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place like Holmes memories 221B Baker Street is a world in itself all because of a fictional detective born out of one man's imagination, but borne, through generations, by many My first meeting with Mr.
Sherlock Holmes was quite prosaic. I was six or seven when my When my elder sister's birthday arrived, I realised she was getting the entire two volumed, unabridged, Sherlock Holmes collection. Her present yes, but yours truly was there to pounce on the first volume as soon as the wrapping paper came off. I was hooked. I doubt I knew where my best friend lived. But I did know 221B Baker Street. As soon as I learnt it was a real address, I had to see it. Of course I didn't know at the time that it was a museum for the detective. I imagined people actually lived there, and a little explanation (read pleading) might be necessary to gain entry. On my previous trips to London, Baker Street always got left out. But this time was different. For one, it was up to my brother and me to decide what to do with our day. For another, I now knew about the museum and was grateful that instead of offering to pay for the owners' entire week's groceries, I would just have to buy a ticket. My brother isn't a fan, but a little sticks and carrots from both sides and viola! We're turning left from Marylebone Road. and onto Baker Street. We browse through the museum shop below the apartment and then head up into 221B Baker Street. The ticket tells me I'm a category (b) visitor. Was I excited? You bet.
This place had been painted in my imagination for almost 10 The famous deerstalker cap and the magnifying glass lay on the table, ready to become accessories to make-believe. The place looked lived-in. "I can't make bricks without clay," says Holmes once. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had provided the clay. And enthusiasts had done the rest. 221B Baker Street was real. It even had the ubiquitous Japanese tourists, who were seemingly so happy to be there, that they forgot any snippets of English they might have picked up before. I only say this because when I asked them to kindly get out of the frame, they obligingly took a picture of me standing there with a camera in my hands and my mouth half open. The exasperated smile came a few seconds too late for their photograph. Having finally taken a couple of pictures I moved to what was meant to be the detective's bedroom. Instead of the bed, a number of unfortunate villains greet you. Brought to life from Sidney Paget's sketches, Brunton the butler from 'The Musgrave Ritual', Professor James Moriarty, and Dr. Grimesby Roylott from 'The Speckled Band', with the speckled snake still around his head I might add, are ready to oblige. It served him right, given the murderous rogue he was. It was then that I looked around for more to explore. But that was it really. That's as big as 221B Baker Street is. A few more pictures, a little more exploration, and it's time for you to leave. Small place. Is it worth it? I think so. 221B Baker Street has an aura all its own. The London outside disappears. When you step into the building you step into a world you've only imagined. A world strange and familiar at the same time. A world created by the pen of one man. And all because of a fictional detective born out of one man's imagination, but borne, through generations, by many. Why you ask? Elementary, really.
Nilofer Rolston is a
delightful five year-old who lives in Toronto, Canada. She is my grand-niece
who, along with her brother Jibraeel (age seven); I met for the first time
last winter. There was a little confusion about the word 'Mamoon' for they
have one in Canada and I, much older, had suddenly materialised from a place
called Pakistan. But i I recently received a little drawing from Nilofer. One side of the paper says, in that large scrawl typical of any five year-old just beginning to learn the secrets of the written word, "Dear Mamu I hope you have a good tine (sic) in Pakistan love Nilofer." No punctuations, nothing; but the message is full of love and feeling. The other side has a banner reading PAKISTANS on top. Below it is a radiant sun next to which a rainbow casts a joyful light on the landscape of three flowers -- yellow, turquoise and blue -- and two smiling faces. That is the way young Nilofer sees Pakistan: a country of smiling people, sunshine and rainbows coloured by the glory of myriad flowers. Her Pakistan is a joyous, blissful country. The charming, untainted innocence of my grand-niece took me to a time when this country actually was as she depicts it. And it was not because all was good and well with the new Pakistan. It was radiant sun and rainbows and smiling faces because there was hope. That was the Pakistan we inherited on that August day sixty years ago. People died, they became homeless, lost their loved ones, gave up the hearths that carried the warmth