cooking up another scheme to make it big again.