Geetanjali Shree
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as anybody here read Aage Samander Hai? He wrote it in Urdu, but I read it in the Nagri script and I know it is out in English too. It is Intizar Hussain’s novel about a young man who gives up his birthplace for a dream. He travels to the new land called Pakistan. The land simultaneously of hijrat – pilgrimage – and of opportunities, it promises paradise on this earth and also hereafter.
Why did you want to shift there, I once asked him. Shift, he asked back? He was a young man and here was a land promising heaven and earth to the Indian Muslims. It was way more alluring than the American dream is for many of us now. Add to it the uncertainty created by politics about the Muslim in India. So I went, he said. But did I remotely imagine that Fate would misconstrue my going as turning my back on the land of my birth? No, he answered. I went, he said, another time perhaps, with Kathsaritsagar under one arm and Laila Majnu under the other. I went to keep returning. Little knowing that hijrat would turn into exile.
It did. Tragically. The ecstasy of pilgrimage and the agony of its transformation into exile defined the tragedy of Intizar Saheb’s life. And his tragedy, he knew, was the tragedy of his people. The tragedy of those in whose midst he was and of those he had left behind.
Well, I got to read the book and things he had said and the flutter of birds caught crossing a border they never knew nor accepted, all came back to me. I called him up. Someone picked up the phone and was reluctant to hand it over to him. He is not well and this is a hospital, he informed me. I said please tell him my name and say I am calling from France. He, I picture this in my mind’s eye, reached out from his hospital bed and took the phone instantly and said – before I could even begin my aadab arz – kya, Geetanjali bibi, ab aap bhi Pakistan hue ja rahe hain – What, Geetanjali dear, even you are now becoming Pakistan!
It hurt. That Pakistan was not the dream it was believed to be; and India, too, was turning into a nightmare. The hurt burst forth, first thing, from the hospital bed when this Indian ‘friend’ called.
This Indian friend was lucky to have met and got so much affection from Intizar Saheb. We met in Nepal at a conference and the true syncretic that he was, he wrote in humour-tinged awe and admiration of the snowcapped Nanda Devi where Shiva sits and tells Parvati a contemporary story of us new(?) beleagured beings. We did tourist spots together and wondered where Intizar Saheb would display the temple saamagri – diyas, aachman lutiyas, statues, Shivalinga and suchlike – that he was so enthusiastically picking up outside the Pashupatinath and Swayambhu temples and the other Hindu religious spots we visited in that trip. We drank – him nursing a beer the way a decent drinker would a whiskey – and talked in the evenings. The mist was beautiful and the cold was bracing.
Then we met in India and once he got the respect and recognition he deserved and was given a lifetime Indian visa to travel anytime, anywhere and for any length of time, we met as often as he visited, except some lone occasions when we were not in town.
Now that there are no restrictions, Intizar Saheb, I called him at the IIC where he was staying, where would you like to go?
Aisa hai, hamen Barindaban le chaliye, he said, unselfconsciously pronouncing Vrindavan that way!
We were a trifle anxious – a Muslim and a Pakistani to boot, didn’t sound like the most welcome package for that ancient temple town. A thought occurred to ask Acharya Shrivatsa Goswami. We had met this scholar-priest, of all places, in Japan! He is a scion of a venerable sacerdotal family that has headed one of the chief temples in Barindaban. We are ashamed we felt any self-consciousness or guilt about taking Intizar Saheb to the temple city. Or maybe we should be kinder to ourselves – in the atmosphere this country was fast slipping into, we did not wish to risk exposing our revered and beloved guest to any delicate or embarrassing situation.
How we underestimate our own people, or how hopeless we turn. Shrivatsaji of the Gosain clan is a counterpart of Intizar Saheb, or even more so, since he is a paractising priest. Swagat hai was the first thing he said when we told him we had this Pakistani guest we want to bring across. Stay at my ashram, he said.
We did. But that is a later part of the tale.
What happened before that was no less eventful and enjoyable. The morning we were to set out by cab for the temples turned out to be the day of voting for a local election in Mathura. And the roads were curfewed. Now what? We asked here and called there and requested elsewhere and some police contacts responded to our SOS. A delay of a few hours but then we were en route and a delay of a few hours and we were in the Ashram guesthouse, a simple but very comfortable place. Intizar Saheb was in the main room, we in a side one. Very soon after we reached, in walked Shrivatsaji, calling out radhe radhe.
–What, Acharyaji, to get here we needed the police, we joked.
–He was born in a prison. He was a thief. Who but the police can get you through to his nagari, Acharyaji retorted. (He was speaking of Lord Krishna in case some readers are a bit lost here.)
And then it was endless rounds of temple visits and temple food.
