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Storming heaven: A revolt in Makkah

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NADEEM F. PARACHA   The carpenter In 2010, I met a carpenter named Mateeullah (aka Matee Ghara). 'Ghara' in Urdu means carpenter. Matee at the time seemed to be in his early 70s. He was from my ancestral hometown, Makhad in the Attock District (North Punjab). Matee was hired as a carpenter by my paternal grandfather in the 1950s and early 1960s to work in the textile factory that he was setting up in Karachi at the time. Matee Ghara quit the job in the late 1960s when I was born. He remembered me well, even though I had no recollection of him. Matee had quit because he managed to bag a job in Makkah, the Muslim holy city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. However, I did remember him visiting my grandfather once, sometime in the mid-1980s. But when I mentioned this to him, he actually became sad. Surprised by his reaction, I asked whether I had triggered a memory he’d rather not talk about. ‘No, no,  puttar  (son) …’ he responded in Punjabi. ‘I’d come t...