The Lost Generation

by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia

  ‘With the grace of the Almighty, the descendants of the Nizam’s family still come to me to buy ittar,’ says Syed over the racket as we drive back to his shop in an open autorickshaw, crossing the Mecca Masjid near Charminar.

  ‘They particularly like the oud fragrance. Like the kings and queens, oud is a majestic, expensive perfume made from rare agarwood. Maybe it’s one of the most valuable perfumes I have made. Fakirs often experimented with woods to burn beacons and bonfires back in the days of yore,’ he explains. ‘Sometimes, they mistakenly used perfumed woods like agarwood while cooking. When these woods are burnt slowly with sugar, they produce a thick, concentrated smell.’ He closes his eyes, as if inhaling the smell. For centuries, the original location of the bukhur preparation was Yemen’s highest peak, Shibaam. Scholars, writers, students and historians also used it in those times; it created a pious atmosphere of learning and knowledge. Some ingenious minds began bottling it and it became a favourite with the Nizams.’

  He continues, ‘I often import the wood now . . .’ He pauses as the jangle of the rickshaw’s unsteady body echoes in our ears as it is driven over bumps, squeezing through microscopic spaces available on the roads. A swarm of men in woven skullcaps walk out after afternoon prayers at Mecca Masjid as the auto stops at a signal. Some have dabbed shamama on their wrists, a light and viscous fragrance, perhaps taking a drop and rubbing it between their palms to beef up the smell with the moist heat. The women would have added a drop of firdaus to their pail of water, washing their hair with it. They leave behind a trail of fragrance on the street as they walk by, mingling with the fragrance of lamb roasting in ghee at a biryani house.

  ‘Some say the Mughals brought ittar to India, but then I debated this with my neighbour, this learned Kayasth5. He says Ayurveda introduced it centuries ago, as long ago as the sixth century. It’s just that they call it aromatherapy nowadays.’ He laughs as we get out of the vehicle a few metres away from his shop, his time-worn, bony legs taking a bit longer than mine to unfold.

  Tracing its potted history, the earliest distillation of ittar is mentioned in the Ayurvedic text Charaka Samhita, multiple references advising daily usage for its aphrodisiac and psychological healing effects. Varahamihira, the fifth-century scholar, jots down the method to create the bakula scent by extracting the essence from seashells by the method of distillation. Later, the use of agarwood oil is advocated in the seventh century in Harshacharita for perfuming rooms and oneself.

  We have walked halfway across to his shop when he stops by the mosque; a shop worker is sprinkling water on the unpaved ground to prevent dust from flying around. The smell of the water on the sand wafts in the air. Syed stares at the worker for a few moments before walking up to him, cupping his hands before his pipe for the water. He splashes the cool liquid on his face and then combs some into his hair and sprinkles some on his kurta. ‘Khakhi ittar.’ He recognizes the fragrance—the one with the ephemeral smell of wet earth after the first rains, of humid, rainy Indian monsoons. ‘Allah! Lajwab khushboo hai woh [Lord Almighty, it is a fragrance beyond compare.] This fragrance, like Allah’s first rains on dry earth, has been captured in the bottle after maturing wet earth in cauldrons. Which other profession can bring you so close to God?’ He smiles.

  ‘Most of our kind set up their shops here because it is near Mecca Masjid,’ he says as we continue walking, leaving the mosque behind. ‘One should always smell good near places of worship,’ he whispers, quietening near a group of beggars clothed in rags, who sit, hoping for alms from the devout. ‘It is abominable, to attend the mosque for those who have bad breath like them, or smell bad with odour from the armpits. It is mustahab to ask them to go away from the mosque. Ittar wallahs sit here to help people smell better. Our ittar is alcohol-free, and using alcohol for Muslims is forbidden anyway. But ittar . . . ittar is ru parwar. While bowing before the Malik, ittar deepens your faiths.’

  ‘What about those who can’t afford the luxury of ittar,’ I ask him.

  With that cliquishness that marks the cultural gatekeepers of society, he remarks, ‘Har aadmi Allah ko khush nahi rakh sakta, na hi Allah sabka rakhta hai [Not every man can make God happy. Neither can God make every man happy].’

  Syed also has quaint statistics on his ittar. For instance, women from the old city like pure garden bouquets, whereas ones from the other side of the Musi river,6 with bigger bank accounts, like fancy odours with no boutonniere smells.

