The Bengali’s Shop
(Translated into English by Moazzam Sheikh)
There was a small-sized general store at the one end of our neighborhood, by the wide boulevard. Although the actual name
of the place was Muteen General Store, it was more familiar to people as the Bengali’s Shop. There was an obvious reason
for it. The family that ran the store was from East Pakistan.
At the front of the shop glass jars sat atop the counter in a neat line. Inside those jars one found cumin biscuits, sesame
laddoos, chewing gum and sweet candies. A weighing scale sat on the other side of the counter, beside a stack of brown envelopes.
In the midst of the shop, the owner had piled up bags of rice and flour. A huge canister of ghee was set against the wall.
No effort had been undertaken to decorate the shop. The sole object of decoration was a pair of strings that reached the two
front corners from the back wall. Hung throughout the strings were triangular advertisements for some famous tea company.
Flies perched on the strings and due to the flies’ excretion over a long period the strings had darkened. The shop in
fact had been created by tearing down a front wall of the house. The family lived in the rest of the property.
The proprietor was an older man and had four sons, who, in turn, helped out. Muteen, however, remained the most familiar face
there. A small girl too was seen helping out, but as she shot up a bit she stopped helping, lest one thought she too, like
merchandise, was for sale. The shop was part of the livable space. If too many guests arrived and felt crammed inside the
house, a few would pour out and sit there. Growing up, I found the shop to be an essential part of my life. If people couldn’t
find an item at a nearby store, they’d stroll down to the Bengali’s shop.
In those days I used to hang out with Sarfraz. Although Sarfraz was only two years my senior, his confident demeanor had
earned him tremendous respect in my eyes. I used to feel a sense of protection under his tutelage and chances of someone picking
on me were curtailed. Sarfraz had good communication with Muteen. Due to their friendship, Muteen once had invited Sarfraz
and me to his house for the Quran recitation. That was my first opportunity to enter the house of any shop keeper. There
was just one door that allowed entrance to the house. The door opened onto a narrow corridor. That day we were made to sit
on a linen spread in the backyard, where extended a metal roof covering part of the verandah. The neem tree had shed its leaves
and berries atop the metal roof.
As the recitation of the Quran came to en end, we were given salted biscuits with tea. After drinking and eating, we headed
home and ran into Yousaf midway. He was Sarfraz’s friend from his school days. Yousaf was on his bicycle. He started
ambling along while still perched on his bicycle. “What did you eat at the Bengali’s house?” Yousaf asked
Sarfraz.
“Don’t refer to them as Bengalis. They don’t like it,” Sarfraz responded with displeasure.
Don’t refer to them as Bengalis. They don’t like it.
Those words from Sarfraz’s mouth remained etched in my mind for many years and many years later I had posed myself a
question: When does a group’s ethnic, religious or linguistic identification becomes a curse? And how many times it
has to be hurled at them for them to start wearing it as a badge of honor?
I remember asking Sarfraz what the difference was between us and the Bengalis.
“Bengalis have thick hair and they don’t shed them. They have sharp eyes, are short and darker.” Sarfraz
had explained it to me with elaboration.
“But Muteen is quite tall,” came out of my mouth of its own volition.
“Every once in a while you’d see a tall one among them too. Moreover, they have been eating better diet while
living in the West Pakistan,” Sarfraz answered with confidence.
Time moved on. Then came the days and nights of upheaval! The country was holding elections after many years and there was
a buzz in the air due to a change in the environment. I wasn’t old enough to know what political parties were contesting
and that why the people of our neighborhood began eyeing the Bengalis with suspicious eyes.
Around the same time I witnessed a man asking Muteen strange questions when I went to the shop one day.
“Do you consider Mujeeb your leader? What’s your opinion about Mujeeb’s six-point agenda?” the man
was hurling questions.
When Muteen did not understand the man’s questions, he called his father to the front. The father entered the shop by
pushing the curtain aside. “What’s the matter here?” His father looked to his son, then to the stranger.
