River of Fire

by Qurratulain Hyder

  “But I saw the city chock-full of Muslims,” Kamal argued.

  “Only the hoi-poloi,” Barey Abba replied dismissively. “The gentry has more or less emigrated.”

  “Moradabad is one of the towns of U.P. where Muslims are a majority but they’re mostly artisans,” Champa explained in an aside to the perplexed visitor. “You are here for too short a time to get the hang of the socio-political situation. Have some tea,” she added as Zebun appeared with the tea-tray.

  “As long as Jawaharlal is alive everything will be all right. But what will happen after he goes? Only Allah knows. In the long run, our succeeding generations will face the same fate as Spain’s Muslims.”

  Kamal shuddered. Does Spain still haunt the Muslim mind—especially in times of crisis? He looked at the pomegranate tree swaying in the gentle evening breeze.

  The old man puffed at his hookah and continued, “Now tell me about Pakistan. I hear all manner of riff-raff from India have prospered. Weavers and butchers from U.P. call themselves Syeds over there, and Punjabis are hobnobbing with the refugees.”

  Kamal had seen Champa today perched on another rung of her ladder, against another backdrop, another set of props. At least this was her real milieu. He closed his eyes. The Champa of Lucknow, Paris, Cambridge and London, and now the Champa of this joyless, half-lit house in Moradabad. The sadder and wiser, the serene Champa of new India!

  Rain-laden winds blowing across the river Ram Ganga ruffled his hair. The painfully alluring rainy season of his country. But this was not his country any more. His visa was about to expire, soon he would set off in the direction of his homeland.

  Moradabad. This murky staircase, Champa Ahmed, Zebunnisa, Mariam, Barey Abba—all this will remain behind. Ought he to shed a tear over this unalterable fact? He felt he was a lone traveller like Abu Rehan Al-Beruni who had trekked down the dusty, craggy road of centuries and seen it all, and now the Spanish mystic Ibn-ul Arabi seemed to have stopped travelling with him. He felt bewildered and alone.

  “Where is Hari Shankar?” asked Champa in her former voice.

  “Champa Baji,” he said indignantly, “Hari Shankar is not my alter ego any more. Why should I know his whereabouts?”

  “Why not? Don’t you write to him?”

  “What on earth should I write to him about, and why?” he replied, sitting down on the cot.

  “You are still very emotional!”

  “Most certainly not,” he answered impatiently, “I am just sick of this Indo-Pakistan melodrama.”

  “You still haven’t become strong,” Champa replied peaceably. “Why did you come here? To see me? Was this a sentimental journey?”

  “Well, one does like to look up one’s old friends once in a while,” Kamal faltered. “And besides, Moradabad was on the way to Dehra Dun,” he added with a long face.

  Rain pattered on the balcony. The fragrance of wet earth reached Kamal’s sensitive nostrils. A woman in scarlet churidar pajamas passed by in the lane, hawking Amroha mangoes.

  Champa continued to sit on the doorstep.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

  “I,” she replied, “am going to set up law practice in Banaras and help my father. Do you happen to know the real name of my mother’s hometown?”

  “Shivpuri.”

  “Yes, the City of Bliss. It is going to be the city of bliss sooner or later, like all the other towns in this subcontinent. It’s up to me to do my own job conscientiously, others can think and act as they choose.”

  The call for afternoon prayers rose from the little mosque. Unconsciously she covered her head with the anchal of her sari.

  Downstairs the girls were busy frying monsoon delicacies. They had put on traditional rainbow-coloured cotton dupattas and saris in honour of the rains. “Send up something for us, too,” Champa called out to them through the window.

  “Okay, Bajia, wait a bit,” one of them shouted back merrily and resumed singing, “Who, oh who, has hung the swing on the mango trees?” This popular song had been composed by Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal king of India. He, too, had been a musician king.

  Kamal became restive. A gharara-clad Zebun appeared on the stairs and came up and placed a plateful of hot and spicy pakwan on the floor. Then she went back, humming the rain-song.

  Champa was still sitting on the threshold. “You must be wondering,” she said slowly, “who will come to my doorstep now! But Kamal, I think that as far as personal success goes, I have been luckier than you. I have found the magic key. Gautam told me once, in London, in his pseudo-philosophic manner, that we had all lost the key. When I received your sister Tehmina’s letter in the rainy season of 1941 in Banaras, welcoming me to Chand Bagh College, I thought that letter was the password to fairyland!”