  ‘But there is one fragrance,’ he says, seating himself back in his alcove-like shop, turning his weary, hardened body with some effort to pick up an ivory Belgian glass bottle, ‘that everyone loves. Men and women. Hindu and Muslim. I created it.’ Half of the nearby store owners say he couldn’t have prepared it himself; the rest of them say no one else but him could have.

  About six years ago, Syed concocted a perfume, stimulated by his hajj and the fragrances he picked up on it. Made of basil leaves, considered shubh, or holy, amongst Hindus, and popular amongst Muslims because of its mention in the Koran, it would be a simple essential oil brewed to just the right roast. Syed rode on his son’s bike through a large farm that grew basil varieties on the fringes of Hyderabad. They journeyed past wild bushes and herb gardens. They sniffed camphor tulsi, which was rather floppy for the concoction they had in mind. Syed also crushed some beneath his fingers and ate it. They tried lemon basil then, which was sweeter, with a light smell. Finding it a bit too sweet, they returned, disappointed, but on their way out they were greeted with the sight of the humble holy basil growing in the wild. It was warm, nostalgic and slightly spicy, perfect for condensing into small bottled jars—and Nagma, a complex ittar, rich and fresh, simultaneously, was ready to be sold.

  As the sun goes down, Syed and his grandson get busier, using cotton buds to dab dots of oil on the customers’ hands. The customers try one fragrance after another. Syed sells shamama to relieve headaches and then kewra to cool an upset stomach. Most of the time, his customers demand to smell a memory—the powdery one that my grandfather used, or the flowers on the bed on my wedding night. One speaks the language of evanescence, while the other attempts to translate it—‘You probably need an amber. No? What about champa then?’

  Four or six tries later, the customer chooses a blend that will be mixed into a tiny vial of scent. A family from Dubai, here to get their son married to a girl from the city, wants to buy a scent for her, a traditional set of ittars in silver ittardans—jasmine, rose, henna, garaj and harusa, flowers for different seasons. The patriarch of the family holds the soaked cotton buds under his nose and breathes deeply, muttering a blur of praises that turn one’s head cloudy, just as perfumes do after you’ve smelled too many.

  ‘It is like cool breeze on water.’

  ‘And this has the silkiness of a cashmere shawl.’

  ‘Exotic like the Al-Buraq.’7

  Next, a brisk man from a nearby shop comes in to pick up a bottle of musk made from a secretion of the musk deer’s bottom. ‘Musk! Ah, musk.’ He sniffs directly from a large bottle. The thing that he would wear to his cousin’s wedding—a crisp kurta and a dab below his wrist, to woo his cousin’s salis. ‘No, not this one’, he says as Syed hands him an ittardan with musk and informs him of the price. ‘I want the synthetic imported one. This is too strong actually.’ And Syed forces a smile for him, muttering so that only I can hear, ‘Naak par rumaal rakh kar bagh mein ghumne walon mein se hain yeh janaab [He is among those who walk in the garden with kerchiefs on their noses].’

  A few years ago, fancy synthetic scents were marketed by a few sellers from Kanauj, Uttar Pradesh. Synthetic scents are inexpensive, easy to control, and the best shops in the vicinity of Charminar started stocking more as the demand grew for the cheap, lighter stuff. Following their successful sale, most ittar wallahs started importing these fragrances, and so the men were doused in cheap jasmine and rose, like the smell of jelly beans, sweet, sharp and chemical!

  ‘We had to start stocking those as w
ell,’ says Syed, pulling out a boxed bottle with synthetic musk fragrance made by a Muscat-based company. ‘They don’t have a nose for the ittar, these young ones,’ he says. ‘These fancy bottles are just illusions of the real stuff.’ Like a beautiful three-storeyed stone bungalow with gardens, but only drawn on paper.

  In the past years, Syed and the family’s wealth has been growing, but the pure ittars are brewed and made lesser than ever. ‘Twenty years ago, we made fifteen cauldrons a year. Now, I just make two or three ittars in a year. The rest are all imported from Kuwait, Dubai and Saudi Arabia.’ The ban on sandalwood in some states for the past two decades has reduced the supply of sandal oil, making ittar more expensive than ever, the customers choosing the cheaper alcohol-based perfumes instead.

