by Nafisa Haji
“Dat boy. He take peektures of Magda.”
“Yes. Is that your name? Magda?”
“I vant. Peektures of Magda.”
Mohsin, who had remained silent thus far, cleared his throat. “I’ll bring you pictures.”
“Yays. Dat veel be nice. Peektures of Magda. Like moowie star. Wery glamorous.” She smiled, revealing gaps where some of her teeth used to be.
She turned and left us, shuffling away slowly as Mohsin and I stared after her for a few moments before turning, ourselves, to leave.
The house was quiet when we got home. I looked at the clock on the mantel in the living room and saw that it was just past midnight. The hour, I remember, made me feel terribly grown up.
“Do you think Mehnaz is home yet?” I whispered, worriedly.
“Nah. Her car’s not in the drive. She won’t be home for hours.” Mohsin sounded unconcerned.
“Won’t your parents be mad?”
“They would be if they were awake. But they’re not. They won’t wait up tonight. They think she’s with us.” Mohsin stood with his hands in his pockets for a moment, before asking, “Do you want some juice or something? I’m getting some for myself.”
“Yes, please.” He turned to go to the kitchen. But I stopped him. “Mohsin? You don’t have to stick to juice because of me. I mean, I don’t care if you want a beer or something,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could.
He laughed and shook his head. And I was vaguely relieved when he came back with two glasses of orange juice. He beckoned me upstairs and into his room. He put his glass down on the desk in the corner and waved me over to the bed as he seated himself at its foot, in front of the shipping trunk I had noted with passing interest the day before. He swept its surface clear of books before opening it to remove, with some solemnity, another book of some kind, well-worn and leather-bound, with papers sticking out of it, like bookmarks.
“What’s that?”
“This.” Mohsin put his palm over the cover of what he held, caressing it a bit. “This is Roshan Qader’s journal.”
My eyes widened. “Dada’s journal?”
Mohsin nodded.
“Where’d you get it?”
“I found it in the trunk. Hidden away in a corner of the attic.”
“Inside the trunk?”
“Along with a bunch of papers—letters and newspaper clippings that he collected.” Mohsin sat down next to me and opened the book to the first page to show me the date. January 21, 1921.
“He started it right after he got out of jail. The first time. He was at Amritsar in April of 1919, at Jallianwalla Bagh, defying British orders that banned public meetings.” Mohsin was tracing a finger down the first page of the journal, but my eyes were on his face. “The general in charge ordered the troops to fire on the crowd, peaceably assembled, without giving them any warning to disperse. Hundreds were killed. More than a thousand wounded. And our grandfather was arrested. He was only nineteen. But he was already married. To Fauzia. Who was pregnant with their first child, Dawood, our dads’ half brother.”
“We had another uncle.” It finally dawned on me, what Mohsin had told me at Leicester Square, what he was telling me now.
“Yes. Dawood Chacha. He was born while Dada was in jail. They beat him up pretty badly and then kept him there for a long time. When he got out, Dawood Chacha was already two years old. And Dada—the rest of his life had begun. A life of service. His own family always came second to it. The same choice that all great men—and women—have to make.” Mohsin stroked that first page. “This journal reflects that commitment. It’s mostly about his work. With only a few references to personal things along the way. Dry stuff really, a bit over your head, I should think. No sex and romance. Not like your other grandfather’s story.”
The superior grin on Mohsin’s face prompted me to punch him in the arm. “I care about other stuff, too. Keep going.”
Mohsin shrugged. “You can read it yourself, if you like.” His casual tone didn’t match the white-knuckled grip with which he was suddenly holding the journal, and I noticed his hand had retreated, possessively, rather than extending to match the offer of his words.
I had to hide a superior smile of my own. “I will.” I thought of my mother’s stories. Of Big Nanima’s and Belle’s. Their voices echoed in my head, along with Razia Nani’s. Here were more family secrets that no one had ever bothered to share. That my father had a brother and sister I had never heard of. That my grandfather had been beaten and jailed by the British. “I’ll read it later. But—you tell me the story first.” The next smile, a little sheepish, I couldn’t hide, feeling like a little girl begging for a bedtime tale. “I like the way you’re telling it. Makes it more alive.”
