A Rover's Life: Causality 1

It is an extremely hard task to define your own philosophy, you need to not only think hard but need to look into your past for instances and people who have shaped your life. For me, one of them was a person called Nazar, not because I learnt something from him but because his presence around me showed how little religion or money comes in doing the right thing.

It was an intellectual night around 8 years ago, a group of us sitting down for dinner in Ithaca, New York. We all were from all kinds of ethnicities. A Russian orthodox Christian who disliked religion, an American born Russian Jewish girl who cherished about visiting Jerusalem, a Malaysian girl whose parents followed a local pagan religion rather than Islam, an American born Chinese, another Midwestern American girl, my friend a Pakistani girl and me an Indian. All these people were extremely smart, well read and well travelled. Sitting amongst 6 or 7 surgeons I felt as the least qualified and the odd one out.

As we sat down the conversation moved to politics and religion, it was intense and thought provoking. We discussed everything from the first migration of Jewish people in India to Islamic laws in Malaysia. At least I knew I could hold my own on this subject at least as it just made the playing field even for all of us.

I do not remember what prompted this discussion but from where I was sitting I could see the walls with a lot of signatures. The restaurant used to ask for donation for a local charity and you could sign your name on the walls in return. Among these was a signature of Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton, who were regulars at this restaurant.

However, during the conversation someone said, “Oh so, when the British left India, Pakistan was made for Muslims and India for Hindus.”, before I could say something my friend agreed in affirmative and started to explain Indian independence then division of India, Pakistan and subsequently Bangladesh. I wanted to say something but kept quiet and that always remains with me. I wanted to say, ‘Pakistan might have been made for Muslims but India was made for Secular people.’ I kept quiet because it is a hard thing to explain, Indian secularism is an enigma. The Indian state is the greatest experiment in democracy and diversity. But also, it is violent at times. We still haven’t learned from our past. Most of our founding fathers were mostly unbiased in their thought and most of them including prominent Indian Muslims as Maulana Azad had very little respect for divisions based on religion. They understood that the fabric of our society has been built over centuries and it is very hard to erode that.

21 years ago around the same time of the year we were confronted with a situation which remains as one of the ugly patch in this quilt. We are facing a similar situation again, the same people just a generation younger are making similar noises, though the intensity and the rhetoric are way lower but the idea remains the same and for me that is a bigger danger.

But what made my philosophy, why didn’t I choose to align with most people during 1992. Why even when 90% of my friends felt one way I always thought the other way. I guess I owe it to my parents for their prejudice free upbringing.

I have always been proud as both my parents and my grandparents were free of any kind of prejudices. Our house was full of people of all religions. Sherry Mama who was a Sikh and was a dear friend of my youngest uncle practically lived with us and if for some reason he didn’t visit us for his weekend visits it made me sad. Same was the case with Aslam mama. They always called my grandparents as Mummy and Papa. We laughed and played together, ate together and lived together. In all these years the question of religion came up. When I made a friend never ever my parents asked about religion or caste or creed. They always remained above it even though they were perfectly middle class Indians, at least at the beginning of my life we had no luxuries nor did we ever imagine having any.

My early childhood was spent in Bhopal. Bhopal was one of those few cities in independent India whose basic cultural and ethnic backdrop was predominantly Muslim and Nawab of Bhopal always wanted to be a part of the Indian State. So the amalgamation into a secular India was smooth.

In the late 70s we used to live in old Bhopal in an area which is called Peer Gate. Living in a tiny house on the first and the second floor, I spent most of time loitering around the small roof. In this small 3 room house there were at least 4 to 5 adults living.

Then one day my father really wanted to buy a scooter, a ‘Lambretta’. But there was a major problem; living on that narrow street on the first and second floor we had no place to keep it. But that didn’t deter my father. He went to the dealership and ordered one.

Next time when he and my uncle visited the dealership to pick it up they were taken aside by a young mechanic and he wanted to tell them something. He revealed that not only the dealership was charging them more money but also was replacing the good parts with the older ones. Now it was my father’s turn to confront the dealership owner. At the end he won, got the price down and it was made sure that all the parts in our scooter were new. The repercussion of all this was at that young mechanic. He was fired from the job for being righteous. His name was Nazar. After getting fired he met my dad and uncle and both of them felt really guilty but couldn’t do much. Over time they kept meeting up and around half a kilometre from our home he opened his own scooter repair shop. The shop was so small that even as a kid I thought it was very small. When he realised that though we had bought the scooter but had no place to keep it and my father had to leave it a few kms away and then walk back, he offered that my father could park it inside his shop. He gave my father a key for his garage so that even in his absence the scooter could be taken out or parked. He never charged nor did he ever care. Every evening he used to go through the trouble of organizing his shop just to make sure that my father could park his scooter. He visited us often and we visited his house too. I started calling him Nazar mama. I got really beaten up after one of the visit to his house by my dad but that is a story for some other day.

Then after my father moved away and I moved to MHOW to stay with my Grandparents we lost touch with him.

I had forgotten his face and I was sure he wouldn’t recognise me or my uncle either. 30 years is real long time not to meet anyone. Driving to that street I realised that so much has changed and it was so much narrower. After paring I walked into a store which we thought was the shop and I asked, ‘Nazar Mama’, he looked at me and said, ‘Haan main hi hoon’, he got up and then suddenly it struck him. Suddenly a familiar smile came all across, now I might have forgotten his face but remembered his smile, as if my brain was merging all the old information with the new images that it was capturing.

He took us for tea to a shop and then told us how he was thinking about my father a couple of months ago and felt like getting in touch but had no idea whom to contact. With a familiar smile he added, ‘Agar dil se milne ki dua mango to mil hi jate hain log.’

For those few moments he was again Nazar Mama for me.

It was a surreal experience as we walked through our old neighbourhood as still was as cosmopolitan as ever though a lot had changed but one thing that hadn’t changed was his, SHOP.