  ‘I have never made synthetic perfumes with my hand. It’s bad iqhlak [immoral],’ he says. ‘Allah ki dua se we earn enough. I have bought a three-storied house and donated it to a madrasa. We live in another two-storied house with the families of my sons. I met with a road accident while travelling by autorickshaw a few years ago.’ He points to his injured calf. ‘I was advised retirement by the doctors.’

  He continues, ‘But this is all I know. I can’t sit at home with my granddaughters and do nothing but eat and sleep, can I?’ He waves his hand dismissively. ‘If not money, my ittar earns me respect. I know my sons will have to start selling only synthetic perfumes soon, but till the time I am around, I’ll keep making and selling pure ittar.’

  He smiles, attending to another customer and another and another . . . until his job—of making this world a little more fragrant—is accomplished.

  10

  THE BHISTI WALLAHS OF CALCUTTA

  Clouds in different shades of grey clamour for space in Calcutta’s December skies, mirroring the people they shelter. It has started raining heavily, drops pelting the windowpanes of my taxi as it approaches Bow Barracks, a locality in central Calcutta—now Kolkata— constructed for World War I soldiers that today houses a diversified population of Anglo-Indians, Buddhists, Chinese and Muslims. Men scurry about, hurriedly wrapping their wares in plastic sheets and running for cover. When I open my taxi door, the noise, blocked until now, bursts in like waters from a flooded river, the ferocious torrent sweeping up with it everything on these cobbled streets—a babel of voices, a racket of rickshaw pullers, din from the coffin-making factories located close by, the clamour of food vendors, thunderous clouds, witticisms from addas, men heaving beneath heavy sacks, horns, cackles, sighs . . . wave after wave of it.

  Large drops of winter rain pelt the backs of butchers skinning chickens near a mosque. Amidst the bloodied feathers of the birds stands a clumsily hunched bhisti wallah, a traditional water-carrier from ancient times. He holds on to the last threads of his ancestral profession, a bag made of leather, mashq, in the shape of an upturned goat, that contains about 20 litres of water. The legs of the goat cadaver stretch across his body, dangling listlessly, ending at a blue lungi hanging around his waist, legs bare to the ground. He stands there breathing it all in, staring at the water, blood and feathers fast collecting around his feet.

  ‘Every evening, I come here to offer water to the devotees after prayers,’ he says as I unfurl an umbrella for us. ‘My father used to say, “Nawazuddin, you will wing your way to paradise with this relief that you provide to thirsty men,”’ he says, his bare shoulders shivering in the cold. As the mullah reads the evening azan over the loudspeaker, I can only ponder over the providence. ‘Bhisti’ is a derivative of the Persian word behesht, meaning ‘paradise’, of blue rivers and verdant gardens.

  ‘But this is nothing,’ he mumbles, slowly nodding his head. ‘On the holy days of Jum’ah, my father served water in silver cups outside Jama Masjid in Delhi, where we lived back then. “Drinking water in a silver utensil purifies the intestines,” he used to say. We were then served zarda and biryani by the pilgrims who would soon embark on their journey for holy Mecca. They make do with plain batasha these days. When I stood close to my father I realized how big his bones were. There was also a moustache that ran up to his ears,’ he recollects, licking his finger before gingerly perking up his own sparse moustache. A khandaani bhisti, Nawaz is very proud of his father’s ancestors who served the badshahs1 in Delhi.

  As Calcutta nostalgists will tell you—preferably over an anachronistically priced cup of coffee at the Indian Coffee House—in the slower and strangely unpeopled Calcutta of the 1950s, light years away from the theatrical exploits of wily men, you could see the lamp lighter put out the street lights at the break of dawn while a bhisti wallah filled his bags at the banks of the river Ganga, spending the morning hours watering the streets to settle the dust. Occasionally, when roads started being laid, the bhisti wallahs were brought in to water the pathway and, again, when the roadrollers were used to flatten the surface.

  History has often been a spectator to the bhistis, who were, in the past, adjuvant characters in the narratives of battles and epics, and are now cogs in the machinery of everyday lives. And during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the bhisti was also an altruist, according to Samuel Murray who states so in his book Seven Legs across the Sea.

