A Place Within (27 page)

Back in Toronto one Sunday morning, having sent a holiday greeting card to Madhu and her husband, we receive a friendly phone call from her daughter in Los Angeles. Madhu is visiting her. Subsequently we inform Nurjehan’s father and uncle in Vancouver about her; perhaps they should give her a call. Uncle Sherali, we learn later, took a flight to Los Angeles to meet her, whom he had not seen in more than fifty years. He took extra care with his dressing that day, his wife says. How exactly the meeting went we never find out.

It seems morbid, impolite, to ask about the Pakistan border—just a few miles away on the Grand Trunk Road—the creation of which was a cause of so much killing, and which over the years has come to symbolize pain, hatred, and suspicion. Three wars have already been fought between the two neighbours. Newspapers go on about Pakistani infiltrators and agents; Bollywood superheroes perform marvellous feats against them in defence of India’s honour and safety. Both countries have tested nuclear weapons. Mutual threats are uttered. But when we ask about the border, to our great surprise we are told, Go see it, it’s not far, lots of visitors go. There’s a parade every day at six. The border, at a place called Wagah, is apparently a tourist attraction.

When we arrive at Wagah, it is crowded with parked cars; vendors come to sell snacks and tea, but there is no milk for the tea. The air is almost festive, though there’s a strange, expectant quietude around all the same. We follow others on foot, come to a halt some ten feet from the gate. The area is farming country, a pair of barbed wire fences cutting through it, dividing the two nations. Along this route, from the other side, came the Turks, the Afghans, the Mughals.

As I look at the border, a story by Manto comes to mind. In the story—comic and tragic at the same time, for in Manto rage finds form in the bizarrely comic—at the time of Partition a transport of non-Muslim lunatics is to take place from the new Pakistan to India. Among them is one Sikh fellow, called Bishan Singh, who wants to return only to his village, called Toba Tek Singh, but nobody knows whether it has been allocated to India or to Pakistan. The last scene of the story takes place at the Wagah border where we now stand. The Pakistani guards have given up attempts to push Bishan Singh to the Indian side, and allow the old man to stand where he is, frozen to one spot in between, where after a full night he gives a scream and collapses to the ground:

There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.

I am reminded also of two men I worked with some years ago in Ontario, one an experimental physicist, the other a theoretical physicist. They had been born in the same town, but one had come from India, the other from Pakistan. This fence has cut deep.

Meanwhile a show is about to begin. We are kept at bay by a handsome soldier, tall and starched, in a plumed hat and smiling. He chats with the people, allows the kids to stand with him and be photographed.

Suddenly he steps aside, and our crowd rushes forward and abruptly stops. Before us on our right to our great surprise there are bleachers packed with more people, craning their necks to see; in front of us are the Indian soldiers. Before we know it, there is heard a series of commands, loud and crisp, each followed by the thumping of feet as soldiers, one by one, go marching forward towards the Indian tricolour at an open gate, perform a salute and return to their positions. Each impressive soldierly performance is followed by applause from the crowd. And to our amazement, an identical, almost mirror-image display is taking place on the other side of the gate, impressive-looking Pakistani soldiers in darker uniforms and plumed hats marching, thumping their feet in exact synchrony with the Indians. Each side approaching its flag, the two flags within a foot or two of each other. Finally the last pair approach the flags and, facing away from each other, lower them exactly together, fold them, turn, and smartly bring them back to their sides. The crowd cheers.

There’s more.

The gates are closed, but the people are now free to go, and they rush forward to the gates on either side to get a look at, stare at, drink in, each other’s faces. What has come between us? I try to
imagine what they might feel; surely not hatred. They all,
we
all, look so ordinary. A Gujarati man waves, is told by a soldier to behave. The rest seem to be Punjabis on both sides, similar to each other in features—if there is Turkish blood, it’s hard to say on which side it predominates.

In Amritsar the temperature has been over a hundred degrees. In Shimla, when we get back, hail has fallen, the ground is white. It is night and desolately silent. We put on our sweaters, turn on the heaters. Cards, jigsaw puzzle, books to entertain us.

