A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  The pampering continued in the villages to which I accompanied my father on his official tours. A tour, lasting for a week, was a virtual expedition. Oxen carts, loaded with tents, camping equipment, kitchen supplies and foodstuff, set off early in the morning while we followed with a retinue of servants, policemen and court clerks. By the evening we would arrive at our first destination, a village where the next day my father would inspect the land records of the patwari, the village’s revenue official, hear complaints, redress grievances and adjudicate disputes. In the falling darkness, which became magically alive with moving pinpoints of light given off by fireflies, cooking fires were lit, pleasantly scenting the air with smoke from burning logs of wood and buffalo-dung cakes.

  During the day, while my father worked in a large tent that served as his field office, I roamed about freely in the village, curious about the other children whose lives were so different from my own. I longed to join in their games, but received deliberately incurious looks rather than the friendly invitations I expected. We were all aware of the gulf dividing us, although in childhood it was still capable of being occasionally bridged. I might have felt myself to be a charmed being but there was little doubt that I was outside their charmed circle.

  Back in our camp, scores of villagers squatted outside the tent, waiting for their turn to register a complaint or seek a favour. From hundreds of years of experience as an enslaved people, they were well versed in the arts of flattery, and making complimentary remarks about my looks and intelligence, and predictions of the great future that lay ahead of the magistrate sahib’s son, was part of a practised repertoire. I still had to learn, which was soon enough, that the fawning I received from the villagers and others in our retinue, was not always love, and that I was not the centre of everyone’s world. I remain grateful, though, that my father gave me access to his work life when I was a child, perhaps the most vital aspect of his or any man’s identity. Such an access, so common once when most fathers did not disappear into high-rise offices, is perhaps the most valuable gift a father can make to the son, one that sets the boy on the road to become a ‘worker’ in his own right.

  I also began school in Sargodha but the only memory I have of those months (actually it must have been two years) is my daily practice of writing the letters of the Urdu alphabet. Penmanship was a valued part of education, not to be casually engaged in with chalk and slate that were used for lessons in other subjects; pencil and paper were, of course, luxuries reserved for adults. In fact, penmanship was a ritual that involved the use of kitta, a simple pen made from easily available reeds, and a takhti, a rectangular wooden tablet coated with a thin layer of yellow clay. The takhti had to be first washed and scrubbed. Then the clay was prepared to the right viscosity with the addition of water. It was applied in a thin, smooth coat on the surface of the wood and left to dry in the sun for a couple of hours. The reed had to be cut to the proper length, its bottom edge shaved with a sharp knife till it was of the required thickness. The thickness of the lines produced by the reed pen could be varied by the amount of pressure applied by the thumb and index finger in which it was held. The ink was prepared by mixing water with a gob of black resin, an operation that always left my fingertips stained black. But the result was worth the effort. I loved the beauty of Urdu letters as they took form on the canvas of the wooden takhti. Their curves and curls, the ornamental dots around the letters like those tattooed on the foreheads of nomadic and tribal women, have remained a source of aesthetic delight even though I have now forgotten how to write and read Urdu.

  Urdu was not only the language in which most of the government work was carried out in north India but it was also the language of literature, indeed, of civilization. Urdu is an elegant language, especially well adapted to the demands of romantic poetry. It is a tragedy that after the independence of the country and the partition riots that accompanied it, Urdu came to be identified solely as the language of Muslims and condemned to lead a ghetto existence as religious identities began to harden. The loss of a specific Indian sensibility associated with the language, which I would identify as a yearning that is simultaneously of the body, heart and spirit, constitutes a loss of patrimony for all Indians.

  My father loved traditional Urdu ghazals, those elegies of unhappy love where the lover bemoans the loss, the inaccessibility or the turning away of the beloved. In the evening, when he came back from work, before dinner we would sometimes sit around the HMV gramophone listening to ghazals on the 78 rpm vinyl discs. His favourites were Master Madan, the boy prodigy from Lahore, singing ‘Youn na reh reh ke hamein tarsaiye—Do not go on making me crave for you’ in his androgynous voice, and Mallika Pukhraj’s ‘Abhi to main jawan hoon—I am still young’, sung in her inimitable husky tenor. Later, he would become a fan of Noor Jahan and then of Suraiya whose voice was ‘like a bell’; Lata Mangeshkar’s voice was sweet but of a virginal girl, he maintained, not that of a woman. I, too, soon learnt how to operate the gramophone: inserting the handle in the hole in its side, cranking it to wind up the spring that rotated the turntable, taking out a steel pin from a box and inserting it into the head of the arm, releasing the brake of the turntable, and then lifting the head and carefully placing the tip of the needle in the first groove of the disc. The procedure had to be repeated after every three or so minutes when a recording ended and the disc was replaced with a new one.

