A Place Within (17 page)

This being Saturday, we pass a road shrine to the god Shani—Saturn—who’s a minor deity but not to be ignored on that account, for he can be vengeful. The shrine is extremely modest, consisting of a low stool, about eighteen inches high, placed strategically at the edge of the road at a busy intersection. On the stool is a metal tray to collect offerings to the god: mustard oil, coins, iron nails. “Black” items, those containing iron, are not to be bought on Saturday, so as not to offend Shani; therefore many people will not buy cars, for example, on this day. Shani is a god to be feared and propitiated, for he is wilful and can bring bad luck, just like that, even though he is a very minor god in the hierarchy, nowhere close to Shiva or the Goddess. In particular, there is a special curse to be avoided, called the “Seven,” that can beset you for seven years, causing havoc in your life. If you find yourself a victim of
persistent bad luck, chances are you’ve been struck by Shani’s Seven. There is no attendant in sight at the shrine now, for obviously who’s going to steal from Shani? But Mahesh tells me there’s probably a fellow somewhere who has put up all the Shani stalls in the area and periodically goes around—like a parking attendant (Mahesh’s image)—collecting money from them, and the oil and coins and nails. Shani also has temples to his name, which many people visit. Mahesh tells me a colleague’s wife, a university professor, had gone to pay her respects to Shani only yesterday, what with a grown daughter’s marriage prospects to worry about. A Shani Seven in such a situation can be deadly; it’s best to preempt it. Such belief in supernatural agencies can be quite casual among the educated. Consulting a horoscope, after all, is an essential part of the marriage process. A few years ago, many people had subscribed to the sensational stories of Ganesh statues, in various parts of India and abroad, imbibing real milk; some people even claimed to have seen the phenomenon.

A grand temple to Shani is situated just off Chandni Chowk. Above the entrance hangs a massive statue with seven horses. This is the sun god, but what is he doing in such a strategic spot outside Saturn’s temple? Because, we are told when we inquire, the sun is the father and will keep naughty Saturn in check.

Ghantewala’s sweet shop, a pre-Mutiny establishment, is close by on the Chowk. Equally old are the teeming parantha shops of the Paranthewali Gali, just further up, where you squeeze into benches at allocated tables and order from an assortment of paranthas available, stuffed with bhindi, karela, daal, carrot, or any of half a dozen more items. It’s as well not to look too hard at the cloth used to wipe the table, and not to worry about the same hand being used to fry the parantha. Gloves are not the thing here.

Still on Chandni Chowk is the Sunehri Masjid—the Golden Mosque—from where Nadir Shah looked upon his troops’ massacre of Delhi’s citizens. The mosque, which has three domes, is not
really golden. When I inquire in the neighbourhood, nobody really knows about it; someone even points me to the Sikh temple, which has golden domes. Having the temerity to inquire about the mosque at the temple, where a Sikh guru was martyred by a Mughal emperor, I am duly rewarded with a scowl.

The only queen to occupy the Delhi throne was Raziya Sultana, who lived from 1205 to 1240.

Her tomb lies in the midst of a residential area, in a courtyard surrounded by the back sides of grimy old buildings. Local residents know about it, rickshaw drivers find it with difficulty. It lies tucked away within a maze of gulleys close to Sitaram Bazar. Passing dimly lit workshops from where busy young men and boys look out at us from their seats on the ground, hand-printing plastic bags, beading leather, and hand-decorating clock faces, we enter what is essentially a residential block, go through dingy corridors, climb some steps, and there below us is the burial compound of the queen, surrounded by a low brick wall. There are two ancient graves to look at, of Raziya and her sister, and, in a corner, two children’s graves. There is a mihrab—a niche, which you face—for prayers, and a tap for ablutions. A man in modest traditional attire, presumably a caretaker, is readying himself for prayer. There’s no sign to identify the site. But for seven hundred years the young queen has lain here, while all around her grave, houses have been built, demolished, rebuilt.

