Lahore is just a half-hour hop away from Delhi. Everything has the same feel as Delhi - climate, birds, trees. Only their humans look much healthier, bigger and better-dressed. There are signs of poverty but none of starvation. Pakistanis are more forthcoming in their exhibitions of friendship. A handshake is regarded as too cold, it has to be a bear-hug. It takes all your wiles to avoid strangers pumping teas, coffees and cokes into your system.
Rawalpindi is another half-hour hop from Lahore. And Islamabad a half-hour drive from the airport. It is a sprawling, half-born city at the foot of the Murree hills and much cooler than Lahore. This time of the year chill winds blow over a frosty landscape of leafless trees and uncompleted multi-storeyed buildings. Everything except the strapping Pathans is in miniature: tiny shops with little worth buying; dimly lit during the grey mornings and closed by 5.30 p.m. because of shortage of electric power.
Prohibition is as much of a farce in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan as it was in Morarji Desai’s India. A drinking man can find liquor in the mirages of the Sahara desert. In Pakistan it does not run like the river Ravi in spate, but it does trickle in tumblerfuls in most well-to-do Pakistani homes. You may have whisky served in metal tumblers or in a teapot and have to sip it from a China cup. It costs more than twice as much as in India but also goes down twice as well because it tastes of sin.
Religion lays its heavy hand on the social life of the country. In Lahore, morning azaans blare forth in succession from dozens of mosques lasting a full twenty-five minutes followed by recitation from the Quran till the roar of traffic overcomes the incantations from the holy book.
Our seminar on as secular a subject as relations between nations of Southeast Asia began with the recitation of a tilawat and every Pakistani speaker including the ex-foreign minister, Agha Shahi, started their orations with ‘Bismillah-hir-Rehman-e-Rahim.’ One night I watched a debate on Pak television between the minister of information and broadcasting, and three divines on the role of media in spreading the message of Islam. A maulvi sahib who looked like a twin brother of the Shahi Imam of the Jama Masjid of Delhi was upset that not enough was being done to emphasize the ‘two-nation theory’. The other man, the principal of a Peshawar college, was unhappy that not enough emphasis was laid on the beauty of Islam. The third, a grim-looking lady in dark glasses with her head covered, was disturbed at the exposure of the limbs of girls at play. The minister sahib was on the defensive throughout. The next evening I happened to be sitting on his right at an official dinner hosted by him for the visiting Indian delegation. He read out a very formal speech of welcome. I had to respond. I had a little liquor inside and was emboldened to refer to his interview the evening before and offered him an appropriate sher (verse) for his next confrontation with orthodoxy:
Mulla, gar asar hai dua mein
To masjid hila ke dikha!
Gar naheen to do ghoont pee
Aur masjid ko hilta dekh.
Mulla, if your prayer has power
Let me see you shake the mosque!
If not, take a couple of pegs of liquor
And see how the mosque shakes on its own.
There was a roar of applause in which the minister joined. Then he whispered in my ear: ‘If these fellows had their way, they would make our girls’ hockey teams play in burqas.’
The difference between Indian and Pakistani college girls is that in India you look at their assemblages to see if there are any pretty faces among them; in Pakistan it is the other way round: you look to see if there is any who is not pretty. Hence, despite a very tight schedule of interviews and visitors, when Mrs Philbus, principal of Kinnaird College for Women, asked me to come to speak to her girls, I readily agreed to do so. My friend M.A. Rahman warned me: ‘You know it is now a government college and very conservative. Be careful about what you say. Or the parents would want to know why the principal invited a man like you.’
I told them exactly what I had in mind: that I had agreed to come because as Sadia Dehlavi had said of me that if I were a woman I’d be always pregnant because of my inability to say no. The girls roared with laughter. I told them that I wished their principal (she is as attractive as her girls) had a similar inability to say no, the consequences might have been more fruitful. Another burst of laughter with the principal joining in. I told them never to take anything for granted - neither God nor scriptures nor social norms but think for themselves and reject whatever did not stand the test of logic and reason. They took it in their stride. I told them to learn to make their own mistakes and not leave important decisions, like who they should marry and what careers they should adopt, to their parents. They cheered wildly. Then I told them about the difference between them and Indian college girls. They yelled triumphantly as if they had won an Indo-Pak war. Far from being upset with me for what I had said, Mrs Philbus thanked me profusely for saying things which would make her girls think and talk about for many days. ‘You get away with murder,’ said Rahman ruefully on our way back home.
