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travel Utopia
for me travel "I walked back to Habib Manzil nearly sixty-one years after those who were lost, and the thought foremost in my mind was if I wasn't a trifle late in coming" By Salman Rashid I walked the way my grandmother, two aunts and great-grandfather had walked from the Mohallah Punj Pir home to Habib Manzil in Railway Road in August 1947. As the madness of partition grew, my grandfather, Dr Badruddin had remained in his home that he had named after his younger son while the rest of the family had congregated in the Punj Pir home. But then my grandmother decided she wanted to be with 'Dr Sahib' and my two phuphis followed her home. For Mian Qutubuddin my grandmother, Fatima, his only daughter, was a much favoured child and he too followed her to Habib Manzil. The family that remained
behind in Punj Pir eventually made it to Pakistan. But those in Habib Manzil
were never heard of again. In our family no one ever spoke of that dreadful
time that oversaw the birth of Pakistan. The home in Jalandhar was mentioned
and from a bunch of sepia photographs we knew of the relatives we had lost in
that far off time. Chan (what Chacha Jan became on the It was from Khala Sakina that I first heard of those final days in Jalandhar. Too young to fully comprehend the horror of it all (it must have been 1960); I unknowingly let the demons take root in my soul. It was twenty years later as a young man that I began to be tormented by questions about the fate that befell the House of Dr Badruddin. But we did not speak of partition in our home and I could not ask anyone. More than anything else, I feared I would break out crying if Chan were to tell me what had happened and perhaps make him weep as well. I walked back to Habib Manzil nearly sixty-one years after those who were lost, and the thought foremost in my mind was if I wasn't a trifle late in coming. I knew the house across Krishna Street overlooking Railway Road like Habib Manzil was where Lala Bheek Chand lived. Lala Ji was good friends with my grandfather; I was certain his family would still be living in the same house and would be able to tell me something. But before I went asking, I had to go home to try and imagine what life would have been like had history taken another course. I knocked the door of Habib Manzil and a fat, waddling woman of about fifty answered. I told her I had come from Lahore with the express purpose of visiting my grandfather's home. "No one is home," she said as she tried to shut the door in my face. I stuck a foot in and told her she was home. Why, she wanted to know, did I want to see the house after so many years? After much pleading the woman opened up and let me into the vestibule telling me to hurry up and get it over with. Inside the vestibule a doorway on the left gave access to my grandfather's baithak where he and Lala Ji spent hours in post-retirement leisure. In front was the sunlit central courtyard with the stairs on the left next to an open door. In front was a veranda with rooms to either side and to the right the courtyard ended in a couple of rooms. Most of the rooms were locked and the woman told me that the real owners, a Sahotra family, now living in UK had permitted her to live in as a caretaker. To humour her I made small talk and learned she came from Gujranwala. So did my wife, I said. But her ugly mask of distrust did not soften. I asked if I could check out the upstairs rooms as well. "Even if you do that, you'll never be able to reclaim this property!" If there was ever a harpy, this evil, ugly piece of work was one. I told her I lived in Lahore in my own home and as much as I might want, I have no claim over the property because I have no documents to show for my grandfather's possession of it. With great reluctance again old harpy permitted me upstairs and no sooner was I there began to call for me to get over with and get out. I could not have been more than five minutes when she called in the man who ran his tea stall on a barrow just outside the door. I was duly chased out with another reminder that my desire to possess her home was vain. The DEN at Delhi, the railwaymen at Solan railway station, the good people at Desh Bhagat Hall and earlier in Amrtisar, all strangers until I had met them, had been so full of empathy when they learned of the purpose of my pilgrimage. There had been unconcealed shows of love and fellow-feeling and now I had this horrible demon on my hands. I walked across the threshold into the street with an overpowering sense of loss: three generations before me had crossed it a million times over and if only history had taken another turn, if Master Tara Singh had not promised a massacre of Muslims were India to be partitioned, if only the trains from Pakistan had not come in with their grisly cargoes of dead bodies and if only the politicians who played into the hands of Western powers had greater sense, this woman would have been living in Gujranwala and I in the home that my grandfather had named Habib Manzil. My grandfather design for the home incorporated two shops facing Railway Road. I went into the one on the corner whose hoarding said, 'Jaswant Singh Harbhajan Singh Hardware and Tool Merchants'. I told the young smiling Sikh behind the counter