An unnamed love letter on a Hindi typewriter, a High Court eviction lawsuit by a goon, kotha rent receipts, music concert handbills, professional singing-dancing trade license, moral character certificate from an MLA; shaky signatures & subpoenas spill an era.

I’ve just discovered a love letter sent to my mother by her unnamed lover in 1975.

He identifies himself as ‘faqat ganwar toh ganwar hai,’ but comes across as an aesthete.

He begins: Hamari namurad ummedon ki bahar, sukoon-e-qalb, malka-e-hayat hamesha khush raho.

Uff allah.

Check the sher in the beginning.

Chashm-e-purnam khareed sakta hoon

Zulf barham khareed sakta hoon

Meri khushiyan agarche bik jaayein

Aap ka gham khareed sakta hoon

Consider the high-flown intro line & Hindi typewriter used.

But that’s not all.

I also discovered how mother’s landlord was dragging her & other tawaifs to high court, to evict them from the kotha.

The women were running to court in the afternoon & dancing in the kotha at night.

Crazy.

The landlord called them immoral & prostitutes.

One of the tawaifs named in that lawsuit (see pix) is this lady, a ‘flim actress’ qawwala, a pamphlet of whose grand outstation show my mother had carefully held on to.

The landlord said the baijis were singing, dancing, indulging in illegal trade.

He calls it ‘baiji business.’

He said it disturbed the peace of the imambara in the kotha, above which they performed.

The women had a professional trade license as singer-dancer they framed and hung in their rooms to avoid hassle.

(Mother’s tax license in this pix.)

The baijis then got together, counter-claiming that the landlord set goons & weapons on them.

Landlord then said the baijis got a goon Omar who drank & sang ‘what not’ with them.

Ab aadmi pi ke thoda toh besura gayega.

Here’s a pix of the tawaifs, mostly uneducated, who signed the affidavit saying they were being bullied. My mother signs as Rekha.

Mother had to procure a character certificate from a local Congress MLA to prove she had good moral bearings.

Mother saved important documents for me to discover after her death.

Here’s one showing she rented a room in the said kotha in 1973, for Rs250 a month.

She marked her life in receipts, paperwork she could not fully grasp.

Which is why she saved my school reports even more carefully.

Here’s one from the time i was in class 2.

The remarks section says: ‘Could do better with a little more effort.’

Now consider I stood 1st in class.

Teachers were brutal.

Thank goodness mother checked only rank.

Last night, before going to bed, I was thinking of the word faqat. I googled its meaning.

Merely, simply, only.

Today, it came back to me both as a surprise and a story to explore, perchance.

Perhaps, maybe, possibly.