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The Rediff Special/Vijay Tendulkar

'The word Muslim had a familiar connotation for us. It meant uncultured, illiterate, undeveloped minds, full of perversities, driven by violence and always ready to go berserk'

The first real Muslim in my life was a boy in my class. This was after we left Mumbai for Kolhapur, a small town and a separate state during British rule with its own king. My new school had boys from lower castes who were the sons of lorry drivers, tailors, carpenters. We also had a girl in our class who was the daughter of a concubine of a rich man, a novel experience even for the more knowledgeable among us.

I met Sheikh here in the school. On the first day of school, we were made to stand up one by one and say, "Present, Sir" as our class teacher read out the roll call. When a tall, gaunt boy with high cheek bones and small peering eyes answered to the name of Aman Ali Izaz Ali Sheikh I looked twice, with utter disbelief at that boy wearing a home washed pajama, a neat cotton coat fully buttoned on a clean white home washed shirt and a black shapeless cap properly placed on his head through which his unruly pink hair sprouted out from all sides.

I simply could not believe my eyes. He did not fit into the concept of a Muslim in my mind at all. He was like any other boy. He looked so gentle and shy and soft-spoken in spite of looking bigger than us! (In my mind I imagined him as Aurangzeb or one of his hefty looking men with me as Shivaji's mavla and felt terribly disappointed. He was no patch on those foul-mouthed villains I had seen and heard in the historical plays.)

As the days passed, I also found that Sheikh was a studious boy, who spoke my language, Marathi. Later, I found that his Marathi had a natural mix of Urdu, but not of the Aurangzeb kind. He spoke in this mix when he was away from school, especially at his home and with his family. This mix of Urdu and Marathi sounded sweeter to me than my chaste Marathi.

Sheikh was very sociable, warm in his general behaviour, eager to make friends, a boy who never uttered a single swear-word and was very co-operative. When I was unwell and had to stay away from class, Sheikh would voluntarily help me in catching up with the backlog by offering me his notebooks. We became friends despite my deep rooted reservations about his being a Muslim.

He lived in a locality which was in the same direction as mine. He had to walk farther on. So we left school together every evening and chatted on the way. For days I could not make up my mind on whether I should invite him home or not. He was a Muslim, after all. Besides my own reservations about Muslims, I had apprehensions about how Sheikh will be received by others at home. I had even avoided mentioning our friendship to my parents.

One day during the lunch break he offered me something from his lunch box. I had not thought of doing so. I ate from my box and he from his though we would be sitting on the same school bench. That day when he took out something from his lunch box and held it in front of me I dithered. I did not know whether I should eat from a Muslim's lunch box. I did since I could not say no to Sheikh but my conscience troubled me that night for doing what I had done.

I even imagined in my sleep that I had turned into a Muslim and my family was blaming me for eating from a Muslim's lunch box. 'Good for you!' they were saying in a chorus. 'Want to eat from a Muslim, eh?' And my mother was crying her heart out as her son had become a Muslim.

But soon this feeling of guilt disappeared and I even invited Sheikh to my house one day to see my collection of kites. I did not inform my family about the religion of my school friend but they discovered it while Sheikh was at our house. Probably by his way of speaking or his appearance, I am not sure. To my surprise they did not object. But my mother took care to tell me that night not to go to his house and not to be 'very friendly' with him. `He seems to be a good boy ' she said, but these people (she meant the Muslims) are not our kind. It is better to stay away from them.'

If I remember correctly, he was uncomfortable and tense for a while in his first visit to my house. But he liked the house and my family and later came frequently to my house to play with me.

His father was a butcher by profession. I did not know this for months, nor did my family with their vegetarian habits, otherwise I would have been forbidden from mixing with Sheikh. I myself came to know of it when I was compelled to go to his house for the first time. I learned that Sheikh was not well and would not be able to come to the school for some time. After knowing this I wanted to help him in his backlog of studies. So I decided after some inner resistance to go to his house.

I remember the shock I felt on meeting his father. A typical village Muslim, dark of complexion, a large frame and a big belly, and a pink and black beard grown all around his face up to the head which had an upright growth of black and pink hair which matched with the beard and gave his face a fierce look. He reminded me of Aurangzeb and his men. But he was very warm, natural, robust yet gentle in manners, attired in a coloured lungi and kurta.

He was curious about me and my upper caste Hindu family. He had seen and even met Hindus but only as clients who came to his shop to buy mutton. He kept asking me questions about how we lived at home, addressed each other, what my father did for his living, how many brothers and sisters I had...

He had seven children. Aman Ali was number five. He had no qualms about his profession. He talked about it as casually as my father used to about his clerical profession. My father talked of files and papers; Sheikh's father talked of the quality of the mutton he sold and the intestines, the brain and the liver of the sheep he killed. His gentle nature hardly matched his big black frame and his profession which in my mind was a violent one.

