My annual visits to Peshawar, my city of birth, are usually predictable affairs. I visit family and friends, attend a few literary gatherings, visit childhood haunts and give lectures at various institutions. Two years ago, on such a visit, I became enmeshed in an unusual quest that took me all over that ancient city in search of some very special artifacts: fragments of a home – scattered, like ashes somewhere in the city.
I was born eighty years ago in a ramshackle old home in the walled city of Peshawar, our homestead since 1870. My grandfather, dada, graduated in 1862 in the maiden class of Lahore Medical School (Later renamed King Edward Medical College). He served as a government doctor in the tribal outposts along the turbulent western frontier. He bought the house in Peshawar in 1870 to put an end to the nomadic life for his family.He was transferred every few years to a new location and it was becoming difficult to relocate his family from outpost to outpost. While he was still working in places like Pahar Pur (near D I Khan), Hangu and Parachinar, at least he had now a place where his family could stay and his only son, my father, could get educated. After retiring from service he settled down to a leisurely retirement but died within few years and left behind a rich legacy of family traditions that survived him another 150 years. All those traditions centered on the hearth and home.
It was an ordinary brick-and-white-plaster house with wood-beam ceilings, cement floors and mud covered roof terraces. In dozen or so rooms spread over three floors lived a large family of nine brothers and sisters, three aunts and a few orphaned cousins. There were always a few guests staying in the baithak or hujra downstairs in the men’s quarters. Upstairs in the women’s quarters or zenana, the ladies of the house lived a rather secluded life that revolved around cooking, sewing and cleaning. Twenty-six children spanning three generations were born and raised in that house. From that house we laid to rest the aged and sometimes not-so-aged members of the family.
Weddings celebrations, funerals and holidays brought the family together. Since my grandfather’s days it was given that all members of the family, no matter where they were stationed, would come to the homestead to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-ul-Adha. For the family togetherness and celebration was as sacred as the religious significant of the holidays themselves.
With a heavy heart I left that enchanting place in 1963 for a faraway land called America. I took nothing with me but a few family snapshots and an album of rich memories. These sustained me during the difficult times that I faced in the first few years after I left home and whenever I could, I returned to the homestead to reaffirm my being just as my elders had done before me.
Dwellings, like people, succumb to the ravages of time. When the last of the family members moved out, the house was given rent-free to some distant acquaintances in the misguided belief that they would try to maintain it. When I visited it about 15 years ago, it had fallen into disrepair and had been reduced to a fleeting shadow of its former glory. Yet I could see the life stories of the many generations that had lived there: faded paint, peeling plaster and sagging ceilings were like a colorful collage to me.
In the past 75 years, like many other parts of the city, our neighborhood had also changed. Once a quiet and sleepy residential area of closely-knit neighbors, it had gradually morphed into a bustling inner city commercial center. One of my friends, a poet and a diehard Peshawari, the late Johar Mir of New York City, mourned our city in one of his celebrated poems:
Strangers have entered our bedrooms
They are now flooded with bright lights
But I am plunged into the darkness of oblivion
O my beloved city, your modesty is for sale to the highest bidder.
Reluctantly, the family decided to let go and move on. The house was sold to a developer who planned to build a shopping arcade on the site.
So it was that before leaving for Pakistan for my annual visit, I asked the new owner to wait a week before tearing the house down. I wanted to visit the place just one more time to say goodbye, whisper a prayer and shed a tear for a way of life long gone. But commerce triumphed over sentimentality and my request for the stay of execution was ignored.
A five-member crew armed with crowbars, hammers, and axes brought the house down and hauled all the salvageable material away, leaving behind a piece of naked land that I could not connect to, try as I would. It was no longer the place where I had been born and raised, and from where I had set off on all my journeys. The absence of any tangible signs to help me connect the past with where I was standing – doors, windows, a niche in the wall for an oil lamp, anything at all – left me in a state of confusion and disarray.
Hence my visit to the dark and damp world of warehouses where they recycle salvaged material from old houses. Scattered in these gigantic chop shops are the abandoned relics of forgotten people and places: faded doors, old almirahs and carved windows that had witnessed countless loves, quarrels and intrigues that are part of any family.
I finally found them: familiar doors and windows leaning against the wall totally out of place. Each scratch, each tiny dent on the faded woodwork had a story to tell. There were doors I had swung on, the windows I had peered through to the outside world and the ceiling beams I had counted innumerable times. On the door ledge of the upstairs terrace, there used to rest an old book, which I would leaf through on lazy summer afternoons, wondering if I would be able to read it some day. To my six-year-old-self it was amazing the way books appeared to speak to the older people.
I asked the warehouse owner whether I could take the rusty old latch-chain from a door. Not comprehending my frame of mind, the kind man offered me a brand new one, free of charge.
In the story of Alladin and the Magic Lamp, the crafty lamp seller goes through the streets offering to exchange old lamps for new ones in the hope of getting his hands on the fabled lamp. Why would I want a new lamp?
Upon my insistence, the man pried loose the latch from the door and gave it to me. He must have wondered whether I had lost my mind. Little did he know that in truth, I’d just found an old piece of it.
Dr. Sayed Amjad Hussain is an emeritus professor of humanities and an emeritus professor of cardiovascular surgery at the University of Toledo, USA, and an op-ed columnist for the daily Toledo Blade and daily Aaj, Peshawar.
