An autobiographic Note-2, Downtown Srinagar in Bombay

Nostalgia

Khusrow on Sale

By

ZGM

                             On my landing in the metropolis, the city I had dreamt about visiting and living in during boyhood, I felt ‘all that I am is driftwood for the sea.’ Seeing seas of humanity coming out of the Church Gate and Victory Terminus Railway stations, fears haunted my mind- it will soon engulf me. The grandeur of the Gothic style architecture of the Victoria Terminus- VT railway station as every commuter called, to assure my self, that it is real and I am not seeing it on the celluloid in the Regal Cinema, it made me rub my eyes.  

In spite of, the fears of getting lost in the sea of people, I wanted to live in the city, not as a driftwood but fastened to my roots. Soon, it came as a big surprise and a boon to me, when I found that the commercial capital of India also has its share of downtown Srinagar- with lots of Kashmir handicrafts dealers having shops and showrooms in the most fashionable part of the city – five to ten minutes walk from my office. The Apollo Bunder Street, just adjacent to the famed Gateway of India, with lots of shop owners from the localities on both the sides of Jhelum from the third bridge to the sixth bridge gave me a sense of belonging and satisfaction- that I am not in an alien city. One of its major beauty of Kashmiri shops was they had retained the Wan-I-Penji culture-  lively discussions as good as in open universities. Of all the shops in this street, the shop owned by Mohammad Shafi Khan was what I would call a great “samanbal” were Kashmiris living in different parts of Bombay, often came for a chat and knowing developments back home. Shafi Khan, as he was popularly called in the market was a good social worker- in fact, an icon for many Kashmiris trading in “Kashmir art”.   

One day, he rang me up and invited me to a cup of tea and Muska-bun in the   Leopold Café, a popular restaurant on Colaba Causeway. To my surprise, he had also invited three of my predecessors in office- two of them Abdul Wahid and Mohammad Amin Bhat had been on a visit, and Dr. Shanti Saroop Nishat had adopted the great city as his home. He was from Mirpur and in 1948 after an invisible line was drawn and the state was vivisected he had stayed in Jammu. He was the first officer to be appointed in Bombay for issuing a ‘permit’ to people in India intending to visit Jammu and Kashmir. Those days everyone, other than the hereditary natives needed a permit- a sort of visa for visiting the State. The office as late as in 1983 was recognized by many in Bombay as Kashmir Consulate in the city. 

Abdul Wahid, who had succeeded Dr. Nishat, an intellectual in his own right, in office had taste for Urdu literature. During his stint in the metropolitan, he had cultivated quite a good number of friends- journalists, poets, writers, and filmmakers. One, of his friend, was Dr. Zoe Ansari, a Ph. D. in Linguistics from the Academy of Science in USSR and an important name in Urdu literature- and highly popular in progressive writers of the city. He had translated George Bernard Shaw, Pushkin, and Chekov and written extensively on Ghalib, Amir Khusrow, and Iqbal. Nevertheless, Khusrow was his forte- and he was passionately involved in his poetry- and was known for his scholarship on the fourteenth-century poet and Sufi musician of the sub-continent.

In Colaba, Dr. Zoe Ansari lived in Daulat-Shirin building,   I also lived in the same building.  A couple of my predecessors in office had also lived in the same building. My predecessors, after our meeting at the restaurant,    joined me for dinner at my home and Abdul Wahid introduced me to Dr. Zoe Ansari. The meeting benefitted me as sharing some important moments with this man of letters and scholarship. Moreover, over a period of time, I came to know a couple of important writers and journalists – some big names in Urdu literature in the great city of art and literature.  One evening Zoe Ansari invited a dozen of prominent Urdu poets and writers for a unique feast- a dinner and songs of Amir Khusrow that he had got composed and recorded in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The invites including Ali Sardar Jafri and Asghar Ali Engineer.  Interestingly, the host has named the evening as ‘Khusrow Night’ as it continued up to midnight.   After playing 90-minutes cassette of Khusrow’s poetry sung by best voices in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, emotionally charged and visibly disturbed over the future of Urdu and the decline of  Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb,  he got up and cried, what I should do with this cassette, there are no takers for this culture in this land, should I stand up in stuffy and suffocating of Bhendi Bazar- Oh, come on, I am selling Amir Khusrow—    But,  there will be no buyers….