The year 1951, which was Saeed’s final year as a master’s student at Government College Lahore, saw the college’s distinguished former student Abdus Salam return from Cambridge. Salam went on to share the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics and became without doubt Pakistan’s most eminent (and famous) scientist. In this part of the memoirs,  Saeed describes his early memories of the great man — in fact their paths were to cross several times later in their lives. As for Saeed himself, he was at a crossroads: whether to pursue his love of literature or science, or somehow both. Eventually, he applied for — and won — a scholarship to do a PhD at Cambridge, being recommended by his tutor Rafi Chaudhari to the Cambridge Nobel laureate James Chadwick as “the most brilliant student he had come across in his 25 years of teaching”. The boat for England was due to leave on 14 September 1953 — which gave Saeed just enough time to go on a trek of the Himalayas with his friends.
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