  I find it difficult to identify the emotional quality of my memories of the country’s partition in 1947 in any simple way. These are memories I have earlier explored in my book, The Colours of Violence. We lived in Rohtak at the time, a town some fifty miles west of Delhi, where my father was posted in 1946 after Sargodha. As the lootings, arson, rapes and killings that accompanied the most horrific event of contemporary Indian history raged uncontrolled in the villages and towns of Punjab, more and more members of my father’s extended family poured into Rohtak as destitute refugees from Lahore that now lay in the freshly created state of Pakistan. They had lost their homes and possessions and many had escaped with only the clothes on their back. The rooms and verandas of our house became sprawling dormitories, with mats and durries spread close to each other on the floors as uncles, aunts and cousins of various degrees of kinship lived and slept in what for a child was an intimate and exciting confusion. There was not a time of day when a few bodies were not seen huddled in nooks and corners in various stages of sleep. The kitchen, over which my mother had abdicated all control, hummed the whole day with the purposeful activity of women. It reminded me of the kitchen in my grandparents’ home in Machhi Hatta in Lahore, though without its cheerfulness and laughter.

  With the loss of their homes and places of work, with the snapping of long-standing friendships and other social ties, there was little for the refugees to do in our house except seek comfort from sharing of each other’s experiences of the violence they had barely escaped. This they did in groups that continuously changed in membership as people drifted from one room to another. As a small boy, yet privileged to be the son of a father who gave them food and shelter, I could sit in on any group of adults, though at its periphery, without being shooed away and told to go and play with other children. I felt confused by the bitterness and hate that came pouring out of people who I had always experienced as kind, loving and cheerful. The refugees’ bitterness was directed at the leaders of newly independent India, Nehru and especially Gandhi, who they felt stood in the way of driving Muslims out of India so that the Hindu refugees could take over their homes and properties just as Muslims in Pakistan had done to the Hindus and Sikhs. Gandhi, they said, was a ‘Mussulman lover’ who was largely responsible for the tragedy that had befallen the Hindus and Sikhs of Punjab. Many of my uncles and aunts shamelessly encouraged my father’s mother as she held forth in her toothless gummy voice, surprisingly similar to the Mahatma’s own, on Gandhi’s many affronts to Hindu sentiment. She would cruelly mimic his speech whenever he came on radio, hissing out every ‘s’ as
‘sh’, the way Gandhi spoke the consonant because of his missing front teeth. My own fascination with Gandhi, which grew into ever greater admiration for the man as I became older and engaged myself with his life and writings, has its origins in my grandmother’s diatribes against the Mahatma.

  The refugees’ hate was directed at the ‘Mussalman’—the ‘Other’ in the inelegant postmodernist discourse—a category from which a few Muslim friends who had protected my kinsmen or facilitated their escape, were excluded. All other Muslims were, and always had been a murderous lot, rapacious invaders since the time of the marauding Afghan kings, Ghazni and Ghouri, who had massacred Hindu men, raped Hindu women and destroyed Hindu temples. They applauded my father’s youngest brother Sohan Lal, my favourite uncle who used to fetch me from Lawrence Road to Machhi Hatta, who was the only one among them who had fought back, perhaps even killed a Muslim during the violence in Lahore. While defending the narrow entrance of Hiranand gali together with a group of other young men from the attack of a Muslim mob that had come to set fire to their homes, Sohan Lal had split the head of the mob’s leader with the blow of an axe, putting the other rioters to flight. We children now looked up to Sohan, not considered particularly bright by his older brothers, academic success being the only measure by which they decided whether a man was deserving of respect, with newfound admiration. We would pester him to flex the muscles of his right arm so that we could feel the hard mound under the skin. A genial young man with a loud, infectious laugh, Sohan good-naturedly acceded to our entreaties. For a while, we even woke up early in the morning for the physical education classes he organized for the boys so that we, too, could have hard, muscled bodies, fit for combat against Muslim aggressors. We did sit-ups and push-ups, learnt to swing bamboo staves around our heads as we twirled from one spot to another, keeping an imagined circle of attackers at bay. Sohanlal’s heroics were an exception, though, since in the other ‘war stories’, some of which I have narrated in Colours, Hindus were mostly at the receiving end as victims.

