Delhi

by R V Smith

  Why he came to Tughlaqabad is not known but, according to the grapevine, he had come to seek the blessings of an Armenian seer in his quest for justice. The holy man had once been a Railway employee, but a dream and a meeting with a wizard made him adopt the monastic life. But why did the Armenian seer decide to make his home in that suburb of Delhi? There are no clear answers available, though it was once believed that some Armenians had settled down in that place after the massacre of Armenians in 1739 during the invasion of Nadir Shah.

  Kishanganj, between Old Delhi and Sarai Rohilla stations, has a cemetery where some notable Armenians and Dutch members of the royal court at the Red Fort are buried. Like the Bourbons, these Armenians also bid goodbye to Delhi during the reign of Mohammad Shah Rangila. The Bourbons were worried about their women being forced by the pleasure-loving emperor to join his harem. They found refuge with the Raja of Narwar, but one night, several of them were murdered by his men for reasons unknown in 1778. The rest escaped to Bhopal where they earned the patronage of the Nawab, who made them his courtiers and one of them, Salvadore even became Prime Minister and his wife came to be known as Madame Dulhan. The Armenians did not find a godfather after their ousting from Delhi.

  Whether you believe the story of the Armenian seer and the Bhawal Sanyasi is a moot point. He may have travelled this far, certainly not on foot but by train, for Tughlaqabad has always been an important railway link.

  One would have to make a night stop there a long time ago when a passenger train to Delhi from Agra Cantonment would be stalled for several hours because of disruption on the track. A friendly off duty train driver, who was to stay at the Tughlaqabad rest house before getting charge of a down train, took off for the rest house and the remainder of the night was spent in drinking endless cups of tea and listening to yarns, like the one about the Bhawal Sanyasi and the Armenian connection.

  The Armenians came to India during the reign of Akbar and settled down mostly in Delhi and Agra. They held high posts at the court, and one of them, Abdul Hayee, even became Chief Justice. Notwithstanding their names, they were all Christians, some prefixing their names with the honorific Khwaja or Khoja. In course of time the Armenian community dwindled in North India. Many of them found a new home in Kolkata, where the Armenian Church and Armenian Street are famous landmarks. The Armenians merged with the Anglo-Indians and became big names like the enterprising Arathoons. Mrs Gandhi during her first term as Prime Minister visited Yeravan, in Armenia, to review old links. One such link in India was the Ceastan family. The name was derived from Siestan, a region of Armenia. The death of Aubrey Ceastan recently opened floodgates of memory. His father was a big, burly mustached man, who resembled Dr Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories and retired as a driver of the Mail and Express trains. His uncle was an absented-minded, soft-spoken man, who looked like Robinson Crusoe and could speak impeccable Urdu with the grace that actor Tom Alter does now. Aubrey, a fine athlete and good boxer, also joined the Railways as a Guard and retired eighteen years ago. His major achievement was volunteering to take an essential supplies’ train for the army to the northern border during the second conflict with Pakistan, necessitated by the Bangladesh War. Imagine the train moving on endangered tracks with bomber planes flying around while Ceastan held his nerve, as if in the boxing ring. One heard a graphic account of his odyssey while once traveling with him to Delhi.

  One’s last meeting with him was two years ago. He had come up from Tughlaqabad and was waiting for a bus at Shankar Road enroute to R.K. Puram. Ceastan was proud that his son had become a teacher in the same school where he and his father had studied. It too had once been an Armenian institution and thus an old link survives.

  4

  Basai Darapur and its Namesake

  ld Bundu Khan long occupied a room in the Taj Hotel, Jama Masjid, Delhi and celebrated Christmas and New Year’s with the same enthusiasm as Id and Bakr Id. However, one New Year’s Eve Khan Sahib was missing, but he did turn up at Kothi No. 8 at Civil Lines, the next day to usher in Naya Saal, with a rose in the buttonhole of his favourite gray suit. After a couple of drinks the colourful man, who looked like a thinner version of Clark Gable, warmed up and revealed that a friend had taken him on a romantic rendezvous to Basai Darapur, beyond Rajouri Garden, which is now better known for the ESI Hospital than for the Nawab who once owned the place and surrounding areas. His bagh was famous in the nineteenth century as also the haveli he owned. When the Nawab lost his lands to the local government, a band of gypsies settled down there. They had fallen on bad times and people started exploiting them for their pretty girls. A clandestine flesh trade flourished for some time until the police got wind of it and the gypsies went away to another Basai, which was in Agra, close to the Taj.

