One autumn Sunday morning in the year 1961, six of us including the devil-may care and CO’s privileged chauffer Corporal Ivor Ray, Leading Aircraftsman Michael Rogers, Aircraftsman Class II Leonard Ward, and the only plain Indian Aircraftsman Class I – myself, along with two young Burn Hall School teachers – plump and pretty Dulcie Pinto and beautiful Yvonne Barretto of shapely legs. The girls carried candles with them; very excited at the prospect of visiting St. Joseph Church of which they had heard so much.
Ours was an illegal trip on a flightless day back in the Air Force camp – not because it was a Sunday, but the sky was overcast; the snow-capped mountains lay in a thick, grey shroud. Since filling fuel in the regular petrol station at Palladium would go on record, we men went Dutch on the refilling cost at another petrol station. Thus, we set off North-Westwards, singing We’re going on a Summer Holiday hoping to reach in a couple of hours Baramulla, where history lay in crackling embers, and be back before someone discovered the missing jeep.
We lost our way quite some distance from Srinagar on a desolate road lined by Chinar trees on both sides. To our good luck, we soon spotted a middle-aged man in brown Kashmiri achkan and a crocheted white cap kneeling on a prayer mat under a tree. We waited till he was done with his Namaz and then greeted him.
“You wish to visit Baramulla, I know,” he said in chaste English with a clipped accent the way English gentries spoke.
“ Of course, to see the church and the hospital where terrible killings happened, ” I said.
Michael nudged me. He was afraid, he later told me, that the Muslim man might take offense.
The Kashmiri introduced himself as Suleiman Bhatt and said, with obvious pride that he was a first cousin of Muqbool Sherwani from his father’s side. He was surprised to learn that we had not heard the name. He narrowed his eyes and stared hard at me and harder at Ivor’s grey-green eyes.
“Are you guys from India or not? You should know that if it was not for Muqbool, Kashmir would be with Pakistan today.”
I learnt the history of Muqbool Sherwani’s sacrifice for India’s cause many decades later from an old internet search engine and regretted not congratulating Mr. Suleiman Bhatt in the autumn of 1961 for being the hero’s cousin. Muqbool was caught and shot several times and his body was hung up as an example for the locals by the Pakistani raiders when they discovered that their volunteering guide from Kashmir was deliberately misleading them. If they had been shown the right route, they would have captured Srinagar before the Indian Army, and then the Air Force could have reacted.
“This is a small town, Pattan.”, Mr. Bhatt said, rolling his prayer mat and placing it cozily under his arm
“My home is over there, just past the culvert. I come here to pray in peace under this tree. St. Joseph’s Hospital is some 20 miles from here. The church is also on the same ground. I have not seen the Mother Superior there for a long time. I can come with you if you could make it convenient to drop me back right here on your way back.”
We readily agreed. He squeezed in with us and during the next hour’s drive described the atrocities committed by the so-called (his adjective) lashcars from Pakistan. When we arrived, he walked into the church leading us where a nun greeted him, brimming with obvious pleasure. Mr. Bhatt introduced us to her, Mother Maria, Mother Superior in the church, and also of the St. Joseph Hospital next door.
The Mother’s voice was faint, shaky and barely audible; Mr Bhatt explained that she had not recovered from the trauma of witnessing the brutality that happened in the church and the hospital fourteen years ago. She saw them coming, alerted the Priest, and ran to hide in a toilet in the hospital next to the church. The priest who thought he could talk sense into the invaders held up his Bible like a shield was cut down. So were the nuns, one of them sliced vertically. In the hospital, they killed the patients and the visitors. They threw babies up in the air and caught them on the tip of their swords. She pointed at our guide and said, “Mr. Suleiman had seen it all. He had come to pick up his wife and the baby. And and..”
Her soft grating voice faded off. Suleiman repeated the words for our benefit.
Then, “They stabbed my Bareen and the baby whose face I had not yet seen and never saw.”
He began to sob in long lurches of breath. The Mother Superior patted his back in sympathy, tears rolling down her pink and freckled cheeks.
Yvonne began to sob. Dulcie held her shoulders, but in a moment began to cry herself. The Mother hugged them both and whispered a prayer. The effect was magical. They stopped crying and wiped their tears and veered off to the chapel to light candles. A few minutes later, Dulcie beckoned us from the chapel. We found a faded portrait of a young nun who died while trying to protect the Mother Superior of the time. Below the portrait was a printed caption which said she gave her life for the people of Kashmir.
