A Case of Cultural Defoliation

HE WAS Mirzaji for the juniors, and Mirza  Bulbul for those with whom he would exchange four-letter words. He ran a paan  khokha at the Nursery Chowk  in the Model Town  for more years than I can remember.

          Having migrated to Lahore  from Meerut  after Partition , he set up the khokha , because he was too poor and too proud to make a larger encroachment on evacuee property. "I left nothing behind in Meerut. So why should I claim anything here?" he would say.

          He sold betel leaves and cigarettes and soft drinks, the last two to make a living but paan  he sold because he loved it himself and because, in his view, no one in Lahore  knew how to make a decent paan . He ate as many paans as he sold, if not more, and he was gruff with those who wanted their cud without zarda' or qivam or similar other poisons. Those who wanted the meetha (sweet) paan were served but with visible displeasure, a dusky countenance getting duskier. Those he liked got their paans at 30 paisa at less than half the going rate. He hated those who wanted to jump the queue, and would sometimes refuse to serve them.

          He was dirty and unkempt and so was his khokha . It appears as if the place was never dusted since it was put up. He himself reminded you of Bertrand Russell  and Krishna Menon , all at once. He had Russell's head of hair-grey and wayward, and Menon's face, unattractive, almost ugly, yet extremely expressive.

          Mirza  was much more than a paanwaala . He was an institution, a living and constantly updated edition of who's who in Model Town . He could tell you where was X and who lived there and who had been blessed with a son the previous night or whose grandmother had kicked the bucket this very morning. His Khokha was a landmark, and people coming in from town would take direction from there.

          Everyone thought that Mirza  was there for good, but then the Model Town  Cooperative Society was dissolved or suspended or whatever the year before last and the Deputy Commissioner was made the Administrator. So the LDA moved in and began giving Model Town a face-lift. Roads were recarpeted with commendable speed. Sewers laid and new trees planted, and parks and playgrounds, neglected since Partition , re-grassed. Mirza would look at the park across the road from his khokha . " Ubb yahan budmasi (badmashi) hovey gi " (now there will be indecency here). One would be amazed and ask him why did he think so. "Arey saab, tum dekh lena. Jidhar paruk hota hai udher badmasi jarorr hoti hei." (You'll see. Where there is a park, there is indecency) and leave it at that. Perhaps Mirza himself had been indiscreet in a public park in Meerut , untold years ago.

          But badmashi there was to be soon enough, though not in the park. Mirza  himself was to be the victim of this badmashi. Someone in the administration thought Mirza's khokha and dozens of other kiosks were hurting the landscape. Model Town  had to be "beautified." These khokhas had, therefore, to go. Suddenly one day, on return from work, I found Mirza's khokha gone razed to the ground, obliterated. Of course, the place looks much cleaner without Mirza and the other khokhawallhs , but it is not the same place. How does one describe it? Cultural defoliation? I can think of no better description.

          For Mirza  it was Partition  all over again. He was offered a shop in the New Market they are setting up. He refused. If he couldn't sell paan at the Nursery Chowk , he would sell them nowhere else. " Ubb to hum German  javegay' (I'II go now to West Germany ), he said. The Federal Republic is just German for him, not Germany. I wanted to correct him but he said, " Arey hum to Hitler  kay wakhat sey German kehtay hein, aaj tuk kissi nein ghalat nahin bola hamen ." He had been saying so since Hitler's days and nobody had questioned him. Who was I to fault him?

          I wanted him photographed for this piece. He refused. "I have friends in Karachi . What will they say?" he said, offering me a paan out of his personal quota, with a murderous quantity of qivam (scented concentrate of tobacco), which I did not have the heart to refuse. The thing would have knocked out Mohammad Ali in his prime. But may Mirza  always be happy in "German " where he is going to live with his son. But I'II never know why was he called bulbul (nightingale). No two birds could be more different.

          Postscript: A sticker on the boot of a car parked on he Mall  Road. "Whenever I am about to make ends meet, someone or the other moves the ends."

January 21, 1984