My grandfather read and wrote in Urdu, and speaks Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, and English in that order of ease. He maintained a private diary till very recently, in which he collected scraps of poetry, absurd news clippings, photos, handwritten letters, and leaves that fell on him during long winding walks. He remembers having grown up in a neighbourhood where identity and culture flowed effortlessly into one another. He identifies as Hindu by birth, Muslim by culture. Blasphemous, you declare. It is simple, he would say.
Partition tore through his neighbourhood, and forced them to flee Sialkot to come take refuge in Delhi. From a neighbourhood in which Hindus and Muslims were largely indistinguishable from each other, he found himself in a city erected along communal lines. I remember him confessing how odd he felt to have only Hindu neighbours for miles. In the absence of concrete, neighbours marked their domestic spaces with sticks, ropes and bricks, and looked after each other’s allotted properties. None had the wherewithal to begin building a house immediately, let alone a nation. They started by living in the open, inhabiting a blueprint drawn on soil, upon which got built a room, then another, and over years their house, their neighbourhood, and along came a nation. Unimaginable, you utter. It is simple, he would say.
He mastered History and became a high school teacher. He answered Gandhi’s call for building the nation by volunteering for community work - building and maintaining parks, organising medical camps, opening evening schools, offering tuition for free, mediating conflicts in the neighbourhood, dismissing offers to hold a post of authority offered in gratitude. He built neighbourhoods wherever he moved, crisscrossing the city from his young days in Karol Bagh, to his settled days on Vikas Marg, to his senior days in Gurgaon now. On one occasion, he ensured that a make-shift school got erected on unused land in his locality, land that was being encroached upon by temple construction in gross violation of public property. He achieved this with his neighbours without making a single enemy, or receiving any threat. Unthinkable, you exclaim. It is simple, he would say.
He lived by Gandhi’s idea of ‘serving the neighbour to serve the country’. At any rate, he has always struggled to grasp that which he could not circumambulate the edges of. He belongs to a nation called neighbourhood. Your neighbourhood is the only country you will ever really inhabit, he’d say.
Today, we see an unprecedented number of neighbourhoods pour out onto the streets in protest against divisive politics. Neighbours are looking out for each other, just like they did back then when the nation was being built. Neighbours are protecting each other just like they did back then when there were no houses. Neighbours are keeping safe the blueprint of this nation just like they did back then for their own houses. For this country is nothing more than a cluster of neighbourhoods built by countless people like this one grandfather, who, after having spent a lifetime building neighbourhoods, when asked today, if it is still possible to do it all over again, it is simple he would say.
