Extract from unfinished novel:
Nawaz along with his mother, father, three brothers and two
sisters, climbed aboard the third class compartment of Karachi Express .The
bogie was crowded and Nawaz and family found space between the door and the
stinking lavatory .They plunked their crude battered tin case along with two
bundles of bed sheets and quilts on top of their meager luggage.
The train left Lahore in the evening, yet Lahore was sizzling
hot and the crowded car made it a very uncomfortable journey .Morning found the
train entering Sindh, but this was even worse, as the temperature was a shade
higher than at Lahore .Coping with the dripping sweat was an unbearable
activity .The train-stop at railway stations did allow Nawaz and his brothers
to stretch their legs but the two girls were not even allowed this brief
respite from the stifling conditions.
The food at the station was stale, unappetizing and quite
expensive .Nawaz and his family carried about 40 chapattis and some sagh and
dal ,which they had for meals .A baked earthen pitcher filled with water was
their lifeline .This they had to refill at every station .The crowded car was
made even more crowded by the throngs of retailers selling biscuits,
stale boiled eggs ,tea in small glasses strung
on wire holders ,over ripe bananas ,health medicines
meant to give special sexual powers ,special oil to grow hair on bald people ,
lottas and multitudes of such small items . These gentlemen screamed on the top
of their voices and added to the infernal din .Beggars further added to the
confusion, all kinds and sex and type of beggars competed with each other and
with the retailing boys .Their bogie was too crowded for any sleep to be
possible, the heat and the noise made it pretty much impossible.
The train shrieked past the yellowish brown farm lands, spewing
clouds of black smoke, the environmentalists had not got their act together as
yet .The farmland mosaic had just turned brown, the wheat crop was ripening and
was close to being reaped .The farmland mosaic changed every few months from
yellowish brown of the summer to the lush green of the autumn to the bright
yellow of the winter .Nature along with human endeavor kept changing this
mosaic as if with a huge paint brush, the color scheme was never the
same and each year brought different shades of brown, yellow and green .This
seemingly cyclic change resulted in a different color mosaic every year.
The farmland was stretched across the irrigated part of the
Punjab and Sindh plains. These had been formed out of gigantic cataclysms .The
Indian plate, which was set adrift from the mother continent, after drifting
for centuries across the ocean, struck with a immense impact the Asian plate
.Like two male rams head butting to decide who is to be the owner of the harem.
Only in this case it seems to have been inconclusive as after irregular
intervals the plates seem to lock horns and create frightening shivers and
quakes that destroyed many a community. In reality the collision and impact is
still going on, the initial impact was dramatic but some 50 million after the
fact it had not completely subsided.
The impact sandwiched smaller islands and impounded the sea in
between the two plates .The impact resulted in a rapid uplift of the land .The
high and imposing mountain that seem so stable and static are in fact very
alive and dynamic .These generate ,from time to time, great destructive forces
that shake the land and destroy communities like flies .Less dramatically ,but
more importantly ,the mountains generate large amount of water that nourish the
great plains that the mountains created in the first place and also the
sediment which kept on depositing to extend the shore line further south-wards
.
The sea that was trapped in between was squeezed out in a mad
rush akin to a gigantic river swollen in a great deluge ,the water flowed to
the Indian Ocean .Some of the water that was trapped was to assist
farmers many centuries later and some was trapped to form huge salt deposits
that exist to this day .The water etched a deep ravine through which the river
flowed .Over time ,when the great flood subsided , the river seemed to flow
very deep down and from the bank on top looked to be a trickle .This was misleading
as the great mountains shed large amounts of water all over the year and the
river flow is always significant .
The water carried tones of sediment that got deposited after the
water slowed down when it descended from the piedmont to form the Punjab and
Sindh plains .Gradually and slowly, over countless centuries this plain
gradually developed and slowly encroached upon the sea .Each year the shore
line drifted further South, a process that is going on to this day, 50 millions
years after the occurrence of the great impact.
The uplift also created a bifurcation in the huge river and
instead of one great mass of water flowing east- west and then south wards many
rivers started to flow .Some of these changed and reversed direction, due to
the continued uplift, to drain into the Bay of Bengal .The uplift created a
rift in the lands that were to be known to as Punjab and Sindh or the Indus
Valley and between what came to be known as India.
