The Mahatma of Pakistan

Abdul Sattar Edhi

My father Meghnad Bhatt was a socialist. For him Pakistan was never an enemy. He wrote glowingly about ZA Bhutto and received letters from the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

The first time I saw Karachi was on a map that my father showed me during the 1971 Indo-Pak war. The headlines of the newspaper (Free Press Journal) proclaimed the Indian Navy had bombed Karachi harbour.

“And to imagine,” my father dismayed, “both the cities were once part of the Bombay Presidency that stretched from Sindh to Mysore.”

The second time I saw Karachi was on television, when the India Pakistan cricket series was revived after a long gap in the mid-1970s. Bishen Bedi and his boys were beaten black and blue by the “wild Pakistanis”.

If I recall correctly, the last test was at Karachi, and Pakistan won rather handsomely, turning the last hour into a sort of a one-day match, and flaying the famed Indian spin quartet (Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna and Venkataraghavan) out of international cricket.

Pakistan won the series. We discovered Kapil Dev.

As a journalist, my most serendipitous experience was to discover Gujarati businessmen from Karachi who on the invitation of the Indian Merchants’ Chamber came to Bombay (Mumbai) in the late 1980s.

A few of them had experienced the trauma of Partition first hand. They were in tears as they happily recalled their lives in Bombay. The younger among the group were dazzled by Bombay’s buzz.

The older members of the group spoke of long standing and deep commercial relations between Karachi and Bombay that needed to be revived..

Then, years later, my student, who became a dear friend, Ehtesham Shahid, got married to Amna Khaishgi, a resident of Karachi. Both met in Dubai.

Amna wrote a scintillating piece for The Quarterly Journal of Opinion (an online magazine I edited for a year in 2002) comparing Bombay and Karachi.

She wrote, “Mumbai and Karachi reflect the diverse meanings of its disparate inhabitants. Both sit at the crossroads of aspirations and desperation, narrating numerous tales of rags to riches. Both have a thriving underworld, fast moving traffic and throbbing nightlife. Perhaps the biggest similarity is the gap between the rich and poor in both the cities. Violence on the streets of both is analogous too. Both touch the same Arabian Sea from their respective coastlines.”

Another friend, Jatin Desai, a journalist-activist, introduced me to Pakistan India Peoples' Forum for Peace and Democracy. In these cynical times, here was an organization that was at least attempting to do something genuinely good and effective.

Kumar Ketkar, both a friend and a mentor, was part of this group. He suggested I be a part of the SAFMA delegation that would be traveling to Karachi in June 2006.

I visited Karachi as part of a delegation promoting Pakistan-India people-to-people contacts. Our delegation comprised journalists. We had a wonderful time.

Two of the many memorable evenings have remained etched in my mind: one where the inimitable Tina Sani sang ghazals, and the other was when we met the Mahatma of Pakistan – Abdul Sattar Edhi.

Edhi was a simple man, who began his work by providing a decent burial to the poor, and then slowly rising to become the philanthropic face of Pakistan. He narrated his story in a straightforward, no-nonsense manner.

One of our delegates asked him, why, if he believed in humanism more than religion, he went to Pakistan during the Partition. He said Pakistan was not a different land at that time, when he went from Gujarat to Karachi. And he emphasized that he did not regret his decision.

He spoke gently for more than an hour, happy to be interacting with Indians. He spoke of the tremendous work his foundation had done during the Kashmir earthquake in 2005 (at that time it was fresh in memory); he spoke of the Indian government not giving him a visa to do disaster relief and philanthropic work in India. He spoke of his tremendous dependence on his wife.

He did not speak from any prepared text, he did not always complete his sentences, his agile and alert mind racing faster than his speech could cope with.

The organizers gave all of us a copy of his biography.

Today, when I saw my social media feed flooded with tributes to Edhi, I remembered the trip to Pakistan, Karachi, Indo-Pak cricket of the 1970s, and, of course, Edhi.

Codes of Misconduct

I love Toronto because nobody knows me.

In Mumbai the fear of meeting someone I knew (and then having to engage myself in meaningless small talk) made me balk at the idea of participating in events.

When I was forced to attend such events, my behaviour swayed between reticence and braggadocio.

Here in Toronto, I’m unknown. I move around freely and attend all sorts of functions.

I know that nobody I know is likely to be at events I attend.

The advantages of anonymity are enormous. I can sit in the midst of a hundred people, quietly reading Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (enjoyable) and wait for an event to start.

When I walked in to Toronto Women’s Bookstore Thursday evening, there was nobody there except the woman behind the cash counter.

Women (and three men) slowly started to gather for the launch of Ashwini Tambe’s Codes of Misconduct, Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay.

When I got an email from Janice Goveas about the book launch event, I was keen to attend because two reasons. First, the book is about Mumbai and second it is about Kamathipura, Mumbai’s ‘red-light district’.

