Delhi Ghosts
Delhi is a thundering city relentless in its inexorable march to becoming a Mega-metropolis swallowing up whatever it needs along the way. New Delhi – World City proclaim the billboards beside the dust, rubble and traffic jams of the Metro in construction
It is strange and overwhelming and so very different. But like everything in India the past lives on alongside the new. Paradoxically even Curzon’s Imperial vision for India continues as now a confident and rather ‘Imperial’ Independent India sees itself as its inheritor. But then again, so too somewhere Gandhi’s vision must also persist .. somewhere…
But the thundering city has been thundering in my head too making me positively blog-blocked. I have been overwhelmed by ghosts of my parents’ past betraytals, stolen dreams, appropriated possessions and manifold injustices they were subjected to as they struggled to reclaim their ‘perfect universe’ from which they were so cruelly torn. And I found myself wracked with the ‘pain of too much tenderness’, - wishing, I could have protected them better, loved them more, and wondering what, but what can I do now? What, but what is my legacy? What, but what do I do with the Ghouls and Ghosts that are invading my mind? There are things that I know I wish I could forget and let go and there are things I don’t know and wish I did know and at the same time there is also so much to do, so much to sort, so much to clear and clarify and I am all alone and if Alone really is all-one, then what, where and how will that come? That All-One?
Having lost Lahore, Delhi became the city to which we were to make our return and put together the fragments of the perfect universe. It is also the city from where I left India for Paris, aged five, carrying a big tin of ghee, the family having heard there was rationing in Europe and certainly there would be no ghee! I remember that tin, with the metal handle, picking it up and putting it down on the tarmac and being so, so, happy. I was about to reclaim my perfect universe - to be with my parents once again after a miserable spell at boarding school. I can remember smiling so wide that I could that I could see my chubby cheeks. Independent India was less than one year old, and we were refugees.
‘Do you think, if your father known that by taking that six month job with Unesco he wouldn’t return to India, that he would have taken it?’ Gitaben, and old family friend had said to me that previous summer. It was a rhetorical question. ‘I don’t think he would.’ She continued, ‘ Your parents were both very rooted in India. None of us imagined they wouldn’t be able to come back.’ A few days later I asked my Calcutta cousin , also in London at the time and who had come over to see my mother if she remembered my parents in Lahore. ‘ Oh yes!’ she replied, ‘ very well. Your parents my darling, were stars.And they were both so beautiful. Beautiful Stars.’
Nizammuddin.
I am staying in Nizammudin, where a friend has lent me his beautiful flat. It feels a bit like the old India of my childhood, slow paced, gracious with the cries the hawkers in the air and as the cars don’t blow their horns, one can imagine there aren’t many around. But once out of the gated colony one is in the roar of the storm.
Nizammudin, named after the great Sufi saint of the 14th century, is also the place where our family could and should have returned, as we, like other refugees from the Partition, were given plots of land there and I remember my mother lying on the bed of our small flat Paris and designing the house she would build to replace the one she had lost. ‘You know I was the first person in my family to build a house’ she would tell me proudly as she described the layout of the new one:- the drawing room, my fathers study and the places she would put all her precious things, her Reorich painting, her Chinese bureau and her golden Buddha, a more recent acquisition from the Paris flea market. I am sad it didn’t get built that the land in Nizammudin got sold, wondering why? Probably she was badly advised or wanting to be closer to her family.
‘The family’ were a central component of my mother’s perfect universe and she loved them all unconditionally. In a condolence letter a family friend had written: ‘Blood ties were important to her and cost her a heavy price.’ And indeed they did. A very heavy price.
Haus Khas
‘Haus Khas?’ asks the Taxi driver. I nod in reply.
In the Delhi of my childhood, Haus Khas was a picnic ground, today it is densly populated. In the early 50’s my mother located a large tract of land coming up for sale in developing Delhi, gave the contact details to her closest family whom she loved dearly, suggested they buy some plots and let her know and buy one for her too. They did let her know and she sent her money which they used it to buy more land for themselves and just cut her out. To this day I remember her distress and shock.
And I remember my own sense of utter bewilderment - these were supposed to be people we loved and who loved us and this appeared a most unloving thing to do.
I always felt that knot of unkindness, greed, injustice even contempt contaminated our return to the perfect universe. A rotten seed was sown then and it sort of continued to grow.
By the time we came back to India on ‘home leave’, they had quietly returned her money to her bank. She appealed to an uncle to arbitrate but said he could do nothing that she must either go to court or forget. She could do neither and the saga scared my youth. And even later as in 1993, my mother went on a hunger strike outside their gate. Although I was far away, it embarrassed me. So now as I pass that property with its proud houses, I find I am still smarting as though it had all happened just yesterday and wishing I could forget. My mother brought other plots of land, built houses, purchased farmland, all of which somehow – got lost, appropriated, sold. All that is left is a second floor flat in Haus Khas which for the last ten years, due to a broken femur, she was unable to use and I was on my way to collect someone for moral support when I opened it.
The door scraped over the carpet of dust. The main room was empty except for a small steel cupboard. One bedroom was invaded by pigeons and was full of carcasses, feathers and faeces. In the other bedroom were some locked trunks, wooden carvings and other artefacts. I didn’t feel able to look further and we locked up the flat and left it. A few days later, after it had been somewhat cleared, I returned with the person who’d organised the clearing. I opened the cupboard briefly to see if there were any useful documents. I pulled out a bag of papers and a couple of books and a statue of a dancing Shiva. Again I closed the flat and left. There was no furniture, nowhere to sit, it was still dusty and though the pigeons had gone, the smell remained, like the old ghosts.
On the way home, I looked at the book, ‘A Nisargattata Maharaj Reader, ‘The Painted Door’ For Private circulation only.’ It opened itself on page 33 and I read
‘ Live your life without hurting anybody. Harmlessness is the most powerful form of Yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal. This is what I call nisarga yoga, a natural yoga. It is the art of living in peace and harmony, in friendliness and love. The fruit of it is happiness, uncaused and endless.’
And the thoughts that came to my head were ‘But if people have hurt you, then what do you do. Do I see the people who hurt my parents, when the hurt is still there in me?’ I didnt like these thoughts but they hung around like the pigeon smell …and the ghouls of Delhi.
And what might my parents say to me? My mother might say ‘ Its best to try and love people whatever they are,’ and my father might say ‘Never try to be nobler than you are’. Well, I will listen to you both.
The ghosts of Nizammudin and Haus Khas continued to haunt me and in my forays into my mothers flat, I would invariably find something to trigger uncomfortable feelings: a distraught letter from my mother to her aunt expressing her sense of betrayal that her aunt had allowed her precious Reorich painting entrusted to her for safekeeping to be appropriated by her cousin. A book of my fathers: ‘Broken ties and other stories’ by Tagore - I had picked this up from the floor in what had been my parents house in Model Town, Lahore. The new owner had cut out my fathers name and scrawled his own Ejaz Batalvi. In fact he had done this to my fathers whole library. ‘Cutting Out’ is what they all seemed to have tried to do to my parents and I wondered why and how this had come about. Maybe I needed to find out. And could I? And should I?
Was this my legacy – to bring some sort of closure? What closure? For whom? For them? For me?
