The Wall

THE WALL

I grew up in an area called Kashmere Gate in North Delhi. This “gate” provided passage to King Shah Jahan’s entourage to Kashmir and is one of the four surviving gates to his capital city, Shajahanabad. I live at Parkash Bhavan on Nicholson Road – a connecting road which runs through the heart of North Delhi – my family’s yellowing two-floor ancestral home with two identical balconies and a warehouse below the first floor. Kite-flying was an irreplaceable hobby for every kid who grew up anywhere along the numerous meandering by lanes of Kashmere Gate. It didn’t matter whether one slept on a carry cart or on a bed on the second floor of a large house – acquiring and falling in love with kites was inevitable. I remember how I used to rush home from the bus stop with my heavy school bag which was too big for me. I cautiously made my way through the thronging traffic of dark, skinny rickshaw pullers clad in cheap clothes bought from roadside vendors sitting outside the Red Fort at Chandini Chowk, and large multi-colored trucks with wooden crates containing God knows what, packed in brown jute covers and reeking of stale celery powder and diesel smoke. The only thing I thought about as I avoided bumping into speeding carry carts or reckless rickshaws and breathing in the thick, malodorous smoke from the beedis that hordes of squatting customers of tea shops on either side of the road exhaled, was climbing the huge wall opposite my house and flying the kite I had made my dad fasten with strings to the sharp “manja” in the little “charakri” that my grandfather had bought me from our neighborhood market.

When I was a toddler, I would sit on the crumbling concrete parapet of the second floor balcony every evening under the supervision of my father as he sipped his orange-colored lemon tea with one hand and held on to my waist with his other arm. He would light a cigarette and sing Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the wall” to me, flicking reddish-grey ash to the street. The ash used to look like a dusty, little snow fall on its way to mingle with the dirt at the feet of the wall. The ancient, arched wall made of white and yellowish stones across the little road below my ancestral home began fascinating me. Large, sturdy, and solid, it was but a fence the emperor had built to consolidate his empire. It had provided protection from and acted as a barrier to any hostile activity aimed at the Mughal emperor’s capital, and shelter to hordes of migrating Punjabi families during partition in 1947.

I still remember how tears welled up at the wrinkled corners of my grandfather’s blue eyes the first time I asked him about the wall. I remember how he folded up his Urdu newspaper twice and put it on his table before wiping the tears with the back of his hand, and telling me the story. He told me about the thousand-odd “muhajir” families armed with nothing but old photo albums, tears and the grief of being forcibly cast out of homes where they had grown up playing and wished to die in, arrived on a Sunday morning just before dawn broke out on the horizon. Below the rising sun were cadres of Policemen from their stations in and around Kashmere Gate, marching towards them, with batons in their hands and deep-set, red eyes filled with rage and indecision. They had been sent to “persuade” the families to go somewhere else rather than carving arcs in the wall and live with eight other members of their families in them. Each family lost at least one member to the Police’s persuasion. My grandfather lost his elder brother and uncle.