Whichever temple we were taken to, the ever humble, ever self-effacing Intizar Saheb would stand politely a little away from the sanctum, lest he offend any religious sensibilities. And, for his part, Shrivatsaji would everywhere announce equally simply and genuinely that this is a very special guest, a great writer from Pakistan, Intizar Hussain Saheb, and deferentially usher him into the innermost sanctum to be part of the prayer and singing.
Both were just being what they were, no rhetoric and posturing in them.
Acharyaji is also very knowledgeable about the histories around each temple. There was much discussion and debate and Intizar Saheb was fully involved in them all. There was talk about small things and big too but what was inspirational was the healthy irreverance both Shrivatsaji and Intizar Saheb excelled in. I remember Intizar Saheb quoting an Urdu couplet – kufr kuchh chahiye islam ki raunak ke liye (some blasphemy is needed to liven up Islam). The holy Jamuna for Acharyaji was this nallah of black muck.And we also talked of the paintings in a famous temple in Chandod, Gujarat, where even as Sita and Ram are performing a yagya, Shri Hanumanji, standing nearby on a higher level, pees straight into the sacred fire. Hanuman is the truest ever bhakt of Ram and Sita. Whatever the other interpretations of this narrative, no insult can be read in its humour. And – repeat – the painting is in a famous temple oft visited by bhaktas.
All this was reminiscent of the two devotees in our midst – the Muslim Intizar Hussain and the Hindu Shrivatsa Goswami.
Both true believers, steeped in the history and complexities of their own religions and not unconversant with the other’s. Both possessing, the confidence to happily lighten up and joke about their religion in ways the paranoid ‘illiterate’ fanatics never can.
There was much revelry too; esecially caused by the red-faced hanuman toli around, the monkeys spoilt from the awareness of their special status in those religious lanes. Keep your bags and glasses and hats away or hold on tight, instructed Shrivatsaji, and precisely at that moment, as if to demonstrate his point, one red-faced shameless creature swung down nimbly and made off with his cell phone and ensconced himself comfortably on the nearest temple pillar to wait there in patient anticipation. Give him some prasad, Shrivatsaji called out. That done, the habitual thief in that land of the thief-god, completed the obviously familiar bargain. Putting the phone gently back, he turned to the prasad.
Intizar Saheb watched all this with glee. We have left all the bandars this side, he said longingly and added ruefully, there are none on that side. I remembered also the neem tree and the Tajmahal he regretted having left behind on this side.
Every evening in the Barindaban ashram, Intizar Saheb recorded the day’s experiences in his diary.
Read Intizar Hussain in The Beacon
It must have been our last evening there. We were out with Shrivatsaji doing detailed rounds of this temple and that temple, which was an ongoing possibility in that land of myriad temples. Bhai, said Intizar Saheb, polite as ever, gracious and humble in his demeanour, simple and genuine as he was, I want to chadhao, make an offering of, some money in the temple, some Pakistani money. Of course, assured Shrivatsaji. There was no drama in either’s tone. We stepped aside and Intizar Saheb stepped reverentially towards the idol and, his head bowed, placed some Pakistani currency at its feet.
We were witnessing true bhakti, true religion, true humanity, truth incarnate if you will…
We returned and met again and talked again. I continued to read him. The man who wrote about Meerut being oppressive because it was full of Hindus and Aligarh too because it had too many Muslims! He was pluralistic and eclectic and that is the atmosphere he craved, whatever your religion. Humanity united, not divided by cults and sects and such. Belonging to any of these did not make for nonporous borders in Intizar Saheb’s estimation. Narrowness and stupid fanaticism and of course politics made for that non-porousness and that pained him and galvanised him into writing.
Aage Samander Hai rued the trusting folk who left for Pakistan, the land of promise, and found themselves cordoned off by a physical border from their land of birth and a mental border in their land of domicile, as peoples from across the border. The muhajirs, a different category of Muslims who did not quite belong. He felt the loss of home on so many fronts and sensitively delved in layers of its stories to bring out the human within.
He left a land and the new land left him and ahead was just the ocean, aage samander hai.
I was far away but just had to call. Never one to lose hope, Intizar Saheb, even as he was convalescing in hospital and ruing the shrinking of civil society on both sides of the border, said that we would meet when he came here next, which would be in February.
On February 2nd he passed on. But surely that too is a border he never accepted and which will not stop him…
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Geetanjali Shree is an acclaimed Hindi fiction writer, playwright, essayist nased in New Dehi. She is also an Advisor to The Beacon
Geetanjali Shree in The Beacon
I read Intizar saheb’s Basti during my college days. The picture of the village that he paints reminded of my own village. This write-up by none other than Geetanjali Shree, added another layer to the glory that Intizar saheb possessed.