A Place Within (39 page)

The Bene Israel have produced two well-known Indian writers: Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004), one of India’s major poets in English,
and Esther David, who has written a lyrically evocative novel,
The Walled City
, about a Jewish girl growing up in old Ahmedabad.

David’s novel brings vividly to life the area of Relief Road, Delhi Darwaza, and Khamasa in an impressionistic, finely detailed account of a Jewish girl coming of age in her extended family in a neighbourhood full of Hindus and Muslims as neighbours, domestics, and vendors. So closely does it stay to the lived experience that, remarkably, there is no awareness in it of the larger political movements of the nation or the state. It is not even dated, though the period it covers seems to be the 1950s and onwards. The children of the family go to convent schools—England and English ways, the legacy of colonial rule and patronage, are preferred—yet among members of the family there is also a yearning to belong and be like the others. The narrator, who is unnamed, wishes she were born a Hindu like her friend Subhadra: “I dread to tell him [her uncle Menachem] that I find the colourful and noisy Hindu temple an easier place to pray in.” When she falls in love with Raphael, without actually speaking to him, instead of the Hebrew prayer, she murmurs a song to Krishna under her breath, as his lover Radha had done. Raphael is from the community of Baghdadi Jews, who are supposedly superior to the Indian, Marathi-speaking Bene Israel. There is a scarcity of Jewish partners and a fear of marrying cousins lest it lead to genetic defects in the offspring. There are the family oddballs, the family secrets. And the call of Israel plays constantly in the background. Throughout the novel there exists an underlying sense of hopelessness, as the community dwindles through death and departure. At the end of the novel, of the extended family two girls remain, now women, looking after their old folks.
The Walled City
observes not only the Jewish family, but also the larger community in the Ahmedabad it is set in. One of its most poignant moments occurs as Mandakini, a Jain girl whom Cousin Samuel loves, is taken away dressed like a bride, in a silver chariot pulled by
white horses, in a procession led by musicians, to a place where her hair will be shorn and she will become a barefoot homeless nun.

Constantly in the novel there are hints of a certain lurking danger. Yet when that danger, a riot, materializes, four times to my counting, Esther David’s reference to it is oblique, almost reluctant. They are simply bewildering events, the murders and rapes carried out by mysterious strangers: “I think Ahmedabad is…always throbbing with a sense of danger…. Swords are drawn. The creepers and flowers in the stone carving are dying. The walled city is under curfew. There are guns and rifles. Outsiders, say the newspapers, are creating the disturbances…. Doors locked. What is your religion? Who are you? From where do you come? We are burning in the fires of hell.” No more.

Uncle Menachem decides to move to a housing colony with Parsis and Christians as neighbours. And then, some unspecified amount of time later: “The riots have erupted again and the poison creepers grow like huge fishing nets in the rivers and in lakes, devouring the last of the dying fish.”

Emmanbaba, a relation, is found dead on a street, stabbed in the stomach.

Is the reticence about details simply a weariness of stating the obvious; or a fear of speaking out and becoming a target?
The Walled City
seems to have been a painful book to write, for more than one reason. When I called David, who still lives in Ahmedabad, to ask to speak to her about the novel and the neighbourhood in which it is set, she told me, There is nothing there. And she gave me the name of another person to call, who in turn directed me to Johnny Jacob.

In the vicinity of the synagogue, at a busy, hectic intersection on Sardar Patel Road, comes the small and elegant Rani Sipri mosque.
This is an old neighbourhood of buildings of two and three storeys packed together, many showing signs of reconstruction or extension, some abandoned, others falling apart. Gates lead off into enclosed areas, the famous Ahmedabad pols, residential “micro” neighbourhoods of the poor variety. Traditionally, however, the pols provided security during riots to a community linked by caste, faith, or profession.

