Many departures from conformity

Book review of Off the Beaten Track: The Story of My Unconventional Life

A change of address is hardly ever a mere shift in geography. Often, it signals a departure from one’s childhood — the home or neighbourhood one grew up in, believing that it contained the world. Sometimes, it is a fleeing. And almost always, it suggests a leaving behind — of people, of objects, a familiar smell, a beloved street.

Saeeda Bano’s memoir, Off the Beaten Track: The Story of My Unconventional Life, published in October this year, is a narrative of departures. Her life would have remained within the conventional realm of the household, had it not been for the many times she changes her address, quite literally, to veer away from a predictable anonymity. First published in 1994 in Urdu as Dagar Se Hat Kar, the memoir, translated into English by her granddaughter Shahana Raza, chronicles these departures that lead her to a vacant new place in history — she becomes the first woman newsreader for All India Radio’s (AIR) Urdu service, amidst the turmoil of Partition in 1947.

Saeeda’s memoir begins with recollections of her childhood in the erstwhile princely state of Bhopal. In 1885, her father, Mir Majid Husain, is appointed English tutor to the sons of the female sovereign of the state, Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum. Growing-up in Bhopal, where women have ruled for four successive generations, is a fated benediction, as it allows young Saeeda a relative freedom. She lives in Anees Manzil, the only house within the residential area of Ameer Ganj that does not have a tiled roof, and provides her the space of a rooftop to play on. She is separated from this home, when, after around 45 years of service within the court of Begum Bhopal, her father tenders his resignation, and moves to Lucknow.

In Lucknow, where Saeeda attends the Isabella Thoburn College, she receives a proposal to marry Justice Mohammad Raza’s third son, Abbas Raza, who is a munsif or judge. “I immediately shot off a letter to my father expressing a desire to study further. I wrote that I was also keen to learn how to play the piano and mentioned briefly that I was absolutely not ready for marriage,” she declares. Despite her remonstration, the wedding is fixed, and the groom’s procession arrives at her home on February 5, 1933, to take her away.

Her indignation at this departure from her father’s house is prophetic; the marital home, both secure and claustrophobic, is one that she finally leaves. In the interim, she has given birth to her sons Asad and Saeed. She has also known the thrill of speaking into a microphone — when AIR sets up a radio station in Lucknow in 1938, she is invited for on-air discussions.

Off the Beaten Track: The Story of My Unconventional Life 

Author: Saeeda Bano (Translated by Shahana Raza) 

Publisher: Penguin Books - Zubaan

Pages: 256

Price: Rs 419

A prolonged disquiet in her marriage, fomented by her husband’s melancholic moods, propels her in the direction of a career, a small but certain income, the audacity of a room of her own. She arrives in Delhi on August 10, 1947, and joins AIR as an Urdu newsreader. Her new address, in the years to come, is the quintessential motif of self-reliance, albeit a precarious one: A hostel room at the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Emblematic of a temporariness, a working woman’s busyness, it also foretells a shift in fortune, and an imminent move to a more permanent residence.

Saeeda’s departures are proclamations of independence, in a milieu that didn’t allow its women such agency over their lives. Her relationship with the married Nuruddin Ahmed, who becomes the mayor of Delhi three times, is also a pronouncement of desire and autonomy, somewhat hesitant at first, but unwavering in its commitment for twenty-five years. In 1954 she rents a house on Feroz Shah Road from a Member of Parliament. This departure from the YWCA heralds a gentle, almost domestic rhythm between Nuruddin and herself: “Nuruddin used to come home every afternoon, have lunch, proceed to Court and then return in the evenings. This was his routine,” she reveals, the mundane nature of the revelation bestowing a quiet dignity to what one hesitates to label an “affair”.

There is nothing mundane about Off The Beaten Track, though, for there can be nothing dull about a woman who chooses aloneness, and otherness, over conformity. Shahana Raza’s English translation from eight audio-cassettes that contain oral recordings of Dagar Se Hat Kar, is a lucid retelling of her grandmother’s life. But perhaps it lacks the exquisite word-play of the original Urdu. The text is strewn with couplets by Mirza Ghalib, Haider Ali Aatish, Amir Khusro. But one aches for Saeeda’s vocabulary, her amusing similes, of which there is one memorable example. “My letter was lost like a parrot’s squawk in a noisy marketplace,” she writes, informing the reader of the fate of her letter to her father, written before her wedding. Phrases then, are lost in translation, although her legacy has been faithfully transcribed.