River of Fire

by Qurratulain Hyder

  “Indian Muslims must pay the price in various ways for the division of India,” said Tom.

  “Yeah,” Kamal shot back. “World Jewry must continue to be blamed for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.”

  Tom kept quiet. He was Jewish.

  “Why don’t you go to Pakistan, yaar, they need scientists,” Gulshan suggested gravely. “Droves of highly qualified non-Muslims come back to India, don’t find suitable employment and return to settle down in the West. It’s being called the brain-drain—join it. Your going away to Pakistan will not be such a world-shaking event. Personally, I woudn’t have returned from London but Surekha wanted to build her dance career at home. And now she has found that the country is teeming with Bharatanatyam dancers. Anyway! Don’t be such a damn fool idealist, yaar. Go.”

  Kamal was leaving for Lucknow by the night train, and met the Urdu poet Hamraz on the platform. Hamraz had gone to Karachi from London and was now on his way to Fyzabad to visit his ailing Indian mother.

  “How is everything with you, Kamal Mian?” he asked with concern.

  “Fine, Hamraz Bhai.”

  “Things don’t look fine to me, Kamal Mian. What is the matter?”

  “Nothing at all, Hamraz Bhai.” Kamal quickly said goodbye to Hamraz Fyzabadi and hurried towards his compartment.

  At long last Kamal obtained a visitor’s visa from the Pakistan High Commission. He had spent many a sleepless night before arriving at this decision. For the last few days he had been trying to hide himself from the world. Shadows seemed to dance about in the empty rooms of Gulfishan. Kamal carried on a terrible dialogue with himself—You blasted coward. Rat. What happened to all your nationalism? Talat is right. One ought to become a grass-cutter and work for the Revolution. Damn you, mercenary weakling, no-good opportunist. Damn, damn, damn.

  There were no vacancies at the moment, even in the Muslim University at Aligarh. He had decided, however, that he would just not forsake his country—he would be one of the eight crore Muslims who were citizens of India. Why had they been written off?

  The Rezas lost their case. Both Khyaban in Dehra Dun and Gulfishan in Lucknow were finally declared evacuee property. Next morning when Kamal woke up he found himself a homeless unemployed refugee in Lucknow. On Monday morning police officers arrived to lock up the bungalow. Kamal requested them to wait so that they could pack their suitcases. On Wednesday Kamal boarded the train along with his aged parents, on Thursday the train reached Delhi. On the sixth day the train crossed the border, on the seventh day Kamal was in Karachi, Pakistan.

  1 I didn’t steal the butter, Ma, At early dawn you sent me out with the cows to Honeywood . . . Ma, I did not . . .

  2 Heer Ranjha, a seventeenth-century Sufi allegory by the mystic poet Waris Shah, a classic of Punjabi literature, popularly sung in rural Punjab.

  66. Letter from Karachi

  Karachi, capital of the fifth largest state in the world. Beautiful houses in posh localities, witness to the fact that never before had the Muslim middle classes acquired such prosperity. But otherwise the situation is not very different from India. The nouveau riches ruled this land of the very poor, and how well the former natives of Uttar Pradesh have transplanted themselves on alien soil! The solid Muslim middle classes form the backbone of ‘refugee’ society. Once a year they go to India to visit members of their families still living in that country, and they still refer to India as ‘home’. You will usually find a very ardent and patriotic Pakistani remarking casually that he or she is going home in December for two months. Therefore, home is Sandila or Moradabad, country is Pakistan—not unlike first generation Armenians or Poles or Greeks in America who refer to the place they come from as ‘the Old Country’. This is a human problem. They even have a Bangalore Town in Karachi, but India would be a cipher for those Mohajirs’ children who are born here.

  Some intellectuals of my acquaintance often get together in a coffee house for lunch, and in the evenings they assemble in some rich friend’s drawing-room to discuss politics. They are all very anti-Establishment.

  Islam has become useful for politicians. It is being presented to the world as an aggressive, militant, even anti-culture religion. Its Promoters are not concerned with Islamic humanism or the liberalism of medieval Arab scholars or Iranian and Indian poets and Sufis. But there are other encouraging signs. Purdah has more or less disappeared, girls are taking up careers and some have become high-ranking officers in the medical corps of the defence forces. Going abroad for higher education has become the norm for young women. What I find odd, though, is how upper-class women, the Begums, have taken to ballroom dancing en masse!