Mohsin smiled at me and punched me back, gently. But I could tell he was happy to oblige. He cleared his throat ceremoniously and started talking again. “I don’t know why, but our grandfather and his first wife, Fauzia, didn’t have any other children for a very long time. But—a little over ten years later—she was pregnant again when Dada decided to join the Salt March. The British government had a monopoly on the manufacture of salt. So Gandhi decided to march to a coastal village called Dandi, to take salt from the sea. To thumb his nose at British rule—though he probably wouldn’t have put it quite that way. To show that Indians refused to recognize the authority of the Raj. Civil disobedience. Peaceful resistance. Satyagraha.” Mohsin turned a few pages of the book he still held in a slightly more relaxed hand and pointed out the date. March 4, 1930. “Dada mentions—in passing—that Fauzia was very upset about him leaving her to go on the march. ‘Regretfully, I took my leave of her amid a torrent of tears. Despite all of my efforts to persuade her of the rightness of my decision, Fauzia could not understand why this march with Gandhiji was so important. She remembered Jallianwalla Bagh. So did I, but with a very different effect.’ By the end of the march, Dada was in jail again. This time, for less than a year. He received this telegram in prison.” Mohsin handed me a fragile piece of yellowed paper, addressed to Roshan Qader in April of 1930.
REGRET TO INFORM YOU FAUZIA DIED IN CHILDBIRTH STOP YOU HAVE A HEALTHY DAUGHTER STOP
My hand shook a little as I handed the telegram back to Mohsin. I watched him tuck the piece of paper carefully back into the page where he had taken it out from and looked up to find him watching me with a face I couldn’t read.
I felt compelled to say something. “That’s—that’s so sad.” The words were inadequate, I knew. “So—he—he wasn’t really there for her, was he? In jail when she gave birth the first time. In jail again when she died.”
Mohsin shrugged. “He did what he had to do.”
“He shouldn’t have gone on that march.” I said what I was thinking out loud without meaning to.
“He had to go.”
“No he didn’t. He chose to go. There’s a difference.”
“Sometimes there is.”
I stared at Mohsin. I knew what he was thinking. “That’s—not—the same.”
“No. It’s not. Dada left his wife—”
“His pregnant wife!”
“Yes. She was pregnant. But he left her—only temporarily, mind you—for something important. Something bigger than himself. Your other grandfather—Kasim Saeed—he left his wife, threw her away like trash, for nothing but his own selfish—” Mohsin broke off. Now, it was his turn to look a little sheepish. “Sorry, Saira. He’s your granddad. And it’s none of my business after all.”
I shook my head and blew out a noisy breath of exasperation as I said, “I’m not defending him! I just—oh, just get on with the story!” I heard my own tone and added, meekly, “Please.”
Mohsin laughed. “All right. Well—” He broke off to look back down at the little book for inspiration. He thumbed through quite a few more pages. “Dada got back home almost a year later. Dawood Chacha and the baby—her name was Gulshan—were with Dada’s mother, our great-grandmother. Dada writes that Dawood Chacha
took his mum’s death hard.”
“How old was he?”
“Just eleven. Dada sent him off to school when he got back from jail.”
I felt my forehead crease with judgment.
Mohsin shrugged. “It’s the way things were back then.”
“What about the baby?”
“She didn’t know her dad. And, well, the way things worked in those days, Dada’s mum was pretty much in charge of her care. In the beginning, anyway. Until one night, soon after Dada returned from prison. He wrote about it.” Mohsin was holding the journal out to me, a finger running under a couple of lines of close, old-fashioned handwriting. “The baby—Gulshan—approached him, toddled her way over to his knee as he sat and worked on an article he was writing. It was the first time she ever looked at him as someone familiar. Not a stranger. She called him ‘Papa’—here’s the bit, here.”
I scanned the words quickly.