A couple of nuns joined us while visitors and patients stared.
After we patted a couple of babies and waved to the women, Mother Maria bid us goodbye. On our way back, Suleiman told us his life history..
In 1935, with a degree in English that he acquired in Sri Pratap College, and no job prospects in Kashmir, he went hitchhiking to Jammu, and then switching buses and trains which took him several days, reached Bombay looking for a decent job. Somebody told him that with the colour of his skin and good looks, he should try a film studio in Nana Chowk where they made talking movies. He tried the only studio there but was summarily ignored. “We have no white man’s role in the movie,” said someone. He sneered when he said he was no white man, but Indian.
Defeated, but not ready to give up, Suleiman sailed as a stowaway in a ship he couldn’t name but was caught and was given work to serve the passengers. So he didn’t starve but was troubled by sea sickness. When the ship docked at the Port of London three weeks later, the captain left him to his fate with a tip of five pounds.
They jailed him at the port but let him off after a month. Out in the streets, although he carried a first-class degree in English, he found communicating with Londoners difficult in the beginning. He got work in a bread-and-eggs shop run by a Sindhi Hindu on the corner of a street.in Brentford. Within a few weeks, because his education helped, his keen ears helped even better, he landed a job as a postman in the Royal Mail Service.
He rented a small room in the loft of a Victorian house owned by an old couple. The old man demanded ten, Ismeil bargained for five and was almost turned away when the old lady called him back and settled the rent at seven pounds a month
“My Dea sa’ah, this man might pay you the first month’s rent, then that will be youah fune’al.”
Your funeral? He was shocked when he heard the phrase for the first time and volunteered to pay a couple of month’s rent as security. Sarah cocked a snook at her husband, fanning the one single-sided white note and a black fiver in his face.
Simon had to have the last word. ” Look, Mr. Whatsyoname, People from India make a lot of noise. Close the door gently. Don’t call out to your friends or a taxi from the window. Don’t put waste food in the water closet.”
” Come on, Simon Dea’. That lady from Calcutta did that only once and then you corrected her.”
Four years later, when Suleiman thought that his pastures were greening and the oldies were demanding a raise in rent, Chamberlain declared war on Germany. By October 1939, London was being bombed night and day. Suleiman had run out and lain on the ground several times a day while buildings came crashing down around him. The government wanted his old land lady to get away to a faraway rescue place for women and children, but she stayed put. The earth tremored, window panes shattered and the roof threatened to fall even when a bomb fell a mile away. Roof tiles lay scattered in the streets. For many months, even after the bombing stopped and a long lull followed, his ears kept ringing and his bed, he thought, kept shaking. He stuck to his rented room in the house where the lady was friendly, the man blamed him for all the noises, even the war. He insisted that ‘if the English had not gone to India and spent good King’s money on educating the thankless blacks, the’a would be no previous woh, and no ho’ble woh such as the one happening ‘ight ovah oua heads“
The old lady would say: “Dea Simon, shut up. You’ve gone mad. If it was not for Indians, we wouldn’t be, like, winning this war.” The way bombs were falling like confetti, Suleiman wasn’t sure that England was winning.
After the Normandy Landing in mid-June, which Eisenhower named the D-Day, Londoners thought that soon peace would prevail. After a lull, flying bombs and rockets began to shower down again. His house collapsed on one of those bombings, crushing the old man to death. After the dead were retrieved and buried at the back of an Anglican church, he led the old lady to a deep shelter in East London and lived nearly the whole year “like being crushed in a vice when you tried to sleep. The V2 bombs came and fell without a sound; you didn’t know you were hit till you died.” Yet his postal service carried on whenever there was a lull.
Hitler probably killed himself, Churchill who called for an early election won at Woodford, but his party, the Conservatives, was roundly defeated. Attlee became the Prime Minister and a thoroughly pissed Churchill went on the Radio babbling incoherent nonsense. Things changed dramatically, the newspapers were already forecasting that India would be given away to Indians as if it were a benign favour.