  Rain fell tunefully in the pool downstairs. The trees appeared lush green, little streams rippled in the lanes, a tank of lustrous water sparkled in the courtyard. The saplings in the cracked china vases swayed in the breeze, and little waterfalls spilled down from rain spouts. “This,” Champa said, “is mine own Water Place. Herein flows the stream of my tears.”

  A shower of rose-apples fell from the over-hanging tree. Champa removed a wet green leaf from her hair.

  “Kamal,” she said thoughtfully, “do you remember that Pakistani artist in London? She painted yard after yard of canvas as the years rolled by. She wandered from studio to studio all over the western world, she held one-woman shows in London and Paris and Rome. Diplomats’ wives and society ladies came to attend the inaugurations, cameras flashed and reporters mobbed her. Meanwhile, she would stand in a corner, talking and smiling politely. At the end of the evening when they left, the hall became empty and she was alone in the company of her celebrated paintings. She took the last bus home, all by herself—Kamal, eat these pakoras while they are hot, they get cold in no time.”

  The following morning he left for Dehra Dun. Champa came to the small window in the creaking old gate and said a surprisingly cheerful, “Khuda hafiz” signalling that she had made her truce with life. He should, too.

  Once again Champa was left behind, a shadowy figure in the distance, just as he had left her once standing behind a glass door on Oxford Street. And just as she had stood on the lonely road in front of Gulfishan when Amir Reza went away to Pakistan. But perhaps today she was not alone, she was part of the crowd. She had at last, and unconditionally, accepted the comradeship of her fellow-beings.

  Kamal used to think that while he was forging ahead, Champa had stayed behind. He would march on to new worlds, new visions, newer horizons. Today, he realised that perhaps he was receding and Champa, who was not lonely any more, was moving forward. She had the sorrowful little priest of her mosque for company, Zebun and Mariam, the veiled women and ragged urchins of her lane, the under-nourished coolies with their push-carts. Champa Baji had become their fellow-wayfarer. At this point the invisible cobwebs of Kamal’s new philosophy of despair snapped with a jerk.

  The tonga was passing through Qazi Bazaar. The muezzins’ call went up from the mosque’s loudspeakers and Muslim shopkeepers were closing their shops for evening prayers. One or two solitary kites fluttered across the horizon. Kamal saw a red kite which had been cut and was adrift in the deep blue sky. Gautam should have been here to appreciate the symbolism of this scene! He smiled sadly. “What can I do, yaar,” he said to himself, “my end has been pretty inglorious.”

  71. The Elusive Bird of the Doon Valley

  The Shivalik hills came into view. The familiar panorama unfolded—mountain streams, waterfalls, temples, sadhus. Rocks, baboons, woods, clusters of lilac and hawthorn.

  The Doon Valley.

  Dehra Dun railway station. Ragged Garhwali coolies surrounded him at the tonga and taxi stands. Saab want go Mussoorie? Want go Rajpur? First-class hotel run by English Memsaab . . .

  On the way to town in a tonga he was suddenly confronted with the newly dug up, denuded mountainside facing Dehra Dun. “They
are cutting down forests for timber and dynamiting rocks to do some kind of mining,” the tonga-wallah told him.

  What are they doing to my beautiful country, Kamal thought with rage and horror. Does Panditji know what is going on over here? I must inform him at once. The next moment the irony of the situation hit him—he had nothing to do with Pandit Nehru any more, this was not his country. In fact he had come here to perform a kind of requiem—to wind up his property matters and sever the last remaining bonds with the land of his ancestors.

  He spent a couple of hours in the district magistrate’s office poring over real estate documents, and discussed Movable and Immovable Property, Agreed and Non-agreed Areas. Afterwards he repaired to a hotel, and in the evening, loitered on the tranquil avenues of Dalanwalla and read the name-plates on the gates.

  The Rispana flowed by.

  “Hari Shankar,” he mused aloud after a while.

  “Hum.”

  “Come to think of it, the Prof. is dead right. We are in a mess.”

  That evening they pondered over the philosophy of renunciation, mouthing profundities.

  “Let’s read the names on the bungalows, the choice of names reveals the psychology of the owners,” said Hari Shankar stopping in front of a garden gate.

