Olden days, golden days

Khalid Zafar

“A sparrow perched on a delicate bough of a thistle and opened a rag, in which corals were tied up. Instantly, one of the corals fell into the thistle; the sparrow said, “O thistle, give me my coral, the thistle replied, I won’t do that, it’s none of my business.”

When after narrating a small portion of the Chitrali folklore, I looked at my daughter, I found her sound asleep. She never falls asleep before listening to some lullaby from her mother or some folklore from her father. Usually, she demands for Boeko Shelogh  (story of the house sparrow).

Tonight, after I saw her asleep, I reflected back on my own childhood; years back when I used to compel my grandmother for narration of some stories before I went asleep. I myself like my daughter, never slept without listening to some orally transmitted stories of the antiquity from my grandma. She started her stories with sentences like, “Long long ago, there lived a king” or “Once upon a time there lived a dumb queen,” etc. That was the pre-TV era and her stories were not less sensational than the Hollywood blockbusters. My younger brother and I would often discuss the characters and try to play the protagonists’ roles.

Whenever I look back in retrospection, the very first thing I could conjure up in my mind is the graceful image of my late grandfather, sitting at the patio underneath the magnificent Maple tree locating just behind our old house. On the left side of the patio, there was a thatch cave of the grape vines. At the extreme left corner, there was an underground cistern tank, which stored drinking water for the whole village. People of my village would fetch water from the tank at any hour of the day. My grandfather spent most of his summer days there, at the patio, reclining on a homemade pillow, listening to his “National” radio.

I can freshly recollect image of the three-band “National” transistor in the folds of a leathern cover enclosed in another homespun embroidered covering made up of a piece of fine cloth. Everyone in the house took great care of Dada Gee’s (Granddad’s) radio. Most often, he listened to the Urdu broadcast of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and one thing I could get now is, the 8:00 pm news bulletins must have been very important, for he made us all hushed by waving his index finger saying , “ Now it is 8’O clock.”

And in winters, my grandfather sat at the inglenook or under Manqal, (an older version of the Japanese Kotatsu), which is heated by an electric heater; manqal on the other hand is a knee-high blanket covered table warmed by placing burning charcoal under it.

We, all the family members gathered around my grandpa and he would narrate stories from the past. His past was very dear to him and sometimes tears would gather in his eyes while narrating some incidents of the antiquity. He told us that life was very hard and poverty existed in its extreme form. People could hardly manage a square meal, yet there was peace, love and harmony amongst the people even in the time of scarcity.

He loved his past and while listening to some saddening news on the radio, he clasped his forehead with his hand and said, “This box has affected us badly” and added, “There were, in fact, no worries when there were no means of communication. The radio gives us nothing, except the news of killing, assassination, bomb blasts or heartrending incidents and the like.” He told us that the communication in ancient times was so slow that news from the Lower Chitral reached the upper part in no less than a week time. We loved to hear from him. There was peace and tranquility in being with the family members. We respected the elders, worked with them, loved them and wanted to spend time as much as we could in their company.

Not only the family members, but also the villagers loved to spend time together, as most of our neighbours visited us each day and sat with Dada Gee (Granddad) for hours. The whole villagers would gather on various occasions and observed every rite and ritual together. Unity, strong bond of friendship relationship and neighborhood prevailed. 

Today, we are living in an era of material development. We have every kind of facility, such as: smartphones, laptops, palmtops and the most advanced artificial intelligence at our fingertips. We have the sophisticated technology in every field of life: in health, education, transport and we largely own state-of-the-art communication facilities.

We have myriad means of communication and the information technology has converted the whole world into a global apartment, yet distances are widening instead of shrinking. We have forgotten the olden social, cultural ethical and moral values and are in pursuit of material gains.

Today, we sit together, live together, work together and even laugh together, but Alas! We don’t have the peace, love, harmony and unity of the past. Maybe, I am living in the phantasmagoria of my past as to me like Charles Lamb, “The past is everything, being nothing” and my heart presses me to say, “Olden days were golden days.”     

 

P/S: The essay was written back in 2019 for the college yearly journal, PHUNAR. It’s being shared with some very slight modifications.

 

(Khalid Zafar is Lecturer in English at GC Chitral Lower).