But there is a mystery here. This is still Shah Jahan’s Delhi, so why is the Turkish queen from centuries before the Mughal’s period buried here?

Raziya’s story is a tangle of vaguely remembered historical intrigues; it is also one of a heroic and able female ruler in a male-dominated medieval world full of court machinations and
treachery. She was named successor to the throne of Delhi by her intensely religious father, Iltutmish, the second sultan of Delhi, against the wishes of the mullahs and some of the Turkish nobility. After Iltutmish’s death, the nobility, having first rejected Raziya’s claim in favour of her weak brother, eventually installed her as queen. In order to take direct control of the affairs of state, she emerged from purdah and abandoned her female attire, appearing in public dressed in a cloak and hat. Delhiites would be amazed by the sight of her openly riding on the back of an elephant. Plots were soon hatching against her. She had elevated an Abyssinian slave called Yaqut to a high status, and it has been suggested that there was a love affair between the two, which historians have with surprising alacrity dismissed as baseless. Yaqut was ultimately murdered, and Raziya, after further misadventures, was finally killed in battle. Bollywood has made a film about her. And the next queen to rule in Delhi, so to speak, was Indira Gandhi, also killed, whose memorial lies not far away in the necropolis along the Jumna.

Punjabi Delhi

I know even after I am gone I will still wander the streets of Delhi…. The noisy racket of Delhi’s people I will hear as one who listens to music. Jamun, shahtut, phirni, chat-pakodi, bedmi kachori, rabri khurchan. Ahh! Ghantewala’s pista-lauj.

KRISHNA SOBTI,
The Heart Has its Reasons

MANY OF THE DELHIITES
I have met are Punjabi, having come as children with their refugee parents from the part of Punjab that is now in Pakistan, or having been born in Delhi of such refugees. Punjabis form a majority in Delhi, and there seems a sense among them of entitlement to the city. Where once Persian or Urdu might have been heard on the streets, now it is Punjabi and Hindi, which is essentially the same as Urdu (the national language of Pakistan) but after Independence has become more Sanskritized. Attempts were made to purge Hindi of its English and Persian loan words, to render it more “national,” but of course that proved impossible, as it is impossible now to avoid Americanisms. My friends during their lighter moments together often break into Punjabi, which would be partially understandable to most north Indians, and I find it rather close to Kutchi, so it is not quite foreign. Mahesh recalls a train ride with his mother at the time of Partition, and her, pointing at smoke in the distance, saying, Look, Lahore is burning. Lahore, the pride of Punjab, went to Pakistan. Right up to the time of her death, she would refer to her birthplace as “Our Pakistan”—not in the political sense that it belonged to India, but to indicate
where she came from. I’ve often seen Mahesh, a liberal-minded professor, get into confrontations with those among his colleagues whom he sees as Hindu chauvinists or nationalists. His interest is African literature, and he has translated several African authors into Hindi. I was introduced to him as an African Asian author outside a book fair when my first book was published in India. Over the years, I have seen him look progressively more stressed and harried, for Delhi life, for a man with several interests, who is also a father and a son in an extended family, demands much more than he thinks he can give. In India traditional obligations—of a parent, a wife, a son—which we from East Africa have learned to turn coldly away from, are not neglected even in the most dysfunctional families. But remove Mahesh from his sansara, the prison of worldly responsibilities, say to the bar of the International Centre or to the venerable United Coffee House in Connaught Place, and he is at his expansive best, a different man.

The coffee house is a den of the affluent. It being Saturday, both the main and the mezzanine floors are full, crowded with middle-class families and young couples, and, at the round table at which we sit, a rambunctious middle-aged group. The place is about seventy years old, the seats are plush, unlike the metal-and-plastic of the “cool” new establishments so favoured by the young. The food is north Indian—daals, sabzis, a variety of naans and chappatis.

