Chashma
This time on my dada abbu’s annual summer trip to our small midwest town, he brought with him a small box. It was a light weight, light green box. It was not a fancy box. It did not look like something that would carry someone’s entire worldview.
This light weight, light green plastic box had Khaled Optical written on it, accompanied by some numbers and a branch address to contact the local glasses-makers for your next off-brand Prada eyewear. This is the same light weight, light green box already stuffed in our miscellaneous drawers. It sits next to some old keys, alcohol wipes, cheap jewelry that is not silver anymore, loose hair pins, and deteriorating passport size photos — all objects which we are too lazy to retire, or have an unexplainable attachment to. The same eyewear boxes that come to America in our relatives’ overweight luggages, placed next to a box of barfi, at times wrapped in a synthetically dyed dubatta from Moon Market, or maybe inside a steel cooking pot bought from Ichhra. These light weight, light green boxes carry vision inside them, because when healthcare, and accessories to see in the United States become too expensive, we contact Khaled Optical to be our Medicare for All.
I opened this box to find the last pair of my dadi’s glasses. The pair she wore before she passed away. A pair that had felt the air of many places and talked to many people. They were sitting still inside this light weight, light green box. Peacefully, as if it were a coffin, as if they had already molded the box to its shape. That is how many years the glasses carried with them across the seven seas.
At first, at the young age I was, the frame was not appealing to me. The big, but thin, circular, yet square-shaped, cream-colored glasses were so faint, they were reminiscent to a chameleon — blending in where ever they saw fit. The accessory reminded me of something to be adorned on the face of a 1970s Bollywood actress, specifically Zeenat Aman playing a Hare Krishna. To me, they were an amulet, an antique, something to sit in our miscellaneous drawers next to some old keys, alcohol wipes, once silver jewelry, loose hair pins and deteriorating passport size photos. To collect dust, to be passed down, not, to be worn.
But my beloved dada abbu did get my -3.00, -3.25 astigmatism prescription fitted in them. And considering that my eyes become weaker every 365 days, I would do them injustice if I did not take them out of that box and let that chashma of my dadi help me navigate this world.
When I wore her glasses for the first time, they were more of a window to the lived experiences of her life, rather than a simple tool to help me see beyond ten feet. They made me feel like I was part of a history much older than my conceptualization, a reality much bigger, and richer than myself. I started visualizing the same stories which were once lullabies to me every night as I laid in a chaar pai next to my dada abbu and dadi ama.
Many of these stories were about their childhood in Bhera. Theirs, and those who were displaced.
Upon wearing the glasses I was reminded of a young girl. Her hair oiled, for strength, growth, and for a sleek, shiny look of course. Braided tightly, and fastened with two golden and red parandas, one for each side of her maang. I saw her running through one of the eight gates of the walled city, the Loharan Mori Gate, and through one of the 90 mohallas of Bhera, the Mohallah Ahmadiyya. She was only a little girl, oblivious to the preachers of the time, whose efforts were focused in trying to “other” neighbors of the same abadis, students of the same schools, and devotees of the same shrine.
She, and my dada abbu were often, let’s say, window shoppers of Khillu’s convenient store. Khillu was one of the Hindu dwellers of the city of Bhera, before the Radcliffe line.
My favorite part of the story, the one I always looked forward to hearing, the one I pretended I never knew before, despite forcing it out of my grandparents multiple times a week, was when Azmat and Hamid would playfully say to the shopkeeper, “Khillu, gosht khaye gaa?” (Khillu, would you like to eat some meat?), accompanied with deviant smiles on their faces resembling a crescent. A crescent similar to the one soon to be stitched on Jinnah’s flag.
But, “Khillu, gosht khaye ga?” did not just come out at first sight. I mean, what type manners are there to say such without a greeting? They would enter the shop, say their salams, and look around for some time. One in one corner, and one in the other.
Khillu was well acquainted with them. After all, Azmat and Hamid were regulars. He was always behind the counter. Stoically, sitting cross legged in his colorful silk and tilla lungi from Mohallah Ali Purian, hand weaved by Bhera’s last silk lungi weaver, Nadir Khan. He was prideful of his genes and his full head of hair, dyed with mehndi, home grown in his city. To preserve his hair in a singular direction, he kept his hand crafted wooden comb near him at all times, whose material, a wild wood called Kahu, was transported to Bhera all the way from Peshawar. He was not to be disturbed, and he found solace in soaking in the aroma of freshly lit lavender incense, placed delicately with love under a gold frame of Guru Gorakhnath. Momentarily, when the paragraphs of the latest column in The Jung became too long for him, he would take a break, move the corner of the paper with his index finger, adjust his chashma, lift an eyebrow, and peak an eye out to make sure that these kids were acting as good Hindustanis.