This rift it seems was sanctioned by nature itself, as centuries
later, after the formation of the plains, human populations also generally
adhered to this rift, rarely did people of these two land unify .Strangely
enough unification when it did take place happened under the influence of
people who were alien to these lands and the union was political and not social
or religious. The last of these outsiders were the British who were Christians
and before them the Mogul, Pathan and Turkish tribes who were nominally Muslim.
Nawaz had bitter memories of the more recent reversion to the
natural status quo between these two lands, Nawaz's father had in fact very
painful memories of this division of lands .He had lost a younger sister, who
was kidnapped and never returned and the entire family of eight of his brother
was brutally massacred .The hatred of Sikhs and Hindus was therefore etched in
his mind.
The forced travel to the new land was, to Nawaz’s parents, as
violent and cataclysmic as the banging of the Indian and Asian plates century’s
earlier .It was not without incident. The train ride to Lahore was harrowing
,he and his wife survived because they played dead and the karpan yielding Sikh
youth left them for dead .They emerged from their crowded boogie at Lahore
station ,except for them not a single person was left alive .Both of
Nawaz’s parents were drenched in the blood of the now dead fellow travelers
.Nawaz his brothers and sisters, who had migrated to Sahiwal well before this
great divide ,came to receive his parents .Both parents were unable to narrate
the ordeal they had undergone to Nawaz or to the inquiring Army Captain .Both
of them took many weeks before they could speak and then also they were
still unable to describe the horror they had undergone .Both of them
frequently awoke, drenched in sweat ,in the middle of the night having
reenacted the horror in their nightmare.
Nawaz, in all this confusion and clamor was happy .He had
persuaded his father to sell his quarter acre land in Sahiwal that was
allocated to them and from the proceeds he managed to buy 40 acres of land, on
the edge of the dessert .This land he had bought from Arshad Ahmed Khan who had
been allocated this land in lieu for lands that Arshad’s family had claimed to
have lost near Delhi .Arshad in fact came from an urban environment and had no love
or feel for the land ,the harsh conditions persuaded him to sell his bequest at
some what lower than normal rates .The one visit to the land was enough to
convince him that this definitely was not his cup of tea. Nawaz was oblivious
to all the heat and noise , he was deep in thought about his plans to develop
this land.
The train reached Nawabshah station seven hours late .Nawaz and
his family got down and searched for the local train which would take them to
Bandhi .From where they could walk to their land, but the train had left and
Nawaz and his family had to spend the night on the platform.
They had by now eaten all the food they had brought .Nawaz was
reluctant to buy any food from the platform .He had just enough money to buy
the pair of bullocks he had sold at Sahiwal and for his seeds for the first
crops .A little was left over for the train ride to Bandhi .They had purchased
20 chapattis and a few onions, these were crushed to provide the meal which
unsurprisingly was very delicious as they were very hungry.
Although Nawaz seemed oblivious of his surroundings his brothers
and sisters were not .Nawabshah station platform at night became very pleasant
.Cool sea breeze from 300 km away made the night very enjoyable .Clear sky and
the cool breeze helped the family to partly forget the miserable train journey
.They spent a rather comfortable night in the platform .Morning sun, however,
completely changed all this .The pleasant, cool evening and night turned into a
blazing, hot morning.
They finally found their local train which was in no hurry to
leave .It finally did leave about four hours later than it should have.
Leisurely the train passed through lush green land, which was browner than
green this time of the year, on both sides of the car they were traveling .This
was a third class compartment and it was smaller than the one they had traveled
on Karachi Express, but this one was even more crowded and was dirtier.
Hungry , thirsty and sweating to their toes they reached Bandhi
.A small sleepy town ,which was the market place for farmers to bring their
produce to sell to the middlemen ,from whom they had already taken cash loans
for seeds ,fertilizer and their other needs .The town had a small post office
and a police station .
The dusty main street had small shops on both sides .The
middlemen also had their somewhat larger offices along the road, most had
godowns, that were larger, but away form the main street .The shops had very
high roofs and a wooden plank was strung across the roof .Hanging from the
plank was a tough piece of cloth made taut by stretching across a thick rope.
.A man sat half dozing, he would pull the string attached to the plank, when
ever he awoke from his rather fitful slumber and this generated a whisper of a
breeze.