  “We shall never build a house, for the falcon doth not make a nest,” observed Kamal, quoting Iqbal.

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

  “Yes, isn’t it strange.”

  They sat down on a little Chinese bridge which connected a villa with the avenue. “There must be some meaning to this,” observed Hari Shankar gravely.

  “There must be,” Kamal agreed.

  They read more name-plates in the deepening twilight. ‘Jasmine’, ‘Shamrock’, ‘Doon Haven’, ‘Rose Mount’, ‘Ashiana’, ‘Fairy Cottage’, ‘Khyaban’.

  Dolefully they strolled down Rajpur Road and observed the rippling waters of the Eastern Canal. A broken shoe sailed past, bobbing up and down in the gushing current.

  A gleaming Chevrolet pulled up near him. Kamal rubbed his eyes and looked around. Hari Shankar had vanished. This was not 1942, but the Dehra Dun of 1956. He rubbed his eyes again. He was sitting on the foot-bridge of his own house, Khyaban. A well-dressed, genial-looking Sikh climbed out of the car and eyed him suspiciously, taking him for some fashionable thug who would make off with his new music system.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  “I . . . I . . . ,” Kamal stammered, confused, his heart beating faster. He looked again at the marble slab on the gate-post: Khan Bahadur Syed Taqi Reza Bahadur of Kalyanpur. This was doubtless his house. He rose to his feet, his throat dry. Nervously he took out the documents from his pocket as proof of his bona fides.

  “Oh, I see! You have come in connection with movable property,” the Sikh said cordially. “Do come in, Bhai Saheb, your store room is safely locked. Have you brought the keys?”

  “Yes,” Kamal replied, looking down at the blue pebbles under his shoes.

  The Sardarji led him to the front veranda and offered him tea. The new owner of Khayaban belonged to Lahore and had come to Dehra Dun as a penniless refugee during the Partition riots. Now he was a wealthy contractor, busy cutting down alpine forests. He almost wept as he talked of Lahore with deep nostalgia.

  “May I come tomorrow morning to open the box-room?” Kamal asked hastily.

  “Certainly, please treat this as your own home, Apna hi ghar samjhen.” The Sardar repeated the customary Indian phrase of hospitality.

  Kamal returned to his hotel.

  In the morning he went to Khyaban and made his way down to the store-room. Sitting there on the red brick staircase he realised that he was a member of India’s Lost Generation. The world his gracious family had inhabited was one of autumn woodlands, hillside cottages and the gleaming silver of afternoon tea. The path through the oaks in front of him had been trodden by elegant ladies of his family, looking like the heroines of some old French or Turkish novel, as they languidly carried Burmese parasols or tiny Italian bags made of beads in their delicate hands.

  Whenever they had come here during the winter to see the snows of Mussoorie, logs were burnt in the grates and satin quilts piled up on the carpets where they sat and drank green tea. Talat would make a little igloo of her quilts, and sit inside with her “John & Mary” colouring books.

  There had been a sprawling bread-fruit tree near the kitchen, and Hussaini’s wife diligently counted its fruit every morning to see that they were not stolen by the neighbour’s cook. A painting in the front veranda depicted a shikar scene, in which a pack of greyhounds chased a stag among the reeds of the Terai. The drawing-room cornice, covered with gold-embroidered black fabric, displayed a row of family photographs in silver frames. Chinese palms stood in brass planters on tall tripods in all four corners of the room. The wash-basin in the dining room was filled with fresh neem leaves every morning, the table was laid in English style on formal occasions, complete with rose petals floating in finger bowls. The silent khidmatgar, Amir Khan, was dressed in a spotless white ‘chapkan’ and scarlet sash and pinned the silver monogram of Father’s name on the red band across his white, crisply starched turban.

  On warm summer afternoons when everybody was fast asleep in the cool rooms inside, Kamal would sneak out to sit under the shade of the lichi trees. A deep cosmic silence descended over the world, suffusing one with cosmic languor and extremely tranquil thoughts. A lone bird cried ceaselessly among the distant deodars. Its cry resembled the words—Main sota tha, main sota tha. ‘Alas I was asleep . . . I was asleep . . .’ This elusive and invisible bird was found nowhere but in the Doon Valley. It remained hidden among the leaves and poured out its lamentation on long summer afternoons. According to a mountain legend, god distributed various boons to his creatures when he created the world. The peacock got his feathers, the koel her voice and so on. At the time this stupid bird was fast asleep somewhere in the woods of the Doon Valley, and consequently it got nothing. This had been its complaint ever after.

