River of Fire

by Qurratulain Hyder

  Menfolk went to the Idgah for congregational prayers and came back greeting everybody with joyous shouts of “Id Mubarak!” Bhaiya Saheb would go for prayers with Kamal and Father, dressed in a cream-coloured sherwani, white churidars and Salimshahi shoes. He looked like a Mughal prince. On this Id he was away in the western seas infested with German submarines. Everybody in Gulfishan prayed for his safe return. They loved him. Why was he behaving so foolishly about Champa?

  It had shocked Talat to discover that feminine beauty was so highly prized, that for men Body was more important than Brains. She lay in a corner of the back lawn, plucked a blade of three-petalled bitter-sweet grass and munched it reflectively. She could hear the faint, sad murmur of women in the outhouses. Perhaps they, too, were talking about Tehmina’s tragedy as they stitched her clothes for the Hopeless Chest.

  Then there was silence.

  Talat blinked at the intense blue of the sky. A shining stillness throbbed everywhere. She put her ears against the cool, peaceful earth. I am lying on the earth with my ears flapping, like Yajooj and Majooj. She stretched her hand and plucked another blade of khat-mithi grass and continued nibbling it unhappily.

  Kamal and Hari Shankar were strolling on a quiet road in Dehra Dun. An Englishman of their acquaintance had become a sadhu, and Kamal and Hari Shankar had been asked by his friends to tail the runaway during the holidays and bring him back. They had fruitlessly combed a few caves and temples in the foothills near Haridwar, and then one day they ran into him near Jog Maya’s temple outside Rishikesh. He pleaded with them to be left alone, jumped over a little stream and disappeared into the pines.

  Now the two young men walked down a fragrant road in Dalanwalla, the Rispana flowing in front of them.

  “Hari Shankar . . . yaar,” Kamal mused aloud.

  “Yep.”

  “Come to think of it, this chap is dead right. We ourselves are in a goddamn bloody awful mess, pardon my language.”

  That evening they pondered a good deal over the philosophy of renunciation and uttered great profundities.

  “All this seems to be a great cosmic misunderstanding,” Kamal observed.

  “Let’s read the bungalows’ names . . .” responded Hari Shankar and read out the names.

  “Ashiana! Aha.”

  “Cloud’s End. I say, that’s a lovely one.”

  “We’re living on the edge of a cloud, we shall never build a house. For the falcon doth not make a nest,” Kamal quoted Iqbal.

  “To think that people have built houses, lovely houses of all kinds. The world is full of houses.”

  “Yes, isn’t it strange.”

  “I had an urge just now to change some of these detachable name-plates as we did once on Fyzabad Road, Lucknow, but I realised that we are not young hooligans any more. We’re only being philosophical.”

  “Come to think of it, that was a rather philosophical act of ours,” observed Kamal, “because the houses remain the same, only their owners’ names change . . .”

  They sat down on a little Chinese bridge which connected Kamal’s own house, Khyaban, with the avenue, and resumed their thinking. The Englishman’s renunciation had upset them. He just gave up and went off to the woods. Why?

  The English sadhu slept peacefully on a rock by the Rispana.

  38. Inquilab, Zindabad!

  In the first week of September, 1943, Kamal was about to leave for Calcutta for famine relief work when he received a letter from Laj’s husband who was a central government officer in New Delhi. Laj’s parents were now trying to find a suitable match for their younger daughter, Nirmala. He wrote:

  You are off to Calcutta, I hear. Sir Deep Narain Nilambar’s son, Gautam, is also there these days. We’re thinking of proposing Nirmala to him. We hear he is also busy in this famine relief work—apart from producing Marxist plays for the Indian People’s Theatre, that is. All rather alarming, I’m afraid. He is reported to be connected with the fine arts in some dubious way and lives soulfully at Santiniketan. Make it a point to track him down in Calcutta and find out all about him—is he a responsible young man or another vagabond like yourself and Hari Shankar? Give me the lowdown at the earliest.

  This was followed by relevant details about the boy’s family.

  Kamal pocketed the letter and groaned. Thousands are dying of hunger, the country is heading for total disaster, and what is Jeejaji doing? He’s busy match-making. Kamal was a fire-eating student worker. Also, ever since the fiasco around his own sister Tehmina’s engagement, any talk of weddings made him see red. “Should I be carrying corpses in the streets of Calcutta,” he said to Talat crossly, “or go around husband-hunting for Miss Nirmala?”