“This gentleman’s been asking me about Sheikh Mujeeb-ur-Rehman,” explained Muteen.
The father lost control.
“Why do you ask this boy such questions? Is Mujeeb-ur-Rehman his uncle? Are you here to buy anything or play politics?
Don’t let me catch you again.” The father gave a thorough dressing down to the stranger.
The man appeared to have been insulted due to my presence.
“Watch yourself, Bengali,” he said and without waiting for an answer, left.
“What did you say, what did you say?” The father rolled up his sleeves and approached the counter, but the man
had taken to heels.
I noticed the father was shivering with anger.
A few more months passed. The elections were held and the results were announced but issues became more complicated resisting
an easy solution.
March 3rd, 1971, was nation’s major test: whether the two parts of the country would rally behind those who had won
the elections. Or whether a group’s false notion of ethnic superiority would prevail? The nation failed the test. The
national assembly couldn’t be sworn in. A situation of uncertainty spread throughout the country. I could guess by reading
people’s worry-stricken faces that a big storm was headed. Then the sun of March 25 rose, the sun of the darkest day
of our history! When the guardians of the house were let loose upon the inhabitants of the house! The war had begun. Not with
anyone else but within. All trust had been violated. There were people who thought that it was possible to suppress others
through power.
A state of war tests people’s character. The unleashed storm denudes the embattled nation. In that nakedness the world
comes to see the reality otherwise hidden behind the delicate façade. It is in a state of war that nations’ entire hatred
jumps out to the fore.
Those who raise the slogan of love on hearing sounds of hatred are sages, prophets. Those days such men and women were nowhere
in sight.
There were only slogans of hatred!
Bengalis are traitors. In East Pakistan the Mukti Bahni thugs are slaughtering people from West Pakistan. They are raping
West Pakistani women. We should do the same here as well. Revenge and revenge and revenge forever! A never ending procession
of lies, brutality, inhumanity!
It was a time when man didn’t recognize man, failing to see the human in the enemy, failing to notice how the two breathe
the same way, the same air. He, the other, too has a job, a house. Just as he is trying to solve his daily problems, the other
too is trying the same. Just as the other loves the ones around him, he too is busy doing just that. When a man forgets to
see a thousand similarities between him and the other and insists upon seeing only one difference, be that race, religion,
language, then he indeed becomes an animal.
I was observing that kind of animal behavior then.
I remember I went to the Bengalis’ shop with Sarfraz in those days. Sarfraz had very stylishly inserted a handkerchief
around his shirt’s collar.
“So, Muteen, my son, is anybody saying anything to you?” Sarfraz asked fiddling with his handkerchief.
“No, Sarfraz bhai, nothing of the sort, answered Muteen.
“Son, let me know if anybody harasses you.” We left the shop.
I wondered for a long time how within the space of one year Muteen changed to "Muteen, my son", for Sarfraz! And why did Muteen
tolerate Sarfraz’s insulting way of addressing him? Why didn’t he protest?
That moment and place appear too far if today I stare back stepping aside from the path of time, too far, where the twain
walls of the path meet. Despite the distance when I try hard I can make out faint features of the place. There is a dust cloud
of fear allowing me to enter it. I recognize the ungly faces of fear striking root inside the heads of the family. I hear
the soft creak when their trembling hands shut doors and windows. I can see fear floating in their wide awake eyes. I become
familiar with the sound of whispers that their dry throats emit. I have felt the pain of that family. I too have cried.
In those tumultuous times that family must have looked in the eyes of every person it came across to see if he were an enemy
or friend. They must have been latching up their door from inside and assuring the doors and windows were securely shut. The
women must have recited surah Yaseen before going to bed and clapped three times to chalk out an imaginary circle of safety
around them. Despite all the precautionary things they did, they still must have been very fearful. And in the middle of
the night when a cat jumped over the metal roof in the back verandah, must have been startled in their sleep.
What do you want? Should East Pakistan separate and become Bangladesh? People would ask these questions without hesitation.
