Half a Rupee: Stories Read online

  Gulzar

  HALF A RUPEE

  Stories

  Translated by

  Sunjoy Shekhar

  Contents

  About the Author

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Dedication

  FOREWORD

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  1. Kuldip Nayyar and Pir Sahib

  2. Sahir and Jaadu

  3. Bhushan Banmali

  II

  1. The Stench

  2. The Rain

  3. The Charioteer

  4. From the Footpath

  III

  1. LoC

  2. Over

  3. The Rams

  IV

  1. Hilsa

  2. The Stone Age

  3. The Search

  V

  1. Farewell

  2. Swayamvar

  3. Half a Rupee

  VI

  1. Gagi and Superman

  2. Ghugu and Jamuni

  3. The Orange

  VII

  1. Under the Earth

  2. Shortcut

  3. Pickpocket

  VIII

  1. Dusk

  2. Dadaji

  3. The Adjustment

  Footnotes

  The Rain

  Farewell

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HALF A RUPEE

  Gulzar is one of India’s most respected scriptwriters and film directors, and has been one of the most popular lyricists in mainstream Hindi cinema for over five decades. One of the country’s leading poets, he has published a number of poetry anthologies and collections of short stories. He is also regarded as one of India’s finest writers for children.

  Apart from many Filmfare and National Awards for his films and lyrics—and an Oscar and Grammy for the song Jai ho—Gulzar has received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2002 and the Padma Bhushan in 2004. He lives and works in Mumbai.

  Sunjoy Shekhar was born in Sahibganj, a small, sleepy town in Jharkhand on the banks of the river Ganga. He started work as an editor with a Delhi-based publishing house before moving on to writing dramas for television. He has more than 10,000 hours of story-writing credits across a host of television channels in India and Indonesia. He has also translated Gulzar’s 100 Lyrics.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Selected Poems, translated by Pavan K. Varma

  100 Lyrics, translated by Sunjoy Shekhar

  Neglected Poems, translated by Pavan K. Varma

  Yudhishtar and Draupadi, translation of a work by

  Pavan K. Varma

  for

  SALIM ARIF AND LUBNA SALIM

  Foreword

  I wish I didn’t have to write a Foreword to my stories. I have nothing to explain about a story, if it doesn’t explain itself.

  Of course there are various subjects on which I have written. But then life is not lived in a monotone. You pass through a variety of phases, both personally and socially. You meet a galaxy of people in the orbit of your days and nights. I have touched on a few.

  Don’t be surprised if you find yourself reading about some well-known names. Some of these stories are biographical in a way. There are many who have shared some emotional experiences with me, and I am sharing them with others.

  Humra Quraishi is one person I would like to mention in particular. We shared a lot of Kashmir though neither of us is from there.

  Some of these stories were translated by Devina Dutt earlier and published in Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi. But all the stories have been translated anew by Sunjoy Shekhar, to give them uniformity of style and expression. Sunjoy is an inimitable writer and an intimate friend; he has a way with words.

  Last—but foremost—is Udayan Mitra: he has given a shine to my work. I agreed to publish this collection on one condition: that he would edit my book. He has done all my earlier books too. And I will come back again, only if he has the time to edit my work. Thank you, Udayan.

  Mumbai

  Gulzar

  December 2012

  Introduction

  When I was growing up on the cobbled streets of small-town Bihar, night always appeared to fall early. Before the streets could echo with the sounds ofconch shells and the ululation of mothers and aunts performing their pujas, we children would be dragged by the scruff of our dusty, mangy collars by elder sisters to be scrubbed clean and placed before piles of waiting homework—before they could stoke the coal in the evening chullahs. In the spiralling smoke of those chullahs you could almost see our prayers rising to petition the Old Man in the sky. All the kids, praying in unison, asking for just one thing—a power cut, the longer the better. And when the street would suddenly plunge into darkness, hundreds of tiny feet would break free, leap out of houses, milling around a man we knew only as Makoria Mamu. He had only half a tongue. The other half he claimed his stepmother had cut off. God knows whose mamu he was, or why he was called Makoria—‘spidery’—but he sure had a web of stories to brighten our darkest nights. We would huddle around him in rapt attention as he spun his narratives—with only half his tongue—around people we knew, around things that happened in our real lives, parables masquerading as real, tangible adventures. At the end of his stories, he would demand a chapatti from each one of us. There was hardly a household in the mohalla that did not make one extra chapatti for Makoria Mamu. We never saw him before dark, and I never saw him ever again when I swapped my small town for big-city India.

  It is believed that a community, a society, a nation is as strong and healthy as the stories they tell themselves. In this collection of twenty-five stories—with a cast of characters to rival the residents of a Naipaulian Miguel Street—I can smell my Makoria Mamu.

  Gulzar saab has always told stories in his songs. But when he writes short stories, he peppers them with the verve of a Bhagwati Charan Varma, the compassion of a Mahadevi Varma; he morphs these stories into songs of a kind that make these characters greater than the sum of their sufferings. The powerful alchemy of his storytelling transforms the atthanni—the half a rupee coin—into a rupaiya.

