A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  As we head for the parked motorbike, Raj Kumar says that the call he received on his cell a while ago was from his wife; a disturbance had begun in some area outside the city, and she had warned him to be careful in case something erupted here.

  Fear, she says at one point, and I am not sure if I’m hearing right.

  Priya is from a high Brahmin family, and unlike most Gujaratis of the area her colouring is extremely fair. Her people had fled the ravages of the sultan Mahmud Begada a long time ago and gone to settle in a neighbouring kingdom. And so Gujarati, her ancestral language, was not her first language, though she’s caught up with it. During my first visit to Baroda, when I said to a seminar that I had expected to take back sweets from this ancestral homeland, not be close to such atrocities as had recently occurred, she had taken me to buy sweetmeats, and I had also bought some embroidered hangings. One of them, depicting Krishna playing the flute, adorns a wall in our house.

  On our way to her home, driving along Old Padra Road, we pass the locality of Alka Puri, where the wealthy live and shop. It was once a suburb of elegant residences, on the sites of many of which now stand condominium buildings, new but cramped office spaces, and a compact modern shopping mall having the look and feel of a discount, claustrophobic version of its North American prototypes. I detect a touch of regret in my host as she drives me here, points out the newer buildings, in this neighbourhood that was in the near past more intimate and simple. Malls are very much the trend now, providing places for family outings and air-conditioned respite from the intense summer heat. During weekends they are jammed. Teenagers haunt the coffee shops and multiplex cinemas. As we park underground, take an elevator, and stroll around past stacks of displays, Priya wonders where people get the money to shop. They tend to overspend, she says, looking anxious, buy what they don’t need.

  The food court sells familiar fast food in plastic ware; this is a place to feel Western-cool, after all. Can we eat bhajias? I ask. We look around, but there is no place that sells bhajias. I’ll make you some at home, she says.

  As I sit in her living room and she potters around in the kitchen, a motorbike parks on the verandah outside; a girl arrives in shalwar-kameez. She must be one of the ninjas on the road; she too is fair, with strikingly delicate features and the gait of a dancer. The language the mother and daughter exchange is refined and musical, a far cry from the coarse vernacular of the streets.

  It is when we sit down later, after the bhajias, and the daughter is upstairs in her room that the word comes up: Fear. I cannot tell the context, and she does not elaborate. But gradually, as she talks, it clarifies.

  She shows me an article in Outlook about a Hindu extremist called Babu Bajrangi. How can unelected people wield so much power? she asks. According to the article, Bajrangi “bullies, coerces and terrifies citizens into doing his bidding.” He “steered” a massacre in Ahmedabad that left eighty-nine people dead. The man’s current mission is to “save” Hindu girls: “There is a ticking bomb in every home,” he is quoted as saying. “It can explode any time. The live bombs are our girls…. Girls spawn our next generation. Saving her from marauding Muslims is our prime religious duty. Saving one girl from going astray is equivalent to saving 100 cows.” So far, he says, he has saved 918 girls, “seventy percent…from the clutches of Muslims and Christians who had enticed them, spoilt them, even married them.” The method of saving is simple, says the author of the article: “The girl is kidnapped while the boy is thrashed and forced to sign divorce papers.” The slightly bemused tone of the article is somewhat alarming.

  It’s the first time since I’ve known Priya that she’s opened up like this; except for her academic interests, she is a family woman, hardly a radical, and she would rather talk about her children, her elderly mother who prefers to live by herself, the pressures of her husband’s job, their last visit to the United States. But this time a dam has burst, she has a need to speak about what we’ve never discussed before. At the university, she says, the local government has imposed compulsory Gujarati; students from other states and foreign countries will stop coming. The university’s intellectual tradition is at stake, and the dissenting faculty is too cowed to say anything. And so, fear.

