When She Was Queen (21 page)

The story was an allegory, he had heard it explained as a child. The king was our soul, and the journey was the meditation hour, in which the soul set off to be united with the Universal Soul; the queen was the fickle, desiring
part of the mind, what we call the heart, and the child was all that was dear to the heart. Beat, kill the wavering mind and reach the goal, the truth.

What was this truth? It was wisdom, enlightenment, revelation. It was often likened to, it was called, “the light.” But it wasn’t a real light, like that of a lamp, as the gurus and pirs had always taken pains to explain. It was something that, once you found it, you simply knew. And once you knew it, you couldn’t explain it, had no desire to explain it, or even tell anybody that you had seen it. Just as when a poor deaf-mute sees a beautiful moon on a clear breezy night over the trees and has no words to describe the miracle.

Moreover, this enlightenment, the light that was not a light, was not something like a diploma you acquired after completion of a course. It was not a right, but a benediction. You could meditate a lifetime yet not acquire it… a depressing thought. And here he was giving sermons to himself again, if he wasn’t careful the hour would slip away….

But what would it be like, to have seen the light, experienced that darshan?

Once, back in Dar es Salaam, a certain well-known elder of the community was on his way to morning session. He was one of those—and there were many in those days—who never missed this blessed hour, come what may. Outside his house there would usually be some trucks parked for the night, on the pavement and on the road. As he was hurrying through the deep shadows cast by the trucks, the elder was blinded by an intense light. The poor man, thinking he’d finally been blessed, cried
out thankfully, “Praise God! Praise God!” The light went out and a voice said in the dark, “What’s wrong, Mister?” It was a night watchman with a flashlight.

It was hard to keep away the silly smile every time the man came to mind; though the incident was probably exaggerated or untrue. He had died recently, in Calgary … and what a great singer of hymns he had been back then….

Beat, kill the mind…. He sensed people stirring around him in their various places, and it seemed the hour was rapidly approaching its end. Soon it would be another futile hour, to pile up on all those other dead hours, wasted on empty thoughts running ahead of him this way and that, leading him astray. Perhaps it was the tea—that sweet, strong, creamy tea that left such a pleasant taste and a slight odour in the mouth—that excited the mind, made it flit about from thought to thought until one became weary keeping track of them. Perhaps they were right, those critics of the tea … but what would it be like, morning mosque without its special tea? Would he come then, spend a good portion of the hour waiting for something to happen to his soul?

His heart at this time, it seemed to him, would always pick up a beat, as though racing now against the few minutes left to the darkness.

Stillness.

He thought, fewer and fewer people show up in the morning these days. His eyes opened momentarily to seek confirmation. The old charm is definitely going, and winter doesn’t help any.

This past summer, it was rumoured, a ghost had been
keeping people away. A policeman ghost. The numbers had never completely recovered since then.

Just after you came out of the dark underpass on Bloor West, on the top of the hill, a policeman standing beside a patrol car would wave you down. You stopped. “Your licence, sir. Your insurance.” The usual stuff. He would take a walk around the car as though inspecting it. The next thing you knew, he had vanished, and so had the patrol car, and when you got to mosque it was late. The same policeman, every time. Young, tall, blue-eyed. Once a smart aleck attempted to get out of the car but the door wouldn’t open. Another time the policeman said, “Follow me,” to a man and his wife, who followed him all the way to the airport, but once there, at the arrivals terminal, they saw themselves tagging along behind a taxi.

There had been quite some excitement in those few weeks when the ghost appeared. It seemed that Satan had singled out their simple Dundas mosque for attention, and the morning session would have to be cancelled.

And then a famous preacher, called “Missionary,” had volunteered to drive away the policeman ghost. For a few days, at a little after four in the morning, Missionary was driven along Bloor Street on the way to the mosque. Three days nothing happened. On the fourth morning, so the story went, the car was stopped. Missionary rolled down his window and spoke to the cop who had appeared. “Sir, I believe this is what you are looking for.” He gave the policeman a folded card, which the policeman took silently and went away. And was never seen again.

This famous incident should have brought hordes of people to morning session, revived flagging faith, but it hadn’t. There were even people who denied it ever happened like that.

It had happened in August, the one month he had been away with the family in Calgary, where they had gone to visit his brother and sister and their families. When he returned, it was all over. He wished he had been here, had met the ghost. Bloor Street West was his daily route, after all. But he’d missed the entire episode—the policeman ghost, the exorcism. His life was ordinary, his struggle ordinary—against his cluttered mind and the anxieties about his son and daughter. It seemed to him that he had been created, allotted his portion of worries, and forgotten.

Once Abou ben Adhem (he recalled from a poem he had studied in school) awoke in the middle of the night to see an angel beside him with a scroll and pen in his hands. “What are you writing?” Abou asked. “The names of the people who remember God the most,” the angel replied. But Abou’s name was not one of them. Disappointed, he went back to sleep. The next night he again saw the angel, writing on a scroll. “What this time?” asked Abou. “The names of the people whom God remembers the most,” came the answer. Abou ben Adhem’s name was first among these.

No, he wasn’t one whom God remembered. His meditations every morning at the hour of four—breathing in-out and repeating the sacred syllables—and all his attempts at stillness, were fruitless, his mind only jangled with useless thoughts. Oh, kill the mind … he opened his
eyes, gave a quick look around, instinctively, and closed his eyes again.

He opened them and saw that the lights had come on, must have been on for some time; all the ceremonies following the meditation hour were over, he was alone in the brilliantly lit hall, everyone else was out in the tea room. No one had thought to wake him up. People had observed him sitting erect, head lowered, legs folded under him, breathing calmly, in-out. And he, getting up now, did not feel as if he had been asleep.

