Roots

Pull of my ancestral village

Roots

By

Imtiaz Piracha

 

At long last, after years of fantasizing about taking the twenty-four hour long bus ride from the coastal city of Karachi at the southern tip of Pakistan, where I live, to Rawalpindi at the Himalayan foothills in the north, I was ready to embark on my coveted cross country adventure, to see my country, rub shoulders with my compatriots, and meet old army buddies too.

While giving final touches to the ten-day trip, I realized that about three hours short of the final destination, the bus would pass close to Shahpur; my ancestral village. Its being located off the main railways, bus and air routes was only one of the reasons I could never break my journey to make a stopover there in the last forty years; there were others. This time around I could make time for it, if I really wanted to, and rediscover the scenes of flocks of red-beaked green parrots noisily squeaking from one huge tree to another under a blue sky and cotton clouds, and an eerie graveyard consisting of mainly mud graves and scary tales; as well as retrace that cold night during a heavy downpour in the company of my grandfather.

Grandpa held my hand and we stepped out of a bus and into the heavy rain. We stood there for a while. He looked around to chart the path we were going to take in order to get home on about a mile of unpaved streets. As the bus moved away, so did the bus headlights and we found ourselves in pitch dark. Grandpa held my hand more firmly. With a trimmed Santa Claus beard, he was reputed to be strong, brave and a pious gentleman. That walk from the bus-stop to home was going to test his character.

As we stepped into the slippery mud and on the uneven path, in which he was using his umbrella as a blind person uses a white cane, he decided to walk along the walls of the houses for better navigation and support. Never letting go of my hand. But those walls formed a slope toward the center of the street; making it more greasy ground. We had first of the several falls we both were going to live through before reaching home. There was no one around. The only sounds were those of lashing rain torrents and occasional barking of stray dogs muffled by rain. Grandpa started reciting prayers, first in whispers then louder whenever we slipped and fell. A fifteen minutes walk in normal weather took more than an hour before we made it home; fully drenched in mud. I think that brought me even closer to grandpa, who topped my list of favorite family elders. He died long time ago and was buried in Shahpur.

The temptation to stopover at Shahpur was strong, but I was not sure whether I was hesitant because of the inevitable change in my travelling plans it would entail, or some kind of fear of the unknown.

The main deterrent in deciding to include Shahpur in my itinerary was that I didn’t know a soul in the village where both my parents, grandparents, and their grandparents, were born and lived. The entire tribe had moved out to big cities, or foreign countries, after most of them sold their homes; a phenomenon of urbanization that brought prosperity to many. However, the tragic irony of abandoning our roots, cast a permanent shadow wherever in the world the diaspora resettled. My parent’s generation was lucky enough to be born and spend its childhood in the village before migrating. My generation was born in various cities and countries. My children’s generation could not even speak the dialect of our forefathers. I believe, if it wasn’t for one slowly dying centuries old tradition of barter trade in the village, our younger generation would have forgotten the name of Shahpur altogether. The cobbler would stitch a pair of shoes for the farmer against grains or other farm produce. A weaver would exchange his fabrics for some chicken or meat with another villager, and so on.

Within this barter system, there was a class of manual workers who specialized in providing all sorts of services during events like weddings or funerals. They could cook for such large gatherings, serve the food to guests, wash the dishes, and attend to the special needs of the bride, groom, or a bereaved family, including burials. In short, they would provide a wide range of domestic help in addition to entertainment, like singing and dancing, in return for new and old clothes, food and some cash. Five or ten such events would provide enough provisions for these families for a year. Half a dozen men and women from this class �" generally docile, poor and illiterate though skilled - continued to be paid travelling expenses and invited to help with social events in the families of the well to do from the village, who had settled in distant cities. When they came to the cities on these occasions, they brought with them the village dialect, gossip, stories from the past and the old rural culture. That is where our children learnt that there was a place called Shahpur where their forefathers came from.

This was a unique opportunity to revisit my lost family past, though not completely free of apprehensions. I started looking for someone in my extended family who might have some contact in the village. I recalled that my cousin Haq had visited the village some time ago. He had worked as an engineer in England and the Middle East for many years and now lived near my house.  I went to see him for leads.

“When you will disembark at the dusty village bus stop, you will be surrounded by curious natives. They will keep an eye on you wherever you go. You can go around the village on foot. It has expanded, but is still quite small. In any case, most of the streets are too narrow for any vehicles except a bicycle. Of course there are no hotels or places for strangers to stay. But if you tell someone mature who your parents and grandparents were, people will recognize and welcome you. You can also walk to your grandfather’s house, I don’t know if anyone lives there, but right next door you will find Attaya, he doesn’t go anywhere. You would probably remember him.” Haq briefed me with his typical smile partially screened by his graying beard. The name rang a bell.

