Hussain Abad, Quetta: the place, the people and their values

Faqir Jango of Hussain Abad, Quetta.

“We are who we are because of the places in which we grow up, the accents and friends we acquire by chance, the burdens we have not chosen but somehow learn to cope with. Real communities are always local-places in which people have put down roots and are willing to put up with the burdens of living together. The fantasy of virtual community is that we can enjoy the benefits of community without its burdens, without the daily effort to keep delicate human connections intact. Real communities can bear these burdens because they are embedded in particular places and evoke enduring loyalties. In cyberspace, however, there is nowhere that a sense of place can grow, and no way in which the solidarities that sustain human beings through difficult times can be forged”  

John Gray

"We have too many things, and too little gratitude."
Abdal Hakim Murad

Note: Short video on Hussainabad at the end.

Haider Surkhai. Faqir Jango. Shaukat Cowboy. Eechak. Seyyed Tawoos Agha. Babay Patayn. And so on. All these names are of the people whom we identified as our own, as the people of Hussain Abad, a neighorhood where we grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. Hussain Abad is a mostly Hazara mohalla (neighborhood) off the main Toghi Road in Quetta. I am not sure about the origin of the name; maybe it was named after the first person who set camp there; since the Hazaras belong to the Shia tradition of Islam, it is more likely that the mohalla was named after the third Shia Imam Hussain (AS), the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Wallahu alam. God knows better. In this blog, I will reflect upon the old days in Hussain Abad---1970s and 1980s---some of its well-known residents and the customs and mores which defined the community then.

The residents of Hussain Abad were then commonly known by the Hazaras of other mohallas, especially by the slick Nichariites and the brash (or let's say blunt, brutally honest) Seyyed Abadis, as the “Shash Maina” which literally translates into “Six Monthers” or “Six month old”. For those readers of this blog who are not well acquainted with the Hazaras of Quetta and their ways, this appellation was both an honorific and a somewhat derogatory designation at the same time. The Hussain Abadis, having arrived into this world from the wombs of their mothers three months earlier than others of the species (hence the sobriquet “six monthers”!), were admired, or envied, for their precociousness, wit and wisdom, resourcefulness and other such qualities that usually define the better segments of a community. At the same time, and rather paradoxically, they were also the target of caustic taunts---especially of the irreverent Seyyed Abadis---for having not advanced beyond the age of six months, postpartum (post-birth)! In other words, they were often accused of immaturity. Those TNT-loaded barbs were especially lobbed at them by the Seyyed Abadi fans at the football (soccer) matches between the two teams during the All Hazara Football Championships often held in dry Quetta summers. Local elections for the provincial legislative assembly were the other such occasions for such a belligerent display of communal rivalry.

Hussain Abadis at Hanna Lake, Quetta, mid 1970s.

On a recent visit to Quetta, I went to check on the old mohalla of Hussain Abad, especially the street that we used to live in. Once there, I was totally lost: almost nothing of the old street could be seen! I had difficulty orienting myself and tried hard to locate the exact location where once stood the old house with the huge mulberry (shahthooth) tree---our house. Gone were the small wooden doors with sun-beaten dried paint that we children used to strip off the door surfaces mischievously. Those small doors with squeaky hinges and rusting bolt-type locks with chain latches that doubled as knocking devices were almost always half open; simple yet elegant, they never failed to remind one of the organic ("wood is always alive!" as someone has said) and unpretentious nature of not only the structures that they were meant to gate and protect, but also of the people who inhabited those quarters. In them one could see and feel what the Japanese call wabi-sabi. In place of them now stood wide metal gates fitted with high security prison grade remote operated locks and flanked by reinforced concrete walls into which the hinges that supported the thick, heavy gates sank deeply, as if trying to impress upon the mortal observer that both the structures and their residents were there to stay indefinitely, as in death-defying indefinitely. Forever! I just stood there, in front of one of those cold, lifeless monstrosities for a long time, thinking about the old times. In exact contrast to what occupied those spaces once, everything now looked so…inorganic, so un-charming, so arrogant, gaudy, nay, ugly!