  I don’t think we realise what a terrible world our generation inherited from our parents. Look at the situation today, in 1956. When a young Muslim man graduates from an Indian university he comes over to Pakistan and becomes a pilot or a member of the civil service. He believes that even if he were to appear for the Competitive Examinations of the Indian Civil Service, he would not be selected. In other words, the demoralised Indian Muslims must continue paying the price for Pakistan, even though most of them had nothing to do with its creation.

  In the demand for Pakistan, Urdu was most thoughtlessly declared to be the language of a “separate Muslim nation”, so now it is also paying the price for the creation of the “homeland”. In India it has almost become a non-language. The word ‘Urdu’ is now associated with Pakistan and creates an emotional and psychological block for most Hindus. Therefore it continues to be the language of films and film songs but is called Hindi. By abolishing Urdu in schools they have also impoverished their own culture.

  It is Saturday night, and I have just returned from the posh house of a local intellectual. His friends include a few interesting foreigners, and I met two very well-read and pleasant Americans there tonight, Jacob Morrison and Mary Richards. Jacob knows a lot of Urdu too and is easily one of the most scholarly men I have met anywhere. (It is rumoured that both of them are CIA.) This club is a kind of Hyde Park Corner. Some of these young Pakistanis are real non-conformists. They remind me of my own old friends. They love to argue, and argue fiercely and brilliantly. A fine crowd. I mean to see more of them during my stay here.

  Tonight a very old American historian came to the Saturday Club, passing through Karachi on his way to Tokyo. He addressed me sadly: “The subcontinent would have been one of the Great Powers if you hadn’t split. What would have happened to us if America had been divided after the Civil War? Don’t repeat your famous theory that the real cause of Partition was economic. What else was it? That is what I want to find out . . .” He waved his hand and looked at me with his large, melancholy eyes.

  “I merely wish to know the real cause of the Decline of the East. I asked Prof. Toynbee, too. Why did India fall in the 18th century?” Mary Richards wondered aloud.

  “India had an inadequate irrigation system,” replied Jacob Morrison gravely. “The problem is purely agricultural.”

  “Unlike the sea-faring medieval Arabs the Mughals were originally horsemen from landlocked steppes. They didn’t build a navy to guard their vast coastline. Tipoo Sultan did. But it was too late.”

  “The Ottoman Turks were originally horsemen, too,” I objected. “But till the 17th century, as a European naval power, they considered the Mediterranean to be a mere Turkish lake.”

  “O.K. But what was the basic cause of the decline of Islam?” Mary persisted.

  “The Asharites,” Tanveer, the host, replied shortly.

  “Who?”

  “The Asharites. Their philosophy of pre-destination replaced the doctrine of the Muattazalites—the rationalists who believed in Free Will. The Pre-destination School become all powerful, because after the Mongol Invasion and the Fall of Baghdad in 1256—” Tanveer paused and began again with some emotion, “Do you know that the Mongols threw all the books of all the libraries of Baghdad into the Tigris and used them as a bridge? The water of the Tigris turned black with ink.”
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  “Who were the Asharites, for god’s sake,” Mary repeated her question.

  “After the Fall of Baghdad people thought this must have been the Will of God that all the intellectual achievements of Islam be destroyed and the Caliphate knocked down by the barbarians. Pre-destination—this was the Asharite dogma—which is followed to this day by the majority of Muslims—

  “Another irony—Raja Rammohun had studied in an Arabic madrassa and was influenced by the Muattazalite philosophy. Thus those Rationalists indirectly figure among the founders of Hindu Reformation, while the Muslims discarded them eight hundred years earlier!”

  “Ah, but the Sunni church could not very well adopt the Shia Muattazalites’ doctrine—” Jacob commented knowledgeably.

  Thus it went on and on . . . till we dispersed at 1.30 in the morning and drove to the airport to have coffee. I have come home only an hour ago. I was too sleepless, so I started writing this letter to you.

  Now, I must tell you the big news. Yesterday, I, Dr. Kamal Reza, revolutionary, ardent believer in the destiny and greatness of a United India and so on and so forth, ate my hat and was appointed on a post starting with a salary of twelve hundred rupees a month. I have to set up a laboratory in East Pakistan and may be sent to the United States soon to buy some apparatus. Next week I am leaving for the East Wing; shall write to you from Dacca.

