Mishal Husain goes in search of her past

Photographs by Charlie Clift

My mother is a great list-maker and the one in her handbag for this trip was unique, including finding Shahid’s school, Feroze Kothi and older family homes we knew only as Hamid Manzil and Jafar Manzil, named for Shahid’s father and grandfather. Then there were the imambaras and other sights, and a shopping list – not only chikankari, the style of embroidery for which Lucknow is well-known, but spices, traditional perfume and varq, the tissue-thin beaten edible silver used to decorate rice or sweet dishes for special occasions.

It was a trip to explore Lucknow in the widest possible sense, and we were confident we would manage linguistically, hearing mostly Hindi but speaking Urdu. The city was, however, daunting: it’s the capital of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, today swelling beyond what Shahid would ever have known. The traffic was immediately intimidating, especially when I told Ama the most practical transport would at times be auto rickshaws rather than cars, better able to navigate congested areas.

The bazaar at Chowk, the oldest part of the city, was exactly such a place. This was where we’d find the more traditional items on Ama’s list and also where, I realised, Feroze herself would have shopped.

We chose the quieter morning hours to head into its narrow lanes, soon after shops opened, passing street vendors selling namash, a milk-based Lucknow confection. When Ama said it was a favourite of Shahid’s, I felt I had to try, conscious, too, that we were lucky to find it: the days were getting warmer and namash spoils too easily to be made much beyond the winter. Forty rupees – about 40p – bought a small paper cup’s worth of the zabaglione-like delicacy, giving us a sugar boost as we walked.

A perfume-seller in the bazaar took us through his wares, with a stock of itr – source of the English word attar – in large bottles on shelves behind his counter. Alongside the single-flower fragrances – notably rose and jasmine – there were blends of petals, herbs and oils, and even “attar of earth”, capturing the scent that rises from parched ground when hit by the summer monsoons.

Further on, the spice seller persuaded me to buy not only the lazzat-e-taam masala on Ama’s list – she had read about it in a book – but others which would, I was assured, result in the perfect “chicken fry” or lamb korma. We had a lunch stop at the famed Tunday Kababi, where minced meat is marinated according to a secret recipe and tenderised with crushed papaya. We bought some miniature Qur’ans, no bigger than a postage stamp. And we found a reputable varq shop, where the delicate silver leaf was pure.

At the imambaras we imagined scenes from Shahid’s childhood, when his Shia Muslim grandmother would have him and his brother dressed in green for the entire holy month of Muharram, and we marvelled at the nearby Rumi Darwaza, an arched city gateway both majestic in scale and elegant in decoration.

We passed along the embankments of the Gomti River, a tributary of the Ganges, and crossed it to visit Shahid’s old school, walking in the grounds and picturing him running up the steps or through the playing fields. As we left I felt obliged to explain to the mildly curious caretaker that we were related to an old boy, and received a broad smile of recognition. “Ah yes,” he said. “People come from all over.”

Shahid returned to Lucknow only once between 1947 and his death in 1993, but from the way he spoke of it, I knew the city’s hold on him never weakened. “Education, encouragement to men of letters, libraries, publishing houses, newspapers, religious institutions, calligraphy, poetry,” Shahid wrote of the city. “Respect, courtesy and tolerance of views and beliefs.” Much of that was due to the cultural environment nurtured by the Muslim rulers who, from the late 18th century, gave Lucknow its heyday. Live storytelling was particularly prized as an art form, and Shahid and his siblings were taken to music, dance and poetry readings.

All of this I only knew from Shahid’s written descriptions: the environment in which I saw him and my grandmother Tahirah in Pakistan in their later life was nowhere near as rich culturally. But I did recognise one aspect of Lucknow that had remained at the heart of family interactions, playing a significant role in my own upbringing. “Lucknow was recognised as the metropolis of good manners and civilised behaviour,” Shahid wrote. “Courtesy to the old and young, humility towards all.”

In my mother’s family this was exemplified by the way we addressed each other. It was not enough to simply use the Urdu for mother or grandmother: instead Feroze was called Bi Ama, “Respected Mother”. My mother’s eldest aunt was known to us as “Elder Mother” and the youngest as “Little Mother”, while older siblings and cousins would always be referred to as brother or sister, never addressed by name alone.

I did, therefore, feel that Lucknow was a part of me; my mother, even more so. Shahid’s limited ability to visit after 1947 was due to his profession: being in the Pakistani army made it impossible to enter India, even in retirement – a reality that continues for members of both sides’ armed forces. The one trip he did make in the 1970s came after he befriended an Indian High Commissioner in Islamabad and told him how much he would like to say a prayer at the grave of his father. The diplomat kindly arranged it, but the short-stay visa did not allow Shahid to linger, as I discovered when I found a letter from one of his old teachers in his papers. “Dear Shahid,” it read. “I heard that you were here. I wish I had known, we could have met. I do not know when there will be another chance.”