  These stories can make your heart grow larger. A story sprouts wherever the men and women who populate this book appear—be it a far-flung desert outpost or the storage godown of a film studio. The characters in this book are born into their own stories, but it is only when Gulzar, the writer, is born out of these stories that he finds shelter: ‘tum hee se janmoon toh shayad panah miley’.

  The magic of storytelling is derived from our ability to summon up all our thoughts about who we are and where we are going, by our ability to take lives that are lived in halves and make them whole. A good storyteller is the conscience-keeper of a nation.

  And Gulzar saab is a good storyteller.

  I had a blast translating these stories and I just hope that I was able to capture the magic of Gulzar saab’s originals in my translations. If I have succeeded even in a small measure, the credit must go to Udayan Mitra, an editor every writer should pray for, and to my wife of twenty years, Geeta. I would like to dedicate my translations to my Subhash Mamu, and to my daughter Gauraa in the hope that she can see a world that she could not read about in the original Urdu. I also need to thank Manoj Punjabi, without whose magnanimity I would not have found the time to finish this book.

  Jakarta

  Sunjoy Shekhar

  December 2012

  I

  Walk through the pages of a book and

  You’ll find characters, like old friends

  In the corridors of time—

  Kuldip Nayyar and Pir Sahib

  I remember it was a Friday, the evening of 14 August 1998. Kuldip Nayyar and I were driving
towards the Wagah border.

  Nayyar Sahib had been doing this without fail for quite some time. Every year on 14 August he would land up at the Wagah border with a few scholars, poets, artists and littérateurs. During the change of guards, when the fags of the two nations are lowered, he and his friends would rend the air with slogans of Indo-Pak friendship. They would light lamps at the border post and keep up their candlelight vigil till the clocks struck the turn of a new day. This was how he and his friends celebrated the two Independence Days of a pair of twins born a day apart.

  It was a long straight road to Wagah. The evening was gathering darkness and Nayyar Sahib was saying, ‘If the road keeps going straight ahead like this and there are no roadblocks, no checkposts, no hindrances or obstructions of any kind—and if I go visit Pakistan for a little while, what harm will I cause to that country, what will I have pillaged? Not that there is a dearth of pillagers and plunderers in that country or ours. No one needs to raid our countries from the outside.’

  A hush fell over us. After a long pause Nayyar Sahib said, ‘After all, that country too is my home. A large part of me still lives on that side of the border.’

  He must have seen some sort of question floating in my eyes, for he elaborated further: ‘My school is over there—my madrasa. My teacher, Master Dinanath, and my maulvi, Ismail. My alphabet primer, my school bags, they still are across the border. My roots still remain on the other side. I have only cut loose the branches and tugged them along with me.’

  Nayyar Sahib’s voice was increasingly tinged with veneration for what was once his home. That day, Sialkot took over his thoughts often. ‘All of us, uncles and aunts—father’s elder brother, younger brother, his brother-in-law—we all had our houses next to each other, in the same lane. Right in front of our house was a large space. An open space. Not a single brick wall to mark a boundary. Not a single peg hammered in the ground to delineate one house from another. Enough space for everybody. No need to squabble over it. Right across this open space was a big leafy pipal tree. It was closer to our house than any of my uncles’. And right under the tree’s canopy, near the foot of its trunk was a grave. It was unmarked. We had no idea whose bones lay under the raised mound of mud, but Ma often said that it was the holy Pir Baba’s grave, and that was how it was known.

  ‘Ma would anoint the trunk of the pipal with sindoor and light a diya, an earthen lamp, on the grave. She would dip her finger in the small pot of sindoor and smear it on the pipal but would wipe the rich vermillion smeared on her finger clean against the exposed bricks of the grave. She would light the diya, do the aarti of the pipal but would place the lit diya in the crumbling alcove of the tombstone. When an offering was made to the pipal, an offering would be made to the Pir Sahib as well. If things had upset her at home, she would go and sit leaning against the trunk of the pipal and talk for hours on end to Pir Sahib. At times she would even cry her heart out. Thus unburdened, she would glide back to the house, and bring the Pir Sahib along too. Poor Pir Sahib! He knew of no peace even in his grave. Ma would summon him from his rest all the time.

  ‘I remember during our school examinations, Ma would say, “Bow your head before Pir Sahib, seek his blessing before you go.” Whether it was examinations or festivals, moments of celebration or mourning, there was no happiness big enough and no sadness small enough not to involve Pir Sahab. There was no respite for him.’

  Lapsing into colloquial Punjabi, Nayyar Sahib said, ‘If an important question needed to be answered, some decision needed to be made, it was Pir Sahib’s advice that Ma sought. We never got any answers from Pir Sahib, but Ma would get signs from him. At times, Ma would say that Pir Sahib came in her dreams and told her what to do.’

  We had reached Wagah. The sun was about to set. The fags of both the countries were lowered in a ritualistic retreat ceremony. There were a few people on the Pakistan side and a handful on ours. Film star Raj Babbar had joined us. The celebrated lawyer and human rights activist Asma Jahangir was supposed to be on the other side, but eventually she did not turn up; she was not allowed to by her government. At the stroke of midnight we all lit candles at the border. We took a few pictures and rent the air thick with Indo–Pak friendship slogans. And with a lump in our a-little-parched-a-little-choked throats, we returned.