"How can he kill the poor, innocent animals and be so gentle?" I used to ask myself in those days. Years later, I became a meat eater but have never cared to ask myself how I relish eating animals killed by someone, despite my gentle, non-violent nature.

Sheikhs's mother and sister stayed confined to the kitchen whenever men or even a boy like me was around. They wore burkhas and looked mysterious, even sinister, to my eyes because of that. I had not seen anyone in a burkha till then. Not even in a Marathi historical play. I could not imagine my mother or my sister moving in our house in a burkha. I imagined myself in a burkha and felt stifled.

Sheikh's mother called me beta (son) and gave me some sweet to eat. I had not eaten anything as tasty as that in my life or I thought so while I ate the 'special dish'. Sheikh was not keen to show me his father's shop. Out of curiosity I insisted that he should take me there at least once. I went with him and could not take in the gory sight of raw headless cadavers hanging upside down. It upset my stomach and I even felt that I shall throw up but managed not to.

That first sight of raw flesh and blood was so irresistible to me in spite of the revulsion I experienced that I wanted to visit that shop again and see a sheep being killed by Sheikh's father. For some reason Sheikh avoided it. May be he himself did not like his father's profession. Or he did not relish killing.

My friendship with Sheikh was my first genuine education on the subject of Muslims. Sheikh remained behind when we left Kolhapur for Pune, a predominantly brahmin city at that time. It was nearly impossible to get accommodation in a brahmin locality of Pune if you were -- no, not a Muslim -- a non-brahmin. You would be asked to state your caste before anything else was discussed and we were non-brahmins. Which meant that we were flesh-eaters. In fact, my family was strictly vegetarian but it took a lot of effort on my father's part to get a place for us in a decent 'no flesh' locality.

The next crucial influence in my life vis-a-vis Muslims was the experience of Partition of the country. We were given to understand mostly through the discussions of the elders, the media and all kinds of hearsay and we readily believed that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was the villain of the piece in this gory drama that unfolded before us. Even the most authentic accounts of the massacres that took place in this period on both sides of the dividing line read like cheap pulp fiction consisting of unlimited violence and the most perverted kind of sex.

For us Jinnah and his Muslim League was the cause of it all. The word Muslim had a familiar connotation for us. It meant uncultured, illiterate, undeveloped minds, full of perversities, driven by violence and always ready to go berserk. Hindus, though cultured and civilised, had no option but to retaliate with the same pervert violence.

Everyone around seemed convinced about this.

I was in my late teens then.

When we heard on the radio that Gandhi has been assassinated everyone around me knew for certain and made no bones of it that the assassin had to be a Muslim. When we were told that he was not a Muslim but a Hindu our benumbed minds stoutly refused to believe it. But, then, we knew why a Hindu had to kill the Mahatma: because of the pro-Muslim politics of the otherwise great man, a politics which pampered the bloodthirsty, wicked Muslims at the cost of well-behaved, gentle Hindus.

Those were the days of a rabid anti-Muslim feeling around me.

This was when I heard a new Marathi word for the first time. It was not new in that sense. I had heard and even used it before in a different context. The word was Laandya). It literally meant 'an animal whose tail has been cut', generally a dog. When I heard it for the first time in a new context to suggest a Muslim, I could not catch its meaning. Then I was enlightened on the subject by my Hindu friends.

Muslims were circumcised after their birth. I, too, tried to use this word in my speech that had acquired a new twist and felt very self-conscious, embarrassed and thrilled at the same time. That word became a household word during those days among the boys of my age. They would always refer to a Muslim as Laandya.

The bias which had been intentionally and unintentionally sown in our minds when we were children now grew into confirmed opinion. Muslims were an aggressive, rowdy, savage, rabid minority... dogs with a cut tail. Their leaders used them for their gains and like fools the secular Hindu leaders were playing in their hands at the cost of the interests of us Hindus who were a majority but suffered at the hands of a mere minority.

As a growing boy in my teens, I too held this view though not with the fanatic rage of the typical white-collared Hindu of that time.

During this very period, another Muslim entered my life. He was leading the cultural squad of the undivided Communist Party in my state. He was Amar Sheikh Shaheer (the bard), popularly called Amar Sheikh. He came from a poor rural Muslim family and sang songs with a political message. He had a strong booming voice which thrilled an audience of thousands. You did not have to be a communist to feel charged by the magic in his voice. The `revolutionary' message did not mar the lilt and the roar of his singing.

I was so charmed by his irresistible voice that the fact that he was a Muslim did not bother me even in the midst of a climate rife with anti-Muslim vitriol. The songs moved me as they seemed to come straight from the heart. Once in a while, I did wonder how Sheikh, a Muslim, could put so much passion in some of the patriotic songs he sang. But his style of singing them was irresistible.

By arrangement with Communalism Combat

'We were born as Muslims and that puts a stamp on our forehead in this country: TRAITOR! Why?'

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