For me Pakistan is Manzur Qadir, the greatest human being I have known. He was the ablest, the most truthful and the humblest of men I have ever met. He has been dead for many years but I feel his presence around me whenever I have to make a decision. I visit his grave every time I am in Lahore the same way as devotees do ziarat at the tombs of Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer or at Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya’s in Delhi. The only difference is that although Manzur was also somewhat of a Sufi he was denounced as a mulhid (unbeliever) by the thekedars of the faith. He wrote some poetry in praise of God but was much more spirited when he recited his highly pornographic compositions.
Miani is Lahore’s biggest graveyard. It has thousands of graves scattered amidst dusty mounds, mazars and jujube trees. Manzur’s wife, Asghari, and her sister, Husnara, were with me when we drove into the maze of narrow lanes. It took us quite some time to locate our destination. Word had gone round of my intended pilgrimage. A cluster of men with Munshi Saleem (Manzur’s assistant) were present with flowers and a press photographer. Manzur’s grave was covered with fresh rose petals and joss-sticks sending up fragrant smoke. I was very disappointed. I wanted a few quiet moments with my friend and to recite the fateha; they made it into a kind of a press conference. I decided to get away as fast as I could.
It was a grey, misty morning. And there was a long way to go. I had to cross three rivers: Ravi, Chenab and the Jhelum before I would get to my destination, village Hadali, over three hundred kilometres away. I was loaned a new Japanese station-wagon with retired Colonel Gul Hayat Awan to act as my escort. Driver Ameen Khan, a Pathan from Bannu, placed his hands on the steering-wheel and intoned loudly, ‘Bismillah!’ Every journey in Pakistan begins with the name of God. And quite often with Noah’s prayer before he set out on his famous Ark: ‘Go safely and return safely.’
Over the years Lahore has become more and more unrecognizable. New buildings have come up to smother the old. Dual highways with overbridges have been laid to cope with its exploding population and the chaotic traffic of cycles, rickshaws, scooters, tongas, donkey and camel carts, and buses which bulge on either side as if doubly pregnant. On the way out of the city I could barely recognize landmarks I had once known well: Chauburjeem, D.A.V. College (since Islamized), Gol Bagh, the lawcourts and Government College. We passed the Badshahi mosque and Ranjit Singh’s samadhi to cross the Ravi. Jehangir’s mausoleum was lost in the morning mist.
Sheikhupura I remembered well. Other towns we passed through had become faint echoes of the past: Choor Kana, Pindi Bhattian, Chiniot, Rabwah (headquarters of the Qadiani Muslims), Sargodha. The contrast with our Punjab was telling: bumpy roads, not many tractors and vast tracts of uncultivated land. I did not see a single seed, fertilizer or insecticide depot; only one cold storage plant and one silo. The chaikhanas en route had none of the basketful of eggs that have become the main features of Haryana-Punjab dhabas.
We arrived at our destination two hours behind time. I was born there
seventy years ago and had not been back since the family migrated to Sargodha and then to Delhi sixty years ago. All I remembered of Hadali was a tiny hamlet with less than three hundred families - mostly Muslims of Baloch extraction divided into clans, Waddhals, Mastials and Awans. Tall, rugged, handsome men with Romanesque features proud of their horsemanship, falconry (the nobs sported hawks on their hands) and martial tradition. The tiny railway station had a marble plaque stating that 437 men of the village (which meant every able-bodied adult) had fought in the First World War and seven had laid down their lives - the highest proportion of fighting men of any village in India. Their women, I recalled, were equally tall, slender-waisted, well-rounded and carried three pitchers of water on their heads and one under each arm as they glided by with downcast eyes.