Mahesh grew up in the Delhi of independent India, Nehru’s child, if you will, and his memory and his narrative art are phenomenal. Eyes shining, wide smile on his bearded face, his voice loud and expressive, he lets forth. Even the waiters pause to listen. He tells us of the time when the well-to-do families of the city came to the United Coffee House so that a child could view a prospective spouse, and when the great merchants of the city would gather for their coffee in the morning and make their deals. He details the progress of a cricket match in Delhi way back in the sixties, when the West Indies were here to play India. Ah, the days
of lost youth; this Delhi is as dear to him as Mir Nahal’s was to him. He speaks of a secret meeting in the night with a minister when he was a leader of the powerful teachers’ union. The next day, when the union leaders called off the strike, shoes were thrown at them and they escaped (perhaps) with their lives. He describes his travails as a tour coordinator when he led a group of uncouth fellow English teachers to a conference in East Germany. He describes the dramatic appearance of Indira Gandhi at an embassy function. And he tells us how one day he met Rajiv Gandhi at a bookstore next door.

Vegetables of all sorts are a passion. He will angle towards them at a market or a stall, and fondle a tomato or an eggplant to make you blush. Recently, to add to his demanding sansara that often keeps him on edge, he has bought a farm outside Delhi where he grows vegetables to his heart’s content, and he is able to carry out lengthy knowledgeable discussions with the vendors he meets on the streets. Politics arouses him, though one suspects that he is now at the calmer stage in his life, and he detests the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which created the electric climate in which the Babri (Mughal emperor Babur’s) Mosque was destroyed by its fanatical supporters, leading to violent communal outbursts, and whose state branch oversaw the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. And yet curiously, I have always thought, he does not appear to have any close Muslim friends or any from the lower castes. This reflects more the divisions in Indian society than deliberate choice. And this is true of all the Punjabi Delhiites I know. I myself have not come to know any Muslims in Delhi; I hardly see them, except in Old Delhi or, in minuscule numbers, at a university class or at some function. Discrimination in housing against Muslims is quite common. It is, when one becomes aware of it, the oddest feeling, because everywhere in Delhi are signs of that historical Muslim presence. It is also a subject one never talks about; few people outside of
India, one imagines, are aware of these absences and silences. The writer Ramachandra Guha, however, recently published a very forthright piece in the
New York Times
about this aspect of living in post-Partition Delhi:

Yet among my close friends in India there was not a single Muslim. The novelist Mukul Kesavan, a contemporary, has written that in his school in Delhi he never came across a Muslim name: “The only place you were sure of meeting Muslims was the movies.” Some of the finest actors, singers, composers and directors in Bombay’s film industry were Muslims. But in law, medicine, business and the upper echelons of public service, Hindus dominated. There were sprinklings of Christians and Sikhs, but very few Muslims.

But this is how my friend Mahesh came to meet Rajiv Gandhi in Connaught Place. He was on his way to pay an electric bill somewhere on this block when, to his great surprise, he saw the prime minister himself browsing outside a bookstore. A young man had just asked him for an autograph, and Rajiv looked around for a pen, then asked Mahesh if he could borrow his. Certainly, Mahesh replied. This was two days before the prime minister was killed by a suicide bomb down south, set off by a Sri Lankan Tamil separatist, his body shredded beyond recognition.

As we leave the coffee house, we pass the very bookstore, which is hardly more than a stall, with a rack of magazines at the doorway. Twenty years after Mahesh’s meeting with Rajiv Gandhi, the same shopkeeper sits at a small table at the entrance. Yes, he confirms to my friend’s enthusiastic reminder, two days before his assassination Rajiv had stopped by. Not a spark, a twinkle, in the eye, not a twitch in the face or a change in the voice to betray any emotion—as though prime ministers regularly stop by at his store before getting blown to bits.

Thus Mahesh, among a circle of friends, a bit of a showman. But at more private moments, when no one else is around, and because he has become a close friend, he reveals the soft core, tells me of the toll of Partition on the refugees who had to leave everything behind and start anew.

