Jaipur Dreams

For the fourth time, I rush madly from one end of the terminal to the other. In his typical fashion, Abbu has managed to get lost. I grumble under my breath while peering intently into the faces of weary travelers. Another botched airport pickup. It was supposed to have been a quick drive-through deal. And would have been - until the stern-faced cop had motioned me to move on - no dallying by the terminal, he had mouthed. So Abbu had gotten out, I had driven to the parking lot and we had managed to lose each other in the interim.

As I turn around for the fifth iteration, an amiable voice stops me in my tracks.

"Zia Beta, is that you?"

I turn to face the source. A portly gent with a cherubic face, a broad smile, and one piece of carry-on luggage is studying me keenly.

"Uh - Chiman - uh - Uncle?" I utter.

He nods, moves towards me, arms spread wide, face radiant.

I hesitate, not entirely sure if I want to hug a complete stranger on a warm summer night at Logan. He is unyielding. I relent.

"I knew it," he says triumphantly, as he holds me close. "I knew it when I saw you walk by. Would I not know Hilal’s son?"

I panic. Almost. Where is Abbu? From the limited vantage that being hugged by a stranger offers, I scan for my paternal savior. Predictably, he is nowhere to be seen.

We disengage and chitchat for a few minutes. I utter the usual banalities. How was your flight, Uncle? Have you eaten, Uncle? Oh really, you hate airline peanuts too, Uncle?

And then suddenly, out of nowhere, Abbu makes an appearance. Here he is, I say with relief, and Chiman Uncle whirls around to meet his past.

They hug. Wordlessly. I have never seen Abbu cry before. It’s oddly disquieting. Paradoxically though, the tears of the parent are not as affecting as those of the stranger. I stand at a respectful distance, embarrassed. There is something subtly voyeuristic about my presence - witnessing this intensely personal moment between friends, looking back in time at my father, at a person that I never knew.

We start walking towards the car. I lead, clutching the carry-on, the friends follow arm in arm. They talk in bursts, four decades of words that refuse to be contained any longer. I have trouble following the non-linear flow of conversation. It shifts wildly, from places I have never seen to people I have never met. I try to latch on to some of the salient recurrences - Jaipur, Nayla, Xavier’s. But the narrative is far too alien, I am a trespasser in its midst.

I put the carry-on in the trunk and the three of us get in. Satisfied with my bit part in bridging boundaries - geographical, emotional, political - I drive off into the midsummer Boston night.

#

The botched airport pickup had been set in motion many months earlier. I was at the office, pretending to be hard at work, when Abbu sent me the curious directive. I was to call some guy in LA - someone Abbu had known in the old days in Jaipur - and essentially say, hi, this is Hilal’s son, how are you? The magic phone number had yielded itself through an inspired search on the Internet.

Things had been funny recently, since Abbu had acquired a "real" computer. Bhayeea’s feisty 386 from college had long been junked, an ancient relic of pre-pervasive-Internet times. So when Ammi insisted upon a home computer, Abbu discovered the Internet and his past came tumbling forth like parwanas after the first monsoon rain.

I remember Bhayeea crushing parwanas mercilessly as a child, even consuming a few in the slaughter’s aftermath. But Abbu accepted the electronic ghosts from his past with great relish. Friends materialized out of the four corners of the globe - from California and Sweden, Delhi and Jaipur. Even a particularly worrisome lady friend from Bombay - worrisome for Ammi, that is, mildly amusing for Bhayeea and myself.

But I digress.

None of the parwanas, the ghosts of Christmas past, had affected me, until that directive-over-IM. Call a ghost, it urged, call him now.

Some context would be appropriate here - given that I’ve called Amreeka-wali-phuppo in Detroit exactly three times in nine years, the ghost-calling idea bordered on the ridiculous. Something Abbu knew quite well. Strangely enough though, no directives had been issued with regards to the eternally irate Aunt, yet the mysterious gentleman - Chiman being his given name - was worthy of an online edict.

So, despite numerous forebodings to the contrary, I closed the office door and placed a phone call.

All in all, things worked out pretty well. I was my usual awkward self, beginning with a "uh - this may sound strange, but a certain Mr. Hilal, my father, was wondering if you remembered him from some forty years ago?" Chiman "Uncle" - all untyped father-aged males in Pakistan are called "Uncle" - was ecstatic. Yes, of course he remembered Hilal - as if he could forget himself or a brother - and where was Hilal, and how old was I and what was I doing and how long had I been in the United States? He was unusually free with questions, and - for a person whom I had never heard of, let alone spoken with until a few minutes ago - his emotions. He choked up when recalling a goodbye scene at Jaipur train station, the last time he had seen Abbu, more than a decade before my birth. It was a scene that would have done Dilip Kumar proud.

Of course, no Hindi movie scene would be complete without the customary foray into the supernatural. For some months prior to my intrepid phone call, Chiman Uncle had been dream-thinking about how a young man would accost him on the street and introduce himself as Hilal’s son. And it just so happened to be his birthday the day of my phone call. The stars were indeed in alignment!