These shops and other houses behind it were surprisingly cool,
these were mostly building constructed by the by the Hindus who had left for
India after partition These building were cool in spite of the stifling heat
and the blazing sun .The roof was very high, the walls were made of mud bricks
plastered with shredded jute bags kneaded in the limestone and sand mixture
.The roof was thick and made similar to the walls,
The post office was made in modern style, with baked bricks,
cement mortar plaster and this rendered it as hot as an oven .It was simply
impossible to enter this building from late morning to early evening, which was
why the postman sat outside on his depilated cot, under a small tree, puffing
on his hookah.
Khadim was one of the partners in a middleman business, his
partner Ibrahim had inherited the business from the Hindu baniya Randho Mal,
who tried to keep his business running much after partition, but old age and
migration of family and relatives forced him to sell his business. Ibrahim who
also belonged to Sahiwal purchased all of Randho Mal’s business, his house and
his position in the local economy .This meant that Ibrahim was also the
unofficial banker .He like Randho, advanced money against collateral, which
usually was jewelry and less frequently title documents to the land. Ibrahim
had also purchased the main store of the town from Rando, this store carried
cloth and food stuff that was obtained from Karachi and sold at a
handsome profit to the farmers.
Ibrahim was as shrewd as Rahdo and did fit in Ranho’s
shoes rather well. There was ,however , one area where Ibrahim and his partner
failed and that was to become a part of the power structure .Randho and his
like had evolved a method by which they ensured protection and a free license
to exhort money from hapless farmers .Randho would advance money at rather high
rates and this was secured credit as it was covered by either Jewelry ,of about
three times the value of the loan or land documents which were also valued many
times the amount of the loan .It was his greed that finally did his kind in
.They had ,over time ,obtained claims to ownership a large percentage of the
land in the district and the Province .Unfortunately for Randho ,and his kind
,most of the large landowners, protectors of Randho and co, found the partition
a very convenient excuse to get out of the loan obligations of the Hindu Baniya
.Ibrahim did avoid this pitfall and lent money to smaller landowners at
somewhat less than exorbitant rates .
The system that Randho and his community had perfected was that
one of the their daughter was always married to the Baluch Wadera ,who was the
virtual king in the area .His authority was only superseded by the Pirs who had
an arrangement by which they controlled most of Sindh .The Pir and Wadera thus
controlled the whole of Sindh ,both professed to be outsiders ,one Syed and the
other Baluch .Ibrahim and his kind lacked the instinctive knowledge of how to
integrate within the local power structure .Very hard working , frugal and
shrewd Ibrahim was more than equal replacement to Randho but Ibrahim was not
prepared to have family ties with the Wadera and the Pir .This was an odd
reluctance .The Hindu Binaya was willing to have his daughter wed
the wadera but the Muslim Ibrahim and his kind were not .It was this failure
that was to nullify all his toil and acumen for in the end the Pir and wadera
managed to exhort money in one form or other and his life time of struggle was
severely devalued.
The Hindu Binaya had integrated into the social fabric but his
replacement, co-religionist of the local population, failed to do so and
thereby created a fissure in the social set up .The Sindh rural set up was
perhaps brutal and repressive but for all that there was cohesion and the society
was closely knit in intricate relationships, all of this was fractured by the
arrival of Ibrahim and Nawaz and Arshad and their kind.
Nawaz and his family got out of the station and with their
meager luggage on their head started their trudge to their land .They passed
the main street, which was rather quite in the hot late afternoon.
Walking out of the town they were greeted with the same
yellowish brown hue that the land had leaving Lahore only here it was more
brown that yellow as the wheat crop had ripened and was in the process of being
reaped ,being located South and nearer to the equator the crops ripened earlier
in Sindh than in Punjab . Walking a few mile out of the town they found the
landscape turning to a semi desert, it was not as brown and was much less
cultivated, at about the end of this semi arid landscape Nawaz finally reached
his land .For this he and his father had traveled many miles, had undergone
numerous mishaps but finally he was at the land of his dream.
