By Z.G.Muhammad
For catharsis, I love telling stories about my birth burg. I have not learned these stories from smutty and soiled; old leather bound Persian books. I have heard them on shop fronts, lived them and memorized them as the poet says, “How it was born and who we have been and where”. Nevertheless, the junk shops in our mohalla were no less than museums. Everything old, from ornate wooden furniture of British and Brown Sahibs to porcelain pottery to classical poetry books remained heaped together in their dingy garage type shops like dead soldiers in battlegrounds.
One of the biggest junk shops of old bottles and canisters called Mandi was a brazen expression of our callosity towards history. On the backside of Khanqah-i-Naqshbandi, sheds of this mandi spread over few kanals of land had been raised on a historic patch of land. Many years back Sultan Hussain Shah (1563-1572) had set up an Islamic academy for teaching the Quran and Islamic jurisprudence and laid down a beautiful garden at the place.
The spoiled classical books in junk shop caught my imagination. These once might have precious possession of the nobles and the litterateurs of the world, known in history as Sikandar Pora-the capital of great lover of literature and scholarship Sultan Sikandar. Some of them had been written by best of our calligraphers on koshur-Kagaz; an indigenous paper in South Asia and Central Asia for hundreds of years. During our childhood , some top calligraphers lived in and around Nowhatta. The torn yellowish pages sticking out of hardbound books were telling a big story about death of rich literary traditions culture. For this culture, it had taken six hundred years to strike its roots and given us a distinct identity to our land. That had opened portals of the royal courts in Europe, Arabia, Persia and the Central Asia for our souvenirs. Made poets like Thomas Moore to sing songs for us.
I stood in front of these junk shops and looked at every item with a curator’s eye to the annoyance of their owner. The broken bicycles and toys used by children of colonial sahibs did arouse in me a great curiosity. I often thought of buying the old bicycle, getting it repaired and racing with Tongas driven by best horses from Peshawar. One day, I asked the junk shop owner Bamboo if the bicycle mechanic of our mohalla, could repair these old bicycles. For having worked as a mechanic during second world war perhaps on Burma border, he was counted as best of all mechanics in the locality. My curiosity dampened when junk shop owner told me that these were English bicycles, your khar cannot repair them. My schoolmates and I would also get attracted towards the old swings in the junk-shop. In those days of economic deprivation, we did not dream of having one in our Courtyard. The junk shop with all old toys, sports goods, see-saws, and swings left by the British children showcased for us life lived by children of the elite.
The soiled books in the Junk shops owned by Bamboo brother-also a family of folk singer and musicians often set me thinking these books were the treasure house wherefrom my unlettered grandmother learnt about life inside the castles of Sikandar Pora.Chronicles do say that Nowhatta, with its thousands of years history, was chosen as capital by Sultan Sikandar, the great of Mulk-i-Kashmir , and had named it as Sikandar
Pora.When Mir Mohammad Hamdani, illustrious son of Kashmirs great benefactor Syed Ali Hamadani had arrived in the Capital of the King, it wore a festive look and agog with jubilations. The King accorded a reception to him at his palace. After that, one after another, Khanqah was constructed in the capital city. In one Khanqah, for twenty years one of the greatest saints of our land had meditated this capital had been the centre of Islamic studies,art and literature up to 1819. My grandmother also narrated such stories. She perhaps had learnt these through oral tradition through traditional bards and storytellers, who like minstrels visited from house to house for making an earning.
Z.G.Muhammad is a noted writer and columnist
