Our Elsewheres: 'Just Being', The Past Shaping The Present And The Future

In 1937, we moved to Peshawar. It was a typical house in the cantonment, single-storied and set in an open space, some of which was garden and some just unkempt. Such a change from living in the confined area of Thal Fort. Cantonment houses had a particular style. One entered from the front veranda into a central corridor. There was a sitting and dining room on each side of the corridor with a bedroom alongside, and verandas on the outer side. Each bedroom had an attached toilet and bathing arrangement, with one door opening to the outside. This was for the sweeper—as he/she was then called—to come and go and clean the toilet. There were of course no flush toilets in those early days. The fourth side at the back had a small semi-detached annexe that housed the kitchen, the pantry and the store room. Charcoal and coal fires used for cooking were kept a little away from the main house. The store room was where everything—from coal to cooking oil, to atta and dals—was kept, to be measured out daily and given to the cook. The woman of the house learnt to be meticulous about quantities and careful about kitchen accounts. I recently discovered one of my mother’s kitchen-account books from this period, and was amazed to read the price of items of daily consumption—fairly substantial amounts of atta, dal, rice, etc., being less than a rupee for a seer (1.25 kilograms), with some prices counted in annas, sixteen of which made up a rupee. Really expensive items came in sums of eight annas. A handsome salary for a servant was about Rs 30 per month. 

Beyond this little kitchen annexe, and at a small distance across an unkempt space, was a row of barrack-like quarters where the servants lived. Calling a servant sometimes involved a loud yell, or a small walk in the direction of the ‘quarters’. The unkempt space in between was where the snakes wandered and occasionally found their way onto the back veranda. What remains strongly impressed in my memory is the sense of space and of openness. 

Curiously, I don’t remember much about Miss Birch’s school. But among my strong memories from those two years are of my friends outside school, and of a couple of my father’s friends. Our house had a common boundary wall with the larger house next door which was set in a lovely garden of old trees. It was the house of the political agent appointed by the British administration to keep an eye on whatever was going on. The family that lived next door was of the political agent Iskandar Ali Mirza, later president of Pakistan. Our two families became fast friends, and the Mirza children and I were always in and out of each other’s houses. 

My father and Sikandar—the form of the name commonly used—had a teasing relationship, punctuated by endless jokes. Among the six Mirza children, the one from whom I was inseparable was Zeenath, a year older than I. Much time was spent in inventing games and acting out stories we loved. In those days, children had to invent their own entertainment, thoughtfully and creatively—it did not come to us at the click of a mouse. Invention made us curious about the world that surrounded us possibly to a greater degree than most of today’s children. 

Our world of imagination drew from an extensive repertoire of the stories that we were reading and being told—a variety of fairy tales, mythological stories, epic stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and suchlike. We also enacted what we read in school, such as Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, The Secret Garden, Alice in Wonderland, and these kept us enthralled. Additionally, the simple poems about Christopher Robin in the A. A. Milne books were fun. 

But the one story that I heard repeatedly—easily my hottest favourite—was Gul-e-Bakavali, about the adventures of a young prince that held me in continuous anticipatedsuspense. The story was to surface in my life again, many decades later, in the 1960s. Historian Simon Digby was a master storyteller and often drew from medieval Indian literature. We would sometimes visit the Urdu bazaar near Jama Masjid and then settle down to lunch in a neighbouring dhaba. On one occasion, I mentioned Gul-e-Bakavali and Simon had me spellbound with his interpretations of the story, with all its contextual embellishments from Persian and Urdu literature. 

Our time in Peshawar was the period just before Sikandar Mirza became a supporter of the idea of Pakistan. My father recalled later that in the course of an argument, Sikandar did once say that those who are not Muslims cannot visualize the threat to the minorities when the British leave. This was ironically a turn-around statement. The British had maintained in the nineteenth century that the Hindus were victimized under Muslim rule, and it was British rule that kept them safe! A few years later, when the two friends met in Delhi, Sikandar affirmed that he supported Partition. They argued endlessly, with my father trying to convince him that he was making a mistake. But Sikandar was adamant. They really had been close friends, and my father regretted the change in Sikandar’s thinking. 

Yet the memory of the friendship remained, with an underlying affection. I met Sikandar again after many, many years, when he was in exile, living in London with his second wife. I had been at a conference at UNESCO in Paris and one of the interpreters, hearing about my childhood in Peshawar, asked if I had known Sikander Mirza—he was now her neighbour in London! When he heard that she had met me, he insisted that I visit him on my return to England. I arrived at their home, and was greeted with much affection. We spent the evening reminiscing, despite his occasional lapse of memory—being the age he was. I asked myself whether I had really detected in his voice a soft undertone of regret at all that had happened, or was it just a stray thought wandering through my mind? It did make me wonder about the aftermath of the decisions we take. 

My father’s other close friend was strikingly different both in person and in political views. He was Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, commonly called Badshah Khan, and his brother, Dr Khan-sahib. The latter and my father had shared a cabin on a troopship while returning home at the end of First World War. Badshah Khan would drop in for tea occasionally and sit me down beside him and chat about school. I loved his visits—in part because he fussed over me, but also because he seemed to me to be bigger, in every sense of the word, than other people. He gifted us one of the Congress flags from the historic 1931 session; it is now with my grandnephew, Jaisal. 

I have never been able to explain the bond between my father and Badshah Khan, especially as it was well known that Sikandar Mirza was also our family friend. They obviously had a person-to-person tie. My father was regarded as a helpful doctor when the Pathans were in conflict with the British regiments. He in turn always spoke of Badshah Khan as a genuine nationalist for whom he had utmost respect. Maybe we have lost the quality of friendship in becoming too particular about whom we choose to have as friends, and in a sense eroding what is, after all, the essence of friendship—camaraderie of various kinds and a fundamental trust in the other. In the way these things turn out, years later, in the Delhi of the 1960s, my parents got to know Dr Khan-sahib’s daughter Miriam; my father treated her for asthma. Still later, in the 1990s, I discovered by chance that the tenant who rented the front part of my house happened to be Miriam’s son; he kept a photograph of his grandfather in the sitting room. 

Excerpted with permission from the Seagull Books.