  One of these stories is of a distant cousin told by his elder brother to which my childhood imagination has added vivid detail.

  Roshan Lal killed himself on the way to Rohtak. He threw himself in front of a train. I could not stop him. We had made all the arrangements for the escape from Lyallpur. A Muslim truck driver was ready to drive the three hundred miles to the border for six hundred rupees. Roshan Lal had been married for only five months. He had a very pretty wife.

  On the day of our departure we went out to make the final arrangements with the truck driver. The house was attacked in our absence. When we came back we hid on the roof of a Hindu neighbour’s vacant house. We watched five husky Muslims in our courtyard. They had long butcher’s knives stuck in the top fold of their lungis. They were methodically looting the house. The corpse of our youngest brother—we were three—lay in the courtyard, the head completely severed from the trunk. One of the Muslims sat on a chair in front of the corpse, directing the looters. They were bringing out the packed trunks from inside the house and throwing them in front of him on the ground. The ground was cluttered with wedding sarees and coloured silk blouses. I can still see the shining brass pots lying on their side reflecting the rays of the afternoon sun. We could not move. The sight of the leader’s hairy torso, of which every inch was covered by thick black fur, transfixed me. Then two of the Muslims went inside the house and brought out Roshan Lal’s wife and the leader pulled her to him. She sat on the man’s lap, naked to the waist, her petticoat ripped open, and the Muslim’s hairy hand, like a giant black spider, covered her thigh. After laying her on the ground next to our brother’s corpse, where drops of blood still oozed from the severed neck, they raped her in turn. I was holding Roshan Lal fast, my palm covering his mouth. If he had made the slightest sound the Muslims would have discovered us. But I don’t think Roshan Lal would have done anything. His legs were buckling under him and I had to hold him up. After they finished, they ripped open her belly. Roshan Lal never said a word after it was all over and the Muslims were gone. In the days it took us to cross the border he remained mute. I tried my best to make him talk, to make him shed some of the grief in tears but his soul remained far away. He killed himself just before we reached Rohtak.2

  I remember well the night the violence started in Rohtak. Far from the scene of the riot in the town, from the terrace of our house, where the family had gathered on hearing a continuous, muffled roar break the stillness of the night, we counted at least twenty separate fires as Muslim homes and shops were burnt on that first night. To continue from Colours:

  The roof terraces of our neighbouring bungalows were crowded with whole families come up to watch the distant fires. Angry cries of babies awoken from sleep mingled with excited shouts of discovery as fresh fires were sighted. There were animated exchanges across the roofs as to the exact location of a new fire and the possible reactions of the Muslims.

  On the whole, the onlookers were in a gay mood; there was a feeling of respite from the petty concerns of daily life, a kind of relaxation that comes from the release of long pent-up tensions.

  ‘This is a lesson the Muslims needed to be taught! We should have put them in their place long ago!’ was the general consensus.

  Although the night air began to be permeated by the acrid smell of smoke, the fires were far away and the possibility of danger to our own homes and lives remote. The distant threat gave us a tingling sense of exhilaration that heightened the gaiety of what was fast turning into a festive occasion.

  For the children, and perhaps for the adults too, that first night of the riot thus had a quality akin to the day of the kite-flying festival at the onset of spring, when people throng the roofs and the clear blue sky is profusely dotted with kites in all their bright colours; the town resounds to the battle cries of children as the men compete against each other, trying to cut the string holding a rival kite entangled with their own. The duels taking place in the town that night did not use paper kites as weapons, and the battle cries we heard so faintly were no mere expressions of childish exuberance but declarations of deadly intent. Yet, in the safety of my house and surrounded by the family, an uncanny impression of the riot as a macabre festival persisted throughout the hours I spent on the roof.

