Kuldip Nayar and Sialkot’s Pir Sahib

“Y ou are not a reporter until you have received a couple of legal notices and faced the challenge.” This was a quotable quote by the legendary Kuldip Nayar who was then, what they call these days, a launch editor. The year was 1977 and he was in Chandigarh to launch the North Indian edition of Ramnath Goenka’s paper, The Indian Express, now rid of the rough times during the Emergency. We were the gullible trainees who lapped up the bravado it took slow-learners like me to learn to unlearn.

The last I saw the gutsy Nayar was when he along with senior journalist Saeed Naqvi was running a campaign for the return of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar’s mortal remains from Rangoon (now Yangon) to Delhi five years ago. He was frail yet there at the meet and to my surprise he recognised me. Nayar’s virtues were strong secularism, belief in Punjabiat and of course a newshound’s sharp memory.

But today what comes to my mind is a tender tale of faith he shared with poet and filmmaker Gulzar on one of their drives from Delhi to Amritsar to light candles of peace at the Indo-pak border. Gulzar wrote it in his inimitable style and I had the privilege of translating it from Hindustani to English many years ago for a literary journal called The Little Magazine.

The story related to Pir Sahib’s grave near their ancestral home left behind in Sialkot in 1947. When Nayar was in Tihar Jail during the Emergency in 1975, he was comfortable with a table, a chair, notebooks and a pen but restless to be out about his job. Though arrested as one of the dissenting intellectuals and told that he would be set free soon, his confinement ran into months. He suddenly thought of the Pir Sahib in his heart and asked when he would be released. Nayar’s mother respected the Pir as she did the peepal tree nearby and after prayers she would put vermilion on the tree and the grave.

To Nayar’s surprise, the Pir Sahib, whom he had never seen, appeared in his dream, in a green robe and flowing white beard, and assured him that he would be released the following Thursday. True enough, the orders came late the following Thursday night and on Friday morning he was a free man.

The story did not end here. Nayar’s aging mother would tell him to go to Sialkot and place a chaddar on the Pir’s grave as the Baba was feeling cold. When she passed away in 1980, Nayar made a trip to his old home and found everything had changed. The locality was crowded with shops and neither the tree nor the grave was to be seen. No one seemed to even know about them. But the day he was to return, he met the shopkeeper whose shop was close to the mazaar and persisted in knowing about the grave. Hesitantly, the man confessed that they were refugees from the other side and the whole family crowded the shop. Next to the shop was a grave and they removed it to make a room.

“The needs of life snatched away yet another grave. I returned to India and one day, I went and placed the chaddar that I had taken to Sialkot at the dargah of Nizamuddin Aulia in Delhi,” Nayar told Gulzar. The Pir Sahib never came in Nayar’s dreams again. Perhaps, like his mother he too had attained nirvana.

HERE’S A TENDER TALE OF FAITH HE SHARED WITH FILMMAKER GULZAR ON ONE OF THEIR DRIVES