His parents, from a small town in northern Punjab, had been given a home in Sabzi Mandi, the vegetable market in the Old Delhi area; his mother’s family—his nana and uncles—were first at a camp, a converted British jail that later became the Maulana Azad Medical College near the Delhi Gate, before moving in with his parents. Refugees were awaiting compensation for the homes and businesses left behind in now-Pakistan, and so while his younger uncle sold ice cream on the street, his proud nana, formerly a village moneylender, put to use an old skill, stringing cots to earn a modest income. More than twenty people were crammed into a two-room apartment, until the in-laws were finally settled in Lajpat Nagar further to the south, now a bustling shopping market, their bitterness towards Muslims never abated. The young uncles flirted with the RSS, the right-wing Hindu communalist organization with its own paramilitary corps. His nana was awarded a stationery store that would go on to make a fortune. There must be thousands of Bania trader families in Delhi with similar stories. The number of refugees who arrived in India from Pakistan has been estimated in the millions.

But it is in the details of the new family dynamics—the scrounging for money, the extra jobs, the paying guests taken in to make ends meet, the straining marital relationships in a tradition where marriages are never broken, however tormenting—it is in these that the painful memories lie, that bring a shudder to the face and a tear to the eye as they are recalled.

His stories bring to mind the black-and-white Bollywood family dramas of the fifties and sixties, in which the protagonists are almost always poor, and the families, stressed to breaking point,
always come through in the end. In my childhood the circumstances depicted in these films had seemed imaginable but distant; now, through Mahesh, they seem strangely close and real. There is one image that is etched clearly in his memory, as it is now in mine: his young mother with her young children returning home from her parents’ house, taking a shortcut by walking along the railway tracks. His uncle, her younger brother, would accompany them part of the way.

It is the attitudes formed during those harsh refugee days, Mahesh affirms, all the insecurity, then the resultant greed, aggression, and self-centredness, that persist today in the relationships and attitudes of the modern Delhiites that outsiders often remark upon.

And so this is the newest Delhi: converted refugee camps and settlements—presently booming in the new globalized economy—interspersed among and over the old Delhis: the markets and housing colonies of Lajpat Nagar, Sarojini Nagar, Patel Nagar, Vasant Kunj, Hauz Khas…progressing ever southwards, towards the oldest Delhis and beyond.

We are sitting one day in a hotel room—we’ve been travelling in Kerala—and news has come over Mahesh’s cell that the younger uncle is critically ill in hospital. (The older one is already dead.) Mahesh is the next oldest male in the family. And so this freest of spirits, one who would prefer to travel and explore, write and tell stories, is the family’s crutch, for all to seek comfort and decisions from.

His daughter has recently got married. It is our mutual regret that I missed the ceremony and celebrations. They were lavish, he says. Drinks flowed freely and the food was both veg and nonveg. (He eats only veg.) The groom is also Punjabi, and a Canadian, in the business of developing condominiums in the satellite town of Noida.

We talk of caste. He would not have objected, he says, if his daughter had picked a man of a lower caste. How low? It is a difficult question to ask, and I do not ask it. He is quite liberal in this matter, he says, and I know.

And a Muslim?—I ask. What if she had picked a Muslim man?

The family would not have accepted that, he says. The memories are still bitter.

It’s a deeply unsettling revelation. Sixty years after Partition, to hear this. But it’s not sixty years, it’s not Partition, I come gradually to realize; the prejudices go deeper, and they work both ways. Happily, the new generations in North America are kicking them off.

In November 1858, a year after the Mutiny and directly as its result, the East India Company, which in 1613 had been granted permission to open a trading post on the coast by the Mughal emperor Jehangir, and went on to dominate much of the country while representing British interests, was abolished, and India was placed under the direct rule of the British government. The governor general, Lord Canning, became the first British viceroy of India. A new era called “the British Raj” began.