Bombay Getaway: The Distant Uncle and the Bohra Rebel

And when they know what old books tell,

And that no better can be had,

Know why an old man should be mad.

W. B. YEATS,
“Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?”

Y
ES,
my father-in-law confirms in a letter, the famous writer Mulk Raj Anand is a cousin of his. I should try and see him, Nurjehan suggests. I am skeptical. How real and how strong is this connection? There are cousins and cousins. My father-in-law’s name is Hakim Abu Aly. A cousin to Mulk Raj Anand? But the possibility is intriguing—it’s exciting—for it promises to cast a light on a past that some of us in modern times would rather forget, or suppress if necessary.

Without much of a social life in the beautiful high aloofness of the Institute, the family back in Toronto, my friends back in Delhi, it seems a reasonable idea to find an excuse to travel out of station. And so I write a letter to Anand about the possible family connection and ask him if I could come to Bombay to talk to him. The reply comes quicker than I expected, inviting me to come and have my chat. He gives me the address and the time.

The Himalayan Queen from Shimla stops at New Delhi railway station; I proceed to the university guest house, where a reservation has been made for me. It is a dingy place whose redeeming
features are the cheap, decent meals and its closeness to Connaught Place. Otherwise, the bathroom is wet, a tap dripping constantly, the light is bad, mosquitoes are many and eager. The following afternoon I go to the New Delhi station to catch the fast Rajdhani Express to Bombay. There is something about train names, which are known to all Indians, that makes every railway journey special; the train has a name, and you have a seat on it. But it is the monsoon season and my Bombay Rajdhani is late. Night has fallen, no one can tell me when the train will leave, beyond “early next morning.” The platform clearly is not the place to spend the night, you become an easy target. Already touts hover around me like vultures. Somewhat hesitantly I call up Pabby, Krishan Chander’s troubleshooter, who has helped me before, and put my quandary to him. Immediately he takes off with his wife in the Delhi traffic to come to my rescue. It is one of those instances of extraordinary kindness that makes you bewail the formality we have assumed after moving to the West, where time has become so precious it has to be hoarded. It turns out that the railway station has its own guest house, where Pabby finds me a room, decent and private. They’ll come and call you when the train is ready to depart, he says. Which is what they do.

The Rajdhani duly leaves for Bombay; there are delays on the way, and it appears that we will arrive late in the night. A reservation has been made for me at a Parsi club, but now I learn from my fellow passengers that there is a taxi strike in Bombay. Will there be rickshaws? Not really. It seems that this trip has been jinxed from the start. How will I get to the club? My fellow passengers have made their own plans, no one offers help, a ride to my destination, for example. I am told something will come up. But what?

Nervously I walk out from the station when the train arrives, watch the other privileged passengers of Second AC, Rajdhani Express, being met and disappearing into the night. How dependent one is on the simple conveniences, the habits, of city life. A
simple taxi strike, and here I am, stranded in big bad Bombay in the middle of the night. As I prepare to walk back to the station, suddenly a man walks up to me and asks furtively where I want to go. It turns out he’s a scab, runs a private taxi operation, and he looks as nervous as I feel. My fellow passengers must have known about the likes of him: Something will turn up, they said, and it has. There are a few others he’s collected, including a woman, which is reassuring, and we pack into his small car, parked some distance away. He does not quite know the place I am headed for, but drops me off in the vicinity, from where I make my way to the club, wake up the caretaker, and am taken to my room.

