What
Does This Story Say About The 70th Anniversary?
Saeed Naqvi
This is a true story. I am revisiting it
with a purpose: so that it collides head on with the nation’s 70th
anniversary celebrations. Absolute, undiluted joy on this occasion would
require total amnesia of that which accompanied independence: Partition. With
some of us, these celebrations will always be tempered with Keats’ great
dictum:
“Ay, in the very temple of delight
Veil’d melancholy has her sovran shrine”
Yes, that story, spread over India,
Pakistan and the United States. Before I share the story with you let me first
spell out the dramatis personae to simplify the narrative.
When the feudal order was breaking down,
my family in Mustafabad near Rae Bareli produced two ideological streams. My
father came from a line of staid Congressmen. In fact his elder brother, Wasi
Naqvi, was the first Congress MLA from Rae Bareli. My earliest memory of
political activity in these 70 years is of Feroz Gandhi weaving his
parliamentary seat around my uncle’s assembly constituency. This was the seat
that Indira Gandhi inherited, then Rajiv Gandhi and so on.
My mother’s family was more literary and,
after the intellectual fashion of those days, of a more leftist bent. Her only
brother Saiyid Mohammad Mehdi, our dearest “Mamujan”, caught the eye of P.C.
Joshi, General Secretary of the CPI, who was then stitching together Indian
Peoples Theatre and the Progressive Writers Association. Joshi whisked Mamujan
away to Mumbai to share a commune with Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh
Sultanpuri, Krishen Chander and a host of others.
Mamujan’s younger daughter, Shireen, with
a degree from JNU, could not ignore her mother’s entreaties and married a
cousin, Abbas, a gentleman to boot, settled in Dubai but, alas, of Pakistani
parentage. The condition for the marriage were clear: they would live in a
neutral country, not in Pakistan. Shireen obstinately held onto her Indian
passport.
Like her father, Shireen is a reader (a
book in two days) and taught in a school. Abbas stuck to investment banking.
Their eldest daughter Mariam studied
cinema in Canada, fell in love with a Haitian film maker and settled in Canada.
She was confident that her Indian passport, on which she had travelled to India
numerous times, would be part of the record even if she acquired her husband’s
nationality.
She had goofed. She had not taken into
account the dark shadow that would always hover over her head: her father’s
Pakistani nationality. That fact scratches out her Indianness. This is just a
minor consequence of what the leaders of India, Pakistan and Great Britain
accomplished 70 years ago. But Shireen had to prepare for worse.
When she was in the family way again, her
husband had taken a transfer to the Cayman Islands. For Shireen this was a
Godsend in a most unexpected way. In the ninth month of her pregnancy, she
would cross over to Florida for greater gynaecological care. This is precisely
what Shireen did. So, not only was little Rabab born in a world class hospital,
she was doubly blessed on another score. She was born with a priceless document:
the American passport. So far so good, until God revealed his enigmatic side:
Rabab was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, immobile, comprehensively challenged,
condemned to move only on a wheelchair.
Shireen and Rabab were able to travel to
Delhi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Mustafabad once or twice a year until collapse of the
global economy in 2008 affected Shireen’s mobility. Frequent travel between
Dubai and Delhi became too expensive.
When sorrows come they come in battalions.
At 30, Rabab is a big, heavy girl. With tears in her eyes, her Bangladeshi
nanny told Shireen that Rabab was too heavy for her to change her clothes,
bathe, seat on a wheelchair and be put to bed.
Shireen and Abbas began to share these
chores until the next installment of bad news. Shireen was diagnosed with
leukemia.
She now faces an existential choice. Her
support structure – sister, uncles, cousins, nieces are all in India. She
already has an apartment next door to our daughters, her adoring nieces.
Shireen, ofcourse, has an Indian passport
and can come and go as she pleases. The problem is with Rabab’s long term visa
because it is impossible to cart her back and forth, pointlessly, on a short
term visa which incidentally, is not assured either. One would have thought she
can sail in with her American passport. But that is not the case. Her father’s
nationality trumps all other considerations. Look, she is on a wheel chair.
Doesn’t matter. She is comprehensively challenged. That does not qualify her
for an Indian visa. The system is telling an invalide child that her father is
her curse.
Lest you begin to chastise the present
government for Rabab’s woes, do pause for a moment. The BJP regime came in day
before yesterday. Stringent, sometimes inexplicable, laws were put in place by
successive Congress governments.
The document that Mariam was handed by the
Indian High Commission in Ottawa (when she applied for OCI card some years ago)
takes one’s breath away:
“As per the MHA’s OCI ruling, no person
who, or either of whose parents or grandparents or great grandparents is or has
been a citizen of Pakistan, Bangladesh at any time or such other country as the
Central government may, by notification in the official gazette, specify, shall
be eligible for registration as an overseas citizen of India cardholder. In
view of the existing OCI rules, you are not entitled for grant of OCI card
facility because one of your parents is of Pakistani origin.” That Mariam was
born in India and, before her marriage, travelled extensively on an Indian
passport is of no consequence.
I realize more than most people that these
are abnormal times. In fact my career as a foreign correspondent would have
been impossible without unstinted help, on a personal basis, from friends in
the foreign office and in other parts of government. Additionally, visas for
friends and relatives, on both sides of the border, were there for the asking.
My friends were a strand in the vast mosaic that kept the nation’s sanity.
Thanks to them visiting relatives from Pakistan envied us for the friends we
had. “Bhaiyya, can we buy land here?” It all seems so distant in time.
My mother, an eternal optimist, a great
favourite of Shireen and Abbas, indeed our entire universe, died three years
ago, firm in her belief that sooner or later mists will lift and peace will descend.
She would recite the following couplet with wistfulness in the eyes:
“Bada maza us milap mein hai,
Jo sulah ho jaae, jung ho kar?
(There is great pleasure in that harmony
Which descends after a big quarrel.)
Would my mother have been able to sustain
that optimism given the state of play on this, our 70th birthday?
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