The roots

 

A fair-colored slim boy of twenty-two, Ayaz Ahmad is a Muslim from Kashmir. He works as a truck driver with a contractor specializing in earthworks.

I ask him if he can understand Haryanvi. ‘Of course, I can understand most of it. I’m a gujjar. I understand Rajasthani language because it’s the language of our tribe, the nomads, our ancestors!’ he says with perky pride.

Then I realize that Haryanvi and Rajasthani are similar in crude countryside intonation. ‘Haryanvi is similar to Rajasthani,’ I hear him saying with a touch of Haryanvi in his Rajasthani-based dialect.

His ancestors were wandering nomads from Rajasthan. They must have been Hindu. Those were relatively easier times for crossovers—geographic and religious. They must have migrated to Kashmir and there they took up Islam.

The way he says, ‘I’m a gujjar!’ gives an idea about his feeling of pride for their primary ethnic identity. ‘Gujjar’ connoting more about an occupation, a pastoral living, a distinct nomadic culture. And the way he puts it, it seems that he is more secure in asserting this base identity than he would be in asserting his religious identity which is an add-on to his basic identity.

People, however far they might bloom in the sky in the form of flowers, fruits and new shoots, have a devotional respect for their roots, the roots hidden in the soil, grit, grime, dust of time. They maintain a mythic connection even with the most distant roots they can recall.