The Journey

By Khozem Poonawala

The year was 1966. Interfaith marriages in India were a taboo. They were rare and often provoked violence.

The Journey is the telling of one such love; of the trials and tribulations faced by a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl, both mired in a forbidden love.

The novel delves into the complexitie

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Aug 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639885756

Book preview

THE

JOURNEY

A Novel

Khozem Poonawala

atmosphere press

© 2022 Khozem Poonawala

Published by Atmosphere Press

Cover design by Ronaldo Alves

No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the author except in brief quotations and in reviews. This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to real places, persons, or events is entirely coincidental.

Atmospherepress.com

To the women in my life:

My mother, my sister, my bhabi,

my wife, and my daughters (in-law)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue (1966)

The Formative Years

A Blessed Encounter

Sojourn in America

The Wedding

An Interfaith Dialogue

Eureka!

Epilogue

INTRODUCTION

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

— Lao Tzu

I considered retirement the last phase of my career, a natural progression to a hedonistic lifestyle after years of toil. There would be no more fighting the rush hour traffic, no meetings or phone calls or deadlines to contend with. I had not contemplated what I would do following retirement till my colleagues at work started asking me about my plans.

Question: Do you plan to move to a Sunbelt city after your retirement?

Answer: No! There are no plans to move from Chicago. All my pallbearers are in Chicago.

Question: What do you plan to do in retirement?

Answer: I don’t know. I will get rid of the alarm clock, substitute brunch for breakfast and then do whatever my heart desires.

These and the many other questions raised gave me cause for concern. I was short on specifics. What would I be doing in retirement? Should I have made plans for retirement before actually retiring? Would I regret having retired? To mitigate these concerns, I started a bucket list of things to do in retirement. Topmost on the list was to write a novel. I honestly do not know what propelled me to put this fantasy as the first thing to accomplish after retirement. A Chinese sage wrote that a man must write a book, become a father to a son, and build a house; not necessarily, I hope, in that order. I was a father to two adorable boys and had bought a house when my firstborn was two years old, though if I had known the sage’s thoughts earlier, I would have built the house. So, writing a book was a logical thing to do. A year into retirement, I started writing. Part memoirs but largely fiction, the novel narrates the trials and tribulations of a Muslim boy in love with a Hindu girl, an allegory of a romantic journey beset with the resentment entrenched in an intolerant society. Up until the mid to late eighties, interfaith marriages in India, especially marriages between Hindus and Muslims, were rare and often provoked violence. To put this in perspective, imagine a black man courting a white girl prior to the American civil war.

The second thing on my bucket list was travel. Retirement afforded me the time to indulge in my wanderlust. I prioritized the cities I wanted to visit and mapped the places I wished to see. When my wife said she wanted to vacation in Istanbul, I put my foot down and told her, in a stern and powerful James Earl Jones voice, that we would be traveling to Machu Picchu, since Istanbul was not on my bucket list. Last year we returned from a trip to Turkey. Machu Picchu remains on the bucket list.

PROLOGUE (1966)

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!

— John Donne

Ram Naam Satya Hai.

Ram Naam Satya Hai.

The name of Ram is Truth (Rama, the seventh avatar of God Vishnu in Maharishi Valmiki’s Hindu epic Ramayana).

With these chants, Madhu, bedecked in flowers from head to toe with just her face and ankles showing, embarked on her final journey. She looked radiant and serene in her funeral attire. Her face exuded warmth. She seemed happy to be journeying for a rendezvous with her creator. The phone call came late one evening from her sister Geeta. Madhu had died following a massive heart attack earlier in the day. The news was hard to comprehend. How could a twenty-one-year-old die of a heart attack? Madhu and I had planned on getting old together. The news of her death left me devastated. I felt alone, deprived, cheated. I was angry at heaven for calling its favorites at a young age. I called Geeta the next morning to inquire if I could attend Madhu’s funeral services.

Of course you can, she answered. It will be in the evening, around 6:00 p.m. It will start from our house.

How do I present myself? I asked. Madhu was of the Hindu faith and I was a Muslim. Our different faiths did not bother either of us.

