BackLounge Extract |The Golden Pigeon
Moving excerpts of the impact of Partition from a new novel on Delhi
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Shahid Siddiqui, a former member of Parliament and an Urdu author who grew up in old Delhi, has just written his first novel in English. The book, The Golden Pigeon, deals with the story of two brothers divided by the events of 1947. Edited excerpts:
I was shivering and so was my mother. Under the seat of the tonga in which we were hiding, we could hardly breathe. I wanted to cry but my mother had put her henna-coloured hand on my mouth. I used to love sucking her fingers but now she was virtually suffocating me. I could taste the pungent smell of fear emanating from her body, which normally smelled of roses and jasmine.
I could hear the rhythm of the tonga, taktaktak, tuktuktak. The beat of the horse’s hooves used to be music to my ears when we rode in a tonga to the Qutb Minar for a picnic on the third day of Eid every year. All the girls in the family would be singing loudly, while I enjoyed the soft comfort of their laps. But today my mother and I were escaping from my father, with whom we had gone to Old Delhi railway station before sunrise. My father, Azizuddin Khan, had decided to migrate to Pakistan but my mother was opposed to it. She had resisted my father for two years. My mother, Hina Begum, loved the bylanes of Delhi. She could never imagine living in any city but Shahjahanabad, the city of her Mughal ancestors. My mother cried and cried, but failed to convince my father. When his jeweller’s shop in Chandni Chowk was attacked and burnt down, Azizuddin said, enough is enough. He could not live in Delhi anymore. He was going with his beautiful wife Hina Kauser and his twin sons Aijaz and Shiraz to Pakistan, where he was told that every Muslim was safe.
‘Lahore is as much the land of our ancestors as Delhi ever was. It was also built by Akbar, Jahangir and Shahjahan. You will not miss your beloved Delhi. Lahore is a carbon copy of Shahjahanabad,’ argued Azizuddin Khan.
‘But they speak Punjabi in Lahore, not Urdu, and how can you compare Dilli to Lahore.’ Hina was scandalized. ‘Lahore is the city of Noor Jahan, the conspirator princess from Persia, not the city of the Mughals. Our ancestors loved Delhi and Agra,’ said my mother, trying to score some points in this argument, which she knew she was going to lose anyway.
We had our last dinner of Dilli ki nahari, a special spicy meat preparation invented by the Delhi of Shahjahan, on the evening of 30 March 1950. My Nani, Qudsia Begum, hugged us all for the last time. My mother was crying silently, tears rolling down from her golden-brown eyes and making Azizuddin miserable. My brother Aijaz and I were just two years old—though Aijaz was older than me by twenty-five minutes—and had no idea what all the fuss was about. The only thing we knew was that we were going to sit in a train, which we had only seen from a distance till then. Bundu Chacha, our family coachman, used to take us to the Old Delhi railway station in his tonga and show us the big black noisy engine. He was very good at copying the sounds of a train and we enjoyed sitting on his back while he crawled around the room on all fours, whistling like an engine. Tall and fair, with a handlebar moustache, Bundu Khan was a brave, proud man who claimed to be a descendant of the great horsemen of Samarqand. He plied his humble tonga through the crowded streets of Delhi with all the pride of a royal charioteer.
In the darkness of a cloudy Delhi morning, we took two tongas to the railway station. The city was burning. There had been riots all night in the walled city of Shahjahanabad. My father’s house was in Kuncha Cheelan in Daryaganj. The rioters were still asleep, tired after a day of burning and looting. My father took advantage of this lull and asked Bundu Chacha to take us to the station to catch the morning train to Lahore. We reached the station safely. My father was carrying Aijaz while I slept in my mother’s lap, unaware of the great drama taking place around me. My father settled Hina Begum on an empty bench and went to buy the tickets with Aijaz sleeping on his shoulder. My mother, clad in her black burqa, suddenly stood up and, holding me in her arms, ran out of the station. She would not go to this godforsaken place called Pakistan when the graves of her Mughal ancestors were all here in Delhi. She had gone blank with fear. She was not in control of herself, it was as though some jinn had possessed her. A woman who had never walked out of her door alone, a woman who had never spoken to a strange man, was running madly, not knowing where she was headed. Suddenly, she tripped and fell on the road, her burqa flying in all directions. I began crying at full volume. Someone picked me up, and then I was in the strong hands of Bundu Chacha. He helped my mother get up. When she told him to take her to my grandmother’s house in Ballimaran, Bundu looked at her disapprovingly. Bundu was a follower of Maulana Azad and was entirely opposed to the idea of Pakistan, but he also knew that a woman’s place was with her sartaj, her husband.
‘Hina Begum, you must go back and be with your husband, wherever he may take you,’ he admonished my mother in his gruff voice. But my mother was adamant she wanted to go to her mother’s house. She could not leave her mother and all her memories here in her beloved Dilli.
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