A Place Within (37 page)

On the opposite side of the prayer hall, at the eastern end, is a gateway that leads outside to the tomb of Ahmed Shah. The area is dirty and neglected, and endowed with a faint odour of urine. The path is littered; there is a goat or two running around, an overturned trash can, dysfunctional push carts, a parked scooter, a discarded mattress. Two kids ask us for pens, then chocolates, finally rupees. A man carving a red block of stone tells us it is for repairs to the mosque. Further on we reach the royal tomb, a rectangular stone building with a verandah and three rooms, the central one of which is the dingiest and contains the grave of Ahmed Shah, shrouded in a cloth of green with red borders, as well as those of a son and a grandson, who followed him as sultans. On the walls, badly framed pictures of the Kaaba, a mosque, and Quranic sayings. Elsewhere, an oil lamp, a money chest for donations, two threadbare carpets,
gaudy fixtures. Everything is makeshift, a hand-me-down; there is an air, here, of neglect, ignorance, and poverty. People come to pray in this place, I don’t know why—perhaps there are families that trace their roots to the sultan. The two other rooms also contain graves. The place has been looked after by the same family for nine generations, I am told by a woman, who now has the job with her epileptic son, who has two front teeth missing. They earn nine hundred rupees (twenty-three dollars approximately) a month, paid by a committee, and she earns money part time by constructing paper flowers and such for sale in the bazaar. There is another son who works in the city.

Thus, the founder of Ahmedabad. The site is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India; but just outside the monument lie four carved stones broken away and perhaps destined for the market. Nearby, a goat rooting among the garbage, a chai shop selling excellent tea at a mere two and a half rupees a cup. There are no other customers about.

In the British Raj, musicians would sit at the entrance of the mausoleum with their instruments, singing verses three times a day. An urs festival was held once a year in honour of the dead sultan. And khichdi, poor people’s fare consisting of boiled rice and daal, was distributed daily from this site. The expenses for all that were paid from the government treasury.

Past this site, after two cups of tea each, we enter the Manek Chowk market, which begins with a line of stores selling printed cloth, the owners or their assistants sitting in the wide doorways inviting you in as you pass. The one we patronize is world-renowned, belying its modest appearance. A narrow staircase leads to a second floor, a riot of colours and a whiff of cotton dust. The cloth is printed in Kutch and, while you sit on the proffered bench to inspect it, the owner, in impeccable white kurta-pyjamas, will spend as much time as required, spreading out his samples on the floor, from the more
modest to the most exquisite, to suit your needs. The price is non-negotiable. After this uplifting experience we arrive at a bustling outdoor market, its stalls makeshift or permanent, displaying spices, cassettes, CDs and DVDs, decorations, dried and fresh fruits, worship paraphernalia, candies and paan masala, gift cards with coins attached to add auspiciousness, all in such a brilliant display of colour as to dazzle the eye. Behind these stalls, more clothing merchants. Then, right beside this section of the market, comes a shabby, quieter section, in the midst of which we have been told is the Rani no Hajiro—the Mausoleum of the Queens, where lie buried the queens of Ahmed Shah. We walk through a short, narrow, crowded street and finally find it, behind a row of stalls. How do we go in? we ask a hawker. Go round the corner, ask the aunty for the key, he tells us; it’s self-service. We turn the corner, find the aunty, an impressive-looking woman with a white dupatta around her hennaed hair, her mouth red with paan, sitting with two other women on a metal charpai surrounded by junk. Behind her, steps lead up to a verandah and the tombs. There’s the key, she says, it’s hanging from a nail on a board. We climb up the steps of the mausoleum to a gritty verandah covered with charpais, bundles of merchandise, trunks, furniture, and more junk. A teenage girl sits on the floor playing with a toddler. And silent, muted witnesses humbled by time: ancient columns, fragments of wall carvings, delicate latticework, all covered in grime. The door is blue, oil painted; we open the padlock, step in. There, in an unswept, neglected, broken courtyard open to the weather, lie three queens in their graves, draped in old chaddars: Mugalibibi, Mirakibibi, and Hazaribibi. We stare a couple of minutes, then close and lock the door, greet the girl and toddler, and leave. As we depart, after thanking the aunty, the stall-keepers grumble about how the government doesn’t preserve this precious heritage. They could do with some tourist business, obviously.

Ahmedabad, indeed Gujarat, is full of such neglected historical sites and architectural wonders. Perhaps there is simply too much
of the past to cope with, written and rewritten, fragmentary and disputed; all of it seems to relate to sultans and rajas. If there is glory to remember, someone’s victory is someone else’s defeat, and memories are long, they are convenient. If history is taught in comic-book versions of us-versus-them, it’s better that history itself has such a low premium. Better to keep your eyes on the future; on the stock markets and cricket scores; on globalization and the GDP; on America and China. And history can be revisited when it’s less personal and wounding.