Mulk Raj Anand is one of the most renowned Indian writers of the twentieth century. He was born in 1905 in Peshawar, now in Pakistan. Although the family trade was in copper and silver smithing, his father was in the Dogra Regiment and Mulk was educated at cantonment schools. He did his B.A. in Amritsar, and after earning the wrath of his family for participating in Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign as a teenager, for which he was jailed briefly, and later for falling in love with a Muslim girl, he left for England in 1925, where he attended Cambridge and completed a Ph.D. in philosophy in London. He returned some twenty years later to an India on the brink of independence. He started writing in London, and his first novel,
Untouchable
, was rejected by nineteen publishers before being published in 1935 after E. M. Forster, whom he met while working at T. S. Eliot’s
The Criterion
, agreed to write an introduction. It is now considered a classic. He himself comes from an upper caste, and although the biographies and novels published more recently by writers from the “Untouchable” castes are more powerfully immediate and visceral, Anand’s novel made a large impact when it came out, for it held up a mirror to Indian society to reveal perhaps its worst evil. The caste system was a subject not discussed in polite society, and it is still a subject best
avoided. Even now,
Untouchable
remains one of the very few well-known novels on the subject. And obviously, the subject of untouchability has hardly been embraced by Bollywood, that exotic fairy-tale mirror of Indian society. Anand’s second novel was
Coolie
(1936), which depicts the desperate life of a coolie called Munoo. These two novels are, in the words of a critic, “India seen third-class,” without the romanticism. In total, Mulk Raj Anand has published dozens of books, of art, criticism, and fiction, and he is actively involved with social causes.

In
Coolie
, Munoo leaves his home in the Kangra hills to seek a better life in a city in the plains, whence he continues to Bombay, where he becomes one of the faceless millions of toilers in the factories:

Shivering, weak, bleary, with twisted, ugly faces, black, filthy, gutless, spineless, they stole along with unconscious, vacant looks; idiots, looking at the smoky heavens, as they sighed or murmured “Ram, Ram” and the other names of God, in greeting to each other and in thanksgiving for the gifts of the Almighty. The boy recalled how his patron Prabha in Daulatpur used to say that everything was the blessing of God, even Ganpat’s ill-treatment, the beating the police had given him, and the fever of which he nearly died.

Finally Munoo is taken back to the hills, to Shimla, by a kindly English memsahib. There, he enthusiastically takes her around in a rickshaw, along the Mall, on the Jakhoo road, to Christ Church, everywhere the English socialized in their summer capital, all the places that the tourists now delight to visit. One Friday evening he takes her to the Hotel Cecil on Chaura Maidan for dinner, after which he races up the hill along with dozens of other coolies to drop her off at the ball at the viceroy’s residence. Amidst the strains of exotic Western dance music, as the sahibs, the memsahibs, and the occasional Indian maharaja and princess waltz around on the
polished oak floors of the ballroom of the Viceregal Lodge, Munoo collapses and dies on the steps outside, awaiting his mem.

By a curious coincidence, it is from the former Viceregal Lodge that I have come to meet Munoo’s creator in Bombay.

I am a little wary about meeting a writer with such a reputation. He knows nothing about me, and my knowledge of him is superficial. My only interest at this point is to take a look at him, and to confirm the family connection, hopefully find out more about that.

He lives in an elegant white building on Cuffe Parade, a wealthy area, in a ground-floor apartment; the entrance is from the side. A woman opens the door, asks me what I want, then lets me in. I find him in the large front room, apparently a study: books on shelves, and more books, magazines, papers, in piles on the floor. He is a short, somewhat stooping man, not thin; bald, white hair at the sides, wearing a white kurta-pyjama, sitting on a chair looking abstracted, lonely.

What does a writer do at this stage of life, his energies spent, his vogue diminished?

He takes up an aggressive posture at the start: What does writing a novel (as I have told him I am doing) have to do with the Institute of Advanced Study? He has spent time at the Institute and perhaps feels that I do not quite qualify to be there. I tell him defensively that I am also conducting research for a book about “returning to India.” What’s so special about returning to India? he asks. He should know, he returned having missed a crucial part of its history, but I keep quiet. He calms down. He’s quite deaf, so it’s easier to let him talk, and he has much to say that he’s most likely said many times but I have not heard before. He talks about Nehru, Muhammad Iqbal, Gandhi. But his life in London, where he fraternized with the literati of the time, including the Bloomsbury group, he remembers with pride, speaks of with confidence. It’s the favourite soundtrack. Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. Eliot,
Malraux, Forster, Orwell—he’s known them all. And this to my great surprise: he fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Clearly he was one of those young Indians who set out to conquer the world: writers, scientists, at least one mathematician.