  Dawn is breaking. I have spent the entire night writing this disjointed letter. Just now I drew the curtains and looked out. Karachi has woken up. Karachi is going to work. Hundreds of thousands of people riding on bicycles and cycle rikshaws and buses are advancing towards factories and workshops. They are mostly Muhajirs. These are the people who were referred to as the ‘lovable masses’ in our Party jargon. It was not their fault, Talat. They deserved to live in peace, eat and sleep with at least a roof over their heads. I witness a sea of workers on their way to the P.I.D.C. Dockyards which are under construction at the moment. It is, honestly, a thrilling sight. They are the new proletariat and they will bring about the socialist revolution in Pakistan.

  It is foolish to think that India Divided can be reunited again. The map of the world changes after every world war. It changed after 1945, too.

  I once borrowed Lin Yu Tang’s Leaves in the Storm from Hari Shankar and read it sitting inside my cosy room in Gulfishan.

  So, shall I consider myself a mere trembling leaf, blown far away from my rose-garden—Gulfishan?

  Think of the Palestinians. I have found a home, they haven’t.

  I have always dreamed of creation and not of destruction. Do you think I am going to allow myself to be lost in the vacuum of despair? Oh no, Talat, I shan’t let this happen to me.

  I will re-construct.

  First I will construct a house for myself, ha, ha.

  Amir Reza’s mansion has been built by a famous firm of Italian architects. Mrs. Amir Reza is an unmitigated bitch. Her lavish dinner parties are faithfully reported in the glossy society magazine called The Mirror. She is hell-bent on my rehabilitation (her younger sister is studying in Nainital, U.P.). This Abominable Sister-in-law of ours has just arranged for me to buy 1,000 square yards of land through one of her influential uncles and I’ll get a house-building loan of sixty thousand from my department. Yesterday when the Signor came to see me with the blue-print, I wanted to tear my hair and howl.

  Our parents will stay in Cousin Amir’s annex till my house is built. Father spends the day reading newspapers and does not talk much. Mother keeps meeting her friends and relatives who have migrated from Lucknow. I understand my parents’ plight. Asad Mamoo has died of old age and loneliness in Neelampur.

  With love,

  Yours,

  Kamal

  P.S. Met Roshan Kazmi at a party. She is married and looks O.K. Sajida Begum has become a political leader. She hasn’t changed. “It’s a sad tragedy,” she told the press in her condolence message, when some worthy died the other day. Good old Sajida Apa. I wanted to ask her, what’s a happy tragedy? Perhaps she would have replied, “Yours, dear Kamal.”

  67. The Road to Sylhet

  India of the Middle Ages. Jaunpur, Gujarat, Bengal and Malwa of the Sultanate period. Mandu’s Hindola Mahal, the Chaurasi Gumbad of Kalpi, pre-Mughal India. He placed his hands on cold grey stones which belonged to the past and the present at the same time. He contemplated the decorative motifs—arabesque, lotus flowers, Gandharvas, elephants. He touched the slim bricks of the minarets, paced up and down the labyrinths and peered into the dark underground halls of medieval forts. Often a village girl would pass through a broken arch, tending her flock of goats or an urchin would suddenly dive from a peepul tree into an ancient, murky well. Once a grasping, blind mendicant drifted into a deserted palace, sat down among fallen columns and smoked his coconut hookah. The glassy-blue sky hung low over glazed Persian domes and silent courtyards. Clouds rose from the mist-clad hills of the western ghats and broke over the Sufi hospices of Bijapur. The sorrowful, silent, deserted India of the Middle Ages was bathed in sealike rain, the weeds and grass heaved in strong winds.

  He returned to the local dak bungalow at sundown and had his glass of whiskey on the veranda. The khansama made him an excellent English dinner, followed by caramel pudding. How did the fellow manage to produce such a repast in godforsaken places, and at such short notice? One of the wonders of Hindustan.

  He felt a bit awkward for he was held in awe by the common people. Even educated Indians became self-conscious in his presence. The White Saheb’s mystique was intact. Sometimes he too felt he was a very special person. Perhaps the solar hat and the tropics did it. Now he understood what Champa had told him that last day over the phone about the inherent superiority complex of Englishmen.

