Graves, Nostalgia and Memory

“Tab dafan kiya bhai nay bhai ko kaway ki misaal par. So woh thi pehli qabar kay bani ruyay zameen par aur tha woh pehla khoon aadmi ka kay huwa aadmi kay hathon aur tha woh pehla bhai kay maara gaya bhai kay hathon” (10-11).

Zakir, a history professor, engages with the past on several levels – firstly by teaching it to young boys at the college and, secondly, by reflecting on his own past through the jungle of his memories. Therefore, the past figures very intimately and recurrently in Basti. An interesting motif of the past that is used by Intezar Hussain is that of graves. It is my contention that the graveyard, for the novel, is a place most intimately related with loss, nostalgia and memory. The grave, therefore, becomes the place which holds the remains of past lives, arousing mourning and nostalgia from within the present life.

In the first instance, Zakir reads about the story of Cain and Abel and discovers that Cain buries his own brother, on the analogy of a crow. The conversation that Zakir has after this with Bi Amma shows that he is concerned with the notion of how one brother could kill another. For the young Zakir, I believe, this is the beginning of a sort of desensitization towards the notion of killing and death. In this way, the reader is introduced to the idea of a grave, not through the grave of Bi Amma or someone the protagonist knows intimately; but through history – through the first grave on the Earth.  After his conversation with Bi Amma, he goes to Abba Jan, who is discussing Qayamat with his friends. Within the same breath, therefore, the motif of graves sets up a view of history as a holistic continuity – from the Fall of man to the Earth to the Day of Judgment. The Muslim is linked with a pre-historic past as well as a distant future – but with this action, there’s no room for the present to interfere. Life becomes a continuity that moves from graves of others to your own grave.

In the second instance, we see two children playing and making their own graves. On the first count, the fact that children are playing with graves goes to show just how normalized the idea of graves has become – death is neither feared nor revered, it just simply becomes a fact, an inevitability. Secondly, it is interesting to note the way in which the kids talk about the graves – “paaon daal kay daikh lai” and “naram garam qabar” – as if they are having a sensual experience of graves. This bodily description of mitti entails a deep intimacy with the land. The grave, therefore, becomes symbolic of the zameen jis ko Bi Amma nay pakar kar rakha wa tha. It is the land that the graves are situated on that pulls the living towards it - as a site of nostalgia and mourning. Therefore, while the living physically leave behind the graves (during Partition), they continue to live on in their memories.