As with the buildings, so with the people. Looking strangely, suspiciously, at me as I walked past them---still somewhat lost and confused---the cold, unfamiliar faces seemed equally unfamiliar to each other as well. The fruits of development, progress, or "taraqqee", I thought. Hence the booming market for NGOs and their armies of "community developers"!

As I turned the corner to get back on the main Yazdan Khan Road, my eyes suddenly caught sight of an abnormally thin man with an equally emaciated face half of which was covered with a scraggly beard. He was just standing there, almost motionless. He was clad in all white, head covered with a black and white keffiyeh, of the type that always reminds one of the great Palestinian freedom fighter, Yasser Arafat. His eyes that seemed to have lost their shine decades ago met mine and that brief moment during which we locked eyes seemed like a very long time: decades of memories quickly rolled down in front of my eyes, in that familiar yet strange space between us. Still looking at him, I halted once and then slowly moved closer to him until I was standing at an arm’s length from him. I knew the man. Yes. I had always known him. “Recognize me?”, I asked him. A few seconds passed. Nothing. His eyes were still searching for something. Finally, he extended his right hand to me and smiled, more with his eyes than with his mouth. I took his hand and told him who I was. He nodded once, twice and then doing it continuously, he squeezed my hand hard in his as the smile spread all over his face, the shine returning to his eyes. “Yes, I remember you. Yes, I do” he kept saying. This was Ahmed Ali, son of the late Haji (Mullah) Ghulam Ali who was a meticulous man, a rather brutal disciplinarian and a great teacher of Islamic subjects to the boys and girls of Hussain Abad. After a very long, long time, I had met Ahmed Ali, or Ahmed qun quni of Hussain Abad, as he was known to all of us.

The community, early 1970s

Hazaras usually have (or used to have) a tag or appellation attached to their proper names, the leaving out of which often causes great inconvenience and even confusion in communication. Their use equally becomes the cause of embarrassment for both the speaker and the listeners, especially if the person referred to, or a relative of his, happens to be present among the audience. A paradox, a dilemma. This is because the appellatives are almost always some kind of humorous pun or negative comment on the person’s physical appearance, unusual habits, some peculiarity of character or anomaly in familial background etc.  For example, take this qun quni. It means talking in a peculiar way whereby the words are not pronounced full and are instead uttered in a semi- or un-chewed, mumbling manner making a twangy and buzzing sound. So, to qun qun is to half-speak words with a deep nasal twang that further makes sentences indistinct and speech fuzzy.  As a true blue Hussain Abadi, yours truly also had one of these tags attached to his name, one which specifically referred to a body part, to a sort of flaw in that part: his pair of jumbo ears! And so did many of my Hussain Abadi friends: Ibrahim, Zulfo, Sikander, Muhammad, Ghazanfar (Ghazzo), Samad and Raza. Nobody was exempt. Although I recognized Ahmed before he could open his mouth and utter something in that peculiar style of his that had earned him that label, I suspect he recognized me primarily because of my XL-sized, poppadum flappers!       

Hussain Abadi "Shash Mainas" in winter, early 1980s.

Hussain Abad was, first and foremost, a real community, that is, community in the old, traditional sense of that word. It was a different era. It was a time when the cancer of modern alienation and anomie, the logical products of modern lifestyles of hyper-consumerism and dog-eat-dog capitalistic individualism that are part and parcel of a vulgar worldview the defining characteristic of which is a business-school instrumental rationality with zero regard for moral-ethical means-ends consistency, this diseased value system had not yet taken root in the traditional Quetta communities and, therefore, the communities like Hussain Abad did not have any need for noisy NGO missionaries and sloganeering civil society activists----the "humanitarian" hustlers and "poverty alleviation" charlatans almost always pushing some Godless, neo-colonial agenda----to teach them about the benefits of community living or about "community development". In Hussain Abad in particular what that essentially meant was that neighbors cared for and shared with each other. Sharing was especially a big feature of community life in Hussain Abad then. There wasn’t a day when we would not send or receive something---dishes, chapati, paratha, fruit, halwa, shir birinj (dessert), kulcha, bosragh (cookies)----from the neighbors. The plates and bowls that were used for sending something never came back empty. This exchange of goodies would continue all year long, the items changing with the passing seasons and with the events that dotted the lives of all the families of the community. The bonds among the community members, and the mores that underpinned those bonds, were of such a nature that there were times when kids would actually go to a neighbor’s house with a request like the following: “My mother says that because of such and such reason, she has not had the time to cook something for dinner. Would it be okay to borrow some food from you tonight?” 