A small iron gate opens into the mosque site, which consists of a water tank in front, behind which, up some steps on a raised platform, are the mosque, on the left, and across the yard from it, the mausoleum of the queen, Rani Sipri. Both buildings are of red stone. The mosque, commissioned by Rani Sipri, widow of Mahmud Begada, was built in 1514 and is called “masjid-e-nagirna,” jewel of a mosque, for its beauty, very much evident in the fine tracery on the outer walls and minarets, the intricate see-through latticework of the windows, and its proportions. The mosque is a shallow space, with three domes, three doors, two minarets. The mausoleum is padlocked, opening only at certain hours. From outside, looking into the dark shade of the room, lighted only by the rays filtering through the latticework, we see the single raised tomb of the queen, covered with a large red and a smaller green chaddar. The queen’s burial chamber serves also as a storage space; there is a pile of mattresses on the floor, rolled mats, and metal kitchen and eating ware for communal meals.

Outside on the road, the traffic streams by, but the sound hardly intrudes here on the raised level of the mosque. A handful of people are about, a few walk in from the street past the small wrought-iron gate. It’s close to prayer time. The azaan pierces the air; two cats go chasing after a chipmunk who runs up the tracery of the mausoleum wall. The Arabic cadences of the call to prayer linger high above us, but the voice is of a young man standing a few feet away, in clean and pressed white kurta-pyjamas and cap, a hand to his ear, reciting into an ancient micro
phone fixed to a pillar. On the next pillar, a sign in Gujarati asks, Did you switch off your mobile?

As we walk out, more people trickle in from the street. A woman sits on the steps begging.

A little further up the road an odd sight meets the eye: two round ancient-looking domes perched over otherwise quite ordinary squat, drab buildings. Between the two domes is a stone gateway, from which a narrow road leads into a pol. From one side of the gate a flight of stairs leads up to what I presume is a lookout post from bygone times, because there is a window at the top. The road branches inside into two narrow cluttered streets, the odd man sitting outside, women hanging out clothes or cleaning grain, resting on cots or stretched out on the ground. Boys and girls of various young ages run around happily, playing cricket with a bat no more than a foot long and a plastic ball. They pause in their play, watch us, big smiles on their faces. The adults look up curiously. We ask them what the domes signify, had there been a temple or a mosque here? No one has an answer. We walk back towards the gate.

One of the domed buildings opens onto the main road and is used as a tire shop. The other one does not open to the front; behind it, however, is a modest residence, with a little verandah with a cot, and on the wall above it small coloured prints of Ganesh and two other deities. At the end of the verandah, and opening presumably into the inside of the dome, is a shut door, on which is stuck a small printed symbol, an open palm. There comes a nonplussed look on Mahesh’s face. Wait, I tell him, with a mysterious smile. I have been here before, and it was to show him this place with the domes that I dragged him all the way from Rani Sipri mosque, promising him a surprise.

The door opens after some minutes, and a man in his sixties appears, a wiry fellow with a bristly white beard all over the face. He is wearing a Muslim cap, and a long shirt and trousers, all
white. He comes out with twinkling eyes and smiling. Greeting us, he says he’s been saying the namaz, the Muslim prayer. He is a follower of Imamshah. He takes us inside to his room. What I see there stuns me.

Two years ago, the door had been similarly closed, and just as today, the man had come out and bade me come in. There was at that time in this room a small personal shrine to Imamshah in the corner just behind the door, consisting of a picture of the Imamshah shrine in Pirana, a lamp, an Imamshah symbol—the open palm—and other items. It was decorated with a series of multicoloured festival lights. The man told me he had two names, Mohan and Akbar, that he was a Thakur by caste and a Parmar, descended from the kings of Gujarat. The room was quite dark and dingy, as it is now.

It was uncanny, this experience. Imamshah was hardly a major character known to all, like Kabir, Mira Bai, and Sufis like Nizamuddin of Delhi. I had no doubt that, were I to inquire, there would not be a soul walking outside on the road who would know the name. What was the probability that in this great bustling city, of all the roadside shrines here, I would walk into one I could directly relate to? Was this man a Hindu or a Muslim? He did not have to be exclusively one or the other, as his two names vouched, and according to the original Imamshah tradition. But for me, here was an example of how a holy man of the past could be reinvented and assimilated, how a tradition could be modified into a personal faith in total disregard to the orthodoxies that dictated to and bullied the masses. How contradictory and mysterious India could be.