Wear a white shirt, untucked, and white trousers, she said.

I am ignorant of funeral decorum. Do I need to do anything? I inquired.

No. Simply follow the funeral procession to the cremation grounds.

Can I be a pallbearer? I asked.

No! I mean, I do not know, she replied, in a loud and nervous tone as she hung up the phone.

The high-pitched ‘No!’ and the double negative implied I should not attempt to be a pallbearer.

Till now, I had never encountered death. I never thought about death, never tried to understand death. To me it was an alien word, not in my vocabulary. Madhu’s passing brought death to the fore. Human mortality is a given; death becomes us all. It is like our shadow, a basic component of our brief life on earth, an integral part of our existence, a common thread among all living creatures. Our instinct for survival fights death every which way. Notwithstanding the promise of a heaven in the Hereafter, we strive to prolong life on earth as long as possible. But death is inevitable; we are powerless against the overpowering pervasiveness of death. Just as we are born, we are fated to die. While we celebrate birth, death saddens us. The death of a person well into the years grieves us, but not for long, finding solace that he or she lived a long and full life. Death was expected; it was a good death. And when someone who is sick and in pain departs from this transient world, we inwardly rejoice, knowing the person has left for an abode void of suffering. Death was beseeched; it was a merciful death, and in some ways, a relief to the living. Death defines life; in death people eulogize the life lived. Madhu’s death was a tragic death. It was neither expected nor beseeched. She had hardly lived. It’s hard to eulogize a life deprived of life at a tender young age. Her death was difficult to accept. The Hindu epic Mahabharata says: A man whose hour has not yet come does not die although transfixed by a hundred arrows; a man whose hour has come does not remain alive if just touched by the tip of a blade of grass. The Quran confirms this thought: For everything there is a time prescribed.

Antyeshi, the funeral rites for the deceased in Hinduism, translates in Sanskrit to last sacrifice. Atman, the immortal soul, is released from the body at the Antyeshi ritual. Hindus cremate their dead. The universe and the human body are comprised of five elements – air, water, fire, earth and space – and the cremation returns the body to these elements. Apart from disposing of the physical body, cremation releases the spiritual soul from its earthly existence. If the body is not cremated, the soul supposedly lingers for days or months. The cremation ceremony begins with the ritual cleansing, dressing, and adorning the body before being carried to the cremation grounds. Prayers are chanted along the route and at the entrance to the cremation grounds. A funeral pyre is assembled, crafted of wood crisscrossed to form a rectangular structure. The body is placed on top or under the pyre which is then set on fire by the chief mourner, usually the eldest male in the family or a priest. Once the pyre is lit, the chief mourner circumambulates it counter-clockwise three times, pouring oil over the pyre as it burns. Twelve to fifteen hours after cremation, family members return to collect the ashes which are then immersed in a river, spiritually the best way to dispose of the ashes. Water is all-assimilating and quickly disperses the ashes; hence they cannot be controlled by demons and devils. On the scientific front, phosphate-rich bones in the ashes enrich the water as it irrigates large tracts of land along the river banks, ultimately returning elements of the body back to nature.

As the funeral meandered its way through the narrow lanes, the distraught faces in the windows of the homes lining the streets wore the somber look of disbelief and sorrow at the passing of one so young. Haggard and dazed, I joined the procession, bringing up the rear. As the funeral cortege settled to a steady pace, I wanted it to slow down. Unable to rationalize Madhu’s death, I wanted to walk behind her cortege forever. It took less than an hour to arrive at the cremation grounds and thirty minutes for the rituals after which the pyre was lit. My heart stopped momentarily as the first flames gradually engulfed Madhu. As I watched from a distance, the flames intensified and my heart pulsated faster. As the pyre kept burning, people started to leave. I thought of leaving too, but kept staring at the burning pyre, contemplating on a life without Madhu. It was getting dark. Suddenly, I found myself alone. Embers were flying into the night sky off the funeral pyre. The place was eerie with the dimmest light emanating from the pyre and the half-crescent moon on a clear starry night. I wanted to leave, but could not move. I could sense Madhu’s presence, pleading with me to stay. I sat down and leaned against the trunk of a lone banyan tree and closed my eyes, relishing the good times I had shared with Madhu during our brief time together. One dies, and many lament. Death takes its toll on the dead and the living. Madhu’s death ended her aspirations to become a doctor; it deprived a father of seeing his daughter in wedding finery; stole a child from a mother; robbed a sister from a sister; and shattered my dreams of a life with my love. The Bhagavad Gita, part of the Mahabharata, narrates the spiritual and material advice imparted by Lord Krishna to the warrior prince Arjuna: Whatever happened, happened for the good; whatever is happening, is happening for the good; whatever will happen, will also happen for the good only. The Bhagavad Gita also says not to grieve for what is unavoidable, and death is unavoidable. The Buddhists think nothing of death. For them, death is something natural, a fulfilling and enriching part of the cycle of existence. Buddha considered his hour of death an occasion for joy. Hindus believe in rebirth. So Madhu is reborn, somewhere.