  Still, as a matter of duty he carefully noted down this fellow’s address and left for Bengal with a large contingent of boys and girls from his university. They sang, argued or dozed during the long and tedious journey. Kamal watched the green cornfields roll by as the train hurtled along towards the east. He kept thinking: This is my unhappy country, this is my starving country. The urge for revolution created an upsurge of intense and painful emotions in his young heart. He leaned back against the hard wooden wall of the compartment. He was not used to travelling third class but he did not want to open his holdall and lie down on his expensive bedding. His peers would call him a sissy. He closed his eyes and tried to analyse his class affiliations and the fountainhead of his intense patriotism. His father had recently joined the Muslim League and he could find no simple explanation for the happenings of the recent past—wheels within wheels within wheels . . .

  Like everybody else he also had his personal India. It was made up of so many things. The picturesque village Neelampur, the vast, ancient family graveyard surrounded by banyan trees. A clear brook ran through the burial ground like the Biblical “living waters”. There was a tiny dargah adjoining the cemetery, inhabited by quaint-looking harmless dervishes. Sometimes in the dead of night you could hear one of them shouting, “Allah—hoo!” None could fathom the mysteries of those silent nights and those lonely cries—what the Sufis called the flight of the alone to the alone.

  There was another mysterious-looking gray building in his village, the matth of an ancient sanyasi order, which he had once visited as a boy with his father. A thick-set young man in ochre robes sat placidly upon a wooden settee in a bare room. The young man was a university graduate and had recently succeeded to the gaddi of the matth. He had remained silent and given Kamal an orange.

  Well, he also has one kind of life to lead, thought Kamal, in an area of human experience of which I know nothing.

  Outside, the monastery’s garden was full of marigolds and plantains. Red lotuses bloomed in a tank, a koel sang in the mango trees.

  So, how was this country to be defined? India was Qadeer’s old mother, clad in a yellow sari of rough cotton. She was a career woman, as it were, warder of the district jail’s female wing. She had come to the railway station at Mirzapur once and given Kamal clay toys. The quiet avenues of Civil Lines where the dog-boys of the Angrez Sahebs took out their pets, were also India. In rural areas chicken-pox and small-pox were simply called ‘Mata’ and considered a manifestation of the wrath of the goddess Sitala. Their old cook, Basharat Hussain, belonged to a village in the district of Ghazipur. He looked like Ali Baba with his long white beard.

  As a small boy Kamal had come down with chicken-pox, and one fine morning old Basharat Hussain tiptoed into the sick-room. He put on his muslin skull cap, stood on one leg, folded his hands and implored the folk ‘spirit’: “Sitala Mata, leave Kamman Bhaiya alone and go away. I beg of you, I fold my hands before you!”

  This khansama was also India.

  1857 still haunted his grandparents’ generation. Even Englishmen had recorded that they had sewn Hindus and Muslims alive in cow-hide and pigskin, as punishment.

  Kamal’s adventurous great-grandfather, Kamaluddin Ali Reza Bahadur, alias Nawab Kamman, had gone to England in the fateful year 1856. On his return two
years later, he had found Lucknow lying in ruins and had shifted to Calcutta. His descendants had moved back to the north.

  The Muslims have an emotional problem. Once an English friend at Oxford asked Maulana Mohammed Ali to suggest a caption for a photograph he had taken of a beggar woman in a ragged burqa, sitting on the steps of Delhi’s Jama Masjid. Mohammed Ali scribbled underneath—Her father built it.

  In 1901, two puny taluqdars of the Terai region travelled to Delhi, both descendants of Queen Hazrat Mahal’s knights. The Two Gentleman of the Terai were Kamal and Hari Shankar’s grandfathers, proudly come to attend the Delhi Durbar celebrating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

  Akbar Allahabadi, the satirist, wrote:

  How shall I tell you what I saw

  In the Empire’s pomp and show,

  Jamuna-ji was flowing past

  The highest of the mighty Laats,

  The famous Duke Connaught.

  Elephants and horsemen, cannons and camps and military bands,

  Worthies jostling in the throng

  To get close to the seat of power.

  In the high noon of the Raj

  I even saw Curzon Maharaj.

  The Mehfil and the Saqi are theirs.

  Lady Curzon danced till dawn

  In Shahjahan’s marble hall.

  The Ball was like Inder Sabha, I hear,

  For how could I go there?

  The view from a distance is my share.

  Only the eyes are mine, the rest is theirs.