Suleiman did not win a medal as he had hoped, but the Royal Mail Office promoted him to Postmaster. In 1945. With wartime restrictions and rationing, 25 pounds a week wasn’t all that bad, he could scrounge and save up for a trip to India in the next couple of years, and, as a Vilayat return, marry a pretty Kashmiri girl. Sadly, those were the days when London was recovering from the shock of shattered homes and buildings; bridges and hospitals, there was no hope of bringing a bride with him to England.
“That was the greatest tragedy in my life,” sighed Suleiman.
During the Christmas holidays of 1947, he took a long leave, half of it on pay, sailed to Bombay, took a train to Delhi, then a bus to Jammu, and hitchhiked to Pattan. His father arranged his marriage, negotiated the Mahr and bought new wall-to-wall Nur Jahan carpets to welcome the bride. Within the next ten days, he married Bareen (“so beautiful that I couldn’t take my eyes off her”) from the village of Aram Pora.
Life was like a dream for the next six weeks, holding her hands in European style on a bus to Srinagar disregarding stares, roaming Naseem Bagh on the banks of Dal Lake in the first week of marriage, riding a shikhara in the lake, holding her close while the shikhara man looked away shyly. They then returned to Pattan, spending a week in a relation’s house near Mansabal Lake and rowing a rented shikhara with her by his side for whole days and taking photographs of her with mountains in the backdrop with the box camera he had bought in London. When it was all over like an hour’s dream, he kissed the tearful Bareen goodbye and set off on his circuitous journey back to London.
“ My marriage lasted six weeks,“ he said, staring straight ahead.
Seven months later in late August 1947, along with the news of the independence of India and Pakistan, he got a letter written by Bareen and posted in April that she was expecting their baby, “Allah knows boy or girl, but I want you, inshallah, to be the first to hold your baby,”
He set sail in mid-September.
News reports from Kashmir were scary; Shake Abdullah who favoured India was jailed; and the Muslim conference was, like, opting to join Pakistan. The Maharajah tarried between independence and India. His Dogra army fought the Muslims, said one report; there were also internal skirmishes between the Muslim Conference and the National Conference while Pandits played safe not giving out any point of view. They knew that His Highness Harisingh only thought of his own and his family’s safety. The rumour was that another bloodshed was on the boil.
Worried to the bone, Suleiman Bhatt travelled past Srinagar where everything appeared peaceful. The talk in the streets was that there was bloodshed in Poonch where the raiders and the local militia fought, and then many in the militia switched sides and killed their brethren. Suleiman reached home a day before the Baramulla massacre..
His hometown Pattan on the outskirts where we found him seemed unaware of what was happening except that Akbar Mir, the soft-spoken Mullah, had sold all his land for a pittance and took his family of eight to Kupwara, hoping to make a home in Pakistan. Maqbool Sherwani had been crucified by the Pakistani raiders who wore tribal clothes but had swords and military-grade three-not-three rifles in hand.
His father had shriveled more with fear than age; he told him that Bareen was admitted to St. Joseph Hospital 40 kilometres away. In Baramulla. He borrowed a friend’s motorbike and arrived at the hospital a few minutes too late.
He watched the killers disappearing with shouts of Allahu Akbar and rattling their weapons.
“There was no one alive who could give me a couple of fresh bed sheets to shroud my darlings When I was shouting for help, this Mother Superior – then Sister Maria – came out, shivering, and found me a couple of white bedlinen for shrouds. I couldn’t bear to see the face of the little one; even to check whether it was a boy or girl. It was the Imam in Pattan who later told me that my child was a girl; blue-eyed and beautiful like Bareen..”
When his face clouded again and a sob seemed imminent, Michael reminded him that it happened so long ago – nearly 14 years; if we did not let time heal our sorrows, who would? Suleiman nodded in doubtful agreement. That was the first time I heard Michael Rogers philosophize in his Bishop-Cotton accent.
When we dropped Suleiman Bhatt near the street that led to his house, he said: “ My father is dead, but I will be less of a Kashmiri if I don’t invite you to my lonely home.”
I said thanks, but no thanks; that he had been a great help and a wonderful friend We hoped to meet him again someday.
“Next week I am flying back to London. I will return to India – or would it be Pakistan? – only when I retire. My pension will see me through the rest of my years here in lonesome comfort.”
I assured him it will always be India, the land of Hindus and Muslims, and of Christians and Sikhs for the sake of which his cousin Muqbool Sherwani gave his life.
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