  Thirsty children could be seen running to the bhisti with empty cups in their hands. The bhisti would release his thumb at the mouth of the bag and placed it over the cup. The happy children would drink and walk away. A mother, with a matka in her hand, would call out to him and he would wait until she caught up him. Murray informs us that ‘the Indian mother might leave with him a pie. Rain does not fall in India at certain seasons of the year for periods of five to nine months, and water is water during most of that time. Should the water-carrier pass an ox, a goat, a dog, or a horse—anything in need of water—he at once eases his thumb on the spout of the bag and relieves suffering. The bhisti, in short, practises what Red Cross societies aim to accomplish, and what churches profess to do.’2

  Tracing them further back in history, the bhistis were a Muslim horde from Arabia who are known to have followed the paths of Mughal ingression into India. Formerly, they served the villages and towns without any charge. But, with time, due to their popularity in the Mughal period, the bhistis adopted this as their source of revenue. Also identified as Sheikh Abbasis, they gradually suffused through the subcontinent, keeping alive their austere traditions as Sunni Muslims wherever they went, assimilating folk beliefs every now and then. Every Mohammedan family that could afford a bhisti would keep one to refill pots of fresh water from wells, lakes and rivers. Others, meanwhile, bought mashqs of water from them when required.3 Hindus had pani wallahs who provided a similar service, walking around with earthen pots.4 They were mostly Brahmins—upper-caste figures who also prayed and cleansed their sins regularly in holy water so that the water could be accessed by Hindus of all castes.

  It wasn’t long before the bhistis broke up into a number of clans, or biradaris—a few being Abbasi, Faruqi, Turkee and Bahlim. In the northern regions they appeared during Akbar’s regime as the Abbasis who were the water bearers for the Mughal armies.

  When Nawazuddin recalls their history, as told to him by his father, he speaks with gratification. ‘My great-grandfather served the troops in the late-eighteenth century. The bhistis would follow them into the battlefields. Every time a soldier was injured, he’d crouch beside him, make a skin-cup with one of his hands and wet his lips.’ Covered wagons, cavalries, foot soldiers, messengers on agile horses, gunmen, bonneted sweethearts—all moved around with the troops through war zones and cantonments; and among them would be the bhisti wallahs. In the infantry, a few would move along with every company, as would the barber and the washerman. The bhisti wallahs would escort the troops on their march, filling water in the mashqs from rivulets, cool streams in the forests or village wells as they sang the water-drawing songs of their tribes.

  Perhaps the most famous bhisti wallah in history is Nizam Saqqa. Lore has it that the second Mughal emperor Humayun, while he was still trying to ama
lgamate the annexations made by Babar, was apprehensive of the complex river system of the subcontinent as they caused the loss of lives and farmers’ livelihoods. His reservations were not unsubstantiated. After being treacherously conquered by Sher Shah on the banks of the Ganges near Benares, he barely managed to save his life in the inundated Ganga, all thanks to a bhisti wallah who supported him on his buoyant water-skin. Humayun rewarded the bhisti by allowing him to become king for a day—glorifying the bhistis—and the name Nizam Saqqa lives on.

  ‘With wars in the deserts, where oases were miles away, it was the bhisti, or his mashq, that the enemy tried to shoot first. How do I know this? My great-grandfather lost a leg from a gunshot wound as he crossed the line of fire to offer a dying British soldier his water,’ says Nawazuddin, crabbily brushing his bag, as though spiders had crawled up and made cobwebs on it.

  ‘Our ancestors went around serving water from the mashqs to grouchy British troops, who often flayed, ridiculed and belted them on the battlefield,’ informs Nawazuddin, gazing restlessly at the rain that has now reduced to a mild drizzle. ‘In fact, they’d wake up devotedly at the crack of dawn, holding out water for the troops as they brushed their teeth or washed their faces, even before they themselves had their day’s first glass of water in the parched countryside. They’d train us into thinking that were the lowly class, or that they were meant to be like this. But none of us thinks of ourselves as low or incapable. We always knew this was zakat, help.’ Over time, like the other Muslim artisan classes, the ‘bhisti or mashakwalas’ have been granted OBC (other backward class) status, given their sensitivity to endangerment. Their community identity, though, continues to remain strong in some places, with caste associations like the Maharashtra Bhisti Samaj acting as a tool of community welfare as well as a pressure group on behalf of the community to avail the benefits of the OBC status. ‘I knew of something like this in Delhi. In Calcutta, where we moved, looking for better work, there are too few, too scattered, too burdened with arranging food for the next meal to bother with the sarkar . . .’