That was the sum of my contribution - I had played my part as a conduit for email addresses and phone numbers. Abbu and Chiman Uncle exchanged communiqués and ostensibly picked up where they had left off, some four decades ago.

#

That summer, Abbu came to Boston and planned a trip to LA. At the last minute, fate intervened in the form of a hernia inflammation, so his plan came to naught. The enterprising Chiman Uncle flew over for a weekend instead. The bungled airport pickup ensued.

He was a thoroughly genial person, treating me with the easy familiarity of an actual uncle instead of the stranger that he was, a ghost from Abbu’s past. He accepted refrigerated Indian food without complaint, praising my styrofoam hospitality like I was slaving over hot chapattis for him. And he was utterly at ease with his surroundings, donning a kurta-pyjama the moment he stepped indoors. And he talked.

Names, dates and places dropped from his lips at a furious pace. I had trouble keeping up. Abbu nodded frantically at every reference and occasionally popped in a question or two. Chiman Uncle flicked time aside as if four decades were a mere irritant and not a lost lifetime. It was as if he had conjured up the past, and I had traveled through time to Jaipur-that-was - a Pleasantville where everyone knew everyone else, where upright school teachers gave you lessons after-hours, where Abbu - Ghalib-like - could celebrate Diwali and Eid without contradiction, and where the aristocratic Dada Abba and family lived in a mansion with a platoon of naukar-chakar (servants). Funny how all muhajir (immigrant) types seem to have left mansions behind - that’s an awful lot of luxury homes in pre-Partition India.

Despite myself, I listened with fascination to tales of youthful debauchery. Nothing sensational, mind you, just ordinary coming-of-age anecdotes. As the night progressed, there slowly emerged a picture of Abbu as a person whom I had never known. Not the diligent professional, not the virtuous moralist, not the praying-fasting Muslim, not the authoritarian figure around the house, but a wholly different type of being altogether. Someone who skipped classes for a whole year and flunked out of college. Someone who sold his school books for cigarettes. Someone who snuck out to the local restaurant for endless cups of tea and pastries during Ramzan. Where was this person now?

#

The next day was typically touristy. We had a lame but overpriced buffet at the Bombay Club, took the T to Long Wharf and watched the ships go by. From there, it was a short jaunt to Quincy Market where Abbu consumed a cannoli with great gusto, Chiman Uncle had some coffee and I ogled the street performers. We discussed the relative merits of whale watches and harbor cruises.

That night, Chiman Uncle regaled us with a hilarious memory. One Sunday morning, a bus full of school children pulled over at Dada Abba’s. The children - including Chiman Uncle, but not Abbu - marched on to the lawn, just outside Dada Abba’s bedroom window and chanted in unison: "Hilal ka baap kahaan hay?" ("Where is Hilal’s father?") Led by the class teacher, a Jesuit priest from Chicago who only spoke broken Hindi, this motley crew kept up its demand until Dada Abba finally relented and gave Abbu permission to accompany his classmates on the school picnic.

It seemed a little sad to me that Abbu and Chiman Uncle were both immigrants. Abbu had left his native Rajasthan and Chiman Uncle his Sindh. The Sindh factor came in handy later when Chiman Uncle informed me that contrary to popular belief, Moenjodaro meant "The Place of Moen" and not "The Mound of Death." My follow up question about the talented Mr. Moen’s identity had no takers.

Later, when Chiman Uncle called his wife and Abbu got to speak with her as well, I had another surreal moment. Unconsciously, Abbu lapsed into a Hindi-ized Urdu, replete with "namaskar bhabi-s" and "chinta-s." Not surprisingly, it turns out that he can read and write Hindi just as well as Urdu, an interesting fact that had never filtered its way into my consciousness before.

#

This was not my story. It was my father’s. Mine was the part of a mere bystander. Yet, when Chiman Uncle left the next day, apart from a box of See’s candies and the memory of an enjoyable weekend, he left me with a few things. First, a reinforced confusion about my sense of identity. If my father was an Indian until the sixties, what does that make me? Second, a determination to reclaim what is mine by heritage. By what right do our political masters bar me from visiting my father’s onetime home? Third, a grudging respect for a father who so seamlessly transitioned from one life to another, and bottled up the past like old wine. Can I ever truly know him without knowing what he was?

So, Messrs. Musharraf and Vajpayee and others of your kind, listen up. I am tired of the bellicosity. I am tired of the rhetoric. Kashmir doesn’t run in my blood. It is not my jugular vein or inseparable part. I am tired of barbaric jihadis and freedom fighters and army jawans and lines-of-control and Siachens and grand slams. My India is a slightly portly, bespectacled man of charming disposition who calls me beta (son) and means it. I want to take the ferry to Bombay and meet the woman who grew up next door to my father and never tires of forwarding him nauseating emails from self-help gurus about God and peace and love and spirituality. I want to take the train to Rajasthan and see Dada Abba’s house in Jaipur. I want to fly to Delhi and visit all the friends that I admire and work with, to say namaste to their mothers and not feel weird. These are my Jaipur dreams.