A surge within that took over

Many of the significant novels of the nineteenth/twentieth century have probed the illusive but ever-present value of the past. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, in a way Joyce’s Ulysses and some works of Virginia Woolf. Perhaps the new theories about the working of the mind made the writers to revisit their understanding of what had gone by, the immanence of something that was being understood as civilisational collective consciousness.

It captured the attention as one read these novels but reading Intizar Husain was like dipping into the seething pool of one’s own being. What was so qualitatively different -- perhaps it was Urdu that made the past so pressingly ones own, it could be that what he writes about is not about another culture but revisited in the collective experience of our immediate past.

The symbol of migration has always attracted and haunted mankind. The uprooting is traumatic but opens new possibilities through the anguish and agony of losing a home conjoined with the hope of acquiring a new one. The people of this region, too, underwent a migration the scale of which was not known to human history.

So many moved without focus, or full intention, or complete conviction, little realising that all this would be an accretion of memories that they would not get rid of the way they got rid of the land and physical surroundings.

These memories disordered, unmarshalled, chaotic, take some shape, some form with a dynamic all its own and the present becomes a heap of memories, the future as if coloured by the force of the same sinuous memories. The emotional trauma is not informed merely by the consequence of physical survival and well-being.

The writings of Intizar Husain, like Qayyuma Ki Dukaan, were read with a certain kind of detached response. But when I visited the land where my family had migrated from, on an hours notice in 1947, the whole evocative force of his writings became palpable and a lived experience. It became my own experience.

I was born in Lahore after my parents migrated but had grown up listening to the tales and stories of a land that had become inaccessible to them. The graveyard of the ancestors and the indifferently managed orchards had as if wrenched away from them and there was this ever-present yearning to reconnect and create a small island founded on the memories of time that they could only reclaim through recall.

With passing years the state of dispossession in material terms was compensated to some extent but the cultural vacuum became bigger with every passing event or a happening of some significance. The first few years of my life in Lahore was a series of endless comparisons; time was not butchered into hours, minutes and seconds but felt through the scent of dust, the smell of summer, the cool embracing darkness of the tehkhanas (basements), the bracing onrush of monsoon breeze, the dark clusters of invading clouds, the feel of rain, the fragrance of the first drop on arid land.

I went to Panipat as a grown-up and alone, and as I stepped onto the streets there was a surge within that took over. It was as if I was being driven by an unknown force that had taken hold of me, guiding me through the narrow streets. The streets and the houses were the same as in any town of northern India but it was not my interaction with brick, mortar, stone and asphalt but with bits and pieces from the lore which I had grown up.

These were the building blocks of my consciousness, the core of my emotional self. I did not know what I was looking for -- the ancestral mohalla, the house of my grandfather, the shrine of Boo Ali Qalandar, hujras where the great sarangi players did their riyaz, the bela of dhak trees on the bank of the Jamuna aplenty with neel gai and harans. Hali Muslim School, the chauraha outside the imambargah.

I was even afraid to ask the strangers to reach my own address for it was like permitting the intruders into the inner most chamber of my own secrecy.

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Intizar Husain’s evocation of the land of birth "janam bhoomi," the sight of the walls from the rocking cradle like a heaving bosom, the door opening into the courtyard letting in the first ray of sunlight, the small playground turned into an insatiable appetite of adventure, the street outside the great unknown and the first trip to the bazaar, dargah or a grandmother’s house boiling over with instinctual yearnings is so very real that to deny it is to block the flow of the river of human consciousness, and to denounce it is to pander only to the dictates of the present-day realities.