By Z.G.Muhammad
The pair of partridges was no less than Aladdin’s treasure and orderly Amir Khan, a genie who could get anything for me from Baramulla. Caring for the birds had become a whole-time job; I had gathered sufficient knowledge from Ama Pava, our Mohalla birdshop owner, about feeding them. Songbirds; a variety of them thrushes, wagtails, pipits, golden oriole, tits, doves and parakeet in different types of cages, dome and pyramid-shaped kept me glued to his shop. I wished to have them all and fill our home with their merry songs that Pava told me were their mystic incantations- he also said to me that he caught these birds in and around Dal and Nageen lakes and Badamwari. If these were found in Baramulla, he did not know.
Staring on the Deed (gate) on Saturday evenings and enthusiastically waiting for my father became a hobby. His very entrance brought warmth and glow to my face- for me, he for me was no more a weekly visitor. Equally, the wish list of gifts for presenting to the father also multiplied. In class four, my elder brother, on occasions, travelled with his father to Baramulla and stayed there till the weekend. He was grandmother’s, ‘dear darling’, so it was now a double wait for her son and grandson, and my expectations for gifts also had doubled- terracotta and wooden toys.
Nevertheless, Saturdays, and Sundays, when my father would be around, were not only days when our house was abuzz; it used to be a whole week affair. Our house was very strategically located; it was less than two hundred yards from the Jamia Masjid and near the bus stand and tonga adda, from where people would go to Hazratbal. On Fridays, some of our relatives and friends of my uncle Ghulam Nabi after offering pa’shin namaz ( Duhur) at Hazratbal and the Jamia Masjid on their way to their homes, dropped at our home for chitchat, a smoke from Hubble-bubble, a few cups of Nuna-chai from sizzling and hissing Samovar and Chochwor. Our house was a stopover for my uncle’s friends from places as far away as Ram Bagh and Solina working at the Government Silk Factory – famous for the 1924 worker revolt against corruption and the discriminatory wage system instituted by the Dogras. From their homes, they cycled to Hazratbal for Juma prayers. A few – overflowing with devoutness – travelled miles on foot to say Juma Namaz at the Jamia Masjid. One of the prayer goers to the Jamia Masjid was a hugely turbaned, older person from Nalbandpora with impaired hearing. His name remained stamped on my mind for quite some time; it has now evaporated. However, the suffix of his name ‘Haji Sahib’ persists. After matriculation, my uncle worked part-time in his shop for six months and maintained his accounts. The two, however, had developed a quasi father and son relationship, which survived many tides of the times. Haji Sahib was perhaps the biggest bicycle vendor in the city and a great devotee of the exiled Mirwaiz Yousf Sahib. Deep-down, his craving for the return of Mirwaiz to Kashmir made the older man paddle his way to the Jamia Masjid in hot summers and even when the roads would be frozen to the glass. Neither the Hubble bubble nor the discussion about Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad on the wooden platform interested him. His deafness would go, and adrenaline would run through his veins once the name of Mirwaiz Sahib was mentioned- it would also bring tears to his aged eyes. What intrigued my elder sibling and me was his antique cycle, fitted with a dynamo and carrier. He had purchased it from a junk shop in our Mohalla- famed for selling old goods of British Sahibs. I don’t remember having ever seen my father squatting on the wooden platform and chitchatting with the visitors, even after he had been transferred from Baramulla.
My father chose not to talk politics at home; he perhaps had no time for it. Or there was any other reason. On weekends at home, he had his schedule. His day in all seasons and weathers started much before the roosters’ call. One of his interests after saying his Fajar prayers in one of two Khanaqahs in our neighbourhood, one just hundred and fifty yards from our home and another on the Jhelum bank at ten minutes’ walk, was brooming the compound of the house and the lane connecting our house to the main street. Despite domestic workers, his sweeping activity was puzzling to the neighbours – it did not cause much concern to us, the children; perhaps we did not understand these social nuances and niceties.
Having made it to Baramulla, in his government accommodation- a hutment on the bank of river Jhelum, my father has had sleepless nights waiting for the first bus that would leave for Srinagar. There were stories on the family grapevine; on that fateful night that saw Srinagar plunged into darkness, he had reached from Mohra to Baramulla in the din of gunfire and rain of bullets. And when he was treading on his way to Baramulla, the Maharaja and his Rani had packed all their diamonds, gems, jewellery, brocades, and Persian carpets under gaslights. And in a caravan of motorcades and trucks, leaving the city without petrol they were chuckling on slushy Banihall cart road towards Jammu. I always was curious to know the whole story, but I was too young to have asked him.