The patriotism of the shop owners was tested everyday. The owner would smile and say: The country should remain one, people
should learn to live with each other. That still didn’t satisfy people. What they perhaps wanted was for the owner to
shout 'Long Live Pakistan' every day and go hoarse yelling 'Sheikh Mujeeb is a traitor, it is not enough to put him in prison,
he should be hanged.'
Those days the owner was regularly seen attending the mosque. A storm of hatred had been unleashed and he was simply trying
to hold on to something as firmly as possible. Many believed that the glue of religion would keep the two parts of the country
together. But that wasn’t meant to be. The storm of linguistic and ethnic hatred was way beyond the power of that glue
to keep the parts together. In the end the bond turned out to be quite weak. The entire country plopped down like a defeated,
bogged down wrestler.
A new wave of emigration began. Bengali vendors seen squatting atop a small dais selling chooran and colorful fish at the
end of school day disappeared. The Bengali women who worked as housemaids too were spotted more infrequently.
“Now you’ve got your Bangladesh. Go there,” people would taunt them.
Despite hearing such venomous bile, the Bengali’s shop stood in the neighborhood. After some time we moved to a different
locality. In the beginning I used to visit the old neighborhood often but gradually my visits became very sporadic.
Years went by.
Then an incident of a gruesome slaying happened in our old neighborhood. I read it in the newspaper. A person by the name
of Dr. Ja’afar Husain Syed had just opened his clinic when a car came to a stop outside. The back window of the car
rolled down and the bullets spewed by a Klashinikov riddled the clinic. After the firing that lasted no more than a minute,
the car sped away. People carried the doctor to a hospital but he died on the way. Two days after the murder I went back to
my old neighborhood to size up the situation. I noticed shops were open for business as usual. The road was crammed with every
conceivable type of traffic. Perhaps people had preferred to forget a two-day old incident. Childhood memories returned on
visiting the old neighborhood. I got a jolt realizing that Muteen General Store was not there anymore. In its place Asghar
Sports Shop had opened. Involuntarily I entered the shop. The shop’s owner was behind the counter and writing something
in his small notebook. He looked up on noticing my arrival. I began looking at cricket bats decked against the wall.
“How long have you been running this shop?” I asked him after a while.
He was still scribbling in his notebook. My curiosity had surprised him.
“The reason I am asking is that there used to be a general store here many years ago,” I offered.
“Well, I do not know about that. I have been running the shop for the last six months. This shop was vacant when I
came here,” answered the shop owner as he eyed me carefully.
“We used to live in this neighborhood. I have spent my childhood here. In those days there used to be a Muteen General
Store here. It used to do good business.”
He didn’t respond. Now he polished the glass top of the counter.
“How is the business?” I asked after a long pause.
“It’s okay. We’re surviving somehow. Whatever sports is on the TV helps the sale. You know this is the
hockey season,” he said slowly running the cloth over the glass counter top.
He let out a chuckle at the end his sentence. I too laughed with him, the way two strangers laugh on inconsequential small
talk.
I asked his name as I was about to leave.
“Asghar,” he replied.
“Very nice, and that’s why the shop is named Asghar Sports. And what’s your full name?” I asked.
I sensed my question had made him tense. He looked to his right and then to his left very reluctantly and only then did he
answer, “My name is Asghar Husain Zaidi. And yours?”
I told him my name. An expression of relief came over his face.
I took his leave and came out of the shop.
Our Insanities: The Babri Mosque Retaliation
It was early in the morning as we entered Fareed Gate of the old town of Bhawalpur. The shops were being swept in preparation
for starting the business. They were the same old town narrow alleys through which only pedestrians could pass. The drain
water flowed in open sewers and you could often see garbage that once clotted the sewer placed besides the sewer line. It
was the kind of place where everything was open; man was there with all the openness of his uncultured ways. You could tell
what the residents ate last night by looking at a garbage heap. A man in his late forties who fastened his pants rather high
was showing me way to the Kaladari Mandir. Kaladari temple occupied a big area. A big portion of its boundary wall was removed;
it was hard to tell if the intention was to steal the main gate or to make a big enough space so that host of people could
rush in and occupy places at the time of creation of Pakistan. In front of the beautiful Hindu facade little children played
cricket. The temple is occupied by more than twenty families. Most of the temple's beautiful portions are gutted. Was someone
mentioning the desecration of Babri Mosque? Were my people angry over the religious intolerance in India? Well, maybe they
have never been to Kaladari and other temples of Pakistan. And mind you, all that was not in retaliation of the Babri demolition,
it was like that even before, right from the time of the partition.
