The Non-Conformist

by Parikshat Sahni

  Dad was surprised to know that apart from him, very few people were aware of Mahjoor Saheb’s identity. One day, Dad was travelling in a tonga with Mahjoor Saheb when he found a crowd of people standing around Sheri, the bard who sang the latter’s songs in marketplaces. Dad stopped the tonga and asked someone who had written this song. The man replied that it was written by an ancient Sufi poet. When Dad pointed to Mahjoor Saheb and informed the crowd that the song had been written by the man sitting with him in the tonga, at first they did not believe him. But when Mahjoor Saheb revealed who he was, and when Sheri, the singer, corroborated this, the crowd went wild and there was an impromptu celebration in the market.

  The film was to be shot entirely in Kashmir. That was the main attraction for me—the lure of spending a few months in Kashmir in our old ancestral home. I enthusiastically embarked on the project. When I landed in Srinagar in the late sixties, my joy knew no bounds. Kashmir was beautiful as ever. The land was lush and green. The air was pure and intoxicating as ever. The people were warm and affectionate. It was a homecoming.

  Shooting the film was however a tough assignment. But once I set aside my preconceived notions, I submitted myself to the experience and began enjoying every moment. I spent a great deal of time with the local people, whose hospitality and affection endeared them to me even further, and made up my mind to settle for good in Kashmir some day and be of some service to the valley and its people.

  But when I went back to Kashmir after a decade in 1979, to shoot a TV serial called Gul, Gulshan, Gulfam, things had changed drastically. Dad’s prediction seemed to be coming true. The Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was active by then and there was frequent cross-firing in the Dal Gate area. We once saw a bus being blown up on the road just across from where the houseboat, on which we were shooting in, was moored, and there were frequent blackouts. This was a Srinagar I had never seen before. It surprised and saddened me. I couldn’t help thinking of what Dad would have thought of this change in his beloved valley.

  He had passed away in 1973, but his memory was still fresh in people’s minds. They remembered him fondly and treated me like royalty. A refrain I often heard was, ‘He was one of us’, the highest tribute they could have paid anyone. Benefiting greatly from the love and respect they bore him in their hearts, I also became one of them. I was really moved when they said, ‘It is a great privilege to have you, his son, with us!’

  Whenever blackouts were announced, people were asked to switch off all lights in their houses. However, when this happened, I would get an anonymous phone call from someone who would politely say, ‘I am speaking on behalf of the organization that announced the blackout. I have been asked to convey to you that it does not apply to you, Sahni Saheb. You can keep the lights on in your room. You are a Kashmiri.’

  But one day a letter arrived, evidently from the JKLF, asking us to pack our bags and leave the valley or they would kill the houseboat owners who had given us shelter. Not everyone took the letter seriously till they cut off the cables on our generator, which ran along the bed of the lake, more than ten or fifteen feet underwater. This alarmed everyone in the unit. Cutting such thick cables at such a depth was a gargantuan feat and required tremendous skill. It was a job for scuba divers.

  Shaken, we decided to leave. Our departure was heartrending. We had become family for the houseboat owners in the two months we had lived with them. Some of them wept unabashedly to see us leave. They took me aside and said tearfully, ‘Sir, do not go, please. You are one of us. Your father was like an older brother to us.’

  I wept bitterly when I said goodbye to them. I had a feeling I was bidding goodbye to the best years of my life—goodbye to my home, goodbye to memories, and goodbye perhaps to the valley. If Kashmir had come to this, then I had no desire to return to it. I wept all the way to the airport, even after the plane had taken off (with the airhostess probably thinking I was drunk). My tears continued even when I reached Delhi and narrated my experiences to Bhisham-ji. He looked terribly downcast and was silent for a long time. No words were necessary; his silence conveyed to me the sense of loss he was also experiencing. For both of us it was like a surgical excision of the most cherished part of our lives.

  But the experience in Kashmir, beyond the politics, made me aware of the legacy Dad had left behind. Even after a decade of his passing away, people still remembered him fondly as one of their own. His presence was something that could never be eradicated from their hearts; his memory and his soul still lingered among those whom he had embraced as his own.