He came out calm, without the feeling he had wasted another day; he declined more tea and conversation, put on his shoes, and drove home.

If it had been you or I, we would have wondered if this state of grace was real, how long it would last, and if it would reappear the next day. That thought did not occur to him.

Among my mother’s effects is this
brown cardboard box, bursting at the seams, barely held together with a string running all around, drawing the sides in. It’s her hoard of old photographs from under her bed. The newer, cheery ones, those of her children—me and my brother Mohan—and her husband and herself, went into the family albums for the viewing benefit of our guests over the years. In this dusty trove of her
private memories, stamp-sized snapshots, the personalities of their subjects squeezed into tiny mouse faces, jostle with larger photos that failed to make it to, or perhaps lost their place on, a wall or a dresser. The coloured ones are few and faded, and give the appearance of a fog bathing the scenes. The black-and-whites have preserved better, though a few are stained purple where the chemicals wore off. The edges are crinkled or straight, the corners all worn out and blunt, what do I do with these printed images from another life? There’s one, however (but this one I looked for), that stands out, cries out to be admired: a beautiful, fair-complexioned girl with one choti—a thick braid—falling in front across one shoulder; a sweet, partially lit smile hovers on the edge between shy introspection and the flash of boldness that made her pose for the camera, the dupatta fallen casually behind the neck. The mouth is open, captured in a moment of surprise, a glint of teeth just visible, the eyes aglow. The photographer has caught her leaning diagonally across the frame, Indian-actress fashion. At the bottom it’s signed in Urdu, which the neighbour’s father has read for me, and says, “To Madhu, from your Khatija; with love.”
Pyaar se
. What kind of love?

Mother’s diary I found in one of her drawers, the locked one containing her delicates and a few items of jewellery. It is a girl’s book, yellow with little red flowers, a deep red silk ribbon tying it across. The ribbon is still pretty, carries a shine after all these years, but the yellow of the cover is faded and stained. Good thing I got to it first; no telling what Mohan would have done with it; or, worse still, his wife Anita. Now I can peep
into Mother’s past, her mind; find out what she was like as a person, besides a mother. I think I owe her that. Her life had an intensity the extent of which I could never have guessed.

A match is in progress outside on the cricket grounds; periodically there comes a roar from the crowds—a wicket taken, or a six-run hit. I was never much interested in the game, so maddeningly slow, and am even less so since I left here, but it is surprising how much of it I absorbed unconsciously as a child. The house fetched a good fifty thousand more, I gather, for the attraction of this cricket vantage point. I remember afternoons when the four of us would have tea in the balcony on a Sunday, watching the last overs of a match played out as the sun set in the distance. Because this is a defence colony, many memories of my childhood are of the military and patriotic sort: marching behind a band on Republic Day; drilling with other children, mock rifles in hand, to prepare for the day when we would be needed for the defence of the nation; the anxiety during two wars, the speeches and patriotic songs, followed by immense relief—as though there were any doubt we would win—and distribution of sweets. The enemy, always Pakistan, the sister nation less than twenty miles away, once a part of this country.

I look at the photo, then at the diary. Then at the photo. With love, from your Khatija. What kind of love? I know the story, but not in these exact—these pained—words.

Amritsar, Punjab

April 22, 1947

Dear Khatija—

Something evil is pounding my heart with a pestle, it hurts so, I cannot breathe and I dare not open my eyes to the darkness. There is the smell of burning in the night air and the ugly beastly stench of blood and corpses—Hé Rabba!—can it be true, but my mind conjures these gory pictures from all I heard being said today. This morning, a few hours after you left, another death train arrived, with laashes from Lahore, mutilated bodies, amputated children, missing girls. What happened, my darling, my loving loving Khatija, my friend, I want to hold you in my arms and cry with you, and rock you—do you remember the way we cried each other to sleep when my brother Om died? Save for one wail, my love, this terrible night is quiet, the muezzin has not called and I miss his voice, and I miss the clatter of your front door shutting and your father’s keys jangling as he walks to your mosque in the next alley an hour before dawn breaks. Have our gods declared war, Khatija, has Shivji locked horns with mighty Allah, for this dark cloud upon us is no work of mere human hands, this is the Mahabharata of the gods, where cousin flays cousin and hundreds and thousands lie dead—but then why the wrath unleashed upon us women, Khati, and why the innocent children?

Pyari pyari Khatija, I knew exactly how frightened you were last night. Believe me, my heart beat in step with every beat of yours as those goonda-log stood outside your doors holding flaming torches ready to burn and kill. Khatija!… How fortunate my Bau-ji convinced your obstinate old man to let all of you be locked in from the outside—”Anand Lal, your life is in my hands, don’t I know, but trust me for God’s sake I won’t sell you and yours.” And when the goons came and stood outside, shouting rape and murder, and all you twelve people on the other side, half of you women, do you know what agonies I suffered, what promises I made to the Lord? Shall I tell you how many oceans I wept? Then my Bau-ji pushed past granny and Bi-ji and said to them from the window, “Preserve my property, he owed me a lot, that haram-zada Turk!”

“Have they gone?—where?”

“Yes, to Lahore, the bastards, where else?”

And all the while I whispered, O Rabba, Ya Ali, Ya Ali…. Do you remember how we sang together in your mosque? And how on dussehra we went to mandir together? Are we different, then, Khati? Your father Anand Lal was also “Hassam” but he was Bhishm Mamu’s cousin … and your mother Durga was also “Fatima” … it is true madness, this difference among people. I don’t understand it. I am not educated, but I know it is wrong. There should be no difference between people.