The Reminiscences of Zafrulla Khan — Page 185
169 REMINISCENCES OF SIR MUHAMMAD ZAFRULLA KHAN Conditions in Karachi at that time were very difficult. I had taken my wife and daughter with me from Bhopal to Karachi, but there were no accommodations for us at Karachi. I was staying as a guest with my friend, Syed Amjad Ali, and my wife and daughter were staying as guests with my wife's younger sister, whose husband had already been posted at Karachi and they had an apartment allotted to them. Our things were lying scattered about anyhow. In the middle of all this I had to go to Rangoon, whence I returned on the 7th of January. The flying boat by which I was travelling was met at Kurangi Creek by Mr. Hilali, one of our officers in the Foreign Service, now our High Commissioner in New Delhi and lately our Ambassador in Moscow, who told me that India had taken the Kashmir case to the Security Council and that the Security Council was meeting on the 12th of January to hear the case. My passage had been booked for the following afternoon from Karachi to New York, and I had to get ready to leave as quickly as I could. It was very difficult to get ready in such a short time, with my personal belongings scattered about and not knowing where anything was, not knowing where the relevant documents could be got hold of. Chaudhri Muhammad Ali, who later became Finance Minister and was for some time Prime Minister, was then Secretary General to the Cabinet and was to accompany me, also Mr. Ayub, who is at present our Ambassador at Bonn. I left it to them to collect whatever relevant material was available. There was no time to read anything. We literally stuffed all the documents etc. into a gunny-bag, for we had no other receptacle available, and we started on our journey to New York. We took a Pan- American plane but, as it turned out, fortunately, by the time we arrived in London, they discovered there was some mechanical defect that had to be attended to, and we were detained in London for a day. This gave me an opportunity of studying some of the documentation and to start preparing our reply to the case that India had presented to the Security Council. I was able to work one whole day in London and to dictate the first draft of our reply. Then we started from London and carried on after a stop in Shannon, as far as Gander, Newfoundland. In Gander, we were detained by bad weather. There were several feet of snow, and we were accommodated in wooden cabins at the airport - they were heated - and the stenographer who accompanied us started typing out what I had