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Saima Shah

My maternal grandmother was a staunch supporter of Gandhi and hated the narrow definitions of identity that Jinnah had forced on the Muslim nation.

I watched Khalid Mohammed's Fiza recenty. I felt a deep empathy with the protagonists of the movie and resonated with their sense of helplessness and rage. The brother and sister fought the system differently, she took up the pen and he took up the gun.

What did they really achieve? Perhaps their fight was akin to chipping away at a big thick brick wall with a nail file. Pathetic and laughable.

Is this the judgement that history will pass on those a little like Fiza and Amaan? Or will they be crowned as noble and their deeds epitomised in the halls of justice? Are there more out there? Or is it a painful few whose echoes fill the alleyways of webzines, cliquish cafes and eclectic newspaper columns?

I have never visited Bombay or Mumbai or even India. How can I? My passport says I am a citizen of Pakistan. Pakistanis have nothing to do with India. So even if I watch Fiza, enjoy the perfect Urdu, and am curious to see Mumbai (the place pictured in the movie), I am unable to visit India. The last time I tried for a visa, they said it would take four months because my details will go back to India for some processing. The sub-text was, "No, you Pakistani thug".

Hey, I want to say to all those minions processing passports in the Indian office, `... my grandparents lived in India. Their family lived there for generations. My Dad speaks Tamil, my grandmother lived near Connaught Place in Delhi, it was then called Keeling Road... do you know where that is? And my grandfather worked for the Indian Government'.

Today, my first cousins work for the Indian and Pakistani armies. They can even kill each other to feed their families. And I share family ties with all of them. What a curse it is for our future generations and us that today part of your work is to stop people like me from visiting their ancestral homes.

Why aren't the newspapers full of the human story, rather than the Hindu-Muslim divide and subtler versions of the same? Why do you smile at me speculatively? Why is my passport so interesting and I, somehow, not of any importance?

Out here in Canada, if you have a Canadian grandparent, they offer you permanent residency. I dare not suggest such a thing even in joke, because the entire brood of nationalists on both sides will be after me. But, I belong to the soil of the sub-continent, I am a writer and a culture junkie. Can you guys please go home to your evening meal of delicious aloo parathas and let me walk around the India I heard about as a child?

I BELONG, darn it. I belong by blood, by kinship, by friendship, by language, by love and neither you nor anyone else can make me hate my roots.

My parents had to leave India not because they were Muslim, but because they were `Muslim', if you know what I mean.

My grandparents and mother left India years ago during the partition. They decided to take that step because of fear, not because of the two-nation theory. My grandfather was still more idealistic about Pakistan, my grandmother would dismiss the two-nation theory as crap of the highest order. A Gandhi devotee, she wore khaddar and spouted poetry at the drop of a hat. Their reasons for the move were pretty basic. A bunch of thugs (wearing Sikh turbans) had started following my maternal grandfather and giving him threats. My mother and her parents (plus three siblings) eventually left Calcutta (Kolkata) and took shelter at my grandmother's father's house in Delhi.

My grandfather stopped going to work and one day, the family of six, including my mother, took the last plane to Pakistan. They arrived with just the clothes on their back. My great grandfather refused to leave his home in Delhi and somehow managed to survive the riots because of his Hindu friends and connections. After many years, he eventually moved to Pakistan, but too late to make a parallel claim against his huge property in Delhi.

My maternal grandmother never got over the loss of her home and culture in India. She was always bitter about it, seeking solace in poetry and memories of her home. She had to leave her home in sophisticated Delhi and live in Lahore and Karachi without her Sitar, her books, her old way of life. She was a staunch supporter of Gandhi and hated the narrow definitions of identity that Jinnah had forced on the Muslim nation. As a 10-year-old, I would listen silently when she dismissed whatever heroism my textbooks attributed to Jinnah.

And say, "The British left because they had to, what freedom did Pakistan bring to us? I wish they had stayed... at least we would have some standards of law and order. Jinnah just wanted Pakistan because of an ego trip. He left us to die in the carnage and calmly went to Pakistan first, so all the hoodlums could kill us in India. What leadership did he provide? An old and sick man in 1947, he just died to leave us in this mess."

And then, her rants over Zia-ul-Haq: "No music, no dance, no books, no culture; what is this Muslim Stat? Is this Islam? Ill-educated boors. Somehow they are the moral ones and we the immoral."

I can still see her nod and shake her head at the idiocy, all the while chewing pan and reciting poignant couplets of Ghalib. I led a very odd life for a 10-year-old!

Contrary to what people imagine, children are very smart. Hindus are bad, the world said and I made no comment. As a child, I just had one Hindu friend. Her name was Nilo. (And we lost touch because I left the school). My grandma said that her closest friends were Hindu. But at the same time, it was such a big deal to be Muslim — sort of right and proper. Yes, my grandparents were odd. They were cosmopolitan. They loved art and music and were modern and progressive in many ways, though they hung on to old ideas about women and identity. They loved the discipline and many values of the West, but believed that good girls should dress conservatively and behave demurely. Children, family and a moral life came first.

My grandmother always wore saris and never liked salwar kameez. She thought it wasn't graceful enough. She never wore purdah, but always wore make-up and perfume. After the first few years, both of my grandparents left Pakistan, and moved to England. They moved back to Pakistan to live with my mother, when they became very sick and old. It was in their old age that I got to know them, their history and political thought.

I can still hear my grandmother's voice in my head. She would always say, "I am Muslim, but I don't say my prayers. I used to for many years but I still believe in Allah. I know that Allah will forgive me." In her old age, when she had nowhere to go but to Karachi to live with my mother, she would tell me stories of Delhi, India and Gandhi's ashrams. She taught me Ghalib and Urdu and never stopped talking about the library left behind in Delhi. I have had a yearning through out my life to see that house, the library and hear her sitar.

She would laugh at Zia-ul-Haq, the mullahs and all the brouhaha about being Muslim. She would tell me endless stories of the Hindu friends she left behind in India. But being Muslim was special. It was special because it was. It was unthinkable to be anyone else. It was right to be us. That was our proud identity. But they, the crazy mullah's version, was all wrong. But unfortunately, there wasn't any way to set them straight. They wouldn't listen to reason anyway.

Pakistan was a surreal place in the 1980s with a huge disconnect. A big, parallel universe that was disconnected between what people really thought, and what they said. What people imagined and what they were courageous enough to write.

Salman Rushdie's book Shame caught a lot of it. Because girls couldn't play outside, ride bikes or wear dresses in Zia's time, and PTV aired two hopelessly silly half-hour programmes for kids, there was little choice but to read troublesome political fiction — which was incidentally banned, but available nonetheless.

In the final analysis, I think the partition has ultimately been better for India, because it got rid of quite a few of the know-it-all Muslims — who all hopped over to Pakistan to twist it into a pretzel.

The author, a Pakistani based in Canada, is the Managing Editor of www.chowk.com.

Illustration by Uma Krishnaswamy

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