  In the former princely states he found that commoners still held their erstwhile feudal masters in affection and esteem. That may be the reason why, down the centuries, Indians had continued to be ruled by a variety of rajahs, sultans and British viceroys—they loved pomp and splendour, and kow-towed to authority.

  The dak bungalow’s khansama came in and said deferentially, “Huzoor, the gharry is ready to take you to the railway station.” So he went back to Calcutta, took a Dakota plane to Dacca, and travelled to Sylhet on an over-crowded train.

  Sylhet, at last, was his destination.

  The train stopped with a jerk at a small wayside station. All manner of voices reached his ears swimming through his drowsiness.

  “Boiled eggs . . . Hot tea . . . Hot tea . . . Boiled eggs . . . Bananas . . . Bananas . . .”

  He pushed up the window shutter and looked out. A cool wind brought in the earthy fragrance of freshly ploughed land. An old and bent Hindu carrying numerous little bundles walked briskly down the platform. Hindu women with glittering red sindhur on their foreheads and in the parting of their hair, little girls in multi-coloured cotton saris, Hindu gentlemen in white dhotis, Muslims in chequered sarongs. Half-naked children, Anglo-Indian guards, palanquin-bearers. The train moved. The babel of Bengali voices dissolved in the running dark as the train puffed along past little lakes covered with water-lilies.

  Sometimes a woman could be seen standing in the doorway of her thatched hut among wild orchids. In an instant her purple sari mingled in the dark. Women carrying lanterns—what would be the stories of their lives? Their world-view? Their philosophy? The distance of time covered by them between birth and death? Suffering. Destitution. Famines.

  He closed his eyes again.

  ‘Allah give us rain, give us rice . . . give us clothes.’ The words of the Bengali ballad song in his ears. He had heard it the other day at a cultural function in Dacca. ‘Allah, give us rice . . .’ And how he had always romanticised Bengal!

  The train came to a halt at another little station. The starched turban of a dignified bearer loomed before his sleepy eyes.

  “Dinner, Saheb?” the bearer whispered reverentially.

  He nodded and pulled up his blanket.

  Labourers from e
astern U.P. worked on his tea estate in Sylhet. Ram Daiya, and Ram Autar; Lachman and Sita, Trilochan and Chambelia . . . Two names seemed to be very popular among the purbis . . .Ram and Sita! Ram and Sita!!! The Golden Era of India, the classical period. The Heroic Age—Ayodhya, Lakshnavati, Shravasti. Ram Chandra and Oudh and Janak Kumari Sita of Mithila. Ram and Sita . . . The undernourished labourers of his tea-garden . . .

  “Dinner, Saheb. Coffee or tea?” The bearer placed the tray in front of him. Cyril sat up and remembered that he had to reach Srimangal on time. He was to tour Rangamati and Chandraghona and Bandarban; he had to make more money.

  The train arrived at Sylhet in the morning, and the Eurasian, Peter Jackson, as usual, awaited him at the station.

  It was late in the evening and they drove straight towards the Surma river. Old men and women carrying smoky lanterns boarded the country-craft. Others were coming ashore in hordes—the outboard motor-boat had returned from the other bank. A blind beggar recited Quranic verses, his loud monotone, awe-inspiring. Two blind men had climbed into a canoe, one blind woman sat under a tree, motionless. Planks were attached to the motor-boat and the Mercedes was driven on to the deck.

  Peter hired a nauka. The river bank was left behind. Suddenly a strong wind rose and the canoe began to rock.

  Cyril Ashley picked up the lantern and looked around anxiously. “Peter, have we run into a storm?” Then he called out to the boatman. “I say, look here, er, what do they call you, boatman?” he asked in broken Bengali.

  “Abul Monshur, Saheb . . .”

  “Abul Monshur, let me help you with the oars.”

  “It’s all right, Saheb, Allah is my Captain,” he replied placidly. Cyril peeped under the roof. The little boat contained all the earthly belongings of old Abul Mansur Kamaluddin. Lantern, the prayer mat, pots and pans, a coconut hookah. This was the white-haired boatman’s entire world, rocking on the angry waves of the Padma.