The Garage

My dad's garage was the cradle of my entrepreneurial keera (bug). It may not have been born there, but it was definitely raised, nourished and developed there.

The place had a huge impact on who I am today. The way I do business, my social skills, my ability to detect and filter out BS, even my passion for cars. After my parents' upbringing, it was this place and the years I spent in Mangla with army and gentry brats that probably defined me.

I started working at my dad's garage when I was about sixteen. My mum would send me to help him after school, but very soon I fell in love with the place and looked for excuses to go there.

All newbies started in the left-hand bay, the tyre bay. First you learned to check and correct tyre pressures. Then to jack up cars, remove wheels and check for punctures. We had a tyre changer and wheel balancer at a time when tyres were still being changed with a hammer and levers.

After learning to repair punctures, change tyres and balance wheels, I graduated to the right-hand bay for wheel alignment and tracking. I also perfected my driving skills there, because most customers were too scared to drive their cars over the pit.

When you learn to drive cars with failed brakes and double-dip clutches onto a pit, using a big mirror to see where you are going, you can drive anything, anywhere.

The centre bay was for engines and mechanical work. We had a Crypton engine analyser. Connected to a running engine with wires and sensors, it essentially carried out an ECG. Even the screen and printout looked like something from a hospital ICU ward.

One of my most vivid memories is the day I got my first tip.

It was midday, probably forty to forty-five degrees. A customer pulled up outside the tyre bay and pointed to his front tyre. He didn't even roll down his window. He just sat in his air-conditioned car.

The workers were at lunch. My dad got up to serve him, but I stopped him and said I would go. I checked the air in his tyres in the scorching heat, then stepped back to let him leave. We didn't charge for correcting air pressure.

He opened his window a few millimetres and slid out two rupees.

I looked at my dad, who indicated that I should take it. After the customer drove away, I handed him the money.

“Keep it. It's your tip.”

I felt a whole load of emotions I was probably too young to understand. Pleasure at my first earnings. Anger at the arrogance of someone who hadn't even rolled down his window to acknowledge me or say thanks. The thought that he probably saw me as an uneducated chota, the helper or apprentice everyone in a workshop used and abused.

But the strongest feeling was appreciation for the workers who changed and repaired tyres in that heat every day.

When I was twenty, my father left for the UK to earn money to build us a family home. I was still studying, and he left me running the workshop.

We had built a small office at the back of the tyre bay. A few days after he left, I opened WordPerfect on my computer, used my Epson nine-pin dot-matrix printer and printed a sign for the office door:

“Advance Auto Workshop - Chief Executive, Anjam Sohail.”

My chest would swell every time I walked through that door.

I knew then that I wanted to own and run my own business. From that cabin in the tyre bay, I also started a computer and mobile phone business. I was selling computers before we had internet in the town, and mobile phones in a town that had no mobile service.

I dealt with people from all walks of life. Workers, businessmen, bureaucrats, politicians and army officers from nearby Mangla. Army mechanics brought their Land Cruisers to me for fine-tuning. That was where my passion for Land Cruisers developed.

For customers, an educated, English-speaking motor mechanic who could build them a computer and sell them a mobile phone was a novelty.

I ran the garage and my other businesses until I completed university. I became Microsoft certified and trained other people for their MCSE. My first class included three of my former school, college and university teachers.

I made good money teaching, but I felt I had peaked. The IT industry in the town was years behind. It was time to leave.

I thought that if I was going to leave my hometown, I might as well leave the country. So I moved to the UK.

On the back wall of the garage's middle bay were posters of a Ferrari Testarossa, a Lamborghini Countach and a Porsche 911.

Believe.