The images of author’s ancestral home are from a mural of Peshawar City painted by American artist Kim Seidel and in the personal collection of the author
I was born eighty years ago in a ramshackle old home in the walled city of Peshawar, our homestead since 1870. My grandfather, dada, graduated in 1862 in the maiden class of Lahore Medical School (Later renamed King Edward Medical College). He served as a government doctor in the tribal outposts along the turbulent western frontier. He bought the house in Peshawar in 1870 to put an end to the nomadic life for his family.He was transferred every few years to a new location and it was becoming difficult to relocate his family from outpost to outpost. While he was still working in places like Pahar Pur (near D I Khan), Hangu and Parachinar, at least he had now a place where his family could stay and his only son, my father, could get educated. After retiring from service he settled down to a leisurely retirement but died within few years and left behind a rich legacy of family traditions that survived him another 150 years. All those traditions centered on the hearth and home.
It was an ordinary brick-and-white-plaster house with wood-beam ceilings, cement floors and mud covered roof terraces. In dozen or so rooms spread over three floors lived a large family of nine brothers and sisters, three aunts and a few orphaned cousins. There were always a few guests staying in the baithak or hujra downstairs in the men’s quarters. Upstairs in the women’s quarters or zenana, the ladies of the house lived a rather secluded life that revolved around cooking, sewing and cleaning. Twenty-six children spanning three generations were born and raised in that house. From that house we laid to rest the aged and sometimes not-so-aged members of the family.
Weddings celebrations, funerals and holidays brought the family together. Since my grandfather’s days it was given that all members of the family, no matter where they were stationed, would come to the homestead to celebrate Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-ul-Adha. For the family togetherness and celebration was as sacred as the religious significant of the holidays themselves.
With a heavy heart I left that enchanting place in 1963 for a faraway land called America. I took nothing with me but a few family snapshots and an album of rich memories. These sustained me during the difficult times that I faced in the first few years after I left home and whenever I could, I returned to the homestead to reaffirm my being just as my elders had done before me.
Dwellings, like people, succumb to the ravages of time. When the last of the family members moved out, the house was given rent-free to some distant acquaintances in the misguided belief that they would try to maintain it. When I visited it about 15 years ago, it had fallen into disrepair and had been reduced to a fleeting shadow of its former glory. Yet I could see the life stories of the many generations that had lived there: faded paint, peeling plaster and sagging ceilings were like a colorful collage to me.
In the past 75 years, like many other parts of the city, our neighborhood had also changed. Once a quiet and sleepy residential area of closely-knit neighbors, it had gradually morphed into a bustling inner city commercial center. One of my friends, a poet and a diehard Peshawari, the late Johar Mir of New York City, mourned our city in one of his celebrated poems:
Strangers have entered our bedrooms
They are now flooded with bright lights
But I am plunged into the darkness of oblivion
O my beloved city, your modesty is for sale to the highest bidder.
Reluctantly, the family decided to let go and move on. The house was sold to a developer who planned to build a shopping arcade on the site.
So it was that before leaving for Pakistan for my annual visit, I asked the new owner to wait a week before tearing the house down. I wanted to visit the place just one more time to say goodbye, whisper a prayer and shed a tear for a way of life long gone. But commerce triumphed over sentimentality and my request for the stay of execution was ignored.
A five-member crew armed with crowbars, hammers, and axes brought the house down and hauled all the salvageable material away, leaving behind a piece of naked land that I could not connect to, try as I would. It was no longer the place where I had been born and raised, and from where I had set off on all my journeys. The absence of any tangible signs to help me connect the past with where I was standing – doors, windows, a niche in the wall for an oil lamp, anything at all – left me in a state of confusion and disarray.
Hence my visit to the dark and damp world of warehouses where they recycle salvaged material from old houses. Scattered in these gigantic chop shops are the abandoned relics of forgotten people and places: faded doors, old almirahs and carved windows that had witnessed countless loves, quarrels and intrigues that are part of any family.
I finally found them: familiar doors and windows leaning against the wall totally out of place. Each scratch, each tiny dent on the faded woodwork had a story to tell. There were doors I had swung on, the windows I had peered through to the outside world and the ceiling beams I had counted innumerable times. On the door ledge of the upstairs terrace, there used to rest an old book, which I would leaf through on lazy summer afternoons, wondering if I would be able to read it some day. To my six-year-old-self it was amazing the way books appeared to speak to the older people.
I asked the warehouse owner whether I could take the rusty old latch-chain from a door. Not comprehending my frame of mind, the kind man offered me a brand new one, free of charge.
In the story of Alladin and the Magic Lamp, the crafty lamp seller goes through the streets offering to exchange old lamps for new ones in the hope of getting his hands on the fabled lamp. Why would I want a new lamp?
Upon my insistence, the man pried loose the latch from the door and gave it to me. He must have wondered whether I had lost my mind. Little did he know that in truth, I’d just found an old piece of it.
Dr. Sayed Amjad Hussain is an emeritus professor of humanities and an emeritus professor of cardiovascular surgery at the University of Toledo, USA, and an op-ed columnist for the daily Toledo Blade and daily Aaj, Peshawar.
The images of author’s ancestral home are from a mural of Peshawar City painted by American artist Kim Seidel and in the personal collection of the author