For all of Nawaz’s excitement the land that they had reached was
a sorry looking piece .It was a far cry from the lush green village in Indian
Punjab that they had belonged to .That village, in East Punjab, was situated at
the bottom of the hilly-mountainous area, small streams and ponds dotted the
country side and for most of the year it was very green and comfortable. Even
the village in Sahiwal was greener and the land more hospitable than this
desolate desert that was Nawaz’s farm .It was not leveled and was dotted by
sand dunes and small desert shrub .Yet he was happy and seemed to have achieved
the dream that generations of his family had pined for .He considered himself
extremely lucky .His new farm land was in reality a part of the desert, only
Nawaz was fortunate as the irrigation canal did reach his land and this ensured
that every fourteen days or so he would get enough water to irrigate less than
half his land. The water was available only because the provincial government,
in order to establish rights, used the British built canal feeding the area at
significantly higher discharge than the design discharge
They reached the centre of their land and chose a spot where
they would build their rather modest house .There was not even a tree which
could provide shelter and Nawaz and his brothers went out to collect twigs and
some stout sticks to rig a makeshift shelter .By now it had cooled down and the
blazing hot sun was turning various hues of orange ,the same sea breeze that
greeted them at Nawabshah started blowing, the desert started to cool down and
some of the misery of the journey began to wear away .
The temporary shelter only solved one problem but the more
important one of feeding the family was still to be resolved .They still had a
few chappaties with them, these were barely edible as the great heat they had
traveled through made these almost stale, but their greater problem was that
they did not have even the onions that made up the meal at Nawabshah.
The only asset that Nawaz had was a double barrel gun and a few
shots. The money that they had was enough for the first seed and for the pair
of bullocks that were crucial for their farming effort .Nawaz was not prepared
to use any of this money.
He took his gun and started walking towards the desert .The
desert which formed a part of the Thar-Cholistan desert had not always been as
unwelcoming as it was to Nawaz .One of the lesser rivers, that drained towards
the sea ,passed through what had now become the desert .The river was once host
to perhaps the greatest urban civilization of its time ,The Harappan and
Mohenjadaroen people evolved the earliest and the most systematic urban
community .The civilization was also perhaps the one that evolved or discovered
the One God concept which was passed on to Abraham pbuh and resulted in the
three Monist religions .The land uplift ,that resulted from the great head
butt, was perhaps responsible for the drying out of the river and over
centuries the land turned in a harsh desert .
Nawaz was completely unfamiliar with the desert .He kept on
walking deeper into the desert and after a while saw large amount of pebbles
the size of small grapefruits lying scattered around few shrubs .This was
unexpected as these stones seemed to be completely out of place .Nawaz got
curious and started walking towards these stone as he neared he heard the sound
of many wings flapping and incredibly the pebbles turned into birds and flew
away .He was so shocked and surprised that he forgot to aim and fire his gun
,this meant that he lost the only chance they had of a proper meal that
afternoon .They had to eat their chapattis with water from their earthen water
urn but the encounter with stone turning into birds did teach Nawaz the way to
get high class proteins for their many a next meals .
By now it was getting dark and the desert suddenly turned
unfamiliar as Nawaz lost his bearings .He was completely lost and the desert
with very few landmarks seemed the same in all directions .Fortunately for
Nawaz he found his footsteps still visible in the sand and retreated back to
his farm .This was another lesson that he learned about the desert .This also
put a fear and respect for the desert in his mind.
Next morning he got up very early and trudged back to the desert
.This time he was more careful and froze as soon as saw the pebbles .He cocked
his gun and fired as soon as the partridges started to flee .He got six birds
and that morning his mother helped by her daughters cooked the most delicious
meal that they had eaten for a long time .For many months the partridges stood
between hunger and Nawaz’s family.
Nawaz’s immediate neighbor was Allah Dino who was the local
Wadera and owned larger tracts of land in the district .He was the Baluch
wadera who had taken over political and social control of the area after the
last Baluch incursion unto the area .Although Dino was a wadera, a feudal. and
a outsider he and his like integrated into the social fabric of the land .They
immediately shifted to Sindhi ,the local language , and owned the
local heroes and icons .Shah Abdul Latif became the defining poet ,his sufic
poetry ,which was immensely powerful ,described the sufic concepts in simple
but very beautiful language ,much like Bulah Shah who did the same in Punjabi .