  Khan Sahib knew the history of both Basais. He remembered that when Basai Darapur temporarily became gypsy-land, people started arriving while the evening was still young. They came in tongas, cars, rickshaws, and some even on bicycles, ringing the bell to get some old gypsy dancing girl out of the way. The girls peeped out at the visitors from behind half-closed doors and their vigil was rewarded when a host of customers descended on them.

  The girls were so zealous about attracting customers that they would attack each other for the possession of a man who was still trying to make up his mind. Things would get worse after midnight when brawls would break out, but the gypsies managed to patch up their quarrels before law enforcers arrived. Activity ended at early dawn, and when the sun came out they were fast asleep after a hectic night of love.

  The Basai in Agra, disclosed Khan Sahib, is perhaps the oldest village of dancing girls. As the sun sets over the Taj, the long night of love begins at Basai, to the beat of the tabla and the jingle of ankle bells.

  Among the girls of the village who gained great notoriety was Hasina, just as pretty as her name, declared Bundu Khan and this is the tale he narrated about her.

  ‘Hasina, the bandit queen of the Badlands is no more. She met her end fighting the UP Police, along with her lover, Khilawan Singh. After three broken marriages she found love at last in the arms of Khilawan, her trusted lieutenant. She was also expecting to be a mother. But fate willed it otherwise, for both she and the child in her womb died in a hail of bullets near Thiriyaghat on the UP-MP border.’

  ‘The wayward beauty who at one time led a 25-member gang, met her end after a spirited fight that began before sunrise. At dawn she lay dead, a lovely specimen of womanhood. Her beauty dazzled the villagers and she took full advantage of it. But it was crime that somehow appealed to her, for ever since she was a child she used to move about in the company of dacoits who frequented her village and gave her sweets and kisses in equal proportion.’

  ‘Had she survived for a few more years, Hasina would have overshadowed the exploits of the dreaded Putli. But even otherwise her notoriety has become a byword for any wayward village woman.’

  Whether Hasina had enough time to put on her lipstick, of which she was very fond, is not known but it is rumored that she did kiss the prostrate form of her paramour, with blood oozing out of her mouth, before death snatched her away. Bundu Khan asked the hostess, Mrs Everatt, for more Brandy before ending the tale.

  ‘Like Mona Lisa’s smile we may never be able to fathom the mystery behind Hasina’s smile. Perhaps a good guess may be that she was reconciled to meeting her end with the man she had loved so much and who would have been the father of the only child she has conceived in her long life of love and crime in the Badlands.’ Khan Sahib told this story in 1970. He died in 1991 but for the past seventeen years one always remembers him at Yuletide, like the Ghost of New Years’ Past.

  5

  Bird-watching delights

  igratory birds are making a beeline for Delhi and its outskirts. Sultanpuri, Najafgarh, Okhla and the Delhi Zoo are all recent evidence of this. Surprisingly enough, local fauna too make their impact felt at this time of the year. The green belt in Mayapuri, says birdwatcher Jitender Dhir,
has various species of birds. He once kept a birdhouse in his window AC, thinking that pigeons might occupy it, but he had a surprise waiting for him. Instead of pigeons, blue robins came to inhabit it. The robins have a blue body with white patches on both sides of the wings.

  Green pigeons, sparrows, hawks, kingfishers, robins, Indian hornbills, parrots and sometimes even peacocks are found on the green belt. Mute bulbuls are also seen in sizable number, preening themselves on trees or electric and TV cable wires.