A theme of our days in Lucknow was the curious combination of being tourists, sightseeing as any newcomer to a place would, while also feeling strangely bound to it. Is there a term in any language, I wondered, for a place that was nearly your hometown, or could have been, had history not intervened? I suspected we would feel the emotional dimension of this most acutely when it came to the graves and to Feroze Kothi.

We began in the graveyard, hoping a register might lead us to the resting place of Shahid’s father, who died in 1945, or of his younger sister Jamila, who died two years later. But no records went back 80 years and so we asked, instead, to be pointed towards the oldest plots. We were a curiosity. A couple of families who live in makeshift homes on the premises came to watch, with two of their sons trying to help. “What is the name?” we were asked, and soon we became a small party trying to decipher the Urdu on headstones badly weathered by time.

It was not to be. There were a few pre-independence graves, but the names did not match. We realised this was the end of the road: no one left alive could direct us to Hamid and Jamila. I felt Ama’s disappointment. “They are somewhere here,” we told each other.

In the middle of the graveyard was a small shrine, built around the grave of someone revered as a saint. The elderly men looking after it gave us some fresh rose petals: we could scatter them anywhere, they suggested, and say a prayer for our elders.

That left the house, which we already knew was now an ashram, a Hindu religious retreat. The original plot, which included a large garden surrounding the house, is now covered by multiple dwellings as well as some offices, but we discovered the neighbourhood remains known as Feroze Kothi. As feroze means turquoise, residents today would probably assume its name originated from something blue on the site, rather than a person.

There was one especially tall mango tree which I felt certain dated from the original garden, where Shahid’s sister was married in 1935. My grandfather and his brother must have climbed it, I thought, remembering him talking about Lucknow summers, when the mangoes were in season and children would compete to see who could eat the most, piling up the skins and stones as proof of their appetite.

Even the ashram has now expanded, but we asked to be directed to the oldest section and found ourselves at a locked gate. A caretaker watched from his perch on a nearby chair, but we were not sure which property he belonged to, and wondered what to do next. It was then that two young men paused as they walked by. “You’re clearly not from here,” one said with a smile. “Can we help?” Luckily, looking for an old family home makes immediate sense across communities in South Asia, where so many have been affected by migration, and he beckoned over the caretaker to open the gate for us.

And so we found ourselves in a small courtyard, looking at the façade of Feroze Kothi. No one was in, so we could not go further, but we tried to imagine the life led here by Shahid, his parents and siblings, until one day it was no more.

I thought of Feroze’s own mother, a woman who was born about 1870 and who – Shahid said – used to be carried around on a palanquin in the early part of her life. She, too, was among the party who crept out of Feroze Kothi in 1947, by then in her 70s: if I had the sources, I realised, hers would perhaps be the true story of change to tell.

As we walked away I couldn’t help wondering about alternative realities. Had Shahid opted for India rather than Pakistan at independence, perhaps he would have come to live here, after retiring from the army. Perhaps this would have been the house I later knew as my grandparents’ home, rather than the one they built in Rawalpindi.

There were no neighbours to talk to, and finding someone who had been in the area that far back felt unlikely. But on one side of the block was a small general store, and when we stepped in and told the shopkeeper why we had come, his face lit up. He had been born in the 1960s, he explained, the child of Hindu refugees from Sindh – now southern Pakistan – and this corner of Feroze Kothi had been allocated to his family in lieu of their property across the border. He remembered when the land was much less built up and the space he had enjoyed as a child.

“Feroze was a person,” I told him, and gestured to Ama. “She was my mother’s dadi, her grandmother.” He was amazed.

He asked if we had a picture of Feroze. I showed him on my phone: a lady in middle age, probably photographed around 1940. He looked at it for some time, taking pleasure in being able to attach a face to a name. My mother and I felt touched that he had been interested enough to ask.

Feroze herself could not have imagined, I feel, that a great-grandchild she met only a few times would one day be standing by her old house. I don’t even know what emotions the thought would spark: the schism of partition left deep scars.

I don’t believe, for example, that Shahid ever thought it would be near impossible for him to visit Lucknow once he had opted for Pakistan, but I do feel that with this journey I have followed a thread important to my mother – and to me – as far back as possible. And learning that her grandmother’s name is preserved in a small corner of Lucknow was meaningful to us both: we had come with an abstract sense of connection, but this was a real one, living on into the future.

Broken Threads: A Family from Empire to Independence by Mishal Husain is published on 8 May by Fourth Estate at £10.99