THIS ABOVE ALL
Face to face with life and death
Khushwant Singh

MY friend Preetam Giani of Abbotabad (Pakistan) has a habit of tossing stray thoughts which provoke me to think. In his last letter (post-earthquake which he survived without a scratch) he wrote: "There seems to be a qualitative difference between living bravely and dying bravely. While the latter is admirable enough and certainly not easy, the former appears to me not only much more but also more difficult.

I think too much is made of facing death bravely. Allama Iqbal lauded it in a Persian couplet:

(You ask about a man of faith?

When death comes to him, he has a smile on his lips.)

Unfortunately, death often overtakes one without giving one a chance of displaying one’s courage e.g. in an earthquake or a tsunami; in a plane, train or car crash, one may be struck by lightning, crushed under a tree or go into coma as my mother, a cheerful soul did, many days before she went into deep slumber from which there is no awakening. Even more difficult is to keep a brave face when you are in acute pain. Not even the bravest of the brave can smile if he has a throbbing tooth or earache.

Perhaps the show of bravery is most evident in the battlefield. There also fighting men show valour in a spirit of revenge or fanaticism. Muslim Ghazis (present-day jehadis) who form suicide squads rarely think of consequences of their acts. Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s nihang troops were equally religiously motivated and fortified with bhang (hashish).

As far as I am concerned, I would like to go the way my 90-year-old father went. He was enjoying his evening drink. He felt a little uneasy and lay down in his bed to let the uneasiness pass. It was one for the long road to the unknown. He rose no more.

Being brave in life is altogether a different matter. It can be a life-long battle. Your parents, teachers and childhood friends mould your way of thinking. They fill you with racial, religious and patriotic prejudices before you begin to think for yourself. You are told to strive for success, make lots of money, win popular acclaim. Most of this requires scoring over others by means, foul or fair, compromising with principles, double-crossing friends and indulging in all kinds of skullduggery. You have to decide whether you want to be regarded as a success in life or a man with a clear conscience. It is tough to opt for the latter.

As a schoolboy I spent many summers in Shimla. I heard ghost stories associated with bungalows and parts of roads running through thickly forested hill sides. Most of them were about English men and women who had lived there during the Raj and are buried in a dozen cemeteries. The most spine-chilling were about mummaaee wallas. They were said to be evil spirits in the employ of the British army.

They accosted people at paanwala shops late at night, blew some sort of magic powder on their victims’ faces who then followed them like lambs. The victim was taken to a solitary place, hung upside down over a simmering fire and the oil that dropped from his skull was collected in a basin. It was known as Ram tel which could glue together limbs cut off from the body. The only way to identify a mummaaee walla was to look at his feet: they had heels in front and toes at the back. It was a silly spook story but whenever the rumours spread that the oil collectors were in town, Shimla’s bazaars were deserted after sunset.

Mummaaee wallas stories have not died out; they have reappeared in more mutilated forms. Besides having their feet turned the wrong way, their arms and hands also face the wrong way. I found this while reading Minakshi Chaudhary’s Ghost Stories of Shimla Hills (Rupa). She knows Himachal well having written a couple of books about it, and covered it for The Indian Express.

Minakshi Chaudhary’s collection has many stories Ihad not heard of before. Being familiar with Shimls’a environs and graveyards, reading them gave me an icy thrill. As a rationalist in daytime I discard spooky stories as a load of rubbish. With me reason disappears with sunset. At night I do not dare to go alone to a cemetery or cremation ground. I have my own private unpublished collection of ghost stories connected with Delhi and Kasauli. Delhi has become very crowded, brightly lit with human traffic round the clock. It has driven its ghosts out. Kasauli remains comparatively isolated with several old British cemeteries: ghost stories continue to thrive: phantom horse-riders, rickshaws, sisters who fell to their death trying to scale Monkey Point on horse back. They were buried at the base of the hill named Lady’s Grave. The Indian Air Force destroyed their tomb to build flats for its personnel. I hope the two sisters’ spirits disturb their night’s sleep.

Padma Shri Muhazzab Lakhnavi, credited with an in-depth study of Lakhnavi tehzeeb, once narrated an anecdote to friends about the delicacy, modesty and chastity of the begums of old Lucknow.

One fine morning a Begum Saheba noticed a lota of her toilet missing. The loss sent her into inconsolable sobs.

Her maids reported the incident to Nawab Saheb. Moved by the plight of his beloved Begum, the Nawab assured her he would replace the cheaper aluminium lota with an engraved silver lota of finer quality.

But the agonised begum had her own apprehensions. Sharing her worry with the Nawab Sahib she disclosed, "I am not perturbed over this petty loss but the lurking fear in my mind is this that the old lota had been watching me nude since my childhood and now another one will peep through.

(Contributed by T.N. Raz, Panchkula)