[Reader-list] R-Cades Project (or, The In Sanity Chronicles)

[rehan ansari]

Dear Pratap, 

Your response has reminded me of walks, and talks,
through karachi, bombay, lahore and delhi (delhi
cannot, alas, be ignored) in the 90s that I have
taken, and hope to not take again, who wants to walk
in circles forever.

Sorry for the delay in response, my problem has been
considering how much detail can be packed in a letter.
After all a letter, like a suitcase, can only take
that much. Though often enough, people have had to
fantasise that they can take their all with them…

When you write, about the parents of students, that
you are not sure they are not dreaming about Pakistan,
I read that and claim two negatives can cancel each
other: they are dreaming about Pakistan. Is that such
a fantastic claim?

And can I tell you that this has happened before, this
dreaming in Okhla, in Pahar Ganj, in Darya Ganj, in
Karol Bagh. This no fantasy.

I can tell you about those parent's dreams, but more
important I can tell you their children's dreams, your
student's, if their parents were to come to Pakistan,
and they were kids in Pakistan, and hence not your
students. I can tell you because it has all happened
before. A perfect circle. 

Perfect circles.

Homelessness is a bad thing, you have to grit your
teeth forever, that will be the only way to remember
the grit.

In 1997 when my father visited Delhi after 50 years,
on a magical trip, he visited Okhla, met his uncle:
"Rehan," he told me later, "Muzaffar bhai cannot
forget Purana Qila. As if it is still happening. And
he talked about Babri Masjid. I said ek masjid hai,
aur bahut masjiden hehn, aur banjayngi," said my
Pakistani father. 

"Magar nahin, he can’t let it go."

In the 90's I have been surprised at finding so many
from my generation dreaming about Delhi, Bombay,
Calcutta. I, in Lahore, who would have been a student
of one like you, if we had never left, dreamt about
Delhi. 

After I first came to Delhi, with a fellow writer from
The Frontier Post, in 1992 (of all years, it didn’t
take long in the year for fantasies to wash). With
Murtaza Rizvi, Sunny to friends, walking about in
Greater Kailash 1, looking at gates upon gates which
bore sign plates, Khanna, Malhotra, Kumar, Singh, I
said I could be walking in Mohammed Ali Society,
PECHS, in Karachi, same gates, plot sizes, family
sedans, except the houses are not the properties of
Haq, Rashid, Khan, Akhtar. 

A mirror image, which shows us (not yours and not
mine), our vanities, our
aspirations, exactly, except…

All Sunny and I, wanted, was a break from newsprint,
maybe work for Newstrack for a while, share a barsati.
That's a reasonable, non-fantastic, non-circular,
alternative isnt it? A tv show in Delhi as a break
from a newspaper in Lahore. We fingered our green
passports.

We don’t want to change the world really, we are not
giddy imagining we can walk a zebra crossing of
Khanna, Haq, Malhotra, Rashid, Kumar, Khan, Singh,
Akhtar. We are separate and equal. 

We just want non-reporting, non city-specified, six
month visas.

The first Ansari to leave Sahranpur for Delhi,
recently died. He was also the first Ansari to leave
Delhi for Karachi. And the first to leave Karachi for
London. None of the Ansaris who followed him to
Karachi, and most stayed on in Karachi, became babus,
none of them claimed property as blood money. 

They all became accountants. Un cheezon ka hisaab
lagatay rahey jin ka hisaab lag sakta hai.

My first memory of "Hindu" is when my father teaching
me arithmetic says hindu hisaab main achay hotay
hehn.Years later when I remembered to ask him he said,
he was taught by a pandit, hisaab, in a school, in
Paharganj.

One claim property in exchange for what she lost. But
her story I will betray another time.

They never told stories of Delhi, none of them, not
one. I would not have believed them if they had. If
they had told stories of massacres in schools, of
machine-gun firing in Paharganj, of burning houses in
Daryaganj, I would not have believed them. 

They only started telling stories after I started
visiting Delhi. The prior silence was good for me, or
was it not.  I had to learn for myself, or I did not. 