Mumbai occupies a large, almost physical, space inside me. And it grows larger by the day.

There are times when I sit in the (comparative) comfort of a subway train and get a lump in my throat because I don’t have to rush inside the train to get a seat, as I had to in Mumbai.

With Che I watch DVDs of old Hindi movies – from Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi to Baaton Baaton Mein – only so that I can see the images of old Bombay (albeit fleeting).

When I was there – all 46 years of my life – I didn’t love Mumbai as much as I do now.

Mumbai’s history has always fascinated me – in a non-academic way. In the late 1980s, I regularly attended the local history seminars conducted by St. Xavier’s Heras Institute, and over the years have come to know a number of people whose knowledge of Mumbai’s past has left me awestruck.

During my journalism days in Mumbai (in the late cretaceous era), I made several trips to the archives located at Kala Ghoda. Incidentally, I missed the Kala Ghoda festival the other day when we attended the Vegetarian Food Festival at the Harbourfront Centre.

Ashwini Tambe’s book also deals with sex trade – again a subject of deep and abiding interest for me. In the late cretaceous era, I did a series of in depth feature reports on several aspects of the ‘red-light district’ of Mumbai. Later, prior to immigration, I had almost joined a not-for-profit organisation operated by two former colleagues.

Ashwini Tambe is assistant professor of women's studies and history at the University of Toronto. The book is academic, but from the passages that she read, I felt it should also be of interest to the general reader.

I haven’t read the book so I won't comment on the book. If I do so, Patricia Bradbury will disapprove.

When the author finished reading, I left the bookshop and took the subway home. Everyone there knew everyone else.

I didn’t know anyone. I enjoyed myself.

Image: http://www.utoronto.ca/wgsi/ifst/bios.html

It's raining!

The most amazing thing about the weather in Toronto is that it rains anytime. It’s not restricted to a season as in Mumbai. It doesn’t ever rain as hard as it does in Mumbai. But to compensate for that it rains more frequently.

Of course, there’s nothing in the world that can compare to the Mumbai rains. It’s something that is exhilarating and enlivening, and exquisite and exotic.

Right now, summer’s begun in India. As the months go by and the heat becomes unbearable, all India will await the onset of monsoon. By May-end it’ll hit Kerala coast and reach Mumbai by the first week of June.

When it does, it changes the city from a snarling, over-heated beast into a cowering, demure virgin.

You know, I may be getting a bit carried away with romanticism here. In recent years, the uncontrolled urban sprawl has taken its toll and rains are more a problem than a respite to the summer heat.

But even now, you won’t find an Indian who doesn’t smile involuntarily when she hears of the rains.

One of the best pieces of journalism I’ve done is to write about the Mumbai rains when I was a reporter at The Daily (this was a long time ago…almost as far back as the time when dinosaurs roamed the planet), and had interviewed a few archetypal Bombayites (it wasn’t Mumbai then) such as Russy Karanjia, YD Phadke, G.R. Khairnar, Shobha De, Dr. PS Pasricha.

This morning, I was all ready and dressed to go out in the rain. Fortunately, I had a couple of appointments, so I had a reason to get wet. I had a meeting with Bill Dampier, my official mentor, and then to my son Che’s school for a discussion with his teachers about his dropping grades.

Great opportunity to walk in the rain; get drenched, get my socks soggy, jacket dripping with water, and fighting with the gusts of wind to hold my umbrella from turning inside out. I hadn’t factored the cold.

It was plain and simply wonderful; now my nose is running and I’m humming Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Have you ever seen the rain? Actually, a better song is Raindrops keep falling on my head from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (though there's no rain in the movie during this song).

One of the most amazing books on Indian monsoon is Chasing the Monsoon by Alexander Frater. It’s the only authentic book on the Indian monsoon that I’ve read. It’s a book that one (as a native of Mumbai) can read without getting either a sense of déjà vu or that feeling of reading a travelogue written for a western audience by a westerner who has little or no clue about India.

Frater chases the monsoon from Kerala to Cherapunji – supposedly the wettest place on earth, according to the textbooks that were written during the British times, and haven’t been changed in over a hundred years, because most school textbooks in India even now claim that Cherapunji is in Assam. It isn’t. It’s in Meghalaya, and it isn’t the wettest place any longer, it has a water shortage.

The book has Nehru’s quote on Mumbai’s monsoon and how unimpressed he was by the momentous event.

See the post below for the quote.

Image: View from my window of Lawrence Ave W drenched in rain
Alexander Frater: http://www.panmacmillan.com/Authors%20Illustrators/displayPage.asp?PageTitle=Individual%20Contributor&ContributorID=70891&RLE=Author
Chasing the Monsoon: http://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Monsoon-Modern-Pilgrimage-Through/dp/0805020527