I can’t tell if my father was not talking politics for fear of snoopers and eavesdroppers appointed by the Propaganda Department, headed by very tall and stout Stalinist from the West Punjab- more known to people for his British wife. I don’t have the faintest idea of seeing him glued to the radio after 8.30 PM when the main Urdu news bulletin was broadcast from Radio Pakistan, followed by BBC Urdu Service and All India Radio Urdu news. As we learned later, those were the days when radio sets could receive only selective radio waves. Listening to these night news bulletins had become an obsession and OCD for a big chunk of people- it had become a part of the downtown culture. The newsreaders with a golden voice like legendary Shakeel Ahmed – who people had heard from WW-II days, Anwar Behzad and Saeeda Bano kept them in thrall. Most of them were larger than life for all downtowners – they relished ‘sweetness of their tongue; as the Kashmir adage goes . An eerie silence like those in the deeps woods was in the radio room for those forty-five minutes. Some with their eyes shut, as if in deep meditation, listened to the news, commentaries and analysis. Zafar Pyami Ki Tabsara, a report on the contemporary political scenario that followed the All India Radio Urdu News at 9.15 PM, was like a desert after a sumptuous dinner to all those sitting in the greenish-white clay daubed room of our house. Everyone, my uncle Ghulam Nabi, his friend Ghulam Qadir Bangari, and a couple of other daily visitors to our home believed that he was a Muslim from Lucknow or Delhi who wrote these Tabsara.
None of them thought that he was Dewan Beriender Nath, Binder as he was called in the family of B.P.L. Bedi, a left-leaning Hindu. The family had adopted Binder as their child. His commentaries on Kashmir from All India Radio had endeared him to many a serious listener. But, none knew his antecedents- as a student at Allahabad University, he was at the forefront of the ‘student’s communist movement’. And after a crackdown on this movement, he took shelter in Kashmir, where his mentor B.P.L. Bedi and Freda ruled the roost. Here in Srinagar, he stayed with the Bedi and was counted as a family member. And he got admission to the Jammu and Kashmir University, where he made many friends- this enabled him to know the nuances and fragility of Kashmir politics.
From childhood, his name was etched on my mind also. As late as 1980, my boss asked me to conduct a senior journalist and commentator Dewan Beriender Nath to Chief Minister Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. But I was as ignorant about him as those sitting in the Radio Room of our home. I did not think in my wildest dreams that the guest sitting with me in the old Willie jeep was the famed news commentator Zafar Pyami. Despite knowing him as a member of the Bedi family, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was hesitant to enter into a free and frank conversation with him and asked me to sit in the room during the conversation. However, I found him a fine suave and soft-spoken gentleman with no airs about himself. I became friendly with him, and he asked me to write a weekly column for his news agency, the ‘Press Asia International’. For a couple of years, I continued to write for his feature agency. Many vernacular papers in Punjab and Delhi often picked up my wite ups and published them prominently.
Back to my father’s story, he visited the radio room in the evening whenever he found time. And exchange pleasantries with some neighbours who, almost at every dusk, turned up at our home for listening news from Radio Pakistan and some popular programmes of Radio Azad Kashmir. Nonetheless, he never joined the discussions over smoke from a hookah. I don’t remember seeing him occasionally enjoying a smoke from the hubble-bubble, but he had a taste for top brand cigarettes, Triple Five and Gold Flake- but he never smoked at home. Interestingly despite being a native- a proud native with roots connecting him to the earliest settlers in the valley, I have never seen him draped in traditional pherans. To keep himself warm at home, he had a choice for raw Pashmina blanket popularly known as Pahamba Chaddar or its more refined cousin Dussa- then perhaps it cost between Rs. 200 to 300. Compared to him, his younger brother greatly admired pherans; the two brothers did not differ in costumes alone but temperament.
It was big news in the family when he was posted in Srinagar; perhaps I was in class in three. From Government Middle School Daribal, I had been shifted to Islamia High School and put under the tutelage of an affectionate class teacher Nazim-u-Din.
to be continued……
Z.G.Muhammad is a noted writer and columnist