The market, Manek Chowk, is named after a fabled saint called Maneknath Godaria who—legend tells us—when the walls of Ahmed Shah’s new city were going up, would every evening unravel the threads of a quilt he was weaving, whereupon the day’s construction would all come tumbling down. The sultan was understandably annoyed and sent for the holy man. He asked him what other wonders he could perform, and Maneknath replied that he could enter a badna, a teapot-like vessel, and emerge from its spout. Show me, the sultan said. Maneknath entered the vessel, whereupon the sultan quickly closed off the spout with his finger, thus smothering the saint.

A short walk from the tomb of queens, right in the midst of the market, is an exceedingly modest temple dedicated to Maneknath, who it seems was a very real figure, magician or not. We are met there by a woman and her son, the caretakers, who give us a very confusing account of Maneknath’s sect. There is an inner room, with the shrine, and an outer room, which has a fridge with a variety of soft drinks for sale. We buy our Limcas, make a modest donation, and leave.

Further on, in the vicinity of the rather elegant old stock-market building—where in the Share Mania of the 1860s numerous people lost their fortunes—comes the jewellery market, the shopkeepers all looking out hopefully, there being not much business at this hour. A villager with a stiff, upright bearing, in the typical rustic
white dhoti, white overshirt, and a high folded white turban, walks into a goldsmith’s store and sits down on the floor. We wonder what this patriarch will come out with, perhaps there’s a wedding in the village, but he takes his time. Walking further on, we pass the utensils market, gleaming with brass and aluminum ware—a brass bell catches my eye, reminds me of the one we had in my high school, which surely must have been cast in Gujarat—and come to a vegetable market with fresh produce and more than a dozen kinds of vegetables: long purple wormlike moghra, the tenderest okra, small green peppers, guar, green bananas, baingan (egg-plants) of all shapes and sizes, to name a few. Mahesh is like a kid in a candy store. We buy what in my childhood we used to call English imli, a tender, mild version of the tamarind, which here is the red, rather than white, variety. Its seeds Mahesh hopes to plant back at his farm.

And finally on to Gandhi Road. Back in the hotel we have imli and watermelon for lunch.

At Fernandes Bridge is the Chopda Bazar, the paper and book market: stalls piled upon stalls in a narrow maze of alleys, selling paper, notebooks, envelopes, and books, mostly school and college texts, on shelves and piled on the floor. In some cases it’s impossible even to push through inside to browse; you stand at the door and make your request, and a book makes its way to you from somewhere inside, or magically appears behind you, or it is recommended you inquire elsewhere. But ask for a book in English on Gujarati history, and you get a look that says, Are you kidding? The last such book, a very good one, was published in the 1930s by a Parsi with the intriguing name of Commissariat, and then nothing else appeared until a recent exhaustive survey by Yagnik and Sheth. But this one touches on the politics of communalism and therefore has met with dead silence in the state. I find it in Delhi.

For Gujaratis, business is of overriding importance. I did not have to be told this in Baroda or Ahmedabad, this knowledge was part of my growing up, it was in the blood, so to speak. And so the pride of modern Ahmedabad, across the river, where we wander off briefly, is the prestigious Indian Institute of Management. A degree from here can land a graduate, it is said with envy and wonder, a salary on an American scale. Everyone from this area of the city, you can be sure, has someone in America. Some Gujaratis even call their state the fifty-first state. We pass an American pizza store with the Stars and Stripes proudly displayed, and next to it a not-insignificant Statue of Liberty outside a storefront. We pass a mile-long strip of jewellery stores before heading back to the old city, where vendors run after us desperate to sell cotton kurta-pyjama suits for any price, starting at two hundred rupees, or four dollars, and coming down finally to a ludicrous fifty. With my proverbial Gujarati acumen, I cannot help but wonder, at that price, how
much the cloth cost, how much the tailor, the presser, the vendor would make.

There is a story about Ahmedabad’s legendary prosperity. One evening, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, came to the gate of the old city intending to leave it. The guard informed her he had to ask the sultan’s permission to allow her to go. Certainly, the goddess told him, I’ll wait. But the guard did not see the sultan, who surely could not have denied the goddess; instead, on the way, he cut off his own head. And so Lakshmi was left permanently to tarry in the city awaiting the guard’s return.

This story is told to us by a half-mute man outside a dilapidated shrine which, he informs us, belongs to the guard who made Lakshmi wait. It seems odd for that hero of Ahmedabad to receive such shabby treatment. The shrine sits next to the imposing Bhadra Fort of the sultans, now in ruins. Stalls cling to its side like parasites, and it contains a government bookstore. The famous Lal Darwaja, the Red Gate, is a part of the fort, and not far is the sultans’ private mosque. This is an exquisite structure, some of its pillars beautifully carved and others not. The beauty is marred by electric cables, ceiling fans, the ubiquitous ugly clock.

The cell phone is a sign of modernization, obviously, but it’s also keeping families together over long distances—the ties, the obligations, the formalities—and therefore serves a function very Indian and traditional. Mahesh, speaking to me about something across the table in a restaurant, on impulse interrupts himself to call up his daughter in London, to greet her for the Holi festival, his voice rising several decibels, everyone staring at his English admixed with Hindi and the unabashed endearments. And later, Holi greetings come in from all over India by text message. Happy Holi!