Pratap, you wonder whether Pakistan is a dream of a
civil place. I grew up in the late 70s and 80s and
forever will be mindful of a martial place. 

Karachi I also will tell you teems with refugee
colonies. New Hyderabad, New Paharganj… Obituaries,
these days, it is time for those original refugees to
die, are full of birthplaces, well all of UP. I know
UP qasbahs, not by visiting any, or a map, but from
circling Karachi obituraries, and Hyderabad, but also
Maharashtra, M.P, Tamil Nadu. Tamil Nadu? I asked our
"family" doctor, why did you have to leave. He
shrugged his shoulders.

----

As troops pull out of Gujarat, for the border, towards
the Indus, moving from the site of one communal riot,
which they were summoned to police, to another, where
they will participate-- how mad is our world!--I think
of my gestures at  sanity: I am the most traveled
Pakistani-to-India of my generation.

Here is another adventure from the (in)sanity
chronicles.

A conversation with Shuddha on his rooftop, in Old
Rajendra Nagar. We were trading school stories. I told
him of a debating competition from 1982 in my school
Karachi Grammar School, my first one as a spectator,
watching the seniors. A teacher (a judge in the
competition) stopped the speechmaking, she forbid a
senior from quoting Salman Rushdie. 

His name will not be taken here. 

Shuddha told me at that time Shame was serialized in
The Illustrated Weekly of India. I don’t know if you
can imagine what that revelation from Shuddha did
inside my head. What it is like to grow up under
martial rule, how it makes vacuous so much in print.
How unimaginable Dawn, of 1982, carrying Shame? That
night became brighter. 

Shuddha told me how in his school in old Delhi the
principal of his missionary school told the girls that
their skirts were too long. 

I told him of the principal of my school, also
missionary, who was compelled to defend
coeducation one morning in a speech before the student
body. Ours was the only school in the city that had
coeducation back then, give or take the American
school, more isolated with the General Zia inspired
hot winds of Islamization blowing around us. Our
principal was quoting an Englishman and former
principal from the 30s, who said men and women have to
live together, they might as well start early. 

Back and forth, the objects and their reflections.
Delhi and Karachi.

In Old Rajendra Nagar, Shuddha's neighborhood in
Delhi, a community of mostly 
Punjabi refugees, there is so much new, so many
additions, of terraces, of gates, of roofs, of floors,
added on. Shuddha told me about how for the roof, or a
wall or some construction they hired two carpenters,
they were Muslim. His neighbor, from right across the
street, whose family I can see now on their added on
floors, walked across that thin lane, which is exactly
as wide as two Ambassadors side by side, don’t hire
them. Shuddha's parents shooed them away. I heard that
story as about the flora and fauna of Old Rajendra
Nagar. The night becomes longer. 

Shuddha talks of attending Jamia Millia Islamia and I
ask him about muslboys in his class. He tells stories.
In one story, someone refers to someone as katwa.
Katwa: I didn’t recognize the term immediately. It was
missing in me. I had escaped it in Karachi,
completely. 

I can put that in one column of the ledger, opposing
put Shame in daily newspaper, short skirt encouraging
principal and so on.

----

Dear Rehan,

yeh tumhaara bina alvida kay jaane ka andaaz bhi mast
hai, mujhey musal boys ki tarha jasbati honay ka mauka
bhi nahin mila. Khair is baar nahin, to aur kabhi.
Main to tumhay airport le jaaney wala tha, but this is
delicious too, your disappearance was as sudden as
your appearance, ab urran chuu to ho, magar ghaib
hogay to bahut bura hoga. Ab to aana jaana jari rakhen
gay hum, ke nahin?

Anyway your plane is probably taking off as I write,
and after your thirty-five minutes you will make a
soft landing and see me in
your email mailbox when you get home.

If I look back on this year then the serendipitious
month you spent in my house was a major highlight. Who
hamaari der raat duniya bhar ki ool jalool batein, wo
Dilli sheher ke do nawabzadon ki tarha ghoomna phirna,
and the occasional dawat hosted by the occasional
haseena. And our wandering long drives into the long
night of Delhi.

Love, Shuddha


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