Death, family — and community

A week will have passed when these words are read since the death of a man who had been a part of my life for the best part of a quarter century. No condolences please, we are past that and moving on. Instead, reflect on the values that come with being a part of a family and the community that we all live in.

Twenty-two years ago when I married my wife I knew I was not marrying into wealth. She was the only member of her family educated beyond primary level and they were subsistence farmers working the land largely without agricultural machinery. If it needed doing it got done by hand. And it was a hand that I went to ask for a couple of months before we had a civil ceremony in the midst of a gun battle outside a Rawalpindi courthouse. The hand of his daughter was to be asked and so I met the man that became my father-in-law.

It was all a bit formal. We had had a chaste courtship by letter for two years — you remember letters, those things in envelopes that you put stamps on and send into the void to arrive in our case a couple of weeks later, we still have all of them — and some very serious discussion about the ins and outs of a cross-cultural marriage.

Well the prospective father-in-law was aware that his daughter was up to her ears in something a tad romantic with a gora and a lesser man might have flinched — but not Papa as I came to know him. Being welcomed through the rickety gate of the family home and meeting Papa was one of those life events that never dim in the memory. The courtyard has been added to and built on over the years but the core accommodation is just as I first walked into it. Two rooms. And a lot of people. And next door a lot more people who were about to become my relatives. As well as over a hundred more spread across Punjab and Sindh.

So it was Papa who gave me the once over and decided that yes, if I wanted to make a reasonably honest woman of his daughter then it was with his blessing.

The years passed. Papa — and Mama — became fixtures quite literally in my life, living with me in Peshawar and later here in our house in Bahawalpur and it was Papa, after the death of Mama, who decided that where he really wanted to live was with me and so that was what he did. The ‘why’ of that was that he was acutely aware that living with son-in-law 120kms from the village was a fair insulation against the hordes of relatives that would endlessly pester him for this-that-or-the-other. He saw a chance to bail out and took it.

The last decade has seen Papa lead a quiet life. Cricket, the TV news — he watched the news the morning of the day he died — and a charpoy in a shady part of the garden were his world. Occasional visitors were gracefully received but not necessarily encouraged. He died there, peacefully, aged about 97 or 98.

Farewells were said in the same courtyard in the same house in the same village where I first met Ch Allah Rakhr. He lay in a beautiful shining white stiff winding sheet surrounded by everybody who he had ever known that was still in the land of the living and able to get to his funeral. There were prayers in a packed church — Muslims and Christians side by side — then the bier was carried a mile outside the village to the graveyard where a plot had long been prepared and he rests now next to Mama.

There was nothing fake or theatrical about the grief. It was palpable, visceral, and everybody had a tale to tell about Papa. He was an adult at Independence and remembered it well. He was a fund of stories and poetry and at a stroke the family and the community lost one of the greats, a patriarch in the finest sense of the word. Holes like that do not get filled overnight. Sleep tight, Papa.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 28^th, 2017.

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