And Then One Day: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

to apart from the Sunday movie in Prabhat Talkies, and that was the annual visit to Sardhana, which Baba abhorred, but which Ammi insisted on, and generally with good reason, as one or other of her sisters and/or brothers would be getting married.
    These weddings were monumental affairs. Uncles, aunts and cousins of all varieties from all over the country, from Pakistan and even further, would descend, the celebrations were unending, and the feasts and the flare-ups massive. I don’t remember dancing girls but qawwalis went on into the night, and the wind-up gramophone (my introduction to Hindi film music) would blare non-stop. Guns and fireworks went off and antique swords flashed about. Presiding over all this would be Ammi’s parents, Agha Habib Shah and Naushaba Begum. Until later stricken by paralysis and heartbreak at his warring sons and getting reduced to a pathetic sideshow, he was a gargantuan figure, his great quilted coat engulfing all three of us. She was a tall, slim, elegantly turned out hard- faced lady with twinkling eyes, who smoked asthma cigarettes. The lands they owned were still to be divided and fought over by their children, so the estates were still enormous, but the picnics and shikars and mango-eating contests were to be among the last indulged in. Habib Shah owned the Meerut- Sardhana Roadways, a fleet of three buses which plied the sixteen miles between these two places, and brought bagfuls of loose change every evening. Sardhana still does not have a railway station and Nana’s fleet of buses is long gone, like the lands and the houses, all gradually sold or lying around in states of dilapidation. The last useful function any of the buses performed was to provide us children with a great space to play in, in its remains. The Meerut-Sardhana route today has scores of buses going up and down, but the Shahs blew their chance to control it long ago.
    Ammi had four brothers, two of whom left at Partition and two (the eldest and the youngest) stayed behind. The eldest, Agha Mohiuddin (Agha Mamu) by now a Superintendent of Police, was a trained lawyer, a ‘Hafiz-e-Quran’ and had served in the navy before joining the police. The youngest, Shahabuddin Babar (Shah Mamu), was a lovable rogue who was never to amount to anything, but has stayed my idol always. Of the two who went to Pakistan one, Saeeduddin Khalid (Chand Mamu), later returned in order to manage the lands, as the old man was now losing interest in all that, and wanted to conserve all his energy exclusively for ‘shikar’. I’ve seen him come home with a bag of ten blackbuck, an endangered species today. ‘Shikar’ in fact was to figure very prominently in my definition of Ammi’s three siblings (the fourth I never met) and these three tigers for me were the personification of manhood, so when the dazzle of their personalities later faded, their fallibility and fall from grace was sobering to see. But at that time these square-jawed studs walked among the stars for me; all three of them handsome, humorous, hot-tempered, tall, tough and temperamental, quick to take offence, crack shots with a gun, fast and effective with their fists, seemingly invincible, indestructible people, with an unending capacity for enjoyment.
    Though Agha Mamu the cop always felt he had to live up to his reputation of ‘Dacoit killer of UP’ and very consciously assumed the kind of awesome personality you’d find it tough to feel affection for—in fact who you’d wet your pants at the approach of—the other two when they were young were real cool creatures who laughed and loved a lot. I’ve seen Chand Mamu drop two flying partridges with two shots in succession, and I’ve seen Shah Mamu wrestle a wounded blackbuck to the ground single-handed. They couldn’t do a thing wrong, even if they had the hideously arrogant habit of reaching out and backhanding any unwary pedestrian or cyclist who dared block the path of their jeep or tractor, both rarely seen