  In the gated colony where she lives, a notice was circulated recently by the management saying that it should be informed about intended sales of houses. At a residents’ meeting, someone explicated: We don’t want those other communities. The implication was clear, Muslims were not wanted. During the 2002 violence, she says, fear was whipped up in the colony, vigils kept in the night to guard against Muslim mobs. But after several nights of vigil, her husband came to the conclusion that the neighbours were simply taking the time to enjoy themselves, have bhajias and tea and gossip. He saw no cause for fear and refused to participate, said he had work the next day. Relations became strained. I recall that when I came to see Priya the previous year, I had arrived in a taxi, and when I asked the next-door neighbour where Priya’s house was, she claimed not to know.

  And so the fear is of ostracism, intimidation, victimization. Recently, Babu Bajrangi’s extremists have made impossible the showing of the film Parzania, about the 2002 violence, in Gujarat cinemas; video stores don’t keep it; people are afraid to see it even in their homes.

  I ask her how many of her social circle are Muslims, and she says if they were close by, that would be possible. I ask her about the Shiva statue on the Sursagar lake, a public place. She replies: The will of the majority.

  How cosmopolitan Delhi feels.

  She says that except among the university faculty the feeling is that Muslims should not be allowed to “come up” that is, advance. But then, curiously, she adds she has heard that since Muslims have so many more children, within some years they will start to dominate.

  I don’t know how to respond. I do recall that in Kenya, an MP had raised a similar fear soon after independence, that the Indians with their birth rate would dominate and soon there would be an Indian president in Kenya.

  She walks me past lines of houses to the rickshaw stand outside the gate, instructs the driver to take a straight route, not go through the back areas—she waves towards Muslim Tandelja. This for my safety.

  I realize that whatever community you come from, the fear of being found in the wrong place at the wrong time is too palpable.

  The Jama Masjid, the city’s main mosque in the centre of the town, attained prominence recently because the son of the muezzin—the man who gives the call to prayer five times daily—became a cricket bowling sensation when he captured the lion’s share of wickets during India’s tour of Australia. The young man is tall, curly-haired Irfan Pathan, with a trademark grin that bursts upon his face as he celebrates a fallen wicket.

  In East Africa when I was growing up, cricket was the major sport among Indians. In Dar es Salaam there were more than half a dozen teams competing, in addition to the school teams. In every alley, every open space, in our neighbourhoods, there would be a game being played. When I went to North America, there was a virtual absence of the game. Gradually this has begun to change. In Toronto there are now about half a million South Asians, and even the major dailies report on the great cricket matches worldwide. And there is of course the Internet. So Irfan Pathan’s name is well known.

  Raj Kumar and I enter the mosque, ask to see the muezzin, Mehmood Khan Pathan, and to our surprise, without blinking an eye, a man directs us to the right wing of the establishment. In front of us is a courtyard, on the left a tank for ritual washing. We walk up a flight of stairs to the family apartments. We are told to have seats on the wide verandah, which looks down on the courtyard. Some women are about, extended family members, it appears, from the way they are addressed and the easy manner in which they go in and out of the inner rooms; an event is in progress. A young man comes and joins us, tells us not to worry or feel embarrassed—for indeed we have begun to look foolish to ourselves, having come to take a voyeuristic peek at where the great
new cricketer grew up. The young man is from Ahmedabad, he tells us. The talk turns to the 2002 violence, or the “toofan,” storm, as he calls it. He says that where he lives there is no conflict; people respect each other, who wants violence and curfew? Only the government benefited from it. The Babri Mosque event of 1992 was a frying pan it had kept warm, then it had turned on the heat when it was politically expedient. He himself is an Ayurvedic, an Indian traditional doctor, by profession.

  Mr. Khan finally comes, a heavy-set man with a red hennaed beard, a deep-orange cap, and a long-sleeved long shirt over his trousers. He shakes hands, sits down.

