India, My India; 1; After Seventeen Years

I came back to India when the swallows were gathering, when the season is setting to hope and the promise of harvest. I had last seen India in 1947, the year she gained her independence, the year she was divided into two separate states. I had last seen my native land in turmoil in despair, the dawn of her independence marred by bloodshed and a haphazard partition. Now, after 17 years of exile in England, I came back to India when the winter was nearly

over. I came back to India to a deli of teeming streets and abundant life and I gazed upon them with the loving eyes of a starved exile. I had not left India willingly, I had left India because I could not accept partition because partition divided lollities and cut across families like mine. But in distant England, the longing for India had only grown with time. Now, after 17 years absence, I had come back to see my native land. I came back to India to the sound of celebration in the sight of independence.

To see for the first time after 17 years in the west, the palm of the circumstance of free India, I had returned for a public day, the biggest day in New India's ceremonial calendar. In 1947, I had returned to India from the pan and officer in the Indian Army. During the Second World War, I had fought with the forgotten army in infarge in Koheema, Rengrun and Mandalay. And with the British Commonwealth forces in Japan, I had become familiar enough with the ceremonials in Parade, but this was a sight I had longed for and never known. Because in my time, India had not tasted independence or known this kind of national celebration.

And I came back to India, my India, to give thanks to the tomb of Mahatma Gandhi, with garlands of merry-goals and daisies and thoughts of his martyrdom. Gandhi, who died so that love could triumph over hate and that unity could outlive the division in his India. Soldiers and schoolgirls, princes and poppers, brahmins and harijans, Hindus and Muslims. The children of Mother India.

And now I too joined the endless line of pilgrims to offer my tribute. I recited the lines from the Holy Quran and extended my palms in a Muslim way. Gandhi's word had been my hope, his tomb had become my shrine. But Delhi was only an other station in my pilgrimage. I had come back to Mother India, not just to her capital city, to the land which had given me birth and sustained me. To the land I had left as a young man 17 years before.

My own home lay in Charkare, a dais journey away in the region of Bundelkhand in what used to be called the United Provinces. How were I remembered this route and these wayside stations? In another day and age I had made this journey a thousand times, on holiday from school and university, on leave from the army, on special occasions like the end of the feast of Ramadan. For the years of independence had changed little of India for me and the long fact of absence

had only sharpened my awareness of her. This was the self-same India, from the teeming crowds of Delhi to the wayside Paniwala, the water carrier and no glasses needed if you know the right way of drinking. But this now was more than another moment of departure. The next station with my hometown in Charkare, the home of my birth, my native home. Time for reflection perhaps, excepted in India you never travel alone. For the sunset I would be back with my people in Charkare.

Time for the pious person to complete his devotions. Time for the Urdu poet to polish his lines for the coming symposium. So only in India could one find such a mixture of character in one railway compartment. And for me, time to defect on the last 7,000 miles and to think of my home in England and of my wife and children. My son Nini in England could not even dream of India.

Like his sister Anisa, he had never known the native land of his father. His river was the tinge, his hills the downs, like his brother Shazad. My English wife I had married in Japan after the Second World War. We lived in India only long enough to know the horror of partition. To know that the independence I had cherished and fought for wasn't the end to divide brother from brother. So we came to live in England to make our home and to bring up our family there. But the past remains forever with us and I had always understood through the happiness

and trials of 17 years that exile could not silence the call of mother India. Until at last I was coming back to see my India, my other family. Home to Chalkari to a grandmother, home to my family to the embrace of a brother, home after 17 years to a mother.

But only to the portrait of my father who had waited in vain. And in the fading light of dusk I made my way to the mosque in the orchards where my father lay buried. My own mother had died soon after I was born and my father had cared for me until he married again. I was his favorite son and he had died during my long absence in England. The mosque and the shrine built and preserved in faith made me feel humble and impoverished in my agnosticism. Now I had come home at the end of Ramadan for the great Muslim festival heralded by the crescent moon.

Since last I had celebrated this feast a new generation had grown up. My children in England who knew only Christmas and to whom the crescent moon was but another phase. Preparations for the festival of Eid which marks the end of the month of Ramadan. After a month of fasting Eid is the occasion for thanksgiving and celebration. It is a family time, a time for reunion, a treat for children, a time for dressing up for giving and receiving presents. For Zari my brother's daughter from Chasi, a chain from a condom school. My younger brother's daughter still shy at meeting an uncle she had never seen before.

