AN ARTICLE BY RAJBIR DESWAL published n The Tribune

OH TO BE ONE AGAIN ONCE MORE!Before I narrate the chroniclers’ and travelers’ account, I am to say with some sense of belonging that I represent that age bracket of Indians, who in their childhood had heard stories of places at this instant in Central Asia and particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan and who can still recall, with equal amount of wonder, coupled with a nostalgic pinch experienced within, the happy things related to places like Kabul, Kandhar, Baluchistan, Herat, Peshawar, Chaman, Quetta, Karachi and Lahore.

Famous Persian poet Hafiz held the memories of the cities of Samarkand and Bukahra so close to his heart that he could only barter away the sweet and priceless nostalgia of these places if his beloved would ‘hold his heart in her hands’. Shujaudin Sajid a renowned Urdu poet popularly known as Shuja Khawar and an officer of the Indian Police Service makes a reference to this in one of his couplets of a gazal as, “Mera dil hathon mein lo to kya tumhara jayega;aur mera hee Samarkand aur Bukhara jayega.”

While ‘Kabuliwala’ was representative of the class and character of the Afghans immortalised by none other than Rabindranath Tagore himself but Sir Winston Churchill had his own reasons of describing a Pathan saying, “Except at harvest-time when self-preservation enjoins a temporary truce, the Pathan tribes are always engaged in private or public wars. The life of a Pathan is thus full of interest.”

More on Afghanistan and the United Kingdom has been brought out as, ” … Afghanistan has long been the capital Achilles’ heel of Great Britain in the East. Impregnable elsewhere, she has shown herself uniformly vulnerable here.”

Besides the love legends of Heer-Ranjha, Siri-Farhad, etc., certain locales were home to delicacies made available throughout the Indian subcontinent via the freely frequented routes including the world famous Khaiber Pass. The typical and rich cuisine catered not only to the palate but needed hard guts to really take it all. Juicy and ‘pearl’ filled pomegranates from Kandhar and grapes with very thin, skin-concealments, brought from Chaman, once upon a time in my memory, were unmistakable not only for their taste but also for their fragrance and appearance.

The fruit vendors’ call to costumers yelling at the top of their voice on arrival of first and fresh consignments of grapes could be heard every season with-Chaman waale, Chaman waale! Who can forget the sweet language spoken by the Multanis and gritty addresses of the Jhungis? The fair and well-built men and women of these lands in their typical sartorial apparels were easily distinguishable. I, in particular, liked the lungi like covering of the thighs and legs portion, their women were supposed to be wearing ,when no Fatwas policed the dressing behaviour of females in those areas.

And for Lahore they said-Jis Lahore nahin wekhya, O’ janamyan hi nahin (One who hasn’t seen Lahore is as good, (or bad) as having not at all been born in the world!) George Woodcock, in his Asia’s, Gods and Cities exclaimed about the place, ” Because this new Lahore rises out of the decrepitude of the chaotic old city, and not, like Karachi, from a baron desert, one experiences there a feeling of the compression of time, or perhaps rather of the dissolution of the normal sequences of progress. A new class of hard-jeweled businessmen in English-cut suits has arisen; they fill the chrome-plated modern cafés in the center of the city, and personify the era of the construction sites and the American and Italian cars parked in the serried ranks under the aristocratic trees of The Mall.”

Afganistan’s capital and the ancient city Kabul, currently under severe threat of almost being on the brink of extinction, situated on the river by the same calling, has been described by Robert Byron in his The Road To Oxiana as having “…an easy unpretentious character, as of a Balkan town in the good sense of the term. It clusters round a few bare rocky hills, which rise abruptly from the verdant plane and act as defences. Snow-mountains decorate the distance, the parliament sits in a corn-field, and long avenues shade the town’s approaches… One feels that perhaps Afghanistan has struck the mean for which Asia is looking. Even the most nationalist of them makes a pleasant contrast with the mincing assertiveness of the modern Persian.”

Some very interesting observations have been attributed to other cities also. For example, “Karachi, the Americans say, ‘is half the size of Chicago cemetery and twice as dead.” Rudyard Kipling said about The North-west Frontier, “Guns always-quietly–but always guns.” And Harry de Windt, in A ride to India in 1891, wrote about Baluchistan priding itself with tall and handsome men, “I had, up to the time of my visit, often wondered, that with India so near, Baluchistan should have been so long allowed to remain the terra incognita it is…”

More on Lahore dating back to as early as 1625 has been recorded in the English language of those times with strange but similar phony spelling by William Finch in his own style, “Lahore is one of the greatest Cities of the East …The castle or Towne is inclosed with a strong bricke wall, having thereto twelve faire gates, nine by land, and three openings to the River: the streets faire and well paved, the inhabitants most Baneans and handicrafts men; all white men of note lying in the Suburbs. The buildings are fair and high, with bricke and much curiositie of carved windowes and doores: most of the Gentiles doores of sixe or seven steps ascent, and very troublesome to getup, so built for more securitie, and that passengers should not see into their houses. The castle is seated on Ravee, goodly River which falleth into Indus.

While dwelling on the travellers’ and historians’ narration of the places mentioned above, I unconsciously started humming “Tanga Lahori mera, ghora Pishori mera” sung by Moahmmad Rafi in the Sixties when, once again I was reminded of ‘Kabuliwala’. Its soulfully rendered number by Manna Dey, replete with patriotic falvour — Ai mere pyare watan…tujh pe dil qurban -had always been adopted by our generation as a national song since we associated ourselves in our own, ‘Indian sub-continental’ way with Kabul, Kandhar, Lahore etc. Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan popularly known as Sarhadi Gandhi never made the likes of us even come near a feeling that we were different people.

There has been a sea change in the situation now. Sea-volumes of water have flowed in rivers Kabul, Chenab, Indus, Jhelum, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej since our childhood. It took centuries for our forefathers to forget Ghazni; still they introduced us to those lands. With the scenes flashing in front of my eyes, of the hijacked Indian Air Liner grounded in Kandhar and the wounded twin towers, I find myself at a loss in describing and introducing Kabul and Kandhar et al to my children, the next generations of Indians. For the time being, I can only see rubble transported to Kabul from the WTC; and smoke to Lahore.