Abdul Rahman Siddiqi was an Indian and a Dilli-walla till he was 23. Then one October day in 1947, he became a Pakistani. “I am one of the last of a vanishing breed” he says. “We are not endangered yet, but vanishing fast.”
Nearly 90, Siddiqi was born in Delhi and has lived to tell the tale in his book, Smoke Without Fire: Portraits of Pre-Partition Delhi. His family was one of the wealthiest in Chandni Chowk, belonging to a community known as Punjabi Saudagar, the most well-to do in Delhi. His father was a lawyer and his maternal uncle, the owner of the biggest grocery stores in Delhi. Siddiqi’s family lived in Ballimaran, the mohalla of lawyers, and his father was the first elected Municipal Commissioner of Delhi.
Siddiqi is clear that his account is not nostalgia but a faithful recollection of his life when he was a young man. The pace of life was slower, though the large number of cinema halls in old Delhi shows that even then people knew how to enjoy themselves. Some like the Gaiety Theatre and Majestic are gone. All food, even the most complicated variety, was cooked at home — eating out was generally frowned upon except when on a picnic. Puri kachauri was the standard breakfast, paranthas in the winter.
The easygoing life saw a punctuation mark in the early 1930s, the years of the Great Depression. Families lost everything, and some committed suicide. Ballimaran’s langour was broken by spells of occasional excitement. Siddiqi recalls the visit of Master Shiraz, the popular hero of extravaganzas and action thrillers like Chiragh Ala Din, Baghdad ka Chor and Jadui Bansuri. Siddiqi describes Shiraz: a thickset well-muscled body, thick curly hair, long sideburns, but a thin reedy voice, something of a contrast to the rest of him. Shiraz would sit on a string charpoy, outside his modest ancestral home near the municipal hydrant.
There is an amusing story about Master Shiraz: how one day he came back home and said between repressed tears and sighs that his producer didn’t pay him for three months. Master Shiraz could take no more of it and said, “Pay me or I quit,” possibly secure in the knowledge that the movie Jadui Bansuri that he was shooting at the time would go down the tubes without its hero. The producer told him he was free to go. Apparently, the producer got someone else to stand in during the second half of the film, where a magic wand was used to change the face and figure of the hero, and used a duplicate for the rest of the movie!
Siddiqi finished school and went to St Stephen’s College, and then went on to become a journalist, joining Dawn as an unpaid apprentice sub-editor. He reports Jawaharlal Nehru’s August 14, 1947 “Tryst with destiny” speech and says in his book: ‘For us it might as well have been tryst with disaster. A pall of gloom pervaded Delhi’s Muslim Mohallas.” The gallis and mohallas where he had grown up and played suddenly became dangerous places. “Around midnight September 4-5, the dead of night was broken by the deafening chants of ‘Har Har Mahadev’ from the nearby Hindu mohalla. It was terrifying” he says. Nehru himself came to address Ballimaran to douse the fires. But all it took was one roar of ‘Sat Sri Akal’ and all the Muslims fled the meeting, ignoring Nehru’s call on the PA system to stay put.
It became slowly clear to residents— who had earlier vowed never to leave the land of their birth —that they would have to go. Finally, however regretfully, everyone left. “On 9 October, 1947, I reported at Safdarjung Airport to take the plane — my first flight ever — to Lahore. I had a steel-trunkful of clothes and a bagful of books” Siddiqi recalls. His last thought was a couplet of Dagh Dehalvi:
Jawab kahe ka tha, lajawab thi Dilli
Magar jo khayal se dekha to khwab thi Dilli
(Delhi was peerless; but on sober reflection, it was just a dream)