  Kamal sat up and started reciting the poem, then leaned back again.

  “Mad, yaar,” his friends said, grinning. He closed his eyes and resumed his own journey. Passing through the poverty-stricken districts of eastern U.P., Kamal recalled some events of his childhood. In 1934 the Congress leader, Rafi Ahmad Kidwai, had started the No Rent Movement and the peasants of U.P. stopped paying land revenue. Both Kamal’s father and uncle, Sir Zaki, were furious. Asad Mamoon was jubilant. Asad Mian was a visionary nationalist, a cousin of Kamal’s mother. He had named his daughter, Khalida, after the Turkish writer, Khalida Adib Khanum, Minister of Education in the new Republic of Turkey. He used to come out with unusual bits of information: When Khalida Khanum visited Bombay in 1934 she gave the dancer Annette the name Azurie. The Mangalorian dancer had performed at Begum Atiya Fyzee’s Three Arts Circle on Malabar Hill. According to data collected by the government in 1921, more Muslim girls attended schools in U.P. than their Hindu counterparts.

  So why is this community becoming backward?

  Indians had rejoiced at Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 but could not celebrate the heroes of 1857. They found their heroes in Turkey, Italy and Ireland. Novels were written in Urdu about the Turco-Russian War of 1878, Muslims named their new-born sons after the heroes of the Balkan Wars and World War I. In the University of Lucknow there were two brothers, Midhat Kamal Kidwai and his sibling, Anwar Jamal, who had been named after the Generals Midhat and Enver Pashas. Kamal was fondly called Kamal Pasha, after Kamal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey . . .

  The train crossed into Bihar. Kamal thought of Qadeer’s shrivelled mother . . .

  Badrun Nissa belonged to Monghyr district, and like many old women, was a fund of legends and little-known stories of her region. Like the one about Gul and Sanober, children of Nawab Mir Qasim, Nazim of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Brother and sister would cover themselves with tiger-skins and bring food to their father who was hiding in a forest somewhere in Bihar, after the defeat of Buxar. They were shot down one night by an English officer who mistook them for tigers lurking in the bush.

  Kamal kept gazing out of the window. So the British were again the villains of the piece. Yet the indisputable fact remains that they created modern India. Even Maha Guru Karl Marx said so. He ducked his head—a particle of windblown coal had got into his eye.

  As children we read books published by Father Tuck, London EC4, but also heard stories told by Nani and our old aunts and nurses—Hakim Luqman’s fables, The Arabian Nights, epics of Iran and Arabia. Allusions from the Ramayana have become part of Urdu proverbs. Then there are the dastaans of Aamir Hamza, The Stories of the Prophet, anecdotes of the Sufi saints, events from the reigns of sultans and queens. Tana Shah, a seventeenth-century Sultan of Deccan was a gentle and over-refined aesthete. When a sweepress passed by furlongs away, he is said to have fainted. “Tana Shah” had become synonymous with sensitivity.

  The Indo-Muslim life-style is made up of the Persian-Turki-Mughal and regional Rajput Hindu cultures. So, what is this Indianness which the Muslim League has started questioning? Could there be an alternate India? Why?

  Indian liberals were influenced by the liberalism of nineteenth century England, and in the 1920s two Englishmen, Pratt and Bradley, organised the Communist Party of India.

  There is no colonial power like British colonial power.

  Indians have become victims of urban middle-class politics. Life in the villages is different. Here everybody is referred to as bhaiya, chacha, dada—a big self-contained joint-family, subdivided on the basis of caste. Muslims are merely another caste. There is no inter-dining, but this taboo is considered part of tradition. No religious rancour. Upper caste Hindus do not dine with the lower castes of their own community, either.

  Had Zaki Chacha been alive today he would also have become a Muslim League leader.

  Asad Mamoo told us stirring tales of Maulana Obeidullah Sindhi, Raja Mahender Pratap, their Free India Government, their underground “Red Kerchief Movement”. They stitched secret messages inside the linings of the couriers’ coats. Their leader, Maulana Mahmoodul Hasan, Rector of the Seminary of Deoband, was arrested and deported to Malta. Many revolutionaries lived in poverty in exile in Europe, or died in penury at home. And the legendary Firangi Mahal, the seventeenth-century college of theologians—after 1857 its Rector Maulana had not eaten sugar or ice made in English factories and had not used English blankets. He was the first boycotter of British goods.

