Lefty says he’s heading north the next day to run some errands, and I should come along and meet Sharif. He assures me that the old man, originally from Noakhali (now part of southeastern Bangladesh), speaks ‘good English’, ‘watches English news’ and ‘knows a lot about everything’.
No one knows precisely how old Sharif is, just that he came from Kolkata forty years ago to run a small restaurant and a couple of telephone booths. His empire of tea and telephones serves as a local meeting point, where Sharif holds court each night on the state of the republic, Tarkovsky films, Bollywood and politics. So, the next day, Lefty and I huddle into a rickshaw and head north. After a little more than two hours, we arrive at Sharif ’s eclectically furnished tea stall, full of metal-beamed wooden furniture in earthy, seventies-orange tones, with red-and-yellow leather cushions that have seen better days.
Sharif is a distinguished-looking man with a full head of white hair and a day’s growth of beard. Lefty introduces us in rapid Bengali, and I catch the word ‘cricket’ in the quick banter between them. When Lefty leaves to run his errand, Sharif addresses me in English. ‘People started calling me Sharif after Doctor Zhivago,’ he says with a chuckle, ‘because I looked a little like Omar Sharif.
He speaks with the clipped accent of India’s English-speaking elite of another era. He quotes Wodehouse and Orwell, sometimes adding his own lines to their famous passages. Sharif would have fit right into the clubs of Raj-era Calcutta, sipping gin at three in the afternoon, but in this porous border zone, his diction and disposition are anomalous.
As we sip our tea, Sharif says, ‘Tell me about yourself,’ adding, ‘How can I help, my dear?’
I tell Sharif about my travels along the border with Bangladesh, explaining that I plan to make my way along India’s borders with Burma, China, Tibet, Pakistan and Nepal. I tell him about my conversations with Lefty and Dotty, and how a question about a game of cricket made a little boy comfortable in a place where even children are being spied on.
The game of cricket, says Sharif, has changed beyond recognition. Sportsmanship no longer drives the sport, he laments. Cricket has become the embodiment of bourgeois nationalism, performed for commerce and politics.
Sharif tells me about his years in Calcutta as a student, listening to the All India Radio (AIR) cricket commentary: ‘Many of us learnt English diction listening to these greats speak.’ Until the late 1950s, the commentary was in English. He adored the commentator Bobby Talyarkhan and spent hours in front of the mirror practising lines from the commentary he had committed to memory. It was a different time and, in many ways, a different world, one where princes and scions of crumbling dynasties were the guardians of the game. Cricket was not yet open to the masses. The Presidency matches played before Independence and Partition were mostly communal games featuring teams based on religious groups, where Hindus, Muslims and Parsis played against each other. Sharif shakes his head. ‘Imagine, on one hand, the country was caught up in the growing demand for freedom, and on the other, we were playing communal gladiatorial matches, pitting Muslims against Hindus.’
The communal games continued until 1946, when Pakistan became a political reality. For many like Sharif, Partition ushered in an unforeseen future.
Perhaps I was too young, but no one could have predicted the turbulent months that followed Partition—the riots, violence and mayhem that was unleashed. Calcutta felt like hell’s playground on earth. And there was so much anger and pain. So much was lost, and so quickly. Some of us got to choose, and others had no choice. When people first came here, we called them refugees, and now we call them illegals. But a Bengali is a Bengali no matter where the line is drawn. He was a Bengali when Pakistan was created and is still one when it became Bangladesh.’
News travelled slowly in 1946. It had taken weeks for Sharif, in Calcutta, to hear about the riots that killed the last of his family and the fire that burnt down his ancestral home of Noakhali.
It took a long time for Sharif to come to terms with Partition, but nothing marked the new country’s existence more decisively than India and Pakistan playing each other in 1951, when the newly minted Pakistani team toured Delhi, Bombay and Lucknow. Sharif remembers celebrations on the streets when India won the matches in Delhi and Bombay, as well as the violent reaction in Lucknow when India lost. The sport had become a battle between the two nations. Just a few years earlier, they had shared one cricketing history and the same players, but the wounds of Partition had carried over to the game.
‘Do you know that Pakistan’s first cricket team captain, Abdul Hafeez Kardar, had played Test cricket for India first?’ Sharif smiles. ‘The father of Pakistani cricket started his career playing for India. Imagine what he must have felt? Only years ago, he had played for India, and now he was back to a place he had once called home, to play against men he had once played with on the same team.’ Such were the irreconcilable ambiguities of life.
Sharif has never returned to Noakhali, and he couldn’t go if he wanted to: in 1951, the local river consumed the town. ‘There was too much blood for the earth to soak up, so the water consumed it,’ he says. Like Kardar’s India, Sharif ’s Noakhali is a mythical home built on imagination. He remembers nothing about it. What stories will Lefty, Dotty and the rest of them tell in the years to come, and where will their stories begin?
‘It feels like Partition is still alive,’ says Sharif, of living on a border becoming ever more fortified. ‘We pass its memory on from one generation to another.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India’ by Suchitra Vijayan, Published by Context (Westland).
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