  This was further brought home to me when I went to Srinagar in 2013. Grandpa owned a piece of land in Raj Bagh, which I had never seen. I decided to visit it. There I met a young Kashmiri man, a photographer married to a girl from Delhi, who wanted to buy it and build a studio on it. The area around the plot is crowded with houses now, with hardly any vacant space left. But I was surprised to see that our land was untouched. We found a caretaker who looked after it. When I asked him why our land had been spared, the man said, ‘This is your father Sahni Saheb’s plot of land. How can anyone touch it? We still revere his memory. He was one of us.’ I was left speechless.

  Paradise lost

  The last time I went to Kashmir, around 2014, as a chief guest at my former school, I was heartbroken to see how dilapidated Srinagar had become. I remember being glad that Dad was not around to see what it looked like. He would have been overjoyed to see the new airport, which is truly grand, but any joy he felt would have been dispelled when travelling down the road leading to the city. It was jam packed with cars vying with each other to get ahead as they try to clear the way by persistently honking, jarring people’s ears with the cacophony of sounds. The air was polluted with the exhaust spewing from the cars, making it difficult to breathe. In earlier days, the road wound through paddy fields on either side, with a spectacular view of snow-clad mountains in the distance. But the view from the road was obscured by characterless cement villas, much like in Delhi or Chandigarh. The quaint wooden houses so typical of Kashmir, resembling Swiss chalets, were nowhere in sight. And despite an outward appearance of prosperity, Srinagar had lost its character and looked drab, dull and morose.

  This forbidding mood was reflected in the sullen and preoccupied faces I saw on the roads. And although Dad’s precious Gulmarg abounded with its plethora of fine-looking hotels, the view was marred by huge garbage dumps like the ones one sees in Mumbai. Moreover, Gulmarg was not far from the LOC; the army presence is apparent, with checkpoints and armed guards everywhere. One could not go for a walk without bumping into a platoon of army soldiers!

  Dad’s favourite mountain, the picturesque Zabarwan, which he had delighted in climbing on so many occasions, was bare without a vestige of snow on its peaks—bearing testimony to the fact that global warming had not left Kashmir untouched.

  Khilan Marg had changed dramatically. A regular township of shops and dhabas had sprung up, and it had become a favourite spot for winter sports, with people from around the world coming there. It was prospering rapidly, thriving on the business provided by visitors during summer as well as winter. It is the only place I visited in Kashmir where people seemed satisfied and cheerful.

  I had some tea and parathas in one of the dhabas (if they can be called that with most of them looking like regular restaurants!). The owner was a man called Gul Ahmed. I invited him to have a cup of tea with me and he obliged with alacrity. I asked him how things were in this part of Kashmir.

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ he answered with a broad smile.

  ‘I see the army all over the place,’ I remarked.

  ‘No problem, sir! They do their job and leave us alone.’

  ‘But you hate Indians, don’t you?’

  He smiled amicably. ‘Why should we? We are happy to be a part of India. There should be variety, sir. A garden is beautiful only if different flowers grow in it. What would it be like if the garden had just one kind of flower growing in every
flowerbed? “Let a hundred flowers bloom” as a great man has said, voicing the essence of Kashmir—its Kashmiriyat—which is now so rare in the valley.’

  That cheered me up. But not when I thought about the other changes in the valley. The Dal Lake, in which I swam with Dad in the good old days, was full of weeds and had shrunk considerably because of illegal construction in and around it. And the slopes of the Chashma Shahi garden, which Dad and I would climb, were out of bounds, with the area being crisscrossed with barbed wire and patrolled by army jawans. It was sad to see the pristine, health-giving waters of the Chashma Shahi no longer flowing bountifully. Instead, there was a pipe that supplied water to ministerial homes some distance away.

