Hazarkholi of Malegaon by Mustafa Khan

People with a penchant for Urdu poetry often quote the couplet that god has not changed the condition of people of the community because they themselves do not have awareness of the need for it. If there is an easy way to pass the buck to god it is here. Then why did Mohammad Qaiser Abdul Haq change the destiny of his life as well as of his community. He stood thirty second in IAS, second in Maharashtra. His father wished that this Maharashtra cadre young man should be posted in Malegaon which has huge problems facing the community. In other words he must wash the Augean stables as Hercules did. The accumulation of dirt and muck is very thick in that one thousand small unit housing colony known as 1000-closet (kholi) in the vernacular. Qaiser lives there, one of eleven siblings, with his family.

1000-closet was a benign gesture for the poor and underprivileged. There was another Muslim IAS officer with the Maharashtra government who was instrumental in the sanction of land and construction. When the colony came up it had wide roads with self contained toilet rooming rows. Each set consisted of a drawing room and a bed room with kitchen and toilet. There was absolutely no encroachment. Quite cheap installments of payment did not attract people to shift there as it was out of the town proper. Then wisdom dawned upon the professionals, doctors, teachers, engineers that they had the bonanza of housing facility waiting for them, that too within walking distance. So instead the poor and the underprivileged they moved in. The rooms were sublet to them with a price tag. The two MLAs who ‘ruled’ Malegaon for fifty years also moved in and occupied plum space. The lease was for 99 years. Given the clout of such redoubtable opposition and ruling combine this Hong Kong or Macaw would never return to the mainland. The Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata of Malegaon share the same lane.

These worthies were the past presidents and mayors of the municipality/corporation, too. Under their nose and with their connivance and complicity the residents broke all the rules and by rules of the housing colony and the civic administration. They gave flagrant albeit bold examples of encroachment of public land and illegal annexes, vertical as well as horizontal. They had put swabs of cotton into their ears and distributed the swabs to their neighbours to make the passage possible as Ulysses did vis-à-vis the sorceress Siren. If you see the property papers with a view to trace the original rightful underprivileged owner you will need a ladder to climb the hierarchy of sub-let owners and parasites.

The open space is occupied by wood cutters and shopkeepers. Their huge timbers and saw are too daunting to any passer by. The local residents can pick their way but the outsider would stumble and bump. Then what is left over is occupied by truck owners with their vehicles. So what was frontier settlement where women and decent people would fear to tread is the hub of the town where the fools rush.
A very interesting social manifestation of the colony is the slow assimilation of the different social groups and ancestry. People from the old town, Marathwada region, western Maharashtra, khandesh, Eastern UP, and even Tamil Nadu have made it to the colony. Qaiser’s father is from Paithan near Aurangabad while his mother is from Chalisgaon in Jalgaon district. Some speak Urdu at home, some speak bhujpuri of UP, some the local dialect. And when everyone speaks the local dialect you cannot know their background.
However, there is no playground worth name. There is a garden nearby. Shaikh Usman school where Qaiser did matriculation is in the midst of the houses. It must have come up in the open space meant for a play ground as has become standard practice. People can be forced to yield land for school but not play ground. Or else they are every ready to turn it in another slum. The older MLA had specialized in turning open spaces into slums (which ended up in becoming his vote banks). By all standards it is a humdrum school like any other in the town. But then the better off families there send their children across the road from the colony to JAT High School and Junior College and ATT High School and Junior College, both are now coed institutions. In the morning the students going there crowd the road, a familiar sight. It is interesting to note that Qaiser did not go there. But one must not forget that his main subject in MPSC was Urdu and he did MA in Urdu as an external candidate. So formal education cannot claim him entirely of its own though they can share the pride and sense of satisfaction at his achievement—distinguished by all means despite first three attempts in which he failed and then four years of concerted effort which ultimately brought success in the fourth attempt. His untiring and painstaking endeavour is a parable in perseverance.

In a town known for its powerloom industry the colony is the only neighbourhood of Malegaon which does not have power looms. Perhaps it was for this reason that the wiseacres moved in there. Among the residents there are many rich power loom owners who escape noise pollution of their own power looms by sleeping there, away from their power loom sheds. Of course, Qaiser’s father also drifted to the colony though he was a power loom worker and not owner. Poor indeed he was that his son had to toil so hard eking out family income selling kerosene on a tricycle tank and selling plates of melon for Rs 5 a plate. Three decades ago the editor of Urdu Blitz Hasan Kamal had graced the social gathering of a college with sizable number of Urdu speaking students. At that time he wondered that the textile town of Manchester had produced Karl Marx. How come the Manchester of India had not produced any? His haunting wish has come home to roost.