What Khillu was not able to capture was the way children’s eyes communicate, how thought out their plan of action usually is, and that by a simple glance, and tilt of a head, they are able to signal one another of the next move.
“Khillu! Gosht hhaye ga?”
A startled Khillu would then jump out of his wooden cane chair with a lac foundation, turned by the hands of a widow woodworker located in Chitti Puly Gate, mark his reading with a silver fountain pen to pick up later, and run after Azmat and Hamid. Rushed with adrenaline, in the midst of a joyfulness of triggering him, these two Robinhoods of their time would take with them akhrot, baadaam, chilgoza, pista, kishmish, and kajoo from his grand display of dry fruits from Quetta for their joyride back, and to share with their mohallay daar, all the way across the Nagianwala mandir and the Sher Shahi masjid.
Today, I think of the city-dwellers of Bhera. I think of the Khillus and their loved ones. I think of their new homes after 14 August. What they took with them in trains carrying up to 7000 Hindus and Sikhs, their stay at the nearby refugee camp in Mandi Bahauddin, and how they battled hunger and diseases like cholera there. What emotions did they feel when they reached Atari railway station in India? What arms, if any, did they take up to defend their families when their trains reached its next station? Stations often crowded with the new oppressors of the subcontinent, balwais, who waited eagerly to ambush muhajirs from both sides.
These oppressors were not English colonial officials or their sepoys, rather, home grown righteous young men, ready to slain the other in the name of their Giver.
I think of Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha, Chairman of Bhera’s Municipal Committee during the time of partition, who single handedly turned away a mob of balwais. Right at the dawn of independence, a mob of outsiders had marched to Bhera to purge the Hindu and Sikh families getting ready to depart from their homes. A family friend tells us, Piracha sahib took off his turban and placed it at the feet of the leader of the mob, pleading for salvation — sharing with them the centuries of peaceful coexistence of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, and life in their intertwined mohallas and abadis. His plea reminded me of a passage by Pran Nevile, author of Lahore: A Sentimental Journey, as he reminisced on the brotherhood of the different communities in Lahore. He recalls, “When Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs broke sugarcane, or ate aloo-puri, they did so in a similar fashion. When they went to buy wares at Anarkali bazaar, they did so together. This was — is—our Punjabi culture and it had little to do with religion.” Piracha sahib’s efforts of patriotism for his city were successful, as he was able to disperse the mob.
Another often recited story was about a Muslim elder who marched with the Hindu and Sikh muhajirs to the railway station near Bhera for their departure. This elderly fellow insisted all the windows in the train carts to be shut tightly. Each box held multiple families, all pressed against each other, breathing on top of the other, and in dire need for windows to fulfill their function of air flow in the mid-August heat. Yet, this elder insisted each and every window to be covered. Covered with anything — a handmade quilt, a hand-fan, a flat basket weaved from of saroota; a wild grass, a hand weaved carpet with a Turkamani design, someone’s luggage, even a mother’s yarn salara.
His foresight was precise. Balwais almost always greeted muhajirs with swords, battons, and even revolvers once their train reached its next stop. And a window, often used in early Urdu literature to ignite hope and agency towards liberation among a female protagonist, a window showcasing the variety of agriculture in fields across Punjab, and a window fulfilling its function of air flow, would become a gateway for man slaughter.
Bherochis have plenty of pride for their city. Why wouldn’t they? Bhera was a prominent trading hub near Jhelum, a fruitful crafts center of hand wood carving, lac turning, comb-making, hand woven khais, silk lungis, block printing, khussas, stone carving, and many more. It also birthed the families of prolific writers and actors Bhisham and Balraj Sahni. Its existence in history goes as back as 326 B.C.E. Alexander Cunningham, an archaeologist of the subcontinent, has named it the unofficial capital of Sophytes; who once crowned the salt ranges during the time Alexander the Great arrived in Punjab. Alexander the Great had chosen Hydaspes (Jhelum) to sail down from, and appointed his generals Kraterus and Hephaestion to erect camps near Bhera. The city had impressed Alexander so much, it is rumored that he had Bherochis accompany him back to Greece, whose successors still live there.
