THE SHEPHERD
PART(II)
Dauji smiled and said, “A man who can transform an ordinary donkey like me into one addressed as Munshi Chinta Ram, as Munshiji, what would you call such a man if not a messiah, an aqa?”
Slowly I inched my way from the edge to the centre of the cot, wrapped the quilt securely around myself, and fixed my gaze on Dauji. He sat with drooping head, now looking at his foot, now gently rubbing his calves, smiling a little, then slipping back into silence. Finally he said: ‘It’s amazing. What I started out as, what I became! The first words Hazrat Maulana uttered to me . . . Lifting his blessed face to me he said, “Shepherd boys, come here.” I walked over to him, leaning on my staff. Boy from Chhatta Pathhar and other villages were sitting in front of him in a semicircle memorizing their lessons. It seemed I’d walked straight into a darbar: no one dared to even look up at me. When I approached the Huzur, he said, “My dear, aren’t you the one I see herding goats around here every day? Maybe you should let the animals graze on their own and come over and study with me a bit.” He didn’t wait for my answer and instead asked, “What’s your name?” “Chintu,” I replied, in the coarse manner of a country boy, which prompted His Eminence to smile, even laugh a bit. And then he asked, “What is your full name?” Again, without waiting for response, he proceeded to say, “Must be Chinta Ram.” I nodded. His students were now stealing glances at me. I was wearing a long khaddar shirt and a loincloth in place of a proper pyjama. On my feet I had a pair of coarse raw hide shoes; my head covering improvised from an old pair of red shorts. My goats . . .’
I interrupted Duaji and asked, “You used to be a shepherd? Really, Dauji?”
“Yes, yes indeed I was,” he said with pride, “I was a gadariya. My father owned a dozen goats.”
My mouth fell open in surprise. To get to the bottom of it I rushed to ask, “And you used to graze them near the school?”
Duaji pulled his chair over to my cot, stretched his legs out and, resting his feet on the edge of the bed, said, “Jan-e-pidar, in those days, even the cities didn’t boast of schools, and I’m talking about just a village. Who’d heard of your M.B. High School seventy four years ago? It’s just that my aqa was fond of teaching. So people living in the neighbourhood sent their boys over to him to learn the alphabet. His entire family was adorned with the jewel of learning and enjoyed a surfeit of spiritual blessings. His father had the rare distinction of being the only hakim in the entire district, and was an eminent preacher to boot. And his grandfather was the Mir Munshi in the employ of the Maharaja of Kashmir. A veritable river of learning flowed in their home. Farsi, Arbi, Euclidean geometry, algebra, medicine, astronomy – they were the maids they employed in their house. I never had the good fortune of meeting Huzur’s father, but I was fortunate enough to hear the stories of his great erudition. He was a friend of the poet Sheftah and the poet-physician Momin Khan Momin, while Hazrat Maulana himself received his education in Delhi under the close supervision of the late Mufti Azurdah.”
Afraid that Dauji might be tempted to leave his main story and strike out on some tangent, I quickly asked him, “So you started to study with Hazrat Maulana?”
“Yes,” Dauji began, as if reminiscing to himself. “What a wonder he was! What a discriminating eye he had! Whoever he singled out for attention, he transformed from a humble servant into a master and lord. He could charge a speck of lowly dirt with the most astounding power of cure . . “After a pause, he continued softly, “When he called me, I laid down my club and took a seat near him on the bare ground. But he commanded, “Go and sit with your brothers on the mat.” To which I replied, “All my eighteen years I’ve spent on the bare earth. What difference would it make now?” He smiled again, took out a scroll of abjad letters from a wooden chest, and said, “Repeat after me: alif, be, pe, te. . .” What a lovely voice he had God be praised! With what affection, what tenderness he spoke: “alif, be, te . . .” Chanting the alphabet Dauji lapsed into his past.
A while later he raised his right hand and said, “Over here was a Persian wheel, and a pond of fish right beside it.” Then, waving his left hand in the air, he added, ‘And over there, the brick houses of peasants who worked the fields. The space in between was occupied by Huzur’s garden. Facing it was his magnificent haveli. He set up his school in this very garden. The gate of munificence was open; everyone was welcome. Religion offered no barrier; difference in creed was of no consequence.”
After thinking for some time and fashioning a sentence which would do justice to the decorum warranted by the lofty memory of his revered teacher, I inquired, “What was the ism-e-girami sharif (honourable and noble name) of Hazrat Maulana?“ Whereupon Dauji first corrected my construction and then said, “Hazrat Ismail Chishti, may God’s mercy be upon him. He used to say that his father always called him Jan– e Janan, but sometimes Mazhar Jan– e Janan too, because of the correspondence of the two.”
I was eager to hear more of this fascinating story when Dauji abruptly stopped and said, “Explain the subsidiary system to me.”
