A flight to Bidar- My mother’s fancy

Parkinson’s robbed my mother of her mobility and cruelly ransacked her memory, a treasury where things more precious than gold were stored.  However, some racial memory deep within, wrapped in strong sentiments and guarded by  poignant  emotions, remained untouched by the vagaries of old age and the compounding complications- Bidar, her place of birth, refused to dim out its sparkle and solaced her, made her happy with its fond memories.

A couple of weeks before her demise in Karachi, she woke me up past midnight and said in a fervid voice, “ Let’s pack our things, we have to go to Bidar. ”  She sounded like a soldier who had received the marching orders; or perhaps like a weary  traveller done with changing abodes and just hoped to return home for peace and comfort.  I feel the words were premonitory –  her demise ended the long journey which she had embarked upon by first leaving Bidar as a young girl to settle in Hyderabad, and post partition the tumultuous transition took her away  from Hyderabad to East Pakistan and after the Fall of Dhaka in 1971 she finally settled in Karachi. 

Both my parents left India but carried it in their hearts till the end. A lot of conversations involving my baba’s childhood and teenage years centred around Bangalore, his ancestral place. His fascination for its drizzly damp weather and soothing greenery;  his admiration for this land of the red soil was like the long lasting sweet sandalwood fragrance which enveloped him throughout his lifetime. From my ammi’s side of ancestry, we got linked to Bidar, which she ardently mentioned in the anecdotes from her childhood. Along with that she regaled us with stories about the Nizam of Hyderabad and her college life as she had relocated to the City of Pearls sometime in 1950s for higher education from Osmania University. Having spent the prime years there, she developed a strong affiliation with the local customs, language, cuisine and lifestyle and naturally the Hyderabadi culture dominated and shaped her personality. Her deep connection with Bidar, and  strong association with Hyderabad is such a hybridized  actuality just like my own bi-nation-Indo-Pak identity, that regionalizing her origin to either of places would be difficult; it would not be wrong to say Bidar birthed her and Hyderabad parented her.   

She reminisced about the time spent in Bidar but unfortunately nothing was documented – the names of people or places or the chronological order of the events. All I know is a sketchy ground plan of the house she lived in which had guava trees in the four corners;  it had a room in the courtyard reserved for stocking mangoes and grains, and they had a white horse carriage. Their neighbouring houses belonged to close relatives and  were all inter connected so they could breeze past in any house at any time of the day. The sighs which punctuated ammi’s narrations, the regretful tone with which she recalled her parents’ house, was an expression of lament- the lament of leaving behind the riches,  never to be regained. 

The hard prodding of late reawakening made me find out more about my maternal family history. Funnily enough, the most interesting part of my discussions, once I started speaking to the old relatives, was this quip,  “Have you got some information about the lost properties?” Maybe the kind of intense questioning I had launched prompted this query. My high spirit of inquiry, to find the missing chunks of information and open the avenues leading to a grand past reduced to shambles in the aftermath of the partition,  soon lost steam.  The top tier which witnessed this grueling transition is no longer around and the surviving members’ recollections are hazed with the passage of time.   A dear uncle informed me, and ammi too  often mentioned that our grandfather owned a farmland and cattle near  Nyalkal, a village some miles away from Bidar and had built a house in ‘Maniyar Taleem’. The mango grove, which earned  the moniker ‘Sherbat Bagh’ was her family property in an area named ‘Kal Mein Mul’  (Google couldn’t furnish any information about this place).  

A maternal relative, as interested as I am in unearthing the family history, who recently visited Bidar too , provided bits of valuable information and asserted that our maternal lineage traces its origin to  Mamud Gawan,  the chief minister under the Bahmani Rule. It is a name that some family members too recall and to believe that there was indeed a connection makes one thrilled but in the absence of any solid evidence, it sounds like an attempt at self glorification. Sparse specks of information, missing records and fragmentary facts were reasons strong enough for me to abandon the enthusiastic plan of making a family tree. 

My mother was proud of her splendid background, and she also understandingly accepted the fact that it was long gone. To see how the dust had settled on her rich past and how time had razed to the ground the vibrant vision she had carried in her mind for decades, she once visited Bidar, around twenty six years ago – her last visit to the hometown. It was like a leaf from a coming-of-age novel when she walked in the streets where once stood her house close to the  government hospital, a stone’s throw from the Bidar Fort. Nothing was the same – the only landmark indicating she was at the right layout was an old rusty water pump;  the entire  landscape looked completely unrecognizable. 

Ammi’s Bidar is gone with her.