The women in my life

From the time I started toddling and understanding the world around me to the time she died in 1975, I always saw her in bed.Stricken by paralysis of the left side, she was given six months to live by the eminent doctors of Lahore in 1929.She lived for another forty-six years and outlived them all!!

                 She was the wife of that great man of letters, educationist and missionary of Islam, late Maulvi Muhammad Yakub Khan, who became the first Non-British editor of the Civil and Military Gazette. Imam of the Renowned Woking Mosque and the editor of The Islamic Review, London. (“Imagine the representation of Islam in U.K. falling to a man from Peer Piai…Sir Olaf Caroe would shake his head in astonishment),and a colleague of the Quaid; whose pen was never for sale. Behind every great man is a great woman, and these two great people, poles apart in their background and culture, did manage to make a great team, who guided a whole host of generations, children, grandchildren, students and pupils through the tricky marsh that is life.

                 Their marriage spanned a life-time fifty year. A lot of strains and stresses came their way on this long journey, years, deaths, afflictions, but they managed to keep us together and afloat. Whatever little goodness we brothers have in us today can directly be traced to their influence!!

                 I never saw her wearing any jewelry. Her gold bangles went into the construction of the minarets of the Berlin Mosque in 1922 and these were never replaced. She always wore coarse cotton and, in this respect, could be called a forerunner of Sarhaddi Gandhi and Masud khaddarposh!!

Whatever finery and silks we brought her from the four corners of the world was soon given away to the needy and the deserving!!

Amanji Zubeda Begum with baby boy Mohammad Aslam Khan in 1921

 I once spent a good bit of my monthly salary to bring her a hand-woven silk suit length from Mysore… but I never saw her wearing it!! It went the same way as all our earlier presents…. In the way of Allah!!

                 She singled out just one role that she played all her life… that of being Mother!! To all of us, children, nephews, grandchildren, the Mohalla Kids, the Waifs and strays, the “Maees”… country women who come from the outskirts to work in bungalows’. She was known as “Ammaji”!! Whatever the trouble, whatever the need there was always her rock-like shoulder on which we could all cry, find sympathy and get mental relief.

A more democratic and egalitarian outlook, that the mother had, I have yet to see in my life and roaming around the world!! Rank and worldly position never meant anything to her!! Her younger brother Naseer Ahmad Faruqui, rose to be the top civil servant of Pakistan and yet for her, he always remained the same old kid, her young friend of yore and was always addressed as “Toum”!!

She was a “Sufi” at heart and in this respect resembled father. Was it his Sufi-ism that had been rubbed on her or vice versa, I never could find out!! I knew that she would get up from the latter part of her night sleep and pray fervently! And many a times these prayers were answered, and the turn of future events shown to her in true visions and dreams!! When her life-long partner went in 1972, she turned her attention entirely away from this world as if she was getting ready for the inevitable eternal journey!! She completely lost her appetite and seemed to be in a reverie all the time!!

She went peacefully in her sleep on a balmy April night in 1975, after suffering for forty-six years of bed-ridden life!!

I was informed by wireless by my Tehran head office whilst I was taking an Iranian Merchant Ship from Iran to USA via the Cape of Good Hope!