Yes, he then says, his family had been Agakhanis, the term Indians sometimes use for Indian Ismailis, for they were followers of the Aga Khans, the first of whom came to India from Iran in the mid-nineteenth century. What they were before the Aga Khans came is obscure and somewhat contentious today, but they were Indians holding a syncretistic belief combining elements of Iranian Ismailism and Indian Vaishnavism, Vishnu worship. The term “Ismaili” itself is a relatively recent import to India. (The Khojas of Gujarat have also adopted this description in modern times.) Anand says his grandfather or great-grandfather was a mukhi, an Ismaili headman; and his mother used to have a photo of the third Aga Khan as well as statues and prints of the regular gods. The family quit this path when the third Aga Khan, Sultan Muhammad, went to Europe and married a French woman, as Anand puts it. He remembers another woman in his family besides his mother who was always a follower of the Aga Khan. The Arya Samajis, a modern Hindu group, proselytized among them in the early twentieth century, and according to his estimate some two-thirds of the copper and silver workers of Amritsar reconverted to Hinduism. He feels negatively about the third Aga Khan for his pro-British and pro-Pakistani positions. He advises me to write a book about the Aga Khans, an exposé of sorts.

I am, of course, extremely curious to know more about this duality of beliefs in the family; the syncretism, what it was like, and what the family history was before the Aga Khans came from Iran in the 1800s. Nurjehan’s grandmother had at one time been called Durga, and her grandfather Panna Lal, whose first wife had been a Sikh. What to make of this? The family belief is that they were “hidden” (gupti) Ismailis, which sounds to me like a revisionist
idea, adopted after the split. But this is the kind of information that gets obscured as people move on to the more rigid identities of modern times. What can this old man tell me?

But Mulk, my witness, is deaf, and his interest is focused on something else, his own life, about which he goes relentlessly on.

He recalls that Annie Besant, the famous theosophist, came to Amritsar and recited the creation hymn from the Rig Veda, both in Sanskrit and in English, and he had been rather moved. She had also come to look at Jallianwala Bagh, the place of the massacre. The principal of his college was transferred and there had been riots on campus. Although a career in the army had been planned for him, he did not want that. He went to see the philosopher and poet Muhammad Iqbal in Lahore, and Iqbal advised him to go abroad and wrote letters for him and from what I understand, gave him some money. And so he went to Europe.

His knowledge about fiction is encyclopedic, though distorted by the occasional time warp. His
Coolie
and
Untouchable
have been translated into numerous languages, he reminds me repeatedly, but not into his native Punjabi, and not into many Indian languages. I wonder if it is because his books don’t have the immediacy of caste experience that a native Indian reader might demand. I don’t say this to him, of course; this is not a discussion but a one-way discourse. Recent politics have vindicated these two novels, he says. And he has no complaints about “Mandalism,” the recommendations of the Mandal Commission regarding reservations for the lower or backward classes, which has the middle classes up in arms. The ruling upper classes, he says, consist of 20 per cent of the population and control the media, academia, business.

At the end, he is unstoppable. Tea is offered me, and he turns on the fan; he introduces me to his wife, the woman who let me in, and calls me progressive; and he goes on. Write a biography of Aly Khan, he says. I tell him one already exists, he doesn’t understand.

He has used his money to start two charitable foundations, one in Bombay, the other in Delhi, gives me their addresses. I ask him about Rafiq Zakaria, a man who has written on Muhammad Iqbal, and on Muslims in India. It turns out that Zakaria is a neighbour and a friend. Anand calls him up, and I speak to him, set up an appointment for the following day.

I leave Mulk Raj Anand pottering about his front-room study a lonely old man comforted by his memories of relevance and glory.

When I call up Rafiq Zakaria the next day, it turns out that there has been a misunderstanding. One of us has got the time of our interview wrong; it has passed. He is extremely annoyed, gives me a talking to, calling me a typical Indian who cannot be punctual. He will not listen to my explanation, sounds very much like one of those Indians who will tell you openly he is not like the others in their slack habits. And so I miss the interview, but with no regrets.