But I too had my own problems through adjustment. A little Imranah, a taste of the troubles to be endured in the cause of beauty. And for my sister Bibber from Aliga University, a less academic day than usual. All road lead to the mosque of Eid built on high ground outside the town of Tarkhari

and normally reserved for special Eid prayers. For the children it is a welcome journey because it is after prayers that presents a giving. The giving of arms is also part of the ritual of Eid. But the mosque of the Sunni Muslims, the ritual of embracing had already begun. The custom of embracing the traditional way of meeting friends. I had not taken part in this for 20 years. I was still shy and awkward in these gestures, still confused and even fatigued by it all.

But the very warmth of my people triumphed for this was India and I had come home. At the mosque of the Shia Muslims, sect to which I belonged, I faced the Mecca and Elton prayer for the first time in 20 years. Although now an agnostic, nevertheless I felt no dishonesty in taking part. But as to me was a way of life, not only a religious ritual. And through it I shared with my people a sense of belonging which I had missed in England.

Eid is a Muslim festival. The local Hindus call upon the Muslims and share their festivals. This sharing of each other's feasts and customs has survived through the centuries and derives from a way of life which has brought with it a fusion of Hindu and Muslim culture. There is no division in Chirca. From the home of my children I had returned to the home of my fathers.

And while these two homes remained apart, in my heart there was no separation. And in Chirca, as in my India, there was no distinction. Chirca, a tiny town of 12,000 people turned out to welcome me home more as a hero than a prodigal son. These were the streets of my childhood, the one's familiar faces of my past. Like Ramsewak, the sweet seller, an old school friend whom they now call the light one. I felt as my grandfather must have done in the days of the old Maharaja. And as his chief minister, he had made his regular tours of the town. Except that by visit was quite unofficial and all the gestures of greeting and respect

were entirely spontaneous. The wife of Rajbhush, who still kept her vegetable stall, received me as her own son. Such is the affection of Chirca. The old palace of the Maharajas of Chirca, built as a fortress to dominate this small town was now abandoned and the ancient rule forgotten. As I climbed to these dizzy heights, I remembered as a small boy, the rare occasions in which I was allowed to accompany my father, the Maharaja's minister, to gain a glimpse of a fair detail world of colorful robes and turbans, livery descendants and warriors, and beautiful courtesans whose songs still echoed in my ears. Now the old power had ended, the old domination had gone.

A new age had risen with the dawn of the independence I too had fought for. My father and his father before him had themselves been part of that old regime against which I had rebelled. And because I had rebelled, I too was responsible for the fact that their age and their way of life now lay in ruins around me. But I had not been prepared for the deep sense of shock at coming face to face with the reality of them for the first time. As I approached the parapets which overlooked the town, I knew that the fact of their domination had truly ended. In the central hospital in Jarkari, the pressure of life had multiplied.

The building were overcrowded now, and the doctor held his surgery in the entrance hall to allow a few extra beds in his office. Dr. Saxena was a dedicated man, without adequate facilities and equipment he had to be. The town now operated its own crude form of national health service. Their attention was free, and there were no prescription charges, nor could these patients have paid for them if they had been. But Dr. Saxena attended to 300 patients each day, and there were no specialist facilities. Jarkari, once the proud capital of his state, was now just another town, another administrative unit in the vast system of social reorganization which had taken place since my time.

I myself had fought for this, but victory is many-sided. In the isolation ward, leprosy was treated like another disease now, not as a sin. Nurse Kashi-Bai, whose hands had brought me into the world, cared tenderly for a sufferer who might well have been forgotten in my time. And yet, as I watched the leper woman's daughter cooking chapatis for their midday meal, I wondered why she should be denied the things that my children in England took for granted. But the rhythms of life in Jarkari had not really changed, not at least in the forties since I was born.

I was assured at least of this. Jarkari has still no running water, which is not so much a physical handicap, as a tremendous social asset, because here, the whole range of village chitchat in gossip has turned out to be a bargain for its changed examined. I had of me lay India, my India. I had come back to see not just Jarkari, but the India was way beyond the India of my youth and the India which had developed since I had left her. But already I sensed that the routines of street life and marketplace, the daily details of living, the eternal rhythms remained the same, remained and now began to reveal themselves.

Like marble figures, sheltered the wrong years, now moving on into life again. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.