  It is God’s grace, he says, that has brought his son this success, the way he took out Australia. Irfan and his brother Yusuf used to play down below in the courtyard as children, and also on the street. Later they played in the city grounds, and then someone from a cricket academy took them in without charge. Irfan is nineteen, Yusuf a year older; there is no rivalry between them. In fact, when Irfan was in Australia, he would take tips from his brother over the phone. I can sense how the father wishes the older son were as successful. He prays that Irfan will bring glory to India in the coming series against Pakistan. The boy will have to postpone taking his final exam at the local Gujarati school in order to play. Mehmood Khan’s grandfather came to Baroda from near Peshawar, now in Pakistan, and worked as a muezzin for a pittance. So did his father. He himself earns about fifteen hundred rupees a month and supplements that income by selling attar. And indeed the apartment looks modest. The large family is close and they have returned from a big luncheon to celebrate the recent glory of their son. Halvah is brought for us; there are children about, young men, girls, women, all going in and out of the apartment.

  As we shake hands to leave, Mehmood Khan says, quite suddenly, Let me show you something you’ve never seen before. He’s taken a liking to us. We take off our shoes, go through a door and climb a flight of dark inner stairs, arrive inside a medium-sized room. In front of us is a large glass cabinet. It contains an immense copy of the Quran, roughly six feet by four. It was copied here, I am told, some two hundred years ago. The main text, in large Arabic script, is black; between the lines, in small red script, are words that Mehmood Khan says are Persian translations; in the margins is more Persian. The pages have a gold border.

  This book is only one part of the whole Quran, I understand. Other giant-sized volumes lie closed on the shelves. To read this Quran, the books have to be stood up and two people are required to turn the pages.

  We go down, shake hands with Yusuf Pathan, and leave, after a look at two chests of attar at the entranceway.

  A modest family hit by the lightning of good fortune. Yusuf still awaits his moment of glory. In a recent match, he took his league team to victory, scoring a number of fours and sixes.

  When Irfan plays for India against Pakistan, some months later, I read that Mr. Khan and his wife have flown to watch him in Lahore. It feels I am living a dream, he says to a reporter. It is the first time the couple have flown in an airplane; they go to visit, of course, the ancestral homeland next door in Afghanistan. Mrs. Khan appears in a photograph completely covered in a burqa.

  Later still, a newspaper reports that Mehmood Khan has been asked to vacate the mosque apartment for allegedly damaging the old copy of the Quran. He has moved to the better Muslim neighbourhood of Tandelja by now, but has filed a suit nevertheless against the mosque committee.

  And finally, during my most recent visit to India, I read that Yusuf Pathan has been selected for the Indian 20–20 team along with Irfan, to play a world series in South Africa. Their father, Mehmood Khan Pathan, is elated. “Team India gets a pair of Pathans,” says the Times of India proudly.

  A woman reporter called Manju, a former student of Priya, meets us to show us the site of a Jewish cemetery, which had apparently been “encroached.” A committee consisting of a local Jew and his family had sold off the property, claiming to have permission to do so, using forged signatures. The man had then emigrated to Israel. Manju, a young, petite woman from the south and a recent graduate of the MS University, works for the Times of India. She and a few others had heard about the cemetery’s plight and agitated to have it declared protected.

  The site is at a busy intersection and the graves are dated starting 1950 or thereabouts. A few of them belong to children. The ground is used by a local family as a grazing site for their bullocks, though there is hardly any grass left. The family goes by the name Vaghela, a royal name, far above their occupation and caste. There isn’t a Jewish community left in Baroda, but Manju gives us a few phone numbers to call in Ahmedabad, where there is a synagogue and a small number of Jews still reside.

  The Road to Champaner

  In Samvat fifteen hundred and forty-one,

  in the month of Posh, on the third day,

  the day of the sun, six rajas perished…

  When Mahmud Shah, the great king, took Pavagadh.

  “THE BARDS,” quoted by Alexander Forbes

  FROM A STOREFRONT at the busy Baroda bus station, beside a barber shop where a client is receiving a haircut and a head massage, we hire our taxi to take us to Champaner, a historical area that’s been in the news recently. Our driver is a thin young lad barely out of his teens. His is a lankiness that seems to be an example of the long-legged look of a new generation of Indians. Although he is reluctant to talk about his family, it turns out that his brother is a barber, and he himself plans to join his maternal uncle in Dar es Salaam, where he will drive a taxi. He of course does not know I come from that city, and so this is quite a coincidence, but only the first of several that await me this day. I recall that my barber in Dar es Salaam, when I was young, had returned to Gujarat; and during a recent visit back, I had noticed taxi drivers of Indian origin, when traditionally the occupation was that of Africans.