  When I went to see our house in in Wazir Baugh in Srinagar, I was aghast. Where was the house in which I had spent my childhood? Had I come to the wrong place? But no, this was where I had enjoyed the carefree days of my early years. But there was a five star hotel where our house had once stood. A part of me died that day, as did my dream to settle in Kashmir permanently one day. My desire to live again in our ancestral home was blown away in smoke and I decided to put the idea of moving back to Kashmir out of my mind for good. I know that Dad would have wanted to live in Kashmir in his last days, as his soul and spirit dwelt in it. It is perhaps just as well that he did not live to see his dreams being shattered.

  I met some Kashmiris the other day and asked them how things are now. ‘Kya kahen, Sahni Saheb? Nazar lag gayi hamare Kashmir ko,’ (What can we say, Sahni Saheb, it is as if an evil eye has been cast on our Kashmir), they said ruefully.

  Yet, despite the decline of the valley, I like to dwell on the things that have not changed—things that will never change. I like to think of the wild flowers, for which the valley is so loved, which still bloom on the slopes and downs of Gulmarg; I like to reflect on the tall, graceful fir trees which still stand as silent and resplendent sentinels to the passage of time; I like to relish memories of the fragrant grass, which is verdant as ever—as smooth and soft as the baize surface of a billiards table; I like to think of the huge mountain crows (jackdaws) that still croak hoarsely in the silence of the thick and dark coniferous woods, and I like to celebrate memories of the waters of the Dal Lake, which, although they have shrunk in size, are as pristine as ever, as are the boisterous streams that flow down from the mountains that surround it. Kashmir may have lost its former gloss, but it hasn’t lost its soul, nor its place in our hearts. I like to remember Dad amidst the bonds he built with the common people of Kashmir; their handsome, ruddy and sensitive faces; their hospitality; their innate warmth and affection; their sensitivity and their indestructible, undying Kashmiriyat, which nothing in the world can eradicate.

  7

  The Friends

  The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.

  William Shakespeare

  Associations from Rawalpindi

  ‘I think that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people,’ said Van Gogh. Dad couldn’t have agreed more. Unconditional love was the hallmark of all his relationships. It was the reason why he was such a joy to be with and why he made such fast and long-lasting friendships. Once he had made friends with someone, he ‘grappled them to his soul with hoops of steel’.

  That was also the reason for the excellence of his work, for as Van Gogh also says, ‘Whoever loves much performs much and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.’ For Dad it was love that made the world go around. He is reported to have said once, ‘Love of humanity is the greatest of all goals!’

  Dad was an out and out extrovert and never gave much thought to himself. I recall a time when we were dining together in a small restaurant in Gulmarg; one of the dishes was too spicy and made my mouth burn, but it had no effect on Dad. He was busy admiring the landscape outside the window. He devoured the food with gusto. I asked him whether he liked what he was eating for it could be bad for his stomach. His answer was, ‘Look at the faces of the local men who have brought their ponies on hire standing outside, Parikshat. Such handsome men and so poor! To hell with my innards. I never think about my insides.’

  He loved people and hated being alone for too long. In school and college, as Bhisham-ji recalls, ‘His favourite occupation was getting hold of a few friends and going out on long bicycle rides or on long walks.’ Bhisham-ji also recalls Dad’s adventurous spirit:

  When he saw a hill, he wanted to climb it; when he saw a lake, he wanted to swim across it. He had a remarkable capacity for making friends, and with his handsome face, his candid and buoyant disposition and sociable ways, he was a delightful conversationalist, bubbling with humour and zest. His company was much sought after.

  His friendships lasted a lifetime. Even after Partition, I remember, some of his old friends would come to and meet him from Pakistan and spend a week or ten days in our house (Stella Villa). I remember a lady, Shehla Shibli, from Rawalpindi, who knew our family very well during the pre-Partition days, who visited us in Mumbai, not once but several times. I had a feeling she was a Hindu before the Partition, but had opted to stay back in Rawalpindi and had converted to Islam. She had married a Muslim gentleman whom she was in love with, but of course, she missed her close friends from whom the Partition had torn her away so cruelly. It was heart-rending to see how emotional Shehla-ji and Dad would get when they remembered the ‘good old days’!

