Who is the Real Chand Khala?

On the anniversary of my great aunt's death, I have some very special memories of her I wished to share.

I spent parts of my eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth year in Marake, the tiny village on the outskirts of Lahore, where my great aunt Shima lived. She was extraordinarily generous in her hospitality to me, although she heartily disliked Asif (my husband at the time), who was accompanying me on the later visits. I was in Pakistan to research the effects of war on the Afghan women and children in the refugee camps, about which I was writing at the time.

To my face, Shima Khala (aunt; also used for great aunt, as in this case), ever the Pakistani nationalist, told me I was a fool, and that I ought learn my own history first. At the time, I was indignant, only later realizing the truth of her words. We Pakistani expats (and descendents of expats) drain intellectual and material wealth away from Pakistan, and return nothing but curses to the land of our heritage. We are, indeed, the mentally colonized, in our ignorance of the importance of the ideal of Pakistan, and Pakistan's rich history.

My presence in the refugee camps and in the tribal area did not go unnoticed by the ever-vigilant Pakistani authorities. I was eventually picked up by Pakistani police in Parachinar, who wondered why an eighteen year-old English speaking girl in delicate cotton shalwar kameez, army boots, and thick eyeglasses should be wandering around a dangerous Pakistani border town. I was detained for three weeks while they investigated my presence there.

Since I, not surprisingly, looked Pakistani, they could not charge me with being in the border area illegally, a stipulation that applied only to non-Pakistanis. They looked unsuccessfully for another charge to pin on me to elicit the requisite bribe.

After that I was transferred to the thana in Peshawar. I stayed there for another two weeks, held without charge and disallowed from making phone calls. The Pakistani lady police-wallas felt sorry for me, and treated me well, bringing me fantas to drink.

One day, without warning, the DSP (Deputy Superintendent of Police) informed me that I had a visitor. As I entered his office, I was astonished to see Shima Khala standing there.

This was one of the few occasions on which Shima Khala missed a day at her school. She disliked road travel, but today she had made the long hot drive from Lahore to Peshawar, after handing over the reigns of the village school to a trusted teacher, so that she could bail me out. I felt a twinge of shame at all the trouble I'd caused, but was relieved that at
last I could leave the stifling, roach-infested Peshawar jail. She spared me the well-deserved "I told you so," paid the substantial jurmana and dragged me home by the ear.

I put my writing on hold, and spent the remainder of the summer with her, before returning to university in the States. Once, while I was staying with her, I mistakenly referred to her as Chand Khala, or "Moon-Like Aunt." (It implies an aunt who is very rare, special and priceless.) Chand Khala was a title reserved for my other great aunt, Nazrat. Shima Khala gently corrected me, "No, bay-tay, I am only plain Khala."

During my second visit to the village, I tutored Mahboob and Ali Usman, two of the village children at Shima Khala's request. Mahboob and Ali Usman were both eight years old, with the archetypical, bright eyes and gaunt build of village children. Mahboob was particularly sharp, and one had to continually struggle to come up with new lessons to teach him.

After a long and tiring visit which involved staying almost entirely in refugee camps when not in the village, with no AC in the summer months and no heating in the winter (nor modern facilities in the former case), I returned to the States.

A few years later, I heard that Shima Khala, perhaps seeing the same potential in young Mahboob that I'd seen, had unofficially adopted the young man. They were inseparable. She would not eat dinner without him, nor he without her. When he started going to college a distance away, he would return home late in the day after classes, and become upset to find that Shima Khala had not eaten because she was waiting for him. And when Shima Khala made up her mind, she could not be swayed. She refused to eat without Mahboob.

The first year I was there, Shima Khala's school, which was set up in the side wing of her house, was in its incipient stages, with a relatively small number of children. But the need for the school was so great, attendance grew spontaneously to nearly 400 pupils. Shima Khala, with Mahboob's input, named it Madina-tul 'Ilm (the City of Knowledge). The co-ed school was the sole source of literacy for the indigent village kids, and operated on a sliding scale: free for poor kids, and a nominal charge for the relatively well off. Shima Khala would get up at the crack of dawn each day, and prepare for the school day, no matter how exhausted and drained she might be from Lahore's extreme heat, or how bad she felt, with the high blood pressure and diabetes ravaging her.

During my stay in the village, I taught in the school off and on, and enjoyed the exuberance of the children, so poor in wealth yet rich in life--and blessed with a woman who believed in them. I am sure it was some of this exuberance that kept Shima Khala going on her particularly bad days.

The school was Shima Khala's pride and joy, and an expression of everything she believed in.

For his part, Mahboob clearly loved Shima Khala like a mother, and went to excruciating lengths to take care of her. He was a constant companion to her, eating most of his meals with her (except when he was away at school), listening to her when she was in pain from the diabetes, massaging her, and helping her with all her personal hygiene. He was the primary care giver, as Shima Khala's relatives rarely visited, especially in her final years. Even when they visited, some of them elected to stay in a hotel, although clearly Shima Khala craved visitors and was an impeccable hostess.

At one point, Mahboob even offered to marry me, although he knew I was much older than him, and divorced--something not well looked well upon by conservative Pakistani society--so that I might come there and assist in Shima Khala's care, since he was initially rather embarrassed at the level of personal care he had to provide for her, in the absence of a daughter. Shima Khala had no children of her own and her other female relatives were largely absent.

One night, Shima Khala took a bad fall. She called for help, but there was nobody around to assist. The spacious layout of the house would have made it difficult for the village women, who helped Shima Khala with home chores, to hear her entreaty, even if they had been around. Mahboob became so worried that it might happen again that he started sleeping on the floor at the foot of Shima Khala's bed.

Almost as soon as Shima Khala died, our relatives, who were living in Europe and elsewhere descended upon the estate. They determined to extricate Mahboob from the house he had lived in with Shima Khala for nearly 13 years, and close Madina-tul 'Ilm. This would facilitate the sale of Shima Khala's school, and transfer of the proceeds to (literally) Swiss bank accounts. Eventually Mahboob was thrown out, and the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind ones were successful in whittling down the school.

As I watched all this, I realized that Shima Khala was actually the real Chand Khala, for she had a heart of gold, so rare amongst any in a world filled with greed and materialism. The attitudes of our relatives sickened me to no end. Are any of us, living in the West, really so needy as to necessitate our auctioning off a school like Madina-tul 'Ilm--with all that it symbolizes--to the highest bidder? To me, the actions of my expat Paki relatives resounded of the depravity and ignorance of the looters of the Baghad museum, who could not see the real value of something which was priceless.

I dare to believe the status quo can be challenged. The poor--like Mahboob--will not remain dispossessed indefinitely. And the rich--like my avaricious relatives--will not always remain rich. Inshallah.