  The next day we were on the way to Delhi. But I wanted to trek back to Sialkot. So I picked up the threads of our old conversation. ‘Nayyar Sahib, your mother saw the Pir Sahib in her dreams. Did you ever ask her what the Pir Sahib looked like, how he appeared to be?’

  Nayyar Sahib was in a different mood now. A smile appeared on his lips and he said, ‘I started off as an investigative journalist. It was in my nature to ask. And ask I did. And to tell you the truth, I found Pir Sahib to be exactly the way Ma told me.’

  ‘Found him … meaning … you … you … met him?’

  He kept smiling. And said, ‘In 1975 when Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency, I was amongst the political leaders and intellectuals she threw behind bars. That day too was a Friday—I remember it vividly. 24 July 1975. They kept me in Tihar Jail. The jailer told me that my incarceration was only momentary and that I would be released soon. When I asked him who gave the orders, all he said was a single word: “Madam.” But when a few days passed without any sign of release I requested the jailer if he could fetch me my books and journals. He was a gentleman, the jailer. Not only did he get me what I had asked for, he made sure that I was provided with a table and a table lamp.

  ‘The period of my incarceration began to lengthen at an arduously slow pace. And then one day when I lost hope, I asked him when I would be released.’

  I kept quiet. Nayyar Sahib too just kept looking at me in silence. We were now sitting in the airport lounge in Amritsar. Suddenly, the penny dropped: ‘Him? You asked him? Whom?’

  He was perhaps waiting for me to explicitly raise this question and said, ‘Pir Sahib, who else?’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘He came to me in my dreams. Dressed in flowing green robes with a long white beard. That’s how Ma had described him and that’s how I saw him. I do not remember if his head was covered …’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said that I would be a free man by Thursday.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘Yes … he said, “I am feeling too cold, beta. Give your shawl to me, son.”’ And Nayyar Sahib laughed.

  ‘So, you were released … I mean were you released by Thursday?’

  ‘No. Come Thursday, I became very restless. Not because I was still cooped up in the jail … but for Pir Sahib … I don’t know why but I wanted his promise to come true … perhaps I wanted to believe in him … I don’t know. As was my habit, I kept working late into the night and got up late the next day. It was on Friday morning that the jailer came to me with my release orders. 11 September 1975. A little surprised, I looked at him and asked, “When did these orders come?”

  ‘“The release orders arrived last night only. But by the time I came on duty it was quite late. You were at your desk, working, and you had given us strict instructions not to disturb you.”

  ‘I looked at him, my voice reinforced by faith, and reiterated, “Yesterday! You mean the release orders arrived on Thursday night?”

  ‘The jailer hesitated for a moment and then looked at me, “Yes sir! … You already knew about it?”

  ‘And I happily told him, “Yes, I had prior information!”’

  There was more to this incident. Nayyar Sahib said that when his mother got to know about it, she told him, ‘Son, you must make a pilgrimage to his tomb in Sialkot. You must offer him the shawl. He must be really feeling cold.’

  ‘Tears had welled up in Ma’s eyes,’ Nayyar Sahib recounted. ‘But I was not able to go to Sialkot immediately thereafter. Those days it was difficult to acquire a visa to visit Sialkot. But when Ma passed away in 1990 I felt obligated to go. When I reached Sialkot I found the place where we once lived had become
totally different. It was unrecognizable. The huge open space in front of our house was divided up into small shops. The whole place had taken the shape of a market. And the grave was nowhere to be found. I asked almost everybody I met but no one knew about the grave, no one remembered it. It did not exist in their memories. I somehow approximated the place where the giant pipal had once stood. There was no sign of the tree or the grave.

  ‘A shop now stood there instead. I kept visiting the shopkeeper every day. And he stayed true to his refrain that he had not seen any grave, did not know about one. Then when I was about to return I bumped into the same shopkeeper, this time outside the market area. And he accosted me, saying, “Whose grave was it? The grave that you were looking for?”

  ‘I told him it was the grave of a Pir. My mother had great faith in him.

  ‘The man became a little uneasy at this. He hemmed and hawed but finally with great reluctance confessed, “Yes, there certainly was a grave here, adjacent to our shop. We were refugees. In those days we lived in the shop only. There hardly was any space. It was too confined. And then we encroached upon the grave. In order to live, we had to steal the space of a grave from the dead.”

  ‘I came back. And then one day I went to the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya and the shawl that I had taken with me to Sialkot, I offered at the tomb.’

  ‘Did he come in your dreams ever again?’

  ‘No! How I wished he had! Many a times in my hours of darkness, in my times of trouble, I wished he would come to me in my dreams. I wished I could ask him a few things. How I longed for his advice, his answers. But he never did. Perhaps he left this earth along with Ma. Finally, he had got his respite. Finally, he had found salvation.’

  Sahir and Jaadu

  All this happened before they hoisted Sahir’s mortal remains up on their shoulders and took him out on his last journey. It was Jaadu who told me the story.