Babri demolition really brought out the beast in us. That incident was a test of the children of faith and we failed just
like we have been failing for the last 1100 years. While bulldozing temples, with angry fists in the air and smoke coming
out of the nostrils of the leading fanatic leaders it was hard to convince the world that we were the believers of Islam,
the peace. Pieces rather than peace seemed to be our objective and more than fifty temples lay shattered by the time we cooled
down.
What exactly did we try to prove to the world by such a violent reaction? Your response could be whatever, but realistically
speaking the world adhered more the idea of a criminal mind in general with the word religion and in particular with the word
Islam. By destroying temples we lost four ways.
Damaging a Cause
We gaped at our TV screens when we saw fanatic Hindus leveling the Babri Mosque. It was insane! How could they do that? We
were angry , and we were united for the cause of fighting ugly religious fanaticism. Then Mr. Fanatic took charge. Disobeying
all Islamic principles of tolerance and such he urged us to bring temples to a size where instead of looking up he could look
down at them. Like the front-seaters of a wrestling match we yelled, "we want to see blood". Knocking temples down to pieces
in this high emotion kill'em-beat'em-destroy'em phase we left our theo-sociological ideology indistinguishable from the Indian
one.
Destroying our Schools and Libraries
Our blood starts boiling when we hear abandoned mosques used as warehouses and stables in other countries. It doesn't even
catch a morsel of heat when we occupy abandoned temples for residence or school and use their walls for drying dung cakes.
As if this much desecration was not enough we destroyed those buildings dislocating our own schools and libraries (for example
children going to school housed in Jan Mandir of Choburji, Lahore discovered one morning that their school was there no more).
And what do all those dislocated school children have to say about this? Good question! They now love you even more.
Our mad frenzy meant destruction for the sake of destruction as was evident from the Bara Mandir incident of beautiful Chinyot,
Pakistan's Zanzibar. Bara Mandir's building is occupied by a Girls' school; as an angry mob led by furious mullas reached
the temple they found the thick-walled heavily built temple too strong to destroy, so they broke the school furniture. Beautiful!
You are so intelligent, man. You deserve a Nobel. Similarly the mandir housing a library near the Ghanta Ghar in Sialkot was
destroyed depriving citizens of a good place to read books. In other instances adjacent property was damaged too. For example,
when Balum Mandir in the locality of Neela Gumbad, Lahore was put on fire the adjacent building housing autoparts worth millions
of rupees was also burnt. The Auqaf people occupying the courtyard of the Parladpuri Mandir in Multan saved their lives by
writing on the exterior walls that their building was used to teach the Quran.
Killing our own People
Our fanatic leaders are never known for good organization. Like the inspector of a greyhound race setting the dogs on the
run these leaders could start the process, but could not control it. In razing temples there was no one to warn, "O.K, now
it is coming down, so clear off". Invariably every time a temple was demolished people were also injured or killed. Nine people
alone were killed while destroying mandir Undroon Khair-Ul-Madaris in Multan. True martyrs! Now that's called dying for a
splendid cause. They'll be rushed to heaven.
Destroying our cultural heritage
All old buildings are part of our rich heritage. It shouldn't really matter which religious group built those buildings and
who holds them sacred, they are still ours. By destroying old historical buildings we are depriving ourselves of our living
past. So what's next. Clue #1: Moenjo Daro was built by infidels. Clue #1a: Egyptian kings who built pyramids were not Muslims.
Go for their buildings.
If you cannot properly read the following URDU essays here, try downloading and then reading them on your computer.
************
