Sense of Belongingness

It is matter of about 60 years ago but lovely memories of the view are still stuck in my mind. There were three rooms with two windows each in the back southern walls. The rooms were built with strong red bricks. In front of the rooms there was a vast compound surrounded with almost two and half meter high boundary wall and in the both corners of opposite boundary wall there used to be deep shady ‘dharek; trees. The third room with two doors, one within the veranda and the other out of it opened towards east. A thick green ‘lasoora’ tree bearing sweet glutinous fruit in summer was where the third room and the boundary wall joined making a corner. Just in front of the veranda there were flower beds skillfully made in rows along the boundary walls. Marigold flower never left us without its bloom, mild smell and ornateness, not even in autumn.

Out of the gate of the school there was a big ground to play. A little away from the limits of the ground ruins of the houses started. Most of the ruins still not allotted to any migrant family were covered with ‘Aak’ the toxin milky plants. It used to be a Sikh majority little town before partition and now most of the people settling there were migrants from Jammu and Kashmir who had raised the walls of their abodes on the debris of gutted houses of the Sikhs and Hindus, who had flown across newly drawn border lines after partition. On the northern side of the boundary wall there were fields. In the spring season in the green wheat crop blossom of yellow mustard flowers appeared in full of bloom and charm. Back and western edge of the boundary wall was a stony plain stretched between the pool and the school. The southern descents, spread up to the stream, had also green fields surrounding the town from the west to south east of it.

Buzz of the butterflies over the flowerbeds and the bees firmly sticking in the core of the flowers in the flurry shake sucking their juice had its own charm. The compound, a wide play ground for the students, was used as open ‘class rooms’ to enjoy the sunshine and heat during academic activities in the winter season. The flowerbeds were distributed to each of the five classes of this primary school to take care of them. Small students generally thought to be wanton and naughty were so careful that rarely it happened they had ever trampled any flowerbed and plucked the leaves and flowers. In severe cold of the winter they used to take clay made jugs to bring water from the pool about hundred meters away out of the western boundary wall to water the flower plants. And it was all done before the teachers reached the school.

I don’t remember I had planted anything in my primary school as famous Palestinian scholar, writer and critic late Ehsan Abbas recalled in his autobiography ‘ Ghurbatur Ra’ee’ the tree he planted in his primary school with some of his class fellows in his village Ain Al-Ghazal in his childhood. He died in 2003 leaving behind him a rich literary asset of 87 books on Arab Culture, critiques, biographies and many other areas of knowledge. After getting forced to leave his village due to the atrocious occupation of the Palestinian lands by Israelis and through out his career of teaching in the universities of Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon and America, he never forgot that tree. Whenever he had a chance to enter Palestine he visited his village only to see the tree was safe or not.

My village, Dhamial is about one kilometer away from this school. While traveling to my village still I have to cross the village where the school still exists and I do have a look on it. Nothing of my romance is left there. I see Ghugnrila a fast developing village now having pakka roads on all its four directions linking it with G.T road and Chakwal road and Motor Way but what it has lost are the gifts of nature. No thick strong walled rooms and veranda, no boundary walls, no ‘dharek’ and ‘lasoora’ trees and no signs of flowerbeds. Even high banyan (bargad) trees on the both sides of the pool with heavy and long branches sheltering the local people, wayfarers and cattle also suffering pains of constant practice of cuts. The stream that had never lost the flow of water is dry now. The wells and pools on every direction is now a forgotten matter. The time brings changes but Alas! Not so pleasant now. The elements being the genuine reasons to build a sense of belonging are getting diminished. And the school founded long before partition has not gone up the primary level.

But still there are many reasons to keep the sense of belonging with our origins. We have to stick to our traditions. We have to give a revival to our fading cultural traits. We have to uphold our declining moral values. If the old trees are uprooted we have to grow new trees. If the old streams have gone dried we have to dig new canals. A new era has to be started with the blend of our past, not on its wreckage.