“It’s only a few words, I know. But when you read the whole thing—and you see how little there is of anything sentimental—you realize how much that moment and the next one he wrote about must have meant to him. That night, Dada heard Gulshan, who slept with her grandmother, crying and fussing. He knocked at his mother’s door and asked if everything was all right. She was teething. And his mother was tired. She handed Gulshan over. The baby looked up at her father. Said ‘Papa’ again. He took her to his room, put her down beside him in his bed, and she fell asleep in seconds. From that moment on, Gulshan became Dada’s constant companion—climbing up on his lap when he wrote or read letters, received and reciprocated social and business calls, traveling with him by train or horse and carriage as he crisscrossed the subcontinent, busy with so many projects that it would make your head spin. I know that because so many of the letters that he received later—after—made reference to little Gulshan as her father’s ‘sweet little shadow’—that was how one of Dada’s friends put it.
“Two years later, when Dada was about to leave, with Gulshan, on another trip, she came down with the measles.” Mohsin rifled through the journal again. “‘Dr. Khan having reassured me of the routine nature of her malady, I have reluctantly decided to leave Gulshan behind with Majee while I engage on this journey. I have explained the importance of our mission to Gulshan, whose understanding I have noted as being that of a child well beyond her years. Still, seeing her so weak with fever, my heart is unsettled at the thought of parting from Gulshan, who grows more like her mother every day.’” Mohsin paused.
I knew what would come next, but had to brace myself in order to bear it.
“A few weeks later, Dada had reached Wardha, on his way to Segaon, when this telegram caught up with him, two weeks too late.” Mohsin handed me another yellowed piece of tissue-thin paper.
GULSHAN GRAVELY ILL STOP
RETURN HOME IMMEDIATELY STOP
NOT MUCH TIME STOP
I stared at the words for a long time before handing the paper that captured them back to Mohsin.
He said, “From what I could figure, looking through the dates, Gulshan was already dead by the time Dada got this. It was meningitis—a secondary infection from the measles.” Mohsin put the telegram away, as carefully as he had the first. He paused for a moment, noting the moisture collecting in my eyes. Then he turned the pages again, putting the journal down on the table in front of us. “Um. Six or seven—maybe eight years—after Fauzia died, Dada married again. Her name was Shaheena. He had one son with her. My dad. She died of typhoid a few months after he was born. Dada was there for her death. He describes it in the journal. ‘I arrived home last week after a month’s absence to find Shaheena lying motionless, eyes half-open, weak with fever. I knew the truth immediately, that Shaheena was on her deathbed, recognizing the symptoms too well, those insidious signs, the final stages of typhoid. She was a wonderful wife, a partner, supportive of all of my efforts for the poor. Daily, she made the trip to the jhugees down the road, carrying baskets of food and clothes to distribute to those in desperate need. She befriended the humble occupants of those hovels, laying aside the class hierarchies that divided them from her. It was what killed her, in the end. As a guest in the tin-roofed, straw and mud huts she visited, she never refused the refreshments they offered her, loath to give offense. Refreshments made of water, the disease-ridden, infested water that comes with poverty. I mourn her loss, remembering her cheerful good-byes, so frequent as the nature of my work took me away from her so often. My work—seeking to eradicate the conditions that killed Shaheena, the poverty, the class divide, the horrible discrimination of caste. Her death strengthens my determination, because too many suffer the same.’
“Dawood Chacha must have been twenty-one—older than his stepmother was. Then, only a few weeks after my dad’s mum passed away, Dada’s mother sent a marriage proposal on his behalf to Shaheena’s family. She decided that this time, the baby—Ahmed—would have a mother. Not like Gulshan. So, she arranged her son’s marriage to his sister-in-law. Amna. Your grandmother. My dad’s aunt.”
“That’s—that must have been weird.”
Mohsin tilted his head. “Not really. It made sense. Your grandmother, Amna—Dadi—well, she was getting on a bit in years. In her mid-twenties already. What would have been considered an old maid. And Dada’s mum probably figured it was the best thing for everyone.”
“Have—has your dad ever talked about it? About being raised by a stepmother? Who was also his aunt?”
“Never. I never even knew until I read Dada’s journal. So it must have all worked out for the best.”
“I guess.” I shrugged off my doubt and fixed my eyes back on Mohsin, expectantly.