Wood Worker Widows of Bhera, acrylics on canvas, 2017
After leaving their beloved city, Bherochis named their new home, nearby Delhi, Bhera Enclave. Four cities in West Punjab became part of Greater Delhi’s geography. Still populated today, they are Gujranwala Town, Multan Colony, Bhera Enclave, and Mianwali Nagar. In a community center of Bhera Enclave, a plaque welcomes visitors to the city with the message, “the residents of Bhera Enclave fondly remember BHERA— the city of their ancestors.”
This displacement of Hindu and Sikh families from Bhera, and Pakistan as a whole, was not one that was temporary. After partition, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions, no party platforms that advocated for a singular state. The politics of “othering” had become so engraved in the nation-building project, there was to be no inquiring of sarhad ke uss par — the other side of the border. It was not nationalism in the name of decolonization, or for the collective interest of the common Hindustani in Iqbal’s tarana, but the one Tagore once warned us about in his essay Nationalism, a phenomena to be weary of, a selfish cult that would employ politicizing religion, race, creed, and caste, to make man his own menace, to the point of a partition. Families who migrated to India could not be optimistic about returning to West Punjab in the near future, not even as tourists. Sure, the keys of their vacant homes which they carried with them held plentiful meaning, but would be reduced out of their purpose after finding refuge in those miscellaneous drawers next to some alcohol wipes, once silver jewelry, loose hair pins, and deteriorating passport size photos.
I once again think of Khillu. Did he also tell his family, his children, his grandchildren about his life in undivided India? How proud Bherochis were of the craftsmen and women of their city? How the unity Jinnah once wanted for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan actually existed in Bhera before his speech in the historic Lahore Conference of the League in March of 1940? Did Khillu know the exact moment he entered a new soil? And when he did, whose empty house did he inhabit? Did Khillu tell his loved ones, his children, and grandchildren about Azmat and Hamid too? And did they also look forward to the line “Khillu, gosht khaye ga?”
This is just a brief history of a city that once was, a city prideful of a harmony which we hear only so often. A city currently in utmost need for conservation and preservation of its gurdwaras, temples, masjids, mohallahs, and its craftsmen and women. A city alive, and thriving in the conscious of Bherochis, but actively deteriorating in the recollection of their children and grandchildren.
Not only does the colonizer extract wealth and mobility from its subjects, but it takes away a people’s agency to document the terror they witnessed in front of their eyes. Do not read the diary of a colonial administrator posted in Lahore, whose duty was to record in English the very same resistance which was instituted as a result of his presence there. His limited, uninvited stay, and blasé speech will not give you a nuanced insight of an undivided India. He has homogenized our ancestors, stripped them of their memory, etched out their faces, and painted them as a submissive folk in their history books. I was able to find more complexity in the lullabies of my grandparents, and in Bhera di boli; the indigenous tongue once not suited appropriate enough to archive her history, than the testimony of uninvited guests.
A few couplets by Munawwar Rana come to mind:
Muhajir hain, magar hum aik dunya chorr aye hain
Tumharay pass jitna hai, hum utna chorr aye hain
مہاجر ہیں، مگر ہم ایک دنیا چھوڑ آئے ہیں
تمھارے پاس جتنا ہے ، ہم اُتنا چھوڑ آئے ہے
Kal eik amrood walay say yeh kehna par gaya hum ko
Jahan say aye, iss phal ki bagiyya chorr aye hain
کل ایک امرود والے سے یے کہنا پڑ گیا ہم کو
جہان سے ائے ، اس پھل کی بگیا چھور ائے ہیں
Udhar ka koi mil jaye, idhar to hum yahi pochhain
Hum aankhein chorr aye hain, ke chashma chorr aye hain
اُدھر کا کوئ مل جائے ، اِدھر تو ہم یہی پوچھیں
ہم انکھیں چھوڑ ائے ہیں ، کے چشما چھوڑ ائے ہیں
Sources:
The Persistence of Memory, Kalpana Sahni
Crafts of the Punjab, Vol. III BHERA, Has-Saan Gardezi
Remembering the Beloved Town of Bhera:
Reminiscences of a displaced Hind, Dr. Gian Sarup
Muhajirnama, Munawwar Rana
The timely company of Uncle Prem Sarup and his family
And the lullabies-turned-oral history which my dadi ama and dada abbu, Azmat and Hamid Malik recited to me every night in Lahore