  When the riots were brought under control after three days, I remember that my father gave in to my persistence and promised to take me into the town the next morning to see the aftermath. I remember waking up early that day and looking out at the speckled dawn as the sun struggled with the first clouds of the season. The monsoon was a few days away and, my elbows resting on the windowsill of my parents’ bedroom, I watched its forerunners, dark fluffy clouds racing across the sky as imperious heralds. The morning had been different from others, smelling not only of the sun’s warmth but also of budding grass shoots and the dark faraway thunder. The walk through Rohtak’s bazaars with my father and a posse of policemen in tow was disappointing. I had expected to see smouldering heaps, amputated limbs, cut-off breasts—which I pictured as pale fleshy balls without a trace of blood. The reality was oddly disappointing. Except for an occasional house with charred doors, broken or missing window panes, and smoke scars on its front, the bazaars presented the unchanging vista of a provincial town awakening to another day. There were the men vigorously (and loudly) chewing on marigossa twigs to clean their teeth and clearing their throats with much hawking and spitting. Others murmured their prayers as they bathed under the cool streams of water from public hydrants. The women hissed encouragement over naked babies held up above the gutter. Older children squatted by themselves, with that faraway look which bespeaks of an inward absorption in the working of one’s bowels, a trance occasionally broken as they bent down to contemplate their own dirt.3

  On another day we went to the railway station in the evening. Hindu and Sikh refugees were camped on the platform. Many lay moaning in their sleep and a couple had woken up screaming (I now imagine) from their pe
rsistent nightmares. We had picked our way through a mass of sleeping bodies, the faces discoloured by the dim violet glow of the neon tubes hanging high above the platform. Sitting silently among tattered bedrolls, shrinking at our approach, the children did not cry and rarely whimpered, their large eyes full of a bewildered hurt and (again I imagine) the memories of stabbed and hacked bodies lying on the streets of towns and villages which now belonged to Pakistan. One particular image has become permanently etched: a four-year-old boy with a running nose, the yellow-green mucus a thin plaster of salted sweet on the upper lip, dense with buzzing flies which the child does not lift up his hand to drive away, afraid perhaps of giving offence to even the smallest of living creatures.

  If I remember the partition violence in Rohtak so vividly it is not only because I was an impressionable child or that my father’s extended family was once again gathered under one roof, though in such disturbed times. The stories of violence, as also the short-lived Rohtak riot, had also evoked exhilarating feelings of closeness and belonging, a deep sense of communion with my family and a wider, although vague, entity of ‘us Hindus’, the latter a sometimes mortifying identification for someone who would transcend his religious identity. It is a matter of shame that even as I remember those days I do not recoil in utter disgust from their murderous violence; it is as if a fleur du mal, an evil flower, which sprang from the mean soil of decaying corpses and ashes left behind by arsonists’ fires bloomed in a dark corner of my memory.

  A few weeks after a fretful peace returned to the town, I accompanied our temporary cook—Chet Ram had once again disappeared to his village in the hills to settle an urgent domestic dispute—to the bazaar. The replacement cook, Chet Ram’s cousin, was young, around twenty, and after the vegetable shopping was done, he decided that he wanted a tattoo on his arm from the roadside artist. We squatted on the ground while the tattooist showed various designs he had drawn on a large sheet of soiled paper that had tears at its folds from being handled so often. The tattooist’s speciality was a butterfly with one wing coloured green and the other red, the only two colours he had. This particular tattoo was expensive, though, costing a rupee, and the young cook decided to have just his name in Hindi engraved in black ink on the inside of his forearm. The price was four annas. Fascinated by the whole process, the soft whirr of the drill and the appearance of black Hindi letters under the skin together with droplets of blood at their edges, I insisted that I too wanted a tattoo. The servant tried to dissuade me, fearing the wrath of my parents, but the young master was insistent. We reached a compromise that my tattoo would be minimal, consisting solely of my initials and, befitting my status as the magistrate sahib’s son, the initials would be in the English alphabet. Perhaps the tattooist was nervous because he started the ‘S’ too near the crook of my forearm. The only way to rectify the mistake was to change the unfortunate ‘S’ into something that was supposed to come out as the sacred Hindu symbol of ‘Om’. I must have stuttered ‘K-K-Kakar’ from the sting of the drill when he asked my last name because before I knew it there was an ‘S’ followed by two ‘K’s visible under my skin. My parents were outraged when I returned home with the tattoo, a mark of low class origins, but it was too late. The ‘S K K’ followed by what is meant to be an ‘Om’ are still there on the inside of my right forearm and will only disappear in the flames of the funeral pyre. And, yes, the temporary help lost his job.