  Traversing the parched countryside of Bihar, Kamal suddenly remembered Raja Ram Narain Mauzan’s couplet that Asad Mamoo often recited:

  Ghazalen, tum to waqif ho, kaho Majnun ke marney ki

  Diwana mar gaya, akhir ko, veerany pe kya guzri.

  Gazelies of the desert! You know how Majnun died.

  What happened to the wilderness once he was gone?

  The Raja was an Urdu poet of Patna. He also happened to be the Naib Nazim of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in Siraj-ud-Daulah’s government. When he heard of Siraj’s defeat at Plassey the Raja spontaneously uttered this sher, then tore off his clothes and ran towards the forests. The Raja took sanyas and was never seen again.

  Both Siraj and the Raja were India.

  And the long-forgotten Umar Sobhani, the Cotton King of Bombay, who financed the Indian National Congress. As punishment, the British government brought down the price of Lancashire cotton and made him a pauper overnight. He died in 1926.

  Comrade Mahmud-uz Zafar’s father was a Pathan aristocrat of Rampur. His cousins, Uzra and Zohra, had gone to Germany to learn modern dance, and at the age of six, Mahmud was sent to England for schooling. He could hardly speak Urdu. They had an immense Tudor-style mansion in Dehra Dun with its own waterfall, parkland and zoo. We children used to go there from Khyaban to play. His sister, Hamida, is an eye-surgeon and they donated their stately home to the Party. True communists.

  Sir Wazir and Lady Hasan’s son, Sajjad Zaheer. In 1931 he came from Oxford to India for six months and published Angarey, rebellious short stories in Urdu. Dr. Rashid Jahan was a contributor who married Mahmud-uz Zafar. Her parents, Sheikh and Begum Abdullah, founded the Muslim Girls’ School in Aligarh in 1907, now a famous college for women. The Abdullah’s daughters studied in England, something unheard of at that time. One of them, Khursheed, joined another band of pioneers—Devika Rani and Himanshu Roy. She is Renuka Devi, the star of Bombay Talkies. Then there was Lady Saheb Singh Sokhey who became Maneka, the dancer. A
mazing, yaar.

  The U.P. government banned Angarey. In 1935 Sajjad Zaheer and his comrades in London launched the Indian Progressive Writers Association, and its Manifesto was written by Dr. Jyoti Ghosh, Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, Promod Sen Gupta, Dr. Muhammad Deen Taseer and Sajjad Zaheer.

  Calcutta, Lahore, Lucknow and the Muslim University, Aligarh, were among the major centres of Leftist activity.

  In 1937 two important things happened in Lucknow: the revival of the All India Muslim League and the establishment of Congress rule. According to Asad Mamoo the revival came about largely because of the personal rivalry between two local politicians, Chowdhry Khaliq-uz Zaman and Syed Ali Zaheer.

  One day, as Kamal was passing by the Council Chamber whistling softly, he saw Mrs. Vijaylaxmi Pandit step out of her black limousine. Beautiful lady with an aura of romance. Kamal had heard from his elders that her father’s very good-looking private secretary had fallen in love with her. But he belonged to another community and was hastily banished to America. She then married a Maharashtrian Brahmin.

  Begum Jahan Ara Shahnawaz was the other gracious lady Kamal happened to see the same day that winter. A well-known political leader she, like Mrs. Pandit, represented an upperclass political family. She had come from Lahore to attend the historic session of the All India Muslim League.

  And the Shahzadis of Hyderabad, Durr-i-Shahwar and Nilofer. Sad-faced Turkish beauties of Blood Royal, the last glow of the Ottomon Sultanate, whose portraits were hung in many middle-class Muslim homes. The Padshah of the Deccan was an emotional substitute for the last Mughal emperor.

  “The imperialist allies wrecked the Ottoman Sultanate,” Asad Mamoo thundered. “How could an eastern race remain masters of half of Europe? Call them Terrible Turks. Only Christian whites can be the master race.” Asad Mamoo said to Tim, “Women’s Urdu magazines used to publish the pictures of all those beauties—Mrs. Pandit, Queen Suraiyya of Iran, the Maharanis of Cooch Behar, Kapurthala and Baroda. These magazines also proudly flashed the pictures of the Urdu short-story writer, Hijab Imtiaz Ali of Madras and Lahore who had become a pilot. In 1936! We were sitting in the veranda of Khyaban when this women’s weekly arrived, Tehzil Niswan, with her picture on the cover, goggles and all, sitting in the cockpit!”