that I had come from Pakistan. Then I added, "Bhai Ji, you run your store in my grandfather's property." Overcome with emotion, Iqbal Singh came around the counter and warmly embraced me, holding me close to his chest for a rather long time. He was born in Jalandhar, but his parents had migrated from a Sialkot village. "We who live here pine for the land across the border; you come from the other side to find solace in our part. Oh, what was this great madness?" he said. Iqbal had never heard of Lala Bheek Chand, but he took me by the hand and led me to the store in that property. These people had rented it from the owners who ran a tyre business in a market across town. My friend Ramneek from Rohtak who had given up everything to first be with me in Delhi and now in Jalandhar drove me across. It was a dead-end: the present owners' father had purchased the Bheek Chand home about forty years ago and it was not known where the original owners were. As an afterthought the man said he believed they had moved away from Jalandhar. Not that I expected him to know of them, I asked the man about Dhanno and Shiela, two of Lala Ji's daughters who were friends with my aunts and my mother. He had never even heard the names. Crest-fallen I left the tyre shop: Lala Bheek Chand's family was my only hope of learning the truth and they had vanished. Not knowing what to do, I returned to Iqbal Singh's store where I just sat about in a sort of a daze, staring out at the street. Occasionally I wandered across the road to stare up at the facade of Habib Manzil. On the third time, the gentleman in the bottled gas agency in front of which I stood in my trance, invited me in. He said he had seen so many passers-by glance up to admire the workmanship on the house, but I was acting strangely. I told him and without letting me finish he asked, "Are you Dr Badruddin's grandson?" Kailash Sehgal was too young to have ever known my grandfather; he only remembered him from what he had heard. He knew the family had perished in the riots but he did not know how or their number. He specifically mentioned just one aunt and did not know if my grandmother and her father were also there. Six decades is a long time for memory to become confused, particularly when it is second hand. I returned to Iqbal's store and parked myself in the same chair to stare at the road again. Of a sudden Iqbal put his hand on my arm and asked, "Was your grandfather a doctor?" I was utterly taken aback: how could he know when his family had moved to Jalandhar sometime after the Holocaust when the bones of my family had long been scattered. And then he told me he had heard the whole ghastly tale of the end of my family. He said he had been told of someone being pitched over from the roof into the courtyard below. Who, I asked, was the teller? Iqbal Singh smiled his slow smile and said he could not remember, but it was an elderly customer of his. He was, he said, sure to recall in due time and before I left Jalandhar he would see to it that I met this man. Thereafter I spent most of my waking hours with Iqbal, forever pestering him until I felt I was making a regular nuisance of myself. On the third morning the thought crossed my mind that Iqbal, not certain how I would react were I to meet the murderer of my grandparents, was perhaps pretending to have forgotten, but I could not get myself to confront him. Instead, telling him I would be in my ancestral village Oghi in the morning, I once again stressed upon him to try and recall. I had planned to take a bus to Oghi, but Kailash Sehgal would have none of that. He organised an auto rickshaw which I was not to pay for. Beyond the last houses of Jalandhar we were in countryside where the wheat was somewhere between green and gold with buffaloes wallowing in the ditches by the road. I counted the eucalyptus and sent up a silent curse for Indian foresters much as I do for their Pakistani counterparts. "Just like home," I thought to myself. But this was home, I checked myself quickly. I was on my way home to Oghi where heaven knows how many generations had lived and died -- forebears whose blood runs in my own veins. Bakshish Singh who I had been introduced to in Jalandhar by the good Gurmeet Singh of Desh Bhagat Hall was waiting for me by the Muslim shrine just outside the village. When I had said I wanted to see the Muslim graveyard, young Bakshish had somehow believed this was what I wanted. The only other graves, he said, were outside the compound in a small graveyard. There among half a dozen graves was just one headstone with the inscription 'Allah di Jeeri Mastani' who died on the fourth day of the fast in the Hijri year of 1357, that is, about sixty-nine years ago. I had come to the graveyard to read the headstones in the hope that there will some names of long-dead patriarchs that I know from a family tree that goes back seven generations. But here was just a handful of graves and only one headstone. Bakshish said that the graveyard spread over one square of land until it was bulldozed some years ago and the grain market built over it. I was denied the chance to read the tombstones, the last vestiges of my ancestors. Bakshish Singh's elderly father whose parents had left home near Shahkot in the district he still remembered as Lyallpur broke in a wide