Difficult to digest how things fall apart

My parents were of the generation that survived Partition. Much of my mother’s family had been killed and my father came away with a gunshot wound to his leg. This was the moment that was to substantially define the rest of their lives. Years of work, hopes and plans were gone; as were their homes and many of their friends and family. For the moment, there was nothing or next to nothing to fall back upon. Slowly, like thousands of others, they made new lives in places and situations that could not have been imagined even a few weeks earlier. Expectedly, some of that trauma was to spill over in various ways through the rest of their lives and to the generations that followed.

After Partition, my parents chose to become teachers. There were motives for this, but let’s leave that for another time. My father taught physics and my mother, Hindi. I was no good at either — though, funnily enough, for the brief period that I studied Sanskrit, I was rather good at it and there was a time that I hoped to read originals in that language. While physics lay abandoned at the first available opportunity, Hindi, expectedly, continued. Perhaps, as some sort of atonement for my abject failure as the school’s only student of ‘Higher Hindi’, one used and mostly spoke in the language.

Then, one went to college and stayed in the hostel. There, most of us lived as little islands. The Punjabis from Punjab stuck together. The Punjabis from elsewhere, also stuck together. The Himachalis and the Haryanvis made friends with both and then retreated into themselves. There were no ‘whites’ in our college and the foreigners were Iranians, Nepalese, Afghans, Mauritians and Fijians. Some liked each other and some did not. So, here, we had our stereotypes that were ready and raring to go.

It was an unusual ice-breaker that got one into a conversation with the Nepalese and then, with the Iranians. Sitting in the mess, eating the standard fare of rajmah-chawal, one of the Nepalese boys remarked that of the ‘city-Indians’, I was the only one who spoke in Hindi and all others, even while conversing among themselves, talked in English. “So,” he asked, “have you come to this college to learn English?” For that moment, I was stumped. Maybe mine was a mere ‘street version’ of Hindi, but that was the language I knew before I learnt English.

Across the steel bowls of rajmah-chawal, the Iranians, sitting opposite, became animated and said that they only knew Farsi before they came to India and were now quite fluent in English — and had even learnt some phrases in Punjabi. For reasons, after that last bit, they went into peals of laughter. Two of the Iranians, Hassan and Ismael, had adjoining rooms opposite mine and over the next few months, we became fairly friendly. Both of them were somewhat older than the rest of us. From what one vaguely remembers after all these years, one of them may have been married. Apart from the teenage banter with someone even slightly older, in our conversations, one gathered that both were ambitious and quite idealistic. They wanted not only a good life for themselves, but also a good country back home.

This was the time when the revolution in Iran was on the cusp. Here, in Chandigarh of the late 1970s, the best of friends Hassan and Ismael fell out. One supported the revolution and the other was a communist. Now, one watched them ignore each other as they passed in the corridor.

Apart from the rare times that they ate in the mess with the rest of us, the Iranians had their own place going. They had taken a house on rent and ran a kitchen too. The political situation in their country led to a spillover and their one-time joint mess also split into two. Now, as the numbers were also not enough to sustain both kitchens, they started looking for support elsewhere.

I and a couple of others were invited for a meal. And what a meal it was. Perfectly done mutton with naan and if that was not enough, there was a slab of butter to slather the naan. This was followed by a rich rice pudding full of pistachios and almonds. In a couple of days, we received an invitation to the other mess.

Living in a hostel, the stomach got the better of conscience and off we trooped to another fine meal. The menu and the quality of food in both was similar and, in a word, ‘excellent’. Food apart, the atmosphere in both was tense and what conversation there was, remained guarded. One mess had huge portraits of their leaders and the other, had theirs.

Then came the crux. An invitation came to join one mess. Hot on the heels of that, came another invite to join the other, and now the rival, mess. The matter was settled quite easily — given our limited allowance, we could not afford either. Back to good old rajmah-chawal we went.

It seems to be one of those quirks of human nature that, often enough, when the closest of friends become estranged, they become the bitterest of enemies. We later heard that both Hassan and Ismael, one-time friends, were dead — one fighting for the revolution, the other against.