And now, with Mahesh beside me? The shrine I had seen then is still here, but on the ground before it is something new: a small—a mini—grave covered with a green chaddar. On top of it are small stuffed animals looking like donkeys or horses.

Akbar-Mohan now says his two names are Akbar and Madhav—the latter of course is a form of Mohan, both are names of Krishna.
He tells us that he visits the Rani Sipri mosque to pray and he has a guru in Pirana who is a sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet. So is the man a Muslim now? Worshipping stuffed animals is as un-Islamic as you can be. And there are the two names. Is it a coincidence that Akbar is also the name of the Mughal emperor who conceived of a universal Indian religion? But scruffy-looking Akbar-Mohan-Madhav does not seem to be a man of lofty or regal thoughts.

We sit outside on the verandah, where Akbar-Mohan-Madhav offers us tea, which we are served in saucers. People come to his shrine, he informs us, bringing physical and mental ailments, and through “his” (I presume Imamshah’s) mercy they get cured. A grandson lies quietly beside us on a traditional baby hammock, a ghodio. Akbar-Mohan-Madhav has two sons, who have decent jobs, he says. When he wanted his daughter to get married—he does not say when—money for expenses had appeared for him through “his” miracle.

And so this little branch shrine too has a commercial angle it did not have the previous time. And there’s yet another angle.

The pol is entirely Hindu. This bit of information Mahesh, always the political animal, extracts from the man. No sane Muslim would live in an exclusively Hindu area in today’s Ahmedabad. But this follower of Imamshah admits that the two domes could have had graves in them; one of them, the tire store, could well have been a mausoleum. In fact, he goes on, the area had been a Muslim graveyard before.

How did an ancient Muslim graveyard with a mausoleum turn into a Hindu residential area? The pol has a name, an attribute of Krishna that I will not reveal, written—as Mahesh shows me as we come back into the street—on a BJP poster, with the names of its patrons, well-known right-wing politicians, prominently upon it.

With politics part of the picture, this little shrine makes no coherent sense. The idea of a down-and-out Ahmedabadi inspired
by the mystic Imamshah is wonderful, especially with his several names and mixed faith, even if he is also a rascal playing the money game. Mahesh, however, is convinced of the perfidiousness of Akbar-Mohan-Madhav; he must be an informer against the local Muslims, Mahesh says, in these times when every Muslim is considered a potential terrorist.

I tell my friend I prefer the unresolved enigma.

After a long, hot day spent mostly on our feet, a treat seems to be in order. We decide to eat at the nearby upscale Agashiye, a vegetarian restaurant in the Teen Darwaza area, on the roof (as the name suggests) of a traditional home converted into a heritage hotel. As soon as you step off the elevator, you are invited first to sit inside a covered receiving room, a mandap of sorts, on low seats with bolsters for the back. In this formal ambience, with little time wasted, the starters are brought—a delicate sherbet of fudina and kothmir, with dhoklis and daal bhajias accompanied by exquisite imli and fudina chutney—after which you are taken to the open terrace for the main meal. Our longing for a cold beer on this hot night soon disappears as the food and accompanying drinks are consumed. There is the chaas with jeera, delicate, and endless; spicy hot daal for drinking; kadhi for drinking and to top the khichdi with; gobi muttar, tori patra that tastes like bhindi, pakri (rice bread), chila, gajar halwa. Nothing is overspiced, too sweet, or coarse; the courses are endless, but discreetly so. The servers come like Gandhis, wearing dhotis under long white shirts and white pandit caps. To conclude the meal, badam-pista ice cream, paan, and chai. A convincing answer to those who maintain that vegetarian fare is boring, plebeian, or at best merely homely. The night is clear, an almost full moon is in the sky. Other tables are occupied by noisy middle-class families. The talk is of business,
and my academic Punjabi companion grumbles good-naturedly; business talk is one of those stereotypical Gujarati characteristics, the others being that they eat well, like sweets, and are miserly.