Haider Ali marhoom (Khuda biyamurza, RIP). Hussain Abad in the late 1970s.

In Hussain Abad, weddings, funerals, and all the other big events in life were always collective community events with everybody lending a hand and chipping in in one form or another. Happiness and grief were shared with equal readiness and generosity of spirit. Neighbors not only smiled with you when it was time to smile, but were also equal, caring partners in your grief and sorrow. There was Haider the butcher (aka Haider Surkhai, khudabiyamurz, may his soul rest in peace) who was a familiar face at all such events. He was both adored and feared by the children. A fast talking man with ruddy complexion, he would sometimes chomp on raw sheep or goat liver or kidney to the delight of the watching kids. There was Eechakk, a short man who never walked but always ran; it was so difficult to keep pace with him. A sort of handy man, he had an equally popular presence at all community events. There were babay Pataiyn (Pataiyn’s father) and babay Maqsood (Maqsood’s father, to some he was babay Najaf, his other son), the two general store owners of Hussain Abad. The former, a short and plump man with the voice of a giant, had the best roasted chick peas and peanuts and the latter, a lanky man with an angelic beneficence sold the best rewri (sticky candy coated with white sesame seeds), khinjakk or shinay (a local dried fruit of the berry family with oily rind) and kishta (sun-dried apricots). There were Salman the tandoor walla (naan or bread seller), and babay Barani, the tonga walla who used to take kids to school on his horse pulled carriage (tonga).

But if there is one personality who is justifiably qualified to be identified with Hussain Abad, to be the face of Hussain Abad so to speak, I would say that honor should go to Faqir Jango. There is so much to say about this doyen of Hussain Abad (at least to three generations of its residents!), but what brings to the mind of any Hussain Abadi who hears his name is a pair of sunglasses. And not just any sunglasses but a pair of classic RayBans: to say Faqir Jango is to visualize a pair of original Raybans Aviator with dark tinted glasses. This man, alive and kicking as I write these lines, with his unique communication style and his limitless store of witty anecdotes and original jokes, had the uncanny ability to engage people of different age-groups in hours long sometimes informative and often entertaining conversations. Except for the terribly freezing rainy-snowy winter days, on a typical evening in the decades of 70s and 80s in Hussain Abad, it would be impossible to miss the sight of Jango telling his jokes or narrating some anecdote, surrounded by boys and men of all ages. The usual venue for such live information sessions and verbal performances would be the street corner, in front of babay Maqsood’s general store. Years later, after I had left Quetta and after I had read enough about and by (via his illustrious student Plato or Aflatun) the wise old man of Greece, Socrates, I often thought of Faqir Jango and his captivated audience at that street corner in Hussain Abad. Definitely no Socrates to his captured flock, Faqir Jango had the same power to cast a spell, and the charm, too, of the Athenian sage.


(to be continued…)

Hussainabad: The Video

Note: Many of the people mentioned in this blog post are no longer with us. By writing about them, it has not been my intention to show any kind of disrespect towards any of them or to make fun of or ridicule anyone. This blog post and others that will follow are an attempt by this blogger to recall times past and to try to show how things used to be then in Quetta. My aim is not to romanticize wholesale (not everything was perfect then!) but to tell stories about certain people and aspects of life in Quetta of the recent past. In keeping with Hazaragi tradition, the readers, especially the Hussain Abadi readers of this blog---the shashmainas---are requested to offer a fatiha, or prayer, for all the deceased mentioned in this blog post. May all of them rest in peace in their final abodes and may we have the wisdom, the good sense, to also see the true and the authentic, the good and the beautiful, in the imperfect past that we often disparage and hastily and unthinkingly chuck away as we, with equal haste, embrace everything new and glittering so uncritically and indiscriminately. Khuda Biyamurza, as we say.

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For the interested reader, more about the yesteryears,

1. The old rental libraries of Quetta

2.  Quetta in the 1980s: The battle of the Kawasakis

Dervaish's Quetta Youtube Channel (Click)