Z.G.MUHAMMAD
Every mother had her peculiar grace, and every one of them embodied unexhausted gifts. I am talking about our mothers- that of my buddies and mine who had not been to the Christen Missionary School. Unlike some girls of the feudal aristocracy, they had not been tutored on etiquettes by the British governesses. Nonetheless, they had inherited a rich culture and social ethos over centuries from multiple influences from far and distant lands. Surpassing the tallest peaks, streams of diverse cultures from the continents beyond the majestic Himalayas flowed into our land and assumed their own identity. Our grandmothers and mothers had innate wisdom; they had inherited from the experiences of their ancestors that perhaps no schooling would have given them. As a poet says, “There’s wisdom in women, of more than they have known”- of course, some women are far wiser than their age.
The memories of my mother don’t come to me in isolation of the environs; the remembrances of a host of mothers of my friends and many other ladies of our Mohalla often mix up with these. Some of them were, in the words of Maya Angelou, “phenomenally phenomenal women-” they, for their wisdom, drew a lot of reverence from the women of the Mohalla. One of them was Mukhata, the wife of an elderly houseboat-making carpenter. To us children, the hugely turbaned carpenter in his late eighties or early nineties, towering as cedar with his snow-white beard and gleaming face, looked like a celestial being. With his son and a grandson, he left his home just a hundred yards from our house with their copper tiffin carriers in the wee morning hours for their workplace a mile away on the bank of a tributary of Dal Lake at Nawa-Pora, and they returned to home after the darkness had taken over. My buddies and I would see them leaving home only ‘during the morning-time school hours in summer when we had to be at school at seven in the morning.
Mukhata, his wife, was more a known face in the Mohalla than the husband. Her fair-complexioned face with deep wrinkles as good as troughs caused in the tranquil waters of the Dal Lake by fast-blowing winds spoke of her ‘spiritual richness’, profound understanding of life and treasure of experience that she possessed. The grand old lady was most sought after for words of wisdom in the Mohalla by women, particularly young and recently married women.
Those were the days when the administration from its food and supplies depots rationed not rice but paddy in the city, and there was a ban on importing paddy and rice from the villages into the city. Some people avoiding the checkpoints under cover of darkness smuggled sacks of paddy and rice on horseback. They were locked up and tried, as well as narcotic smugglers if caught. Before the paddy was sent to the rice husking mill, it would be spread on the grass mats for drying under the sun in a small ground at the back of our house. Mukhata would gladly engage herself in warding off the birds from feasting on the paddy, pulling the thin ropes tied on the other side of the mats. She was so gracious; it did not matter to her whose paddy she kept birds away or, whose chillies were being dried or whose had spread the tomato slices, chopped brinjals and gourds to sun drying for tiding over shortage of vegetables during harsh winters- then vegetables were not imported from outside during winters.
Many other older women, like Mukhta, could be comfortably called tender-hearted mothers, but she was more experienced and wiser than many of her contemporaries. Once, talking about her God-given wisdom and tremendous experience, My mother told me that from the gait of a young woman, she could judge if she carried a male or female baby in her womb- once the woman delivered a baby, Mukhta was never proved wrong. If she had a spark of spiritualism in her that made her make such a statement, I don’t know. Then, ultrasound and other such scientific gadgets had not been invented, and women visited Dervishes or soothsayers for such news. Many newly married women tied wish-threads at one or other Astana. Many young pregnant women curious to know if they would have a male or female baby were duped by Syed-Makars. It was a clan of mendicants pretending to be members of one or another “holy family”. They were fluent in whipping up the sentiments of gullible young women and cheating them of their valuables. In our Mohalla, that may be true about other parts of the city; these mendicants mostly visited at noon-time, when men would be at their workplace- the intent behind noon-time visits was to fool the innocent young women. Hot summer or chilling winter, they would be primarily draped in long black or dark grey Pherans touching their ankles, with a sheet of clothing or small blanket hanging from their shoulder. With their long-flowing beards, they looked like priests of Greek temples. Many of them used to be turbaned and carried a mace. Some were from the city’s outskirts, and some descended to the town from nearby villages. One or two from some villages in Pulwama often visited our home; my mother could not be tricked by their distinct phraseology: Yahoo Kotur Cheh Vadaw Karan, etc. She knew they were fakes.
Nonetheless, she looked at them as panhandlers who deserved some alms and invariably fed them and gave them some money. When my uncle was at home, he would ask these mendicants to sing songs of one or other Sufi poets; one of them, Abdul Rehman, had a melodious voice and remembered a lot of Sufi-Kalam, and Wahab Khar was his favourite poet. If this class of “Syed Makars” was the deprived section of immigrants from the Central Asian state, no one in our family or our neighbourhood was bothered. And none contested their genealogy or decent, which they wore on their sleeves. All said about them during our childhood; they were a prominent influence on innocently gullible women- who trusted their vague prognostications as a gospel truth. And if by coincidence, guess proved, in the eyes of these simple women, they attained sainthood. One such woman was pretty middle-aged Wah-Wah Ded; someone from her friends with a very bright imagination had nicknamed her so, and none in the Mohalla remembered her real name. Compared to other women in her class, she wore garish and flashy clothes with frills and fancies. She was among few women who looked at a “Syed-Makar” as a godly man as his “prediction” about his daughter-in-law giving birth to a son had proved true. She was famed for remaining engaged in long conversations with trinket and bangle sellers and Rashmi Kapra Walia (hawkers of cloth from Punjab) – two other prominent characters who would be distinct in our childhood in our Mohalla. Their clientele was also only women…. (to be continued)
Z.G.Muhammad is a noted writer and columnist