Attaya was my age. As a child when I - rarely and briefly - visited my grandparents in the village with my mother, right next to the entrance of the brick and mortar house of my grandfather was a shutter-less entrance to a compound built with thick mud walls where a farmer’s family lived. I remember only two people in that mud house. A very old lady who served us sweet carrots fresh from the farm, and her son Attaya, always sitting on a charpoy keeping himself cool, in the pre-electricity era, by waving handheld straw fan in front of his face. He possessed a permanent pleasant smile and welcoming disposition.

Attaya was struck by polio when still an infant, which left him almost a cripple. He had a normal head, narrow shoulders, his chest and back looked swollen, and he could barely stand on his weak deformed legs. But once he greeted you with a broad smile, looked at you with intelligent eyes and started talking to you, everyone forgot about his physical shortcoming. You hardly found him alone. There was always someone or the other engaged in a lively conversation with him about local politics, or scandals. People liked his company and he liked them. At least I don’t recall bitterness or sadness ever cross his face while I spent time in his company during my brief visits. He had accepted his fate as God’s will. Since he used to be alone at his home most of the day, until his mother returned from the fields at dusk, occasionally, some young couple even found a few moments for a secret rendezvous in a covert corner of his safe house in that conservative society; where everyone knew everyone else and risked the peril of exposure.

A teenager of forty years ago, Attaya, must have obviously changed drastically in his appearance. Who knows what he must have gone through over those four decades? I looked at myself in the mirror. Frankly, I was surprised to learn he was still alive, given his permanently bedridden status and dependence on his old mother. Never saw or heard about his father or any sibling.

“So, when are you going to Shahpur?” Haq wanted to know when we met again.

“I am leaving for Rawalpindi next week, but I am not sure about going to Shahpur. I guess I will have to skip it this time.” I replied.

“Why?”

“I don’t think I am ready for it. You know, it is like another world I would be going to. I think I should do some homework and plan a trip later sometime. Maybe we could go together?”

“It is another world, indeed. Generally they don’t have running water or modern bathrooms. I had gone there after remaining away a long time, like you, and was very uneasy and anxious about the trip.” Said Haq. “I cannot describe the fascination I experienced though. You have to go through it to appreciate the smells of our ancestors emanating from its walls. But it was worth it. In fact I wished I had gone there even earlier.”

I packed my bags and boarded the bus for Rawalpindi the following week with great excitement. I looked forward to cherish the long drive across the country and catch-up with the lives of my old buddies I had not met in a long time.

The Daewoo inter-city bus service was cool and comfortable, running strictly according to the schedule. That is except for a workers strike in a small town on the way that forced us to take a detour, but that delay of an hour or so was made up soon. The first leg of the journey, of about ten hours, was through the hot desert planes of Sindh with some stretches of green cultivations. The next leg was through the flat but greener agricultural fields of Punjab. Rawalpindi would be hot in July, but frequent rains, surrounding forests and proximity to high mountains made the weather more bearable.  

At eleven in the morning of my second day of the journey, the bus made its last scheduled stopover at Sargodha, before heading to Rawalpindi its final destination. As the bus approached the city, wheat, sugarcane and various other crops looked ready for harvesting. I delved deep into my memory to find something �" anything - familiar without success. It looked a fairly developed city now with all sorts of vehicles on the roads, compared to the shabby town of my childhood with lot of horse drawn carriages and cattle.

Warm late morning breeze greeted me at Sargodha as I got down from the bus to stretch my legs and grab a cup of coffee. It was a fifteen-minute stop. This was the closest I came to Shahpur in decades; the bus was going to move away in the opposite direction from this point onwards, to resume its final leg to Rawalpindi. As I walked towards the cafeteria, taxis, rickshaws and smaller public vehicles approached the arriving passengers offering transportation to the nearby towns and villages. I heard “Shahpur” mentioned by one of the several drivers gathered there.

“How far is Shahpur from here?”  I asked one of them instinctively.

“About half an hour.” Was his reply.

I turned around, walked back to the bus, collected my luggage, and before I could fully realize what I was doing, I found myself moving out of the bus station in a taxi heading toward Shahpur!

The longing to have a peak into my origins, and trace the buried footprints of my ancestors on the crooked narrow streets, was unrelenting. My buddies in Rawalpindi could wait another day, or two, for me.

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