The Allahabad I Knew

I grew up with stories and rumors, swirling around me, invading every corner of my life, informing every part of me. Bred so deep into the fabric of my skin and blood and bones that I paid them no heed and each time someone voiced them out aloud I pretended not to hear. For that way I could pretend to be away in places and spaces which my imagination had gilded with adventure and excitement. Places far away from home, far away from Allahabad.

The stories continued to flow around me and even though I pretended not to listen, they seeped into my subconscious and formed the mesh of the past through which I still view the world. I realize now that they form the framework of my memories and the language in which I write.

"Arrey, Firaq sahib phir road par giray huay milay. Bahut sharam ki baat hai. Itney achchey shayar or yeh…tchhh…tcchhhh."

People talked of Firaq Gorakhpuri who lived two miles down the road from me more as the town drunk than the poet and scholar he was. One of his friends was fond of saying that schoolboys could make Firaq follow them by carrying bottles of colored water with them. Others would exchange sly glances for it was well known in Allahabad that young boys and men were enticement enough for Firaq sahib, even without the liquor. It was only when we attended mushairas attended by the poet that it was forcefully reiterated what a massive talent lived in our town. I heard and saw Firaq Gorakhpuri, the great poet that he was when I was a child though I barely appreciated him then. I also knew of him as a complex human being, flawed and tormented. Perhaps I glimpsed the reasons his poetry had the fire it had; demons embedded like burrs under his skin, demanding to be exorcized, making him write. And Allahabadis of my generation and earlier bonded with these secrets about famous literary figures that only we knew.

She was a plain, bucktoothed girl who was married as a child and studied at Crosthwaite School. Teachers and school mates remember her as a serious girl who spent hours sitting on a low hanging tree branch, writing in her notebook. She was spurned by her husband, as a teenager when it came time to start her married life. He was repelled by her plainness and abandoned her. It was only when Mahadevi Verma got famous and wealthy that he came back to her, asking for forgiveness. She turned him away and became a symbol of a quiet feminism for me when I heard this story from my aunt who became the Principal of Crosthwaite decades later. I have seen Mahadevi Verma on her evening walks, emerging from her big bungalow that was obscured from view by the lush greenery and tall trees that grew close to the boundary wall. I imagined the then old woman still climbing on to low hanging branches to write.

On her walk she inevitably passed by another huge, old house, Purab Pashchim, impeccably maintained by the family that still lived in it. The family of Munshi Premchand.
Sumitra Nandan Pant visited all our school functions, his flowing, white hair and long, lean fingers betrayed him for the poet he was. Nirala too lived in Allahabad and we saw him often even though like all children we secretly made fun of his poem, Bhikhari.

When I visited my friend Aleta’s house, I would go past the house where Ruskin Bond once lived. And just a couple of miles away was Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s house, near the campus of Allahabad University where he taught.

One of his friends was the professor of English and Urdu poet, Firaq Gorakhpuri. Hidden behind the suggestive sniggers and sideways glances of old Allahabad, is a famous story about an interaction between the two.

A.N. Jha was a scholar and the warden of Muir Hostel at Allahabad University, which was renamed for him once he passed away. He was also a great friend of the Bachchans, Harivansh and his vivacious wife, Teji. Some in Allahabad insisted that Dr. Jha was more than a friend though few would voice that thought in those genteel times. All except Firaq of course, or so the story goes.

When the Bachchan’s first son, Amitabh, was born, the proud couple threw a party. When Firaq arrived at the party he is reported to have said to the new father, "I don’t know whether to congratulate you or Dr. Jha."

No one knows if this is true or if this happened but it is part of Allahabad lore.

I remember going to parties as child, where I met a very drunk Faiz Ahmad Faiz and a fiery Fehmida Riaz when she was exiled from Pakistan.

This year I visited Allahabad after ten years. Unsustainable construction, with no regard to proper sewage or access has choked off views of the few old bungalows who have managed to exist. Others have been sold off to be knocked down and replaced by massive, ugly apartment buildings. The history that lived in those old houses, after being undisturbed for decades has disappeared with the crumbling bricks and dusty mortar.

The broad, clean roads that were the pride of U.P. are torn up and narrowed because of encroachments from illegal huts and shops. The clean air that I used to draw into my lungs upon returning home from anywhere else is full of the pollution from the many tempos and trucks that clog the streets.

Allahabad used to be full of young women and girls on scooters and mopeds, even cars. I saw none this time. It is as if I visited a stranger that calls itself by the name of someone I knew and loved.

