Two years ago while on a visit to Lahore I ventured into the old city to look for a house where my great-grandfather had lived.
Dwellings, like people, also get old. This particular nondescript house stood for more than 100 years and then it succumbed to the ravages of time. It collapsed from within and after the neighbours and strangers helped themselves to the salvageable material, there remained nothing but a pile of dirt on a piece of naked land.
My great grandfather Syed Qutb Shah was a hakim who practiced in Mohalla Sathan and lived in the narrow street called Kucha Lun Chakhaan within that Mohalla. His only son Syed Sher Shah, my grandfather, attended Lahore Medical School (later King Edwards Medical College) against the wishes of his father. That rift made them estranged from each other.
After graduation in 1862 Sher Shah joined the British India Medical Service and served his entire medical career in the tribal outposts of the turbulent western frontier. He married a Syed girl from Peshawar and after retirement dropped anchor in Peshawar rather than returning to Lahore.
The author (left) with a resident of Kucha Lun Chakhan. In the excitement of finding the place, the author forgot to ask his name
I had visited the house in Mohalla Sathan as a 5-year old boy when my father took the family to Lahore for holidays. My grandfather passed away some 30 years earlier. The childhood impressions of the house were reinforced a few more times when I visited the place while in college.
It was a modest house with a baithak on the ground floor, four or five rooms on the first floor and an outhouse on the terrace on the upper level. After the death of my father in 1944 we seldom visited the place. It was entrusted to the care of Chacha Fazal Din, a friend and playmate of my father. He opened a milk shop on the ground floor where the baithak used to be. Every month like clockwork, we would receive a money order for Rs. 20 as rent.
Chacha Fazal Din – we called him Chacha Phaja – was a simple and humble man. His milk shop was one of the landmarks and a reference point in Kucha Lun Chakan. During my occasional visits to Lahore when I was in high school and later in college, I would make sure to visit him. He would be happy to see me and would ask where I was staying. When I would tell him I was staying with a friend, he would say, “O beeba why don’t you come and stay in your own home?” Chacha Phaja wished to see the house lived in again as it was during his childhood. He died sometimes in the mid 1960s and with the milk shop gone the place was left to the mercy of elements. Eventually by the 1980s it was gone.
A rangrez shop in Mohalla Sathan
Hence the urge to visit the place.
I asked my good friend Salman Rashid, the well-known travel writer and a pucca Lahori, to accompany me in my quest to locate the area where my great grandfather had lived.
Old Lahore, like many cities in the Subcontinent, is a maze of labyrinthine and serpentine streets and alleys. It takes a lifetime to get to know the confusing topography of such a city.
We entered the old city through the Bhati Gate in the western wall of the city. The gate was named after the Rajput clan of Lahore. Between 1902 and 1905 Allama Iqbal had lived in a house near the gate.
The gate leads to a busy bazaar where we dodged rickshaws, small Suzukis and motor bikes. In another era one had to worry about galloping horses and tongas. We asked about mohalla Sathan and were given directions in a typical Pakistani style: Go straight until you come to a mosque at the corner of an alley. Don’t stop there and keep going. There will be a water tank but don’t mind that either and keep going. Beyond that just ask someone to show you the way. Salman and I decided that we would stop every 100 yards and ask the directions to Mohalla Sathan. That got us to the general area.
While we were on a quest to find the area we also stopped to partake of some of the delicacies the old city has to offer. In particular we enjoyed muthian, the small fist-sized savoury confectionary sold in halvai or sweetmeat shops. It was the first time that my friend Salman had the delectable treat and he was suitably impressed.
We found Mohalla Sathan but finding Kucha Lun Chakhan (literally the Alley of the Salt Tasters) was more tedious. Every shop we stopped to ask told us to keep going and we would find it. After following those non-directions for a few more times I found a customer at a shop who knew where the alley was. In fact he lived in the kucha we were looking for.
He was curious as to whom we were visiting. “No particular person, I said, “I am looking for the place where my great grandfather had lived more than a hundred years ago”. The look on the face of the kind man was interesting.
As he led us to the kucha, I told him the story of my family. He said there was a house in the alley that was owned by some Syed family in Peshawar. My heart raced as he told me about some other names in the neighbourhood that were familiar to me.
He brought us to a little clearing and pointed towards a crudely made cement and brick one-storey structure as the site of the house. Tried hard as I did, I could not fit the structure in my mental snap shot of 75 years ago. As we all know childhood memories seldom fit in the contemporary landscape.
I asked him about Chacha Phajja the milk-seller. He had heard of him but the man had died before his birth. “And how about his son Ghulam Hussain, the khushnawees (calligrapher)? I asked. He remembered Ghulam Hussain but he had died a long time ago and his family had moved to the suburbs.
Ghulam Hussain was a master calligrapher. In the late 1940s he had started an Urdu magazine called Khushnawees. Other than articles on the art of calligraphy, it also carried poetry and short stories. One section was devoted to childrens’ contributions. He knew my interest in calligraphy and would send me a free copy of the magazine every month.
With much trepidation I sent him a story and to my delight and utter surprise it was published in the next issue. For a while I carried that copy with me everywhere. It was an unprecedented high for a 12-year-old boy to see his name in print for the first time.
The only thing I could do was to breathe hard and take in the same air that the patriarch of my family had breathed and to walk on the same brick lined dusty street where he and my grandfather had walked. Or when aroma of boiling milk, yogurt, malai, and lassi wafted from Chacha Phajja’s milk shop through the neighbourhood.
The alley appeared both familiar and totally unfamiliar at the same time. There wasn’t mush else I could see or feel.
We thanked our kind guide and left the street of salt tasters. It had been an interesting excursion into the past.
Dr. Sayed Amjad Hussain holds emeritus professorships in Humanities and cardiovascular surgery at the University of Toledo, USA. He is also an op-ed columnist for Toledo Blade and daily Aaj of Peshawar.
The author is an Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Surgery and an Emeritus Professor of Humanities at the University of Toledo, USA. He is the author more recently of A Tapestry of Medicine and Life, a book of English essays, and Chotha Album, a book of profiles in Urdu.
In recognition of his work in preserving the cultural and linguistic legacy of the walled city of Peshawar, the governor of the province bestowed on him in 1996 the title of Baba-e-Peshawar.