Hadali was then lost among sand dunes stretching as far as one could see up to the Salt Range of Khewra. The only vegetation was some date palms. There were a couple of saline ponds (tobhas) which we shared with our buffaloes and which were our chief sources of drinking water as wells were deep and often dry. Sand dunes were our playground. We boys went out together in the evenings to defecate. We watched dung beetles roll our excreta into balls and push them into their subterranean larders. We played on the sands through dusk under starlight and moonlight till impatient voices summoned us home.
No Hindus or Sikhs remained in Hadali after Partition. My ancestral home was taken over by Muslim refugee families from Rohtak. My generation of villagers slept in dusty graveyards. How would their sons receive me? Would anyone of them remember the names of my forefathers?
As we pulled up near the side-road beside the signpost in Urdu reading ‘Hadali’, our car was surrounded by elders of the village. They introduced themselves: Malik Khuda Baksh Tiwana, Malik Habib Nawaz Tiwana and names I failed to memorize. They shook me by both my hands, embraced me and smothered me with gold-tasselled garlands inscribed with words of welcome. Rockets exploded and burst into coloured showers. I was put back in the car to be driven through the village lanes. Men stood in the doorways shouting ‘Khush Aamdeed’, women flung flower petals from rooftops. The house I was born in was specially decorated for the occasion. It was a hero’s welcome given to a man who had done nothing heroic besides wanting to see what his native village looked like after six decades.
Nothing remained of the sand dunes or the tobhas. A canal had turned the desert into greenery and village ponds into swamps covered with hyacinth. The population of Hadali had more than trebled. The one building that they preserved and left unoccupied was the dharamsal where Sikhs and Hindus had worshipped.
In the government school compound the entire male population of Hadali was assembled round a flagmast flying the Pakistani flag. After recitation of tilawat from the Quran, addresses of welcome were read out by a succession of notables, all beginning with ‘Bismillah-hir-Rehman-e-Rahim - and in execrable Urdu which has become the language of oratory. I replied in my village dialect. All I could say to the entirely Muslim audience was that to me coming to Hadali was my Umra and my Haj. Overcome by emotion, I broke down, and made an ass of myself. They loved me all the more as I had given a demonstration of my affection for the village which was once mine and was now theirs. I still regard it as my vatan (homeland).
There is something elemental about one’s place of birth. It is said that when Prophet Muhammad, after eleven years of exile in Medina, returned in triumph to Mecca, he quickly did the rounds of the Kaaba, and asked to be left alone. He spent the night crying by the grave of his first wife, Khadijah. If they had left me alone, I would have spent the night wandering about the lanes of Hadali in the moonlight.
Southern Safari
It must have been the massive inferiority complex from which we northerners suffer vis-à-vis the ‘Madrasis’ that brought it on me. As the plane began its descent towards Kumbakonam airport, my ears began to lose their power of hearing - the roar of the engine faded in the distance; announcements to fasten seat-belts followed by ‘no smoking’, ‘fold tables’ and ‘keep chairs upright’ were barely audible. Nothing unusual in poorly pressurized aircraft. The cold and sore throat which I had carried with me from Goa made it worse. I apologized to the gentlemen who had come to receive me: ‘I’ve gone deaf.’ They assured me it would pass in a few minutes. It did not. For the two days and nights I was in Madras I had to have every question put to me repeated louder; while orating at the IIT and later to the Inter-Faith group at Hotel Connemara, I could not hear my own voice. I am sure I must have been shouting like most deaf people. Neither wax dissolvents, nor trying to blow air out of the ear helped. What did help was getting the flight out of Madras to Bangalore; the further north you go from Tamil Nadu, the less the inferiority complex and the psychosomatic illnesses that follow. Moral: Punjabis unsure of matching their wits against Madrasis should stay away from Tamil Nadu.
