When the stars of Khamiso Khan Mahar of Garhi Aadhu Shah, Sindh, and Raboodan Bibi of Parbatipur, East Bengal, British India, collided in a distant galaxy called Lucknow, UP, sometime in 1930s, a new star was born. That new star, Muhammad Aalim Khan, was to be my mother’s maternal uncle.
Aalim Khan spent his first few youthful springs enjoying the beautiful crimson evenings of Oudh, loafing on the banks of River Gomti in Lucknow – which his Sindhi father, my maternal great grandfather, Khamiso Khan, had made a home for whatever reasons – before the invisible hand of serendipity, and circumstances well beyond his or his father’s control compelled the family to revert to the fragrant, jasmine-smelling mornings of the banks of the Sindhu.
Thus pushed by the heavenly forces, and the haste of post-war colonial British masters to dump India. Khamiso Khan collected everything he had, lock, stock and barrel, and made a beeline for Rohri where his elder brother, my paternal great grandfather Ahmed Khan Mahar, already lived with his family.
Most of the six children of Khamiso Khan were born in Lucknow and, therefore, when they migrated to the neonate Pakistan or millennia old Sindh – whatever way you want to look at it – they all spoke Sindhi slightly worse than my America-born sons. They spoke Sindhi with an Urdu accent with a tinge of the vocabulary sprinkled upon it, whereas my elder son Omar speaks a flawless Sindhi in a perfect Sindhi accent. The younger one, Uzair, though, does it with an American accent.
In Lucknow, my great grandfather was known as Khamiso Khan Sindhi. Here, in Sindh, he was immediately dubbed as Khamiso Khan Hindustani – an oxymoron in itself!
My earliest memories of Mamo Aalim Khan are of a dreaded man in a white immaculately starched Shalwar Kameez – the knife-sharp crease of the Shalwar set to the front, like he was wearing a pair of pants. His freshly polished shoes always shone black. I rarely saw him smiling but whenever he did, his betel chew stained red teeth made him look more bloodcurdling.
“Why is he carrying a dagger, baba?” “Because nobody is not allowed to carry a sword these days”, whispered my grandfather back in my ear, and smiled
He sported a thin, cleanly trimmed sword-cut mustache, a la Raj Kumar of old Indian movies, and always carried a gearhead knife in the side pocket of his kameez, which he would flaunt at the first opportunity: less to cut, for example, an apple, more to show off, with the tuck-tuck-tuck, sound of the gear making a terrorising effect on the onlooker.
At the time of his wedding, I was a little child. Cars were rare those days. A bus was hired to haul Janjia, the wedding party, along with a procession of Tonga, the horse carriages, to Sukkur from Rohri, where he was marrying into a respectable Soomro family. Seeing him carrying a large dagger, I leaned towards my best friend, my maternal grandfather, Musa Khan, and whispered in his ears “Why is he carrying a dagger, baba?”
“Because nobody is not allowed to carry a sword these days”, whispered my grandfather back in my ear, and smiled.
Upon his return to Sindh from India, my great grandfather had bought some lands near Pano Akil, which his sharecroppers tilled. From time to time, Mamo Aalim Khan would disappear. When he resurfaced after a few days, and his friends asked where he had been, he would casually – and with the airs of a great feudal lord -- respond “milkaait te perr ghumain wayo huyus” (I went to walk my feet on my estate).
Most of his friends were Punjabi- and Urdu-speaking small-time railways workers, for whom owning lands was a big deal. After hearing the above declaration from him a couple of times, one of them named him “Wadera Aalam Khan.” The moniker stuck to him afterwards, and he started being referred to as Wadera Aalam Khan.
Truth be told, Mamo Aalim Khan was not exactly a Wadera, a feudal lord. When I think of him now, he was a simple, lovable man, who merely loved to fly his own kite.
Later, however, in my school years, when I started reading Urdu literature and saw pencil sketches of some characters from Lucknow, I realised that he tried to look more like a Lucknowi Banka, a UPian warrior, than a Sindhi wadero. Maybe the childhood memories of Lucknow life were still alive within him and he unconsciously wanted to imitate a Banka.
True to the sub-continental tradition where cousins don’t see each other in the eye, my maternal side of the folks did not get along very well with my paternal family. This brings back a very beautiful memory of my childhood.
In the afternoons, donning a starched Shalwaar Kameez on a polished pair of shoes, his heavily oiled and freshly dyed jet black hair tightly upturned, his thin sword-style mustache neatly trimmed, the gearhead knife in his pocket, Mamo Aalim would set up court in an open-air ‘hotal’ café, in the small market, dragging on his beedis and chatting with his cronies, the same railway-worker crowd.
On those afternoons, whenever one of my uncles went to the small local market to grab something, I would tag along with him, for a reason.
Once in the market, I would make every effort to be spotted by Mamo Aalim. For as soon as saw me, he would beckon at me and shout “Arre, hede aa” (hey you, come here). I, acting surprised at his call and pretending as if I had not noticed him earlier, would rush to him.
Ignoring my uncles’ – who were his cousin’s sons—greetings and without making eye contact with them, he would put his hand in his side pocket, fish out a chaar-anna (25 paisa) coin. Handing it to me, he would signal to me with his eyes and a slight tilt of his head to get lost.
Gladly and quickly – for like everyone else in the family, I dreaded him too – I would vanish. I was only interested in his money, not him. Chaar-anna was a fortune at that time. I could spend the newly acquired wealth in buying the most favoured Kulfi from Ustaad, or a packet full of sizzling pakoras (vegetable fritters), or a lot of toffees.
This continued until I came of age and when I left Rohri for further education, my contacts with the distant family became too less frequent.
Khamiso Khan had died while I was very young. For as long as Amma Rabbul, the strong Bengali matriarch, lived, she held her sons and their families together. However, as soon as she closed her eyes, there started a squabble over the small piece of land. Finally, the brothers decided to sell it.
The gigantic ‘Peepal House’, too, where everyone lived happily for decades, had to be divided into small pieces of land to build an independent house for each brother. Aalim Khan, not used to this kind of living, moved out with his family to a nearby rented railways quarter.
I kept hearing about his worsening financial condition. Education for his kids had never been one of his priorities. Therefore, they were not much help to him either in his old age. I, having devoured many of his four annas, was myself a student, not in any position to help. Too proud, he would not accept assistance from anyone, anyway.
Then, his health too started to crumble. Already a frail man, he started to develop bigger health issues: poverty and the old age being the worst diseases of them all.
I was in the USA when I heard of his passing. Along with the family, a lot of Sindhi, Urdu, Pathan and Punjabi friends appeared to shoulder Wadera Aalam Khan’s palanquin for his last ride to his resting place. May he rest in the eternal peace of Jannatul Firdous!
I am sure that there, wherever he be, he is allowed to carry a sword, and when I finally meet him one day, he has a stock Chaar-anna ready for me.