  Less than an hour northeast of Baroda on the Godhra road, through an almost blinding haze appears a significant protrusion in an otherwise flat, scrubby landscape. This is the Pavagadh hill, which appears as a series of rising plateaus, on the highest of which is a knobby protuberance, beyond which the hill falls down steeply. Further along the highway, beyond the bustling, open little town of Halol and closer to the base of the hill, we come to an arched gate in a fragment of a massive ancient brick wall. It is the outer wall of the fifteenth-century city of Champaner. Past the gate, to our left, appears a more solid, more massive wall of cut stone, which must have enclosed the inner fort. Two arched gates lead inside, one following the other, the inner of which is almost intact and decorated with circular floral motifs of the Indian style and Arabic calligraphy. On one side past the entrance lies a deserted old mosque, the Shehr-ki Masjid, behind an ample green garden enclosed by a fence. Across the road is a small well-tended temple with the date 1946 upon it, very much in use; within its gate, in the yard, a woman draws water from a pump. Further along the road lies the modern village of Champaner, with a population of some hundreds—a typical rundown place of a few dirt roads, with ramshackle houses and a few shops, one of which has a long-distance telephone service.

  The importance of this location is the ancient Kalika Mata (or Kali) temple atop Pavagadh hill, which can draw thousands on important occasions or even on a weekend, and the remains of the medieval city of a Muslim conqueror. Therefore a place of contention. In spite of its small size, it’s been in the news recently.

  In March 1483, Mahmud Begada, the grandson of Ahmed Shah, founder of Ahmedabad, arrived by way of Baroda with half a million men according to legend and laid a long siege to the area, at that time under the domain of Chauhan Rajputs. Two previous sultans had marched against Champaner not long before; in the second case, the siege of Pavagadh, where the Chauhans had their fort, had been lifted when the raja sought help from the sultan of Malwa, a neighbouring region to the east and an opponent of the Ahmedabad rulers. This time, however, Malwa’s current ruler fretted before Mahmud’s might and withheld assistance. After a twenty
-month siege, on November 17, 1484, Mahmud’s army gained access to the fort. In the ensuing battle, says Alexander Forbes, “a Muslim shell—emblem of Kali’s anger—fell upon the palace of its sovereign.” The goddess had been angered, for the king of Champaner, during a Navratri celebration, had cast lustful eyes upon her as she appeared in the form of a beautiful maiden. He had even laid hold of her headscarf. But the Rajputs fought valiantly. In the end, in an act of jauhar, a funeral pyre was raised, upon which went the women and children and the wealth of the Rajputs. When the raging fire had consumed its human sacrifice, the warriors, bathed and dressed in saffron, came out to fight. A few of them survived, including the king and one of his ministers. Refusing to embrace Islam, they were both executed.

  There are many stories about Mahmud, considered the greatest of the Muslim rulers of Gujarat. His rule lasted fifty-three years and his military campaigns were many and impressive, including a naval defeat of the Portuguese on the west coast of India, near the present city of Diu, with the assistance of the sultan of Turkey. His nickname “Begada” was due, some say, to his conquest of two (in Gujarati, be) prominent and well protected mountain forts (ghad ), so he was Mahmud Two-Forts. He had immense moustaches, long and twisted like the horns of a cow (bighad ), which he liked to twirl; this is the second explanation for the nickname. He came to the throne at the age of fourteen and immediately and with patient cunning thwarted a palace coup, meting out punishment according to the standards of the day. (One of the rebels was crushed under the foot of an elephant.) He had an immense appetite, his daily serving of food approximating forty pounds. Poisons had no effect on him—in fact, it has been said that he fed daily on them, so that if a fly happened to alight on his skin it would immediately die, and if he spat a scornful spray of paan juice on a prisoner, it was enough to produce death.