A Curious Tale from the Promised Land

The charming story of a family of Indians who went to Jerusalem to mind an Indian hospice and stayed

As the author walks the historical lanes of Jerusalem, bound to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, a story within stories is called forth; a veritable Russian doll that somehow no one else has stumbled across. It begins with Sarna in Jerusalem, a flâneur who ruminates on the words of Amos Oz and the old American Colony Hotel, that ‘gathering hole, as a newspaper article colourfully put it, of spies, diplomats, authors and romantics’, visited by everyone from Bob Dylan to Peter O’Toole. Then, it moves to Baba Farid, the great Sufi saint of the Chisti order, who visited Jerusalem from his native Punjab and meditated underground for 40 days. And then the tale of the Ansari family, from the village of Ambheta near Saharanpur, who came to Jerusalem to look after an Indian hospice,by Herod’s gate.

Sarna traces how this came to be; the Indian Khilafat Movement, expressing support for the Ottoman Caliphate, was led by a group of leaders who deputed Sheikh Nazir Hasan Ansari, a police inspector’s son, from Saharanpur to Jerusalem in 1924. Leaving behind one Indian wife, he then marries one Palestinian and another Indian wife, in his new home: ‘[A]s a sheikh he could not be seen to be living like a bachelor. That would not be acceptable. He had to bring his wife from India or marry a local girl’, his eldest son Sheikh Munir recounts. Already, the space between two worlds has encouraged radical change. And as for the ‘pile of stones’ Nazir finds upon his arrival, grinding along, soon, wealthy Muslim princes in India help it along.

A series of conversations begin betwen the men, accompanied by tabbouleh and biryani and memories, as well as the family’s stylish daughters, Najam, Nourjahan and Wafa, who like to hang out at the King David Hotel for larks. A treasury of old documents is hunted up, stored in a shiny brocade shawl, and the old lore is brought out. For, the Ansaris, who trace ancestors back to Abu Ayyub al-Ansari of Medina, a supporter of the Prophet, have a truly unusual story; annexed, supplanted by history.

Sarna, the author of two novels—The Exile and We Weren’t Lovers Like That—and two works of non-fiction—The Book of Nanak and Folk Tales of Poland—is a career diplomat, currently Indian Ambassador to Israel. More than three decades in the Indian Foreign Service have taken him around the world, evident in this slight, elegant volume, as is a shining curiosity. He ought to write more non-fiction.

His eye snags on all the right details. There is a strange return home in 1998, described by Nazeer and his son in puzzled detail; the government has invited a party of four Ansari men ‘home’. But it is too late; the party cannot even spend the night in the village of their origins, fleeing Ambheta, where there is no electricity and lots of snakes—for Saharanpur proper. And Sarna discovers, through his single-minded pursuit of this lost historical moment, that in 1340 a Sufi saint of Baba Farid’s Chisti order, Shah Harun, gave ‘Saharanpur’ (morphed over time) its name; fitting that a son of Saharanpur minds the hospice of Baba Farid, he reasons, thrilling at chance.

His is a hungry eye, if the exposition is a little clunky at times; the efforts of the storyteller are more apparent than they ought to be in places as he picks out ‘the large jigsaw puzzle called the past’. The description of lavender bushes, for example, that seems added in almost incidentally, as fragrant as they sound. Yet, this little pocket of history charms in the telling; Sarna, earnestly chasing down history, is almost as quixotic as the men whose chronicle he bears.

This is a book for an invested reader; perhaps too much for someone expecting a lightish read. Yet, there is enough to charm even the novice; panoramas featuring the Mount of Olives,the Dome of the Rock, Herod’s Gate and the Old City; Father Jayaseelan, described as ‘the first Indian priest at the Holy Sepulchre church in 2,000 years’.

‘Stone, fruit and flesh all flaming with love’, goes the last line of Indian Hospice, the Meena Alexander poem which makes up the Prologue. Sarna, channelling Chatwin and Theroux, sought to rescue the past— ‘Herod’s Ascent’ replaces ‘Herod’s Gate’ on a ceramic plate, and he remarks, ‘Another nibble at history’—but it is Kapus´cin´ski who comes to mind.

Indians at Herod’s Gate: A Jerusalem TaleNavtej Sarna