Damn these British! Whether they came in the guise of the East India Company or as bearers of the royal edicts of Queen Victoria, they always managed to spoil things for us. Anyway, I explained the whole structure of the subsidiary system to Dauji, like the multiplication table of one and a quarter. Subsequently, he picked up the grammar book from the table and said, “Go and see if your Bebe’s anger has subsided.” I stepped out into the veranda, pretending to add some water to my ink-well, and found Bebe busy at her sewing machine and Bibi cleaning the chauka.
The greatest disappointment in Dauji’s life was Bebe. Whenever he perceived relative calm inside the house, whenever Bebe looked to be in a better mood, he would call out to us, “Come, all of you, and recite a she’r each.” Invariably, I was asked to go first, and I almost always obliged with these lines:
Lazim tha ke dekho mera rasta ko’i din aur
Tanha ga’e kiyun ab raho tanha ko’i din aur
(You should have waited for me a while longer
you wanted to go alone – well then, stay alone a while longer.)
He would break into applause and then lay down his terms, “Good. But give me a fresh couplet, and make sure it isn’t in Urdu, nor from a longer poem.”
“Okay, but give me time to think,” I’d say. “Bibi can recite hers in the meantime.”
Bibi too had a favourite couplet she usually began with:
Shunidam keh Shapur dam dar kasheed Chu Khusrau bar is mash qalam dar kasheed (I’ve heard that as Shapur breathed his last Khusrau struck his name.)Once again Dauji shouted, “Order! Order! And Bibi, putting down her scissors, recited a different one:
Shori shud wa az khyab-e-adam chashm kashodim
Didim keh baqist shab – e fitnah ghunudim
(A tumult awakened us from our sleep of non-existence. We dozed off again seeing that the night of commotion had not ended.)
Even as Dauji complemented bibi, he would point out, “Beti, you’ve already recited that one several times before.” Then looking at Bebe, he’d say to us, “Well, today, even our Bebe will recite a couplet.”
But Bebe had only one answer, a stale one at that: “I don’t know any sheer- geet.”
“Well then, sing some ghoriyan instead,” Dauji would try again. “The one you sang at your sons’ wedding.”
Bebe lips made as if to smile, but some how couldn’t instead, Dauji himself singing goriyan, exactly mimicking the manner of women, inserting sometimes Aminhand’s and my name into festive verses. Then he declared, “When my Golu Molu gets married, I’ll flaunt a bright red turban. I’ll walk with the Doctor Sahib in the wedding procession, and I will sign my name as a witness on the paper.”
At this I would lower my eyes with the customary shyness of a young boy. He would continue: “Who knows, my little bahu must be in the fifth or sixth class somewhere in the country today. Girls are taught housekeeping one day a week, so she must’ve already learnt to cook quite a few dishes. She’ll be very bright, not like this blockhead who can’t remember whether madiyan means mare or hen, she of course, will have all this at the tip of her tongue. Farfar, just like that. I’ll teach her Farsi. I’ll start with basic calligraphy, and then I’ll teach her shakistah style. Our women usually don’t know how to write shakistah. But my bahu will, I’ll teach it to her. Which means …listen Golu… that I’ll be living with you. My bahu and I will speak to each other in farsi, and while she will elegantly say “Befarma’id, Befarma’id” all the time, you‘ll just stand there like an idiot and gawk at us.”
Dauji would then fold his hands on his chest, bow slightly in an gesture of deference and respect, and rain down a torrent of khele khub, khele khub, jan-e pidar, chira in-qadr zehmat mi-kashi…khub…yad daram and God knows what else. Poor Dauji! He’d set up his little world on his little mat, and keep going by issuing edicts in ornate Farsi.
Sitting one day sunning himself on the rooftop, after he had ordered just such an imaginary world in to being, he said to me softly, ’God has granted you a virtuous wife and me a dutiful bahu. May He, by His generosity, also grant just as good a wife to my Amichand. His ideas don’t sit well with me. All this seva sangh, this muslim league, this Belcha party—I don’t like them at all. You know, he’s learning how to use lathis and clubs these days. He’s not likely to listen to me. But if the Venerable and sublime God could grant him a pious and momin wife, she’d surely talk some sense into him.’
The word momin bothered me quite a bit, but I decided to remain silent. Anything I said would only have hurt Dauji.
While amichand’s and my marriages were mere talk at this point, Bibi actually did get married, on 12 January. Dauji had already filled me in about Ram Partap: what a fine boy he was, how he measured up to Dauji prior consultation with the Quran, so on and so forth. But what pleased him the most was that Ram Partap’s father, his samdhi, was a teacher of Farsi and belonged to the kabir panthi sect.
That evening, when the time came for Bibi to leave the parental home for good, the whole house was thrown into a commotion. Bebe wept inconsolably, Amichand shed his tears quietly, and the women from the neighbourhood whispered among themselves. I stood learning against the wall, and Dauji stood right beside me with his hand on my shoulder, repeating now and again, ’Why do I fell so wobbly today? Seems I can’t keep my balance.’
To be continued...