I was expecting to see a bit of rain in Madras. There was not a drop. It was hot, humid, and still. Gulmohars were in flower just as they are in Delhi before the monsoon sets in. Like Delhi in mid-summer, electric power went off without prior warning and taps went dry. No great problem for me, as I was staying in an old mansion with high ceilings and thick walls. When my mouth was full of toothpaste and not a trickle of water came out of the tap, I rinsed my mouth with Campa Cola. There was plenty of that about as my hostess Surjit Kaur’s son (Sunny) ran the fizz plant. Fluoride toothpaste and Cola make a pleasant mouthwash. Washing my face and getting shampoo out of my beard was a problem I could not solve on my own.
Other surprises awaited me. Lunch at the Madras Club, the oldest and swankiest in town, was a non-starter. My hostess assured me it had the best chef in town and I could invite any friends I liked. Rajmohan Gandhi was one; dimpled and ever-smiling Geeta (Padmanabhan), a doctor, was the other. She warned me not to go barefoot to the club (she had seen me always shoeless in the hotel at Goa). We drove in to the stately club portico and walked through its spacious Victorian lounge into the dining room. A black-coated and necktied waiter scanned me from turban to toe and announced. ‘Not allowed, sir. You have to wear socks and shoes. Also must have collar in your shirt. Club rules.’ I was the only defaulter in the party. ‘I told you so,’ reprimanded Geeta. ‘I am not barefooted,’ I protested, ‘I have sandals.’ They were not good enough. We were turned back. In this very club when Rajaji (Rajmohan’s grandfather) and prohibition ruled, I had been surreptitiously served Scotch in metal tumblers.
‘Very conservative city, Madras,’ remarked Rajmohan Gandhi. They don’t like changing.’ Too true. Somehow I could not reconcile austere caste-marks and white shirt-lungi-wearing addicts of the spiritual columns on the back page of The Hindu who form the backbone of the city allowing clubs to get away with nonsensical rules about socks and shoes.
‘When there is a place like this why should anyone live anywhere else?’ I asked myself as I stepped out of the airbus into the cool, fresh air of Bangalore. Why must we suffer the stifling heat and the duststorms of the northern plains when we have this place where rain-soaked breezes blow throughout the summer months? Why shiver in the biting cold when you can enjoy a warm sun throughout the winter? Here we have our own garden of Eden where you awaken to the piping notes of the whistling thrush and open your window to a casement of dew-washed trees in flower -pink cassias, African tulips, begonias - all in full glory amid weird-shaped arucarias. All day long koels and barbets call from dense green foliage and the evenings are fragrant with jasmine and maulsari.
There are many reasons why we cannot all be living in Bangalore. For one, it is already bursting at the seams with its 5 million inhabitants and cannot take another 900-plus million. In any case we can’t abandon the rest of Bharatvarsha just to be able to live more comfortably in Karnataka, can we? There is a stronger reason why people like me must put aside any notion of migrating to Bangalore for some time to come. Gundu Rao regards journalists as vermin, like snakes and scorpions fit only to be trod upon. He may have learnt this from t
he experience of his predecessor. Devaraj Urs tried to win journalists over by granting them land at throwaway prices to build houses of their own. They sold their allotments at profit. Today Bangalore has a journalists’ colony with no journalists.
Compared to homes of north Indians of the same class, south Indian homes appear very bare. The climate is not conducive to having carpets; apart from the elderly who may have grandfather armchairs to doze and daydream in, others sit and eat on the floor -so there is a minimum of furniture. Pictures, if any, will be colour prints of gods, goddesses or calendars. Almirahs are for storing things; nails in the walls or just a string across the room on which shirts and lungis can be hung are their wardrobes. This is likely to be the style of living of a family with an income of three thousand rupees per month. The only things of ostentation are the gold and diamonds that the ladies wear in their ears and noses. And their ornate silk saris. The south Indian woman’s pride is her kitchen in which she spends more time than women of the north. They are rightly proud of their cooking which is most sensible being easy to digest and extraordinarily tickling to the palate. Any Indian who is doing a sedentary job would be best advised to shun the greasy north Indian diet and switch over to uthapam, vada, idli and dosa with delicate chutney. A new dish which I can recommend is thayir saadam, a delicious rice-and-curd preparation spiced with ginger, garlic and caraway seeds.
Sex,Scotch and Scholarship Page 12