of fires kindled by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of generations of mothers, abandoned the courtyards that bore the memories of as many generations of elders passing down family lore and set out on a harrowing trek down a road where one-time friends waited with honed blades to shed their blood and prevent their passing to a new home in Pakistan. They parted from the graves of their forefathers -- a hard thing to do -- with the hope of living in a new country where all would be well. And the 1950s were indeed a period of hope -- despite the bumbling politicians, over-ambitious bureaucrats and blundering generals (these latter yet on the sidelines, but clearly meddling). There was the hope, albeit among a few idealistic people, of building up a great country. Isn't it Hector Bolitho in his 'Jonah of Pakistan' who is full of admiration for the hundreds of men who gathered to put a derailed locomotive back on its tracks with their bare-hands? This was at Jungshahi near Thatta and the people were all Sindhis who we were later to condemn as something less of Pakistanis than us patriotic Punjabis. That was the country and the nation we were back in those heady days. But we (or the politician bureaucrat general troika) did everything wrong. Within a few short years we set the pace for the ceding of Bangladesh by not permitting the Bengalis to form the government when they had won the majority. For the vested interest of one man (who fell shortly afterwards to the assassin's bullet) we imported new mohajirs and sowed the seed for endless trouble in Karachi. My earliest memories of
living in Lahore go back to 1957 that was when I was the same My Pakistan was Lahore and the Grand Trunk Road to Rawalpindi. It was also Chicho ki Mallian, a little village near Sheikhupura, where the family owned some agricultural land. My Pakistan was a country of Sunday outings to the farm and seeing lotuses blooming in the ditches alongside the road that whizzed past the speeding car and anglers fishing in the turbid waters of the Degh Nadi or the canal or two we crossed. My Pakistan was also country roads that were a tunnel of green shaded by the wonderful acacia and pipal in which golden orioles sang and weaver birds nested. It was also the Grand Trunk Road with its banyan trees that spread so wide that people parked their cars under them to get away from the hail stones coming down as large as chicken's eggs. My Pakistan was Durand Road and Davies (that's how it is spelled!) Road and Elgin Road in the cantonment that we now call Sarwar. And it was also cycling up all the way from Durand Road and watching the flights of hornbills above. My Pakistan was also a country where I, no more than five, ran across the road to stop the birdman who sold colourful avadavats. In the bargain I got hit by a car and the kindly driver who had seen me dashing out of the gate and barely managed to stop, brought me home in his arms. There was only a slight bruise and the man was given a glass of water and asked if he would like a cup of tea as well. He was also told to put himself at ease as I was none the worse for wear and it was entirely my fault for not watching the road. In my Pakistan of the decades preceding the 1970s people cared. In the late 1950s the FC College bridge was a part wooden, part concrete structure where my uncle used to take us kids sometimes for a drink. In those days we only had Coca-Cola and the bottles came from a tin box filled with ice (and not a freezer) kept by the khokha-wallah a few yards down toward the college gate. In my Pakistan of sunshine and smiling faces there was the speeding car coming up from Gulberg and I sitting on the railing of the bridge with my Coke. As the car came abreast I held up the bottle and screamed, "Have a Coke!" The car made a fast turn on Canal Bank in the direction of Jail Road, screeched to a halt and came roaring back in reverse. "Thank you," said the man at the wheel and with rubber burning sped off again. In that Pakistan we used to sleep outside in summer. On cool white sheets, charpais laid on a brick-paved drive cooled by a sprinkling of water with the old pedestal fan sending out a very storm of wind we would lie to a grand vista of stars above. That was when I was first introduced to red Betelgeuse and Aldebaran and blue Rigel and also to Mars and Jupiter and Saturn by my father. In the thickets around the walls and in the far reach of the garden, fireflies flashed on-off, on-off as if to lull us to sleep. We used to sleep outside without a chowkidar guarding us and no fear for the armed dacoit who would come to rape and loot in the dark of night. The worst was the oil-slicked, loin-clothed thief who would climb the roof, tie a rope to the bar across the ventilator and slip down the rope unseen into the house while everyone dreamed on outside. All he would take would be some clothes and pantry appliances. In the magical