I used to walk all over Allahabad as a teenager, fearlessly. It was my town. I remember an evening sitting by the Rasoolabad ghats. It was deserted, a still quiet that even now I associate with evenings in Allahabad, though it is no longer found there. There was a huge, gated house behind me. Perhaps no one was home for it was silent and dark. A flock of birds rose in unison, by some prearranged signal, and flew off to their nests, twittering and chattering. Soon I could neither see nor hear them. I looked into the water lapping at my feet and watched it flash silver, like captured moonlight.

A few hundred yards away a quietly grieving family was cremating a loved one. The pyre was burning brightly, flaring into sudden life as the son poured ghee into the flames. The wind shifted and the smoke made my eyes water as it blew towards me. I gave up trying to wipe the tears away as the sun started to fall into the rippling waves of the Yamuna, the water seemed to ignite. Suddenly everything was aglow, the water, the pyre, the sun, the very air, my own skin and the hair that blew across my face. We were all red and golden, touched by a radiance that faded abruptly as the sun drowned within the river. It was only when I could no longer see my hand in front of my face that I got on to a rickshaw and went home, carrying that quiet within me, that still lives somewhere inside me.

I could walk to the ghats with my eyes closed. I can no longer find my way. I got lost many times trying to find the landmarks of my childhood and youth since the geography of the city has been altered by the illegal buildings created by greasing the palms of corrupt politicians.

A town built to support a hundred thousand people, now has to handle more than five times that number. It has already collapsed under this weight though few seem to notice. Garbage has not picked up in months because the mahapalika employees are on strike. Most days there are power cuts. Large generators chug loudly outside stores, adding a thick haze of noxious smoke to the air.

We used to pride ourselves on the safety of the streets of Allahabad. Yes, there were the roadside Romeos with their whistles and comments but they were generally harmless and if challenged would often run away. No more.

The fate of two young women whom I know personally has changed that bravado. They were both from upper class, fairly rich, well connected and educated families. The first was gang raped one evening as she and her fiancé sat chatting in a parked car in the cantonment.

The other was abducted as she went shopping to the once-swanky Civil Lines, in the middle of the afternoon, with hundreds of people around her, barely a mile from her house. Apparently it was to avenge some action taken by her government servant father against a criminal. The young woman was raped and sold into prostitution. It took her shattered family over a year to recover their only child. They left Allahabad never to return.

In the middle of this horror, entangled within the haphazard, unconscionable construction and the palpable sense of violence and danger in the air, Allahabad is dying. None of the new people who have made this place home care about the literature and beauty of knowledge that once flourished here. They don’t care about the stories that bound us together. If something does not have the name Toyota or Tata or Airtel or Pepsi attached to it must be of no consequence.

I can no longer find Purab Pashchim on my own and I got lost trying to find Mahadevi Varma’s house. I don’t even know if it is still standing. None of the young people I asked on the streets seemed to know. The old stories, the gossip and rumors, the inside stories that made us bond into something special-- something Allahabadi, have died with the older people who told them to me. I wish I had paid more attention to the details. That I had focused on these stories rather than on the inane words of Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Laura Brannigan’s Self Control.

Over a year and a half ago I went to UCLA to listen to Salman Rushdie speak. He talked of membership into families, that you truly belong to a family once you know all its stories and gossip. This resonated with me though I would broaden its focus to include hometowns. You truly belong to a hometown once you know it stories. But what do you do when the stories you knew no longer matter in your hometown? What happens when the stories you know and the ones that thrive in your hometown now bear nothing in common?

This time again I walked into Wheeler’s, the store that has always defined bookshops to me. Dusty and musty, shelves that reach the tall ceilings and an owner who seemed to have read every book ever published. He recognized me and asked about my father. I had not stepped foot into his store in ten years.

As I wandered around, finding obscure books that I had had trouble finding in Mumbai I eavesdropped on a conversation. A customer was looking for Jacques Derrida’s works. He and the owner lamented Derrida’s death before launching into a passionate discussion on deconstruction. I smiled to myself. This was the Allahabad I remember, where words and books and writers meant something.

At least within this store, among two sixty-plus men, I could reconstruct the city of my memories if only for a moment. I linger a moment before leaving. A moment before I venture out and see the new, polluted ugliness and the empty ignorance that lies behind naked greed. A moment when I can be in the Allahabad I knew. The Allahabad that lives in my memories forever.