BY Z.G.MUHAMMAD
I was politically baptized before I was admitted to the kindergarten. It is not being hyperbolic but a reality; a reality that you also might have lived. Yes, I was politically baptized before I had learnt make beautiful tiny paper boats and to floating them in the drain outside our home that after traveling some eight hundred meters discharged in the Mar Canal. Ours is a blood soaked history, I had started learning before, I had perfected the art of making tikavawij – small fan out of crape paper. The sense of insecurity shadowed children of my generation much before we had learnt making a kite and run the same on the lawns of the martyrs graveyard. The anguish and resistance in us started take roots, when mothers as toddlers cautioned us against “boots on the ground and prevented us from going near to parked olive green vehicles. Fears lurked in our mind; these trucks can run over us, trample us down and kill us.
I was barely four or five when, I saw my mother and aunt peeping through latticed windows of our house on the road street outside and bawling, howling and pounding their chests. Men in a frenzy, with black cloth bands tied to their forehead,were carrying a blood-soaked body of a young boy on a charpoy (an open bier) towards the martyrs graveyard. Emotionally surcharged, my mother cried, ‘he was the only son of the widow ceramist from Kraleyar, Rainawari, who often visited our house for selling earthenware. I did remember the Krayaj (ceramist lady) – she had once gifted me ceramic toy horse and a palanquin.
Glued to the wooden fretwork of the window, I watched this scene without understanding what had happened. Such mournful scenes were a regular feature for some days and repeated at regular intervals. I might have seen blood oozing bodies of over a dozen of youth being carried on open biers to the martyr’s graveyard. In a plaintive tone, my mother every time narrated the story behind soldiers piercing the chest of innocent youth with bullets or hitting young and old with iron-head batons bleeding them even to death. These villainy stories did set me thinking but I could hardly comprehend the reason behind man in olive green and khaki killing our youth.
It was a couple of years later after having seen the first martyr that I witnessed how soldiers shoot and kill our boys like ducks in wetlands. Son of our vegetable vendor Rehat Ded, witha huge vat of collared greens on his head, was fired upon by a group soldier from the Khawaja Bazar round about. The sudden booming of firearms brought all children in our house to first-floor windows of our house opening towards the street. The first bullet hit an iron telephone post with a bang cause Goosebumps to all children. Then the bullets started raining in all directions. Perhaps, it was the second bullet fired from close range that straight way hit him in his chest. And blood started flowing out of his chest like fountains in Mughal gardens. One of the scenes that still make my adrenaline going is the scene of killing of Hilal Darazi 15; a neighbour was by men in Khaki on India’s independence. Like many other Independence Day, our city had been placed under curfew. Hilal, who was hard of hearing, unmindful of the curfew ventured out of his home. The moment, he came out, he was Shot in the head.
These gruesome killings had handcuffed me to our gory history and made me realize that all was not hunky-dory in our land.The scenes of soldiers and police firing on people and bodies of young and old in pools of blood outside our home snatched my childhood innocence from me. Fairy tales, stories about kings, queens and wazirs, which I loved to hear from my grandmother no more excited me. Now, I loved listening elders talking about the rising against the despotic rulers, people humbling armed soldiers with stones, martyrs and leaders. The cadence of slogans of rebellion pleased my ears and poetic phrases used by leaders for articulating their cause attracted my attention. Out of many phrases that I often heard, the catchphrase “ Azadi; Tahreer-u-Taqeer (Freedom of expression) had got etched on my mind. Ghulam Mohammad Darzi, a politically agile tailor in our mohalla often mentioned this phrase and without understanding its implications, for I parroted this rhythmic phrase.
The slogan of Azadi; Tahreer-u-Taqeer had been a central theme to our movement in the thirties of the twentieth century. The tailor often lamented that leaders, who from rooftops pleaded for freedom of speech and right to hold public rallies, denied the same to the people after their installation as rulers of the State. In mid-fifties, I had become familiar with words like sleuths, informers and eavesdropping. There were restrictions on speaking freely about or against men in power had been drilled in our ears. The caged and exiled leaders, were bête noire for the government and adulatory words about them can land us in lock up. People in this stifling atmosphere looked for an opportunity for ‘political catharses. Sometimes, it was the folk singers who helped people to purge their pent-up anger.
Z.G.Muhammad is a noted writer and columnist