pre-dawn light the sound that woke me up was either the screeching parakeets feeding in the neem or the pipal or the rhythmic roar of the lion in the zoo. In a straight line the zoo was perhaps just a mile from our Durand Road home and the King's roar carried. I also heard it in the dark of early morning in winter as I lay in the quilt contemplating the cold. Those were days when midwinter mornings meant a lawn covered with frost and the garden hose frozen solid so that when you turned it on, the ice broke through the other end with a crackling sound. My country in the decades preceding the 1970s was a country where girls could cycle around freely. It was country where holding hands -- not men but woman and man -- did not invite stoning to death. It was a country where courtesy was not a sign of weakness, where bribing a policeman was done discreetly and people yet had the shame to not flaunt ill-begotten wealth, regardless that they referred to it as Allah's Bounty -- Allah di Rehmat. That was also a country where women and men had religion in their hearts and souls and not on their sleeves or on the tips of forked tongues. The mullah had not yet launched his unholy war on religion and we were certainly better humans for we had not mastered the craft of hypocrisy that now passes for religiosity. By 1972 we had lost half the country, but somehow hope for what was left yet lived on. For me the country of the radiant sun and rainbows and houses with the Pakistani flag atop died a little in 1977. After that the slide began. And now there is simply very little hope. An eight year-old will be flattened by a mad wagon driver before he can cycle ten yards on Durand Road; a girl on a bicycle jeered to heaven knows where. The hornbills are confined to just a few islands in Lahore for we have destroyed all those majestic pipal trees. A driver knocking down a child will be lynched and his car burnt, and no speeding driver will pause to make a child's day with a thank you -- it is just not worth it. The stars are lost to filth in the air, the roar of the lion smothered by the blare of air pressure horns, the Degh poisoned and fireflies exterminated by a wanton use of pesticides. We now have gun-toting dacoits who flaunt their religiosity and instruct their victims to say their prayers and pay the poor-due but who think nothing wrong with robbing and killing. The country reels from one debacle to another and the sun, rainbow and smiling faces are increasingly obscured by darkness. But young Nilofer in Toronto still wants to look upon the country of her mamoon as one where the sun still shines and people smile. What a long way young Nilofer's priceless gift took me. Every time I hold the page with its message and drawing, I think of the country we had and what we turned it into. And I think: has it been worth it? Was this what part of my family died for in that home in Railway Road, Jullundhar on a humid August day in 1947? |
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parents handed
me a Ladybird impression of the 'Hound of the Baskervilles'. And if that
seems wrong somehow, allow me to say that the book with its vivid sketches
did indeed contain the artist's impression of the said hound, and prompted me
to turn my face away each night when I went to sleep. You may laugh, but to a
boy of six or seven sleeping in the company of a hound from hell was no great
comfort. Passing over the soon-to-be dead hound though, that book acquainted
me to Sherlock Holmes, and it was an acquaintance I wished to continue.
years. I wanted
it be just so. Was it? Not really. It was even better. It was as if someone
had edited my imagination; but had done so in a positive way. Sherlock Holmes
stands at the far end of the room in wax work, smiling indulgently at you;
like he knows what brought you here. Watson stands at the other side, with an
empty expression. Tribute perhaps to the involuntary buffoon he's made out to
be; something those who read the books will know to be incorrect. The
detective's armchair and the window overlooking Baker Street; where so many
adventures begin, and the dining table, where so many end. It was all there.
And it was perfect.
n the end we all agreed that I could also be 'Mamoon'
to them -- just like I am to their mother and to their real 'Mamoon'. In the
two weeks I spent with them we had good fun and the bonding was complete.
age as Nilofer
today. On the inside cover of an old copy of 'Divan-e-Ghalib' owned by my
father from those days, there is a picture of a house with a gabled roof,
windows on two floors and a path leading up to the front door. On either side
of the path there are trees and potted flowering plants and in the background
a radiant sun setting in the V of a mountain range. Atop the house there is,
fluttering in the wind, a flag of Pakistan with its crescent and star. I did
not see Pakistan then very differently from the way Nilofer sees it now.