My twice
a year visits to Peshawar, the city of my birth,
are usually predictable affairs. I visit the family
and friends, attend a few literary sittings, visit
the haunts of my childhood and youth and teach
at my alma mater, Khyber Medical College. Two
years ago on a similar visit I got enmeshed in
an unusual and unique quest that took me all over
that ancient city in search of some very special
mementos. I was searching, literally, for a needle
in a proverbial haystack. In this case the needle
or rather needles were small fragments of a demolished
house and the haystacks were the large warehouses
that recycle salvaged materials from torn down
old houses.
I was born 68 years ago in a ramshackle old house
in the walled city of Peshawar that had been our
homestead since 1870. My grandfather was a physician
in the service of British India and was posted
in the tribal outposts along the unmarked and
turbulent western frontier with Afghanistan. He
bought the house in Peshawar to bring an end to
the nomadic life he was obliged to live working
for the government. Within ten years of dropping
anchor the patriarch died but left behind a rich
legacy of family traditions that survived him
for another hundred years. They were all centered
around the house.
It was an ordinary brick and white-plaster house
with ceilings of wooden beams, cement floors and
dirt-covered roof terraces. In its haphazardly
scattered rooms on three floors, lived a large
family of nine brothers and sisters, three aunts
and a few orphaned cousins. In addition there
were always a few guests staying in the downstairs
male quarters called hujra. Upstairs in the ladies
quarters or zenana, the ladies of the house lived
a rather secluded life that evolved around cooking,
sewing and cleaning. In the afternoon the neighborhood
children came to the house for lessons in Qura’nic
reading given by the ladies of the house.
Twenty-six children spanning three generations
were born and raised in that house. And it was
also from there that we bade farewell in death
to the aged and some times not too aged members
of the family. There were many weddings, circumcisions,
family reunions and holidays that the family celebrated
together. From our grandfather’s days it
was given that all members of the family, no matter
where they were stationed, would come to the family
trough to celebrate the end of Ramadan, the Muslim
month of fasting and then a few months later the
festival of sacrifice that coincides with the
pilgrimage to Mecca. For us family togetherness
and celebration was as sacred as the religious
significance of the holidays. For us this pattern
was as natural and predictable as the change of
seasons in Peshawar Valley.
In 1963 when I left, with heavy heart, that enchanting
place for a far away land called America I took
with me nothing but a few family snap shots and
a rich album of memories. Those memories sustained
me in the initial difficult times as they sustain
any one leaving his or her home for the first
time. And whenever I could, I returned just as
my elders had, to the homestead to reaffirm myself.
Dwellings, like people, also succumb to the ravages
of time. When last of the family members moved
out, the place was given rent-free to some distant
acquaintances in the mistaken belief that they
would maintain the place. It was forlorn and dying
when I last visited it a few years ago. Like an
aged parent, it was at the end of its life; a
setting sun radiating its pale reluctant rays
for the last time. It had become merely a fleeting
shadow of its past glory. But I could still see
through the faded paint, peeling plaster and sagging
ceilings the life stories of many a generation
scattered all over the place.
In the past 50 years our neighborhood, as other
parts of the city, had changed. Once a quiet and
sleepy residential area of closely-knit neighbors
it had gradually turned into a bustling inner
city commercial center. In time the street level
hujras or sitting rooms gave way to glittering
boutique shops selling general merchandise and
women apparel. As the property values rose the
residents started leaving for new fashionable
suburbs outside the city walls. One of my poet
friends and a fellow diehard Peshawarite, the
late Johar Mir of New York, mourned our city in
one of his celebrated Urdu poems:
Strangers have entered our bedrooms,
They are now flooded with bright light,
But I am plunged into the darkness of oblivion,
O my beloved city your modesty is for sale to
the highest bidder.
Reluctantly we also decided to let go of the place.
It was sold to a developer who had planned to
build a shopping arcade on the site.
Before leaving for Pakistan on my yearly visit
I requested the new owner if he if would wait
a week before tearing the house down. I wanted
to visit the place just one more time to say good
bye, whisper a prayer and shed a tear for a way
of life long past. But commerce triumphed over
sentimentality and my request for the stay of
execution was ignored.
A five-member crew armed with crowbars, hammers
and axes brought the noble structure down and
hauled away every little bit that they could.
Left behind was the empty void of a tiny piece
of naked land that had been stripped of its modesty.
I could not for the life of me connect with the
tiny patch of bare land when I visited a week
later. This was not the place where I was born
and raised and from where I had embarked upon
my life journeys. Absence of any tangible signs
to help me connect with the past- doors, windows,
lamp niche in the wall, door latch- left me adrift
in a state of confusion and disarray. There was
not a single speck that I could identify or identify
with.
Hence my visit to the dark and damp world of warehouses
where they recycle salvaged material from old
houses. Scattered in these gigantic ‘chop
shops’ are the forgotten relics of unknown
and obscure people; faded doors, old almirahs
and vintage windows that had been witness to countless
loves, many quarrels and quiet a few intrigues
that are part of any family. Ours was no exception.
I finally found them. Familiar doors and windows
leaning against the wall totally out of place.
Each scratch, each tiny dent on the faded dilapidated
doors had a story to tell. There were doors I
had swung on, windows I had peered through at
the outside world and the ceiling beams I had
counted innumerable times. And there was this
door that hung on the entrance to the terrace
upstairs. On its ledge, in my childhood, sat an
old book that I used to leaf through on lazy summer
afternoons and wondered if I would some day be
able to read it. To a six-year old it was amazing
the way books spoke to older people.
I asked the warehouse owner if I could take the
old rusted latch-chain from the door. Not comprehending
my frame of mind, the kind man offered to give
me a brand new one for free.
In the story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, a
crafty lamp-seller goes around the streets of
the city offering to exchange old lamps with new
ones in the hope to get his hands on the old magic
lamp. Why would I want a new lamp?
At my insistence the man pried loose the latch
from the door and gave it to me. He must have
wondered if I had lost my mind coveting an old
rusty door latch.
(S. Amjad Hussain is an op-ed columnist on the
op-ed pages of the daily Toledo Blade and Professor
Emeritus of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery
at the Medical University of Ohio. He is the author
most recently of Dar-e-Maktab (The School Door)
that chronicles his life journey through educational
institutions)