grin when I told him that I of the clan Arain and he a Kamboh were after all brothers: we descend from a common ancestor. As we sat talking, old Saudagar Singh told me that two of the oldest Hindus in the village were members of an original Oghi family. Off we went to meet with Faqir Chand and his cousin Banarsidas. Both octogenarians, they were upper-caste Pundits surnamed Sangar. Both remembered my grandfather well. But it was Faqir Chand who was in school in nearby Nakodar when my grandfather was in charge of the hospital there. Dr Sahib was a kindly said Faqir Chand, but something came over him in 1940 when he began to sympathise with Muslim League: he became prejudiced against Sikhs. He remembered my grandfather as an elegant man dressed in smoke-white cotton suits and pastel neckties. "He knew everyone in the village by name. This was strange because Dr Sahib hardly ever lived in the village." Said Faqir Chand. Our family home, he told me, was in Lammian di Patti which he took me outside to point out in the distance. But the old home had been replaced about twenty years ago. Back in the Singh home just as we were sitting down to lunch, my cell-phone rang. Iqbal Singh was almost breathless, "Bhai Ji, leave off whatever you have on hand. Get back to Jalandhar for I have found your man. And he wants to speak to you!" Lunch sat heavily with me because I now wanted only to get back to Jalandhar and when we were done eating, Bakshish kindly drove me to Lamra in order to cut my journey time back. Directly upon my return Iqbal Singh got on the phone and within five minutes we had the very energetic seventy-four year Mahendra Kumar Sehgal with us. He spoke fast and with great ardour. "Dr Badruddin was too good a man to deserve the end he got," he said. And then he broke into mild invective calling someone stupid and with a 'narrow heart'. He took me by the hand and we went into Krishna Gali to find old harpy sitting on the threshold dressing vegetables. Mahendra Kumar kicked open the door and told me to go in and see what I had come to see. That was the first time I saw my grandparents' home in any detail. Done with that I asked my new-found friend where it had all happened. Not here, he said. Because everyone knew of Dr Sahib's and Lala Bheek Chand's friendship, it was thought he would be safe in the home of the Chopras in the lane behind. "Come let me show you where it happened," said Mahendra Kumar Sehgal taking me by the hand and leading me away from my grandparents' courtyard. Outside we turned left in Krishna Gali. "See, Eidu was in this room where he lived with his family," said the man pointing to a door at the back of our home. "When the mob came howling into the lane, he took fright. Together with his two year-old son in his arms he bolted making straight for the Chopra home." The mob followed, the Chopras stood aside and my family violently went into their long night. How? I asked. How did it all happen? And what became of my young aunts? Mahendra Kumar Sehgal looked hard at me for a few seconds before he spoke: there was a hole in the timber of the door through which a rifle was fired which got my grandfather in the eye. A panel of the door was broken, the door unlocked and the others cut up. My grandmother, her father, my two aunts, Eidu's wife and four children all passed away from this life in the room where the family now had a kneading machine to prepare dough namak paray. Finding the door locked, Eidu had raced to the roof. From there his two year-old son was pitched into the courtyard below before Eidu too was cut up. Once again Mahendra Kumar broke into invective about the narrow-hearted people. Who, I asked, were these people? Mahendra Kumar glared at me for not having been listening carefully. "My stupid father, who else. That's who threw Eidu's son over and did the poor man in. That fool joined the hooligans to commit this horrible sin against innocent people." I was speechless. I had never heard anyone speak like this about one's father. In our part of the world, what we or those near us do, no matter how gross, is always right; it is always someone else that is in the wrong. Yet here was Mahendra Kumar Sehgal roundly berating his father for the grave sin he committed against good people. I could not have doubted his story for who could have known about Eidu, the servant, and his children. Back in Lahore my mother confirmed Eidu did indeed have a toddler and that he did live in a backroom opening into the street. "Then they hauled the corpses of your family to the taal and cremated them. For days after, my foolish father wept and rued his folly. But it was too late. It is directly from him that I got these details." Thus spoke Mahendra Kumar Sehgal. He said his father may have wanted to rid himself of his guilt through confession; but he lived with it to the last day. I found myself wondering if, by narrating that ghastly story, Mahendra Kumar was trying to exorcise the demons that were born from his father's remorse and had tormented him since and if he knew I too suffered from demons only slightly different. I wonder now if Mahendra Kumar had felt any better getting his load off by telling me, a descendent of those who died at the hands of one whose guilt he had inherited. We were, in a way, connected by our respective legacies: he had guilt and I grief that we had each inherited from those that went before us. If I had believed the discovery of truth would dispel my inherited grief, I was entirely wrong. It only became more pronounced. But having discovered the truth I now wanted to leave knowing fully well that not many weeks after getting back to Lahore, I would want to return home to Jalandhar. Postscript: Just before I left Oghi, I walked into a wheat field and gathered up a fistful of dust to bring home. Some of that was sprinkled on Chan's and my father's graves. The remainder now sits in a bottle on my desk. When I die and if I get a decent burial, the first dust to touch my white shroud will be the dust of Oghi. That is where they lived whose blood courses through my veins. (Concluded)