“Right. Well—” Mohsin’s voice trailed off into a moment of silence. And then became suddenly certain again as he resumed his narrative on a different note, less personal than the trajectory we’d followed until now. “The day did finally come—the day Dada and Gandhi and the whole Independence movement had been struggling for—for so many years. But the way it happened took them all by surprise. The way the negotiations ended, no one was prepared really, not least the British themselves. They withdrew in a pretty nasty kind of way—like parents who’ve given in to a tantrum. They clicked their tongues, washed their hands of the whole Subcontinent, and left it all cut up in pieces, giving it up in a way that was designed for failure, handing power over in bits. And the Indians responded in kind, acting like children, fighting furiously over those bits and pieces.
“Gandhi—the Great Soul of India’s independence—greeted the day with fasting and prayers, mourning all the riots and bloodshed, begging the people to stop. It wasn’t a time for celebration. India was divided—in heart, in mind, in soul, and in blood. That’s not what all those great men had worked for. Muslims in the middle, like Hindus and Sikhs in the west and east, they all had decisions to make. For Dada, there was never a question.”
Mohsin picked up the journal, rustled forward through the pages, and then set it back down on the table, between us, his finger tracing the words he then read aloud: “‘It is wrong, horribly wrong, to support the creation of a nation founded on the religious identity of its majority. My brother, who has decided to leave India, to migrate to Pakistan with my mother, his wife, and his children, believes this is a time to be pragmatic. That what is right and wrong is less important than what is safe and practical. To no avail, I have tried to persuade him that what is right and wrong is always of paramount importance. To stray from principle in the interest of expedience is the road to disaster. The struggle to know what is right, to condemn what is wrong, to fight for the former and against the latter, has been the whole purpose of my life. For me, there is no point in being safe if one is wrong. This nation is founded on a sense of unity and brotherhood that transcends ethnic and religious affiliation. His, the nation he chooses, has sealed the pact of discrimination and separatism in a way that will set precedents for the future that I tremble to contemplate. He is afraid for his children, that in India
they may become an oppressed minority. Whereas I would wish, a thousand times more, that my children wear the yoke of oppression, striving bravely against it, than to join the ranks of the oppressors. A thousand times!’” Mohsin’s eyes, when he looked up, were shining. “Isn’t that amazing? To think that our grandfather wrote those words? Every time I read them, I—I’m in awe. The bloody irony of it! Of what he wrote and how things ended up with his sons! You—you see what I mean, don’t you, Saira?”
“No—they—? What do you mean?”
“I mean my dad. And yours. They did just the opposite of what Dada wished for, didn’t they? They turned their backs on their country, the country he helped to liberate—both of them chasing after the oppressors—the Empire—that Dada worked to get out from under for so long. Instead of sticking around and doing what needed to be done. Like their brother did.”
I didn’t say anything, I couldn’t, in anticipation of the answer I knew was coming to my next question. “What happened to Dawood Chacha?”
“He—he became a journalist.”
I took a deep breath and held it.
Mohsin nodded. “He died—was killed. Murdered by an angry mob while reporting on the riots in Calcutta in 1947. My dad was eight then, yours only three.”
I wanted to say something, opened my mouth to begin, but no words came.
Mohsin cleared his throat and read again from our grandfather’s journal: “‘Dawood’s death was the sharpest blow in a series of them. Amna, who was more of a sister to him than a mother, wept bitterly when we were given the news. Ahmed and Nadeem, both of them so young, met their first conscious experience with death bravely as I myself have learned to do over the course of my life. I am mourning, like all of India mourns, for its sons and brothers, daughters and sisters. Yet there is consolation in knowing that Dawood’s life was a worthy one, that the loss of it can be tallied in the column of other sacrifices for the cause of justice. He was an optimist whose hope for the future was ever eternal, a light shining brightly in the darkness of the barbarous violence that rages on throughout our nation. To the children, to Amna, it falls to me to explain that to honour Dawood’s memory and the memory of all those who suffer still, we must fight on, never wavering before the forces of injustice.’ He goes on a bit here. And then, ‘Curiously, when I think of Dawood, alone and beaten in that crowd of degenerated humanity, I think of his sister, my little Gulshan, and their mother.’” Mohsin pulled out a flimsy piece of newsprint. “This is one of a couple of clippings that Dada must have cut out and saved.”