City on Fire by Zeyad Masroor Khan

Author:Zeyad Masroor Khan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

12

NOORJAHAN APA

NOORJAHAN, THE TWENTIETH wife of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, was one of the most powerful women in Indian history. I found out about her through a show on Doordarshan, India’s state television. A shrewd planner, administrator and an ace marksman, she spent her spare time hunting tigers. She is said to have exerted equal, if not more, influence as the king, passing decrees and taking political decisions that protected her lazy, drunkard husband’s rule. Such power in the hands of a woman at that time was revolutionary. One of the most famous stories about Noorjahan is about how she rescued her husband from a battle in which he faced certain defeat and death at the hands of his enemies.

In my life, I had my own Noorjahan, sort of my nanny, who was as responsible for raising me as Ammi. Whenever Ammi and Sayema went out shopping in Penth, they left me with her, and she took care of me as if I were her own child. I didn’t have enemies like Jahangir had, but my Noorjahan rescued me from Ammi’s anger, bad food and attacks from packs of monkeys that thronged our terrace. On one occasion before my birth, she manifested her inner Mughal queen she was named after and single-handedly saved Farsh Manzil from being burnt down by Hindu rioters.

Noorjahan Apa’s family had been our tenants for forty years, since my grandfather’s time. Her family of four occupied the portion directly opposite Badi Ammi on the first floor. Unlike the Noorjahan on Doordarshan who wore expensive jewellery, she wasn’t rich or powerful. She was a loving old woman with grey hair and sharp features. Her face bore testimony to the hard times she had seen.

She lived with her husband Ghaffar Bhai, a lock worker, and her two sons, Aslam and Ballu. Ballu’s real name was Salahuddin but I never heard anyone call him that. ‘Until I grew up, I didn’t know you people were not my blood relatives and that we were your tenants. It was the biggest shock of my life to find out that this was not our home,’ Ballu Bhai once told me. Even I hadn’t known for years that they were not our blood – until this fact was rubbed against their pride with sandpaper.

Noorjahan Apa’s portion was separated from Badi Ammi’s by a small passage. A small lobby opened in a longish room where the family of four slept on a double bed and two charpoys, under which their belongings were mostly kept. The large window at the end of the room overlooked the entrance and brought in the azaan from the mosque five times a day. ‘We are lucky that we can hear the azaan so closely,’ she’d say whenever the muezzin called.

When she wasn’t reciting duas on her green rosary, Noorjahan Apa was cooking on her stove in a small courtyard shadowed by an adjacent neem tree. If between her prayers, gangs of monkeys came to steal food from her kitchen, she’d take out her stick and scare them away.

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