The Baluch control of most of Sindh occurred in phases which continues to this
day .The early efforts were war like and aggressive but the modern efforts are
more subtle but equally successful .The modern Baluch control occurs due to
fact that the lazy and indolent local slowly loses control of his land and
other means of production to the more dynamic and aggressive outsider .The old
and new Baluch incursions ,however ,did not create a rift in the social fabric
as the outsiders accepted and adopted the more sophisticated local culture and
arrangements and are therefore fully assimilated into the local population .
Allah Dino had large land holdings which were cultivated through
the Hari system .About 16 acre pieces were allocated to hari families who
cultivated the land .The produce was shared between the Wadera and the hari
after deduction of direct expenses .This meant that the hari was barely able to
meet his most basic of his basic needs .The wadera was in fact owner of the
hari ,his women were free game for the wadera and his sons .The wadera did provide
insurance against catastrophic events and in that sense gave insurance against
hunger and other calamities .This arrangement did not result in a environment
that gave encouragement to hari to work hard ,as any wind fall profits that did
accrue to the hari for usurped by the Wadera anyway .This meant that Dino got
very low yields and his large holding barely provided him with a reasonable
living .He ,however , used this arrangement in other ways which did provide him
with much more income than the land did .
Nawaz ,unlike Dino ,did not identify with he local population
.He did learn the local language but always had a vague sense of superiority
and a sense of different-ness that kept him from totally accepting the local
ways .His sense of superiority was related more to his working habits as
compared to that of the haris .Arshad on the other hand had a marked sense of
superiority emanating from his sense of belonging to the ruling mogul class and
the association to the supposedly higher culture and language ,Arshad made no
attempt to learn the Sindhi as he considered it as inferior .Had he made the
attempt he would have realized the beauty in the language and the sufic poetry
that was of great beauty and simplicity .He would also have realized that his language
–Urdu , was akin to both Dino’s language i.e. Sindhi and to Nawaz’s language
–Punjabi .All these three are sister languages, Urdu evolved from Punjabi which
itself evolved from Sindhi and Serieki .All of these had more in common with
the Tamil languages than with Sanskrit and possibly all or some of these
languages still carried words and even the structure of the Harrapan or
Mellehuan language of the Harrapan or Mohenjadaroen people .These languages
seem to echo the theme of the rift caused ,by the great head butt, between the
Indus lands and the Ganges-Jummna lands , as these language do differ from the
Sanskrit related Aryan languages .
Allah Dino was unable to buy Arshad’s land because his attention
and more importantly his cash flow were attracted by the young ,buxom dancing
girl , Shazia from F.B. Area .This for the land was fortuitous because it would
have lain desolate and unattended if Dino had managed to scrape together the
price of the land demanded by Arshad .Nawaz and his family on the other hand
,with back breaking labor, ,managed to arrange the land and prepare the land
like a poor bride .They revered the land much like the
ancients worshipped the promiscuous goddess who slept with different gods and
men and accepted their seeds .The land similarly was prepared to receive
various seeds which over time would bloom to full grown plants .This would be a
part of natures color scheme .This to Nawaz was more beautiful then a miniature
painting from Chughtai or even more than the allures of Shazia .Dino on the
other hand looked at the land as his passport to political and social mobility
.
Latif the youngest of the brothers was not too infected by the
land bug, he found the harsh hot fringe of the desert barely tolerable .He was
a young strapping lad with even features. The harsh landscape and lack of any
friends did depress Latif , who one morning walking around his land came across
Marvi the young daughter of Rusal Bux , one of the Hari of the wadera Allah
Dino . Marvi , who had just turned sixteen , felt an uncontrollable attraction
for the strapping lad , she had a vague sense of doing something forbidden .
They could not talk with each other as both did not understand the others
language but they did lock eyes, Latif with unabashed greed and Marvi with a
shy indefinable exciting feeling. Their first meeting on the edge of the desert
lasted only a few minutes, no words were exchanged but the universal language,
did communicate the mutual attraction that both of them felt for each other,
although the nature of attraction and expectation of each from the other was
widely different. The brief encounter did arouse interest in Latif to learn
Marvi’s language. Latif did imbruse himself whole heartedly towards
a crash course of learning to speak Sindhi and surprisingly it did not take
long for him to be adequately fluent in the language , which is not surprising
as both Sindhi and Punjabi are sister languages .
