All Colors Dissolved (Part 1)

As if everything has changed, there are no more people whose steps were brilliant, no more the rituals that connected the hearts, no more the time when people loved each other. No more love, no more books, no more civility and politeness that we once saw in our elders.

Be it Eid al-Fitr or Bakr Eid, or any other festival, my heart becomes very sad. Because on such happy occasions I remember my parents, grandmothers, aunts, uncles and their children.

Today, I realize why my father used to be so sad when he remembered his childhood home and childhood friends. In fact, searching for the lost is a painful process. I didn’t see it, it was just my grandmother, my mother and grandmother used to talk a lot on the occasions of Eid, which would fall into my ears while playing or sometimes I would be attracted to them while reading stories, sometimes when My elder sister, who was sixteen years older than me, used to join in their conversation whenever she came to visit me. My mother always remembered the lady who would come home with a basket of bangles and make all the women look at her. She used to wear fancy bangles, colorful enameled glass bangles on her wrists, and she used to sing a wedding song. There was brotherhood and sisterhood.

As many girls and women would come to the house where Manihari used to come, the housewives would also treat themselves with tea or syrup depending on the weather, there were more people in my little house. My grandmother and maternal uncle were siblings, so they lived in the same huge and spacious house in Delhi. This was the beauty of that era, everyone was seen holding each other’s hand in times of pain and suffering. How the trends of the times have changed today, the joint family system has died after the partition. Now every relationship is weighed in the scales of wealth. Siblings and blood relations have also rifts.

My father was a highly educated person, who, despite being in the civil service, was well versed in knowledge, literature, music and theatre. He lived in Karachi before the establishment of Pakistan and was a Deputy Director in Civil Aviation. After office, he spent all his time at home listening to music, listening to the radio and between children. He was with my two elder brothers, mother and grandmother. Spending time talking on various topics, his circle of friends was very wide, including many radio artists, including Mr. ZA Bukhari, whom I used to call uncle, whenever Mr. Bukhari came, the two friends would go on a journey into the past. They both remembered Alfred Theatrical Company and Agha Hashar Kashmiri and their plays, Mukhtar Begum was also mentioned, they were both very happy to come to Pakistan, Bukhari loved his two daughters very much.

I was very young, so there was no restraint on me. When I heard about the theater from my mother and grandmother, one day I said, “Take me to see the theater too,” but my father laughed and avoided it. They might have wanted to explain to me, but they would have gone silent because I wouldn’t be able to understand them. My grandmother used to call the theater “Zinda Nach Gana” and used to scold my father. When I grew up, I became interested in what my father said and he used to talk to me about different topics. For me, Sartaj used to bring novels by Rashidul Khairy from the library. After dinner, when the radio was switched off, he would talk about Delhi, Allahabad, Shimla and Bombay. Drunkenness killed Sehgal, he was a very sweet person.

In our childhood the only source of entertainment was radio, today we fondly remember ‘Banaka Geet Mala’, Radio Salon and weekly radio drama ‘Studio No 9’. Radio kept people connected, it was a time when the telephone was only used in a house, on holidays, relatives and friends would visit each other’s houses without any hesitation. Not to be missed, the hosts happily started preparing food for the guests. The visiting guests also used to come at such a time that the host would not suffer and they could prepare the food comfortably. At the time of evening tea, guests were treated with tea, biscuits and sweets. No one used to make faces at anyone.

In those days cinema was also a source of entertainment which my mother and grandmother used to call bioscope. There was a strange charm to watching a movie, the whole family would go to the cinema together and milkshakes and pakolas were a must along with cashew nuts, walnuts, peanuts and peanuts at intervals. The next day there were comments on the film, those days the advertisements of the films were also published in the newspapers that which film was shown in which cinema house, in my memories Rewali, Naaz, Eros, Nishat, Jubilee, Koh Noor and Khayam Cinemas. Names are left and beautiful memories are attached to these names. I watched the first color film ‘On’ with my father and mother at Naaz Cinema and all the way back mom and dad kept talking about Dilip Kumar and Nami’s work. He did not like Nadira at all, who had acted in the film ‘On’ for the first time, both of them liked the songs sung in the voice of Shamshad Begum. Incidentally, even today Shamshad Begum is my first choice.

And then government television came into our lives. Wow! What brilliant dramas were produced during this period, actors like Ruhi Bano, Anwar Sajjad, Mehnaz Rafi, Farooq Zameer and Khalid Saeed Butt captivated everyone. Interesting English movies for kids which were watched with great interest like skippy the bush kangaroo, Flipper, Fury. Best English movies for adults like Dr.Kildare ‘Fugitive,Get smart’Mission imposible,Mrs.Meavr,Star Trek etc. But a miracle happened when people were suddenly locked in a room and all eyes were on a black and white screen. They froze, the market and the streets became quiet, people’s visiting times changed, people became noisy, if someone came at these times and had to turn off the TV, there would be great confusion as to why they came, favorite movie or How will you watch the drama now? In those days, TV came on only from 6 pm to 10 pm and no film or drama was re-telecast. (to be continued)