  Talking of bulbuls, the fabled birds of myth and legend, whose songs have sustained lovesick princesses and commoners alike, themselves pine in the captivity of heartless birdcatchers. Well known birder, Dr Salim Ali has identified over twelve varieties of bulbuls. The cheery notes of the red-whiskered bulbul, the pleasant call of the black-headed yellow bulbul, the half-a-dozen tinkling notes of the ruby-throated bulbul, and the joyous melody of the red-vented bulbul are worth noticing in the capital.

  Contrary to popular belief, the koel is present among Delhi gardens and groves in winter too but is largely overlooked as it calls out at the approach of the hot weather only. But the large pied crested cuckoo or papiah is the harbinger of the rainy season and flies in from Africa, and it is this bird which reminds every beloved of their missing sweetheart or husband with its plaintive cry of ipee-pee-piur rendering in the ears of the lovelorn as pee kahan. The jungle nightjar, and species close to it, shun daylight like the barn and grass owl among other owl varieties. But all these owls are not the birds of bad omen that they are made out to be for unlike the bats, which appear in fiction as Dracula’s vehicles, they are simply creatures of darkness.

  Of the 538 species mentioned in Dr Ali’s book, there are many fascinating birds with their own unique nesting and migration habits. Included are babblers, parakeets, shrikes, vultures, kites, weavers, and more than half a dozen munnias. Remember the caged munnia taken away by the Chatur Musafir or cunning traveller in the folk song? That munnia was a village belle, and not a tiny bird. Bird-watching in Delhi can be a more exciting pastime than its misnomer (when friends gather for some fun at a street corner to see the evening go by in provocative shapes and fancy dresses). The trick lies in spotting the birds in enjoyable venues afforded by silk cotton, coral flowers or flame-of-the-forest trees in bloom. And if you catch a sight of the birds in their nests then even you can lose track of time like the little boy Horatio Nelson who got lost in the woods while collecting nests. It all leaves a vivid impression on the mind.

  6

  Celebrating the Monsoon

  he last day of the month of Ashadh in 2012 hardly lived up to its promise of being the harbinger of the monsoon with a stormy night, that made Mohan Rakesh write his masterpiece, Ashadh ka ek Din. But long before that, William Fraser, the British Resident at the Mughal court, celebrated the coming of the rainy season with his friend, Col. James Skinner, both in the latter’s Kashmiri Gate house and at Hansi. They drank to the billowing clouds and the belles in the Haryana countryside. The activities at Fraser’s own house, the mansion that was later bought by Hindu Rao and has now become Hindu Rao Hospital, were more intimate, with the orientalized sahib enjoying himself along with his female companions at the baoli (now in ruins).

  Fraser probably never once went back to his native land. His brothers came, lived with him. At least one died after a serious illness (TB) that was treated for some time by the grandfather of Hakim Ajmal Khan with Unani medicines – in which Fraser had developed great faith. A scholar of Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Sanskrit, he couldn’t but have been interested in indigenous medicine, including the Ayurvedic system.

  His long-standing interest in the nawabi state of Ferozepore and the young nawab, Shamsuddin Khan, whose guardian he had become, was to later lead to his murder because of his alleged alliance with his protégé’s sister. But in his lifetime Fraser left no doubt, that like Kipling’s Joseph Makintosh (who of course was born much later) he was a Hindustani, if not by blood than by adoption. No wonder he disliked the British stiff-upper-lip attitude of which his personal hate target were the Metcalfe’s, one of whom (Charles) preceded him as Resident and the other, Thomas, succeeded to the post after his assassination.

  Maybe Fraser was wrong in his assessment, for Sir Thomas Metcalfe too turned out to be as great a lover of all things Indian like him. At the monument of Mohammad Quli in Mehrauli, which he made into his country home, Dilkhusha, Sir Thomas, wearing kurta-pyjama and smelling of khas attar, also enjoyed the advent of Sawan. The heat no doubt bothered him, but tubfuls of ice water helped to keep him and his drinks cool in the trying month of Ashadh. Those were the days when there was no threat of global warming and the monsoon arrived almost on the dot every 29 June (the date of the feast of Saints Peter and Paul). Though not a Catholic, he enjoyed the feast just as much as John Keats who, despite his Anglican Church upbringing, was inspired to write one of his best poems, ‘The Eve of St Anges’.