I opened my eyes to the morning sun spreading its warm glow on my face. I must have dozed off. My body was sore and I was bleary-eyed. My watch showed seven o’clock. I glanced at the pyre and saw a man gathering Madhu’s ashes in a brass urn. I approached him and requested a pinch of the ashes to forever remember my love. He readily obliged and I carefully secured the ashes in a crisp twenty rupee note. I thanked the man and headed home.

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

— Omar Khayyam

Poona, the indigenous city, is the Queen of the Deccan, the Oxford of the East. It is also the city of my birth. Nestled in the rain-shadow of the Sahyadri mountain range that runs parallel to the western coast of the Indian peninsula and the confluence of the Mula and Mutha rivers, Poona boasts a salubrious climate. The city sports a cantonment area or Camp, and a city area. The former serves as the Indian military’s Southern Command Headquarters, its vernacular landscape metamorphosed with elegant bungalows, imposing public buildings, army barracks, parade grounds, and officers’ clubs built during the British colonial period; the latter, the native city of Poona, houses the numerous ‘peths’ or hamlets, each with its medley of narrow winding roads, clusters of homes, shops, houses of worship and shrines. Poona is the cultural capital of the state of Maharashtra and its second-largest city. The sprawling municipality excels as a thriving metropolis with a flourishing business center and burgeoning industrial suburbs. It has a large number of educational institutions and research facilities. The names of many of India’s major cities were changed to purge India’s colonial legacy. In 1978, the city’s erstwhile British name Poona reverted to its original Indian name Pune.

In this eternal city, I lived with my parents and my brothers Iqbal and Azhar. Father moved to Poona from a village in an adjoining state to better fend for his family. He started peddling a variety of goods, later opening a shop which eventually grew to multiple shops. A pious man, he never imposed his religious beliefs on us. Religion should be spontaneous, a voluntary act, and intensely personal, he said. While enrolling us in Sunday classes for religious studies, father gave us the freedom to put into practice what we learnt in school. Father never hesitated to discipline us, me in particular. I had more than my fair share of punishment as his footwear landed forcefully on my behind. Father was an indulgent parent. After every beating, he would placate me with my favorite dessert—bread pudding at the Kohinoor restaurant down the street from our house. Mother was the embodiment of love. She nurtured us with the wisdom of the sages, showering us her love, her affection, her kindness, and her understanding. She did everything for her children, often behind father’s back. When father disciplined me, she took me in her lap to explain why I had deserved the whacking. She taught her kids right from wrong; it was okay to make mistakes, provided we learnt our lessons from the mistakes. The bond between Iqbal, Azhar and me, Altaf, was deep and strong. Iqbal was the oldest and I the youngest. Iqbal had the Clark Gable face with an Alain Delon hairstyle, his dark raven wavy hair fashionably combed back, kept in place with a fair amount of Brylcreem. He dressed simply, cotton shirt and pants, both neatly pressed. Aware of his status as the eldest sibling in the family, he was not bitter when Father asked him to quit school to help with the family’s expanding business. Iqbal was a calm and carefree spirit, never temperamental, with an air of benignity. He approached life one day at a time and made decisions