  The Sardarni went from one room to another and closed the pantry door with a bang. Kamal returned from the Dehra Dun of 1936.

  He unlocked the store-room, went in and aimlessly opened and closed the dusty almirahs. He peered into chests and caskets, and wondered about the usefulness of possessions. He looked at the pile of junk which one is pleased to call ‘property’—there was more junk of a similar kind locked up in the store-rooms of Gulfishan and in the country house at Kalyanpur . . . He stood on a little island amidst the litter and reflected . . . people are desperately keen to possess things.

  Now he knew why they renounced the world and took to the woods. He sat down on a stool and tried to be methodical. First he opened the little steel boxes containing family documents, but closed them again weakly. His eyes wandered to a mountain of old and rare Urdu magazines. Not knowing what to do next, he picked up a battered attache case marked “Correspondence”, and opened it with tired curiosity. The letters carried strange post marks: Aurangabad, 6th July, 1933. Indore, 24th October, 1928. Mysore, 3rd March, 1937. Who had sent these letters and what had they written in them? Where were they now and what were they doing? Or, in which graveyards were they buried?

  For instance, this letter from Dr. Ras Bihari Lai dated Pilibhit, 29th July, 1931. Who was Dr. Ras Bihari Lai? Or Vishwanandan Pandey from Ranikhet, and Mohammad Ahmad Abbasi, Sub-Judge, Gonda . . . ? He sat on the floor and wondered and wondered. He shoved the attache case back onto the shelf and turned to a number of files under the carpets. Kalyanpur litigations, papers connected with the legal Separation of Aunt Chunni Begum and her no-good husband, Mir Banney (both of them long dead). One copy of the History of Oudh in Urdu written by Syed Kamaluddin Hyder and published by the celebrated Navalkishore Press, Lucknow, ages ago. Its yellowed pages crumbled to pieces when he picked up the book. He opened it tenderly. The frontispiece had a preposterous pen-and-ink dr
awing of ‘His Highness the Hon’ble Maharaja Sir Digbijay Singh Bahadur, of Balrampur and Tulsipur, the Province of Oudh, on whose gracious command the present history was compiled.’ It also carried a preface written by H.H. the Maharajah in exotically florid Urdu. He began reading at random. ‘In short the Nawab of Bengal was disheartened because of these things and after a great deal of meditation, put on the ochre robes of a mendicant and sat down on a piece of mat. The Court also wore the same lowly garb and was the object of much adverse comment by the ignoble world . . .’

  Kamal turned another page.

  ‘—Thus the great and glorious English Sahebs realised that they had conquered the land of Ind that very day. The reality was revealed from east to west. Therefore they sought to strengthen their position as Ministers to the Emperor. After which they knew that it would be easy to annex the entire Mughal Empire. And that one should not enter somebody’s house all of a sudden and should take one’s time. It was obvious that there was disunity in the Indian nation, as if all the lamps of Hindustan were put out one by one . . .

  ‘The Pathetic Demise of Mirza Ali Khan, June, 1816.

  ‘—He was buried in Calcutta’s Kasi Bagh wherein the son of Tipu Sultan is also enjoying his eternal repose. Some humble folk of the town accompanied his hier considering him to be, after all, Vizier-i-Hind, Prime Minister of India. The Sahebs ordered that the Tommies should guard the bier. That was the reign during which John Lamsden Saheb was the Resident at Lucknow and John Cherry Saheb was the Resident at Benares who was later murdered by Naib Taffazul Hussain Khan . . .

  ‘—Mirza Muzzafer Bakht, son of Delhi’s Prince Mirza Sulaiman Shikoh, tried to venture out of Lucknow wherein he lived as a pensioner of the Court of Oudh. Some down-and-out loafers of the town also accompanied the Prince. When he returned to Lucknow disappointed and dejected, he married Sally Begum, one of the English widows of General Claud Martin, and lived on his White wife’s pension.1 After her death he continued living in her house . . .

  ‘The Departure of Col. Dubois and Eerrell Saheb and Maulvi Mohammed Ismail to London with the Embassy and Priceless Presents for George IV, King of Kings . . .’