By Talia Shahbaz Though dictionary defines 'Utopia' as an ideal society, for me it's more of a state of mind. Because an ideal society is reminiscent of all those dangerous and boring 'isms' like Marxism, Communism, Fascism (!!!). A truly Utopian Utopia must be a filtered version of ideals like Truth, Beauty and Happiness; something that tastes like Peter Pan's Never-Never Land...never say never...nothing is impossible...we can sleep on clouds...slide down rainbows...dance with fairies and elves...look at the world with bright eyes... Like in heaven...Or childhood. Parallels are often drawn between the story of Adam and Eve's fall from heaven and every human being's experience of growing up. Childhood is that one phase when things feel so good...life somehow does not ever regain that sheen and brightness, except maybe when one falls in love. All the things one truly enjoys after becoming an adult are ones that bring out the inner child in us. Why is childhood so exhilarating? Here's why I think: there's
absence of a conception of right or wrong. Even when the morals are As God said to Adam and Eve, according to Christian theology, "but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it". It seems that before the fall from Paradise and the partaking of Original Sin, Eve and Adam were living in the same state of Utopia as children; playful, ignorant, lustful. Most religions claim that the aim of our life on Earth is to somehow go back -- attain heaven, work our way up to Paradise. Is the idea of heaven only a symbolic memory of life as a child? Is the driving force of most religions, or any other ideological institution, just plain old nostalgia? Whatever the case, for me Utopia is magic, fairy tales, today stretching out forever, tomorrow feeling so far away that one doesn't need to worry about petty things like homework (even if one is made to do it!). Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that Utopia essentially means irresponsibility; rather it signifies something bubbly, irrepressible, like freedom. Not living like hobos or hippies or spoilt rich brats but living with a state of mind that makes each day seem as exciting as a completely new discovery; driven by the endless energy of wonder, the seduction of discovery, not just being lustful about lust, but lustful about life per se! There is a reason why fairy tales have passed down since the origin of man, a reason why myths of gods or Adam and Eve were created and indelibly printed in our collective consciousness. Be it Snow White, Laila Majnun, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, Lilith, Zeus, Hercules, Osiris, or the miracles of Jesus Christ or King Arthur and Lancelot, in each tale the story magnetises, makes us relate and yearn for more than this ordinary life. These stories strike a chord in our minds and hearts; they whisper something of that elusive word, Utopia... We keep these stories, study them again and again, interpret them in a thousand ways, try to dig up evidence that people like those could actually have existed, that someone could have lived like that. Why? Only because people, like you and me, want to be larger than life. Secretly, we too believe in miracles and hence our fascination with them and our boredom with real life. We all feel, consciously or otherwise, the restrictions of the normal and the practical world. But since I am on this imaginary voyage, I just don't care about all losers out there striving for World Peace or great gobs of money who go to live in Dubai, striving for achievement or fame. There's a purity in the inner world, in the simplicity of being a child, that I would never trade for anything. So when I say I believe in Utopia, I guess that means believing in miracles. It helps me not to worry about anything else. So, let's say, even if whatever I said here was completely and ridiculously wrong, what better and fun way to live?
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tongues of us four siblings) had once talked wistfully of the bicycle trips
to swim in the clear, fresh water of the Bein stream only a few miles outside
Jalandhar. Other than that, partition was mentioned only obliquely in our
family.
hammered into the child by family and school, it's too early for them to
internalise those. The child's inner reality is truly Utopian, with no sense
of limits. You don't believe me, watch two children in a playground, with
hair and clothes all dirty, not caring about the time or the place; they
indeed are the essence of innocence.