  I also remember a college friend of Dad’s from Lahore, Mr Bakshi, who evidently couldn’t reconcile himself with the two-nation theory and had left Pakistan for good and settled in London instead. He visited India often to meet Dad. He stayed with us for weeks, savouring Indian gin, which he imbibed copiously, as he and Dad reminisced about old times and discussed the needless partition of India.

  On one occasion, someone told him about Maharishi Bhrigu Santa, an ancient astrologer renowned for his compilation of predictive astrological birth charts, the Bhrigu Samhita. Mr Bakshi was intrigued, although being a Muslim, he didn’t believe in horoscopes and fortune tellers. But his curiosity aroused, he decided to visit Hoshiarpur in Punjab from where he brought back his own horoscope, which had evidently been written ages ago and described his past life in great detail, his present whereabouts and his future with such precision and accuracy that the man was dumbfounded, as were all of us (but most of all Dad since he didn’t believe in any religious ‘mumbo-jumbo’ as he called it). The parchment declared, among other things, that Mr Bakshi lived in a ‘faraway’ island, that his wife was of a ‘different race’ and that her name was that of a star (her name was Tara and she was an Englishwoman). The document was written on bhoj part. (In ancient India, people wrote on the thin, paper-like bark of a tree.) The writing was in some archaic, ancient dialect and had to be translated. It had faded with the years, but was still legible. The document looked authentic. Mr Bakshi was stumped by this phenomenon and kept repeating through the haze of Booth’s Dry Gin, ‘How can this be Balraj? No one in India knows me, let alone my wife’s name. And it is written clearly on this ancient piece of parched paper.’ He enjoyed his gin and tonic around the clock and had the ineffably sad look of a cocker spaniel. Neither Dad nor I believed in astrology, but his story, I must say, intrigued both of us.

  Mr Bakshi and Dad remembered their days together in the Government College with great nostalgia and asked one another the whereabouts of mutual friends. Listening to them, I learnt a lot about what the atmosphere was like before Partition and what attitudes prevailed with regard to religion in those days. Mr Bakshi related an intriguing story about a group of four friends, two Hindu and two Muslim. One of the Muslim boys was madly in love with a girl of his own religion and sect, but the parents of the girl objected to the alliance. The lovers decided to get married secretly without the knowledge of their parents and went to a Qazi to formalize the marriage. But there was a problem. Two of the boys accompanying their Muslim friend and his fiancé were Hindus. The fourth Muslim friend
was absent that day. The Qazi needed a Muslim witness, without whose signature the marriage could not be solemnized. This impasse thoroughly demoralized the couple. The girl wept unabashedly till one of the Hindu friends could not bear it any longer and said to the Qazi, ‘So you need a Muslim witness?’ ‘Yes’, declared the Qazi emphatically.

  He was about to leave when the Hindu boy stopped him and declared, ‘This boy is my bosom friend and I can’t see him suffer. Make me a Muslim right away and I will sign the required document so that the marriage can be formalized. Friendship first, religion later!’

  So, right there and then, the Hindu friend was formally converted to Islam (and was even circumcised later on) and given a Muslim name. He had to read the Kalma, and only after that was the marriage solemnized. This was typical of the egalitarian and secular spirit that prevailed in those days.

  Dad and Bakshi Saheb went for long walks on the beach, with Dad’s arm always around his friend’s shoulder. They were ‘buddies’ and still rued the day they had had to be separated because of Partition. Deep and abiding friendships of that kind are a rarity now. But, of course, there are exceptions to the rule.

  Ladies’ man

  Dad was pretty much a ladies’ man. With his good looks and charming personality, it was not surprising that members of the opposite sex sought his company. As I have said before, one of the reasons he had gone to England was to interact with the women there. One lady he befriended was Louise Bateman. It is not clear whether she was one of Dad’s old ‘flames’ with whom he had had an affair during his time in England or if she was just an acquaintance, but from the way she looked at Dad it was evident that they were more than just friends. Perhaps it was not very tactful of Dad to invite her to visit us once or twice and stay with us, but he said she was insistent and wanted to meet him badly. Even at her advanced age she was charming and beautiful! I could understand why Dad had been attracted to her (and vice versa).