  The last day before Sawan saw the peal of thunder after flashes of lightning that lit up the monuments of Mehrauli and threatened to strike the Qutub Minar, which had suffered damage earlier, during both, earthquakes and lightning strikes before Major Robert Smith made it safe from them by installing a lightning conductor. That scenario was the signal to Sir Thomas that soon he would have to go back to his Metcalfe House home in North Delhi – the monsoon rains being too heavy then for him to stay put in the old monument. Still the beginning of the end of the hot weather enthused him to make merry, just like Christmas time, but the merriment at Dilkhusha was of an informal nature, when he could afford to take off his shirt (kurta) and let the raindrops cool his prickly heat-ridden body. At Matka Kothi, Sir Thomas was the pucca sahib who wanted ladies to eat oranges (and mangoes) in the bathroom, lest they let the juice trickle down their faces and make a mess of their clothes, to the secret amusement of the Indian servants who were used to getting their ears pulled by their master’s kid-gloved hand for the slightest misdemeanour.

  Fraser was partly right when he remarked that the Metcalfes were a snobbish lot, who made a bit too much of their white skin. But probably like R.L. Stevensons’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, the dual personality of both Sir Thomas and his elder brother, Sir Charles (who actually started the practice of retiring to a summer house in Mehrauli) made itself evident at different times, for they too had became enamoured by things Indian and started regarding themselves as Naboobs.

  While passing the teasing days of Ashadh one sometimes thinks of those times and takes solace in the antics of the ‘White Mughals’ as the Purva (east wind) blows over pillows wet with perspiration and the smell of raat-ki-rani and jasmine cools the hot, irritating breath. This time the full moon too helped enliven the advent of Sawan on the 4 July, the American Independence Day, which Sir Charles Metcalfe probably attended as the Governor of Jamaica.

  7

  Chehlum with Mahabat Khan

  hehlum the 40th day after Moharrum, is another occasion for taking out tazias, replicas of the tomb of Hazrat Imam Husain in Iraq. Though the number of tazias is not much, the enthusiasm is great. Delhi has always observed this day with great fervour, pulses, and meat dish haleem are distributed, though some opt for biryani, sherbet or halwa. This day generally leads to clashes between Shias and Sunnis not only in Iraq but also in other Islamic countries. In India too clashes are reported in places like Hyderabad, Rampur, Lucknow, and Moradabad. Last year, Delhi too witnessed a violent Chehlum during which Shia mourners clashed with the police at the Jor Bagh Karbala.

  Though tension at Moharrum and Chehlum was evident even during Mughal times, the tazia processions made it to the historic Jor Bagh quite safely. These processions went from Kotla Ferozeshah (since there was no walled city then) and made a detour towards the haveli or mahal of the great general Mahabat Khan in what is now the Indraprastha Estate. Mahabat Khan, who served Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, had become a Shia later in life.

  His real name was Zamana Beg and his exploits were many. Whenever Che
hlum comes around, one cannot help but think of its link to Mahabat Khan whose grave is situated in Jor Bagh near the dargah of Shah-e-Mardan (Hazrat Ali), the prophet’s son-in-law and an invincible warrior. Mahabat Khan, the very name brings to mind the din of battle, clash of steel, neighing of horses, sound of trumpets, groans of the vanquished, and full-throated cry of the victors. The general of the imperial Mughal army initiated Shah Jahan into the art of warfare. He taught the young Prince Khurram how to parry and thrust during personal combat, feint and charge in swordsmanship, and the skilful use of the spear, dagger and shield, the javelin and the discus. But the irony of it all was that the ustad and the pupil were pitted against each other more than once in real battle because of the scheming Nur Jahan who had poisoned the ears of Jahangir against his son and crown prince.

  Khurram was asked to proceed north and counter the Persians whose Shah had captured Kandahar, which had long been part of the Mughal empire. His defiance of the command made matters worse and climaxed to a virtual rebellion. Eventually, Mahabat Khan persuaded his erstwhile pupil to send two of his sons, Dara and Aurangzeb, as hostages to Agra.