Who Invented the Ikka?
He scrunched all eighteen poets into two horse-drawn carts and brought them to the railway station in Kanpur. Upon reading that eighteen poets were packed like sardines into two horse-drawn carts, whichever readers think I’m exaggerating have probably never seen a horse-drawn cart or a poet. (This was in Kanpur. In Aligarh, one horse-drawn cart would have been enough.) For the sake of readers, I’ll describe the construction of this unique and amazing conveyance. First, take a board on which you clean the bodies of dead people and cut it into a rectangle. Then stick onto it two different sizes of rectangular wheels, hoping that the wheels will render Aligarh’s streets smooth and the wheels themselves will become round. The board should be about six feet or so above the street’s potholes so that the passengers’ dangling feet and the passers-by’s heads will be at the same level. The diameter of the small wheel should be five feet. The spokes used for the wheel should look like the sun’s rays, and they should be strong enough so that a passenger can use them to boost himself onto the main seating area. (This will also set the wheel in motion.) Then, there should be a yoke of two pieces of bamboo from which you attach an old, starving horse whose ribs the passengers can count even from a distance so as to satisfy themselves that it has a complete set. There’s your ikka. Its four hazardous parts will be mentioned again later.
Like nihari, rasawal, smoked rice firni, idioms, monsoon dishes, swings in mango groves, arhar dal, silk comforters, long, pleated skirts, dopalli hats, the folk heroes Alha and Udal, witty poems, so too ikkas are part of the special patrimony of UP. During my stay in Aligarh from 1943 to 1945, I also rode in ikkas (and suffered disgrace doing so). I think a horse must have invented them. That’s because the ikka has this one design trick: the passengers have to work harder than the horse; the weight of the extra passengers doesn’t rest on the horse but rather on the other passengers on whose laps they are sitting.6 You must have seen how in Western ballet, there are many delicate moments when the ballerinas stand balanced on their tiptoes. All of their weight rests on their big toes, but on their faces, instead of a grimace, there is a smile. I saw such a happy spectacle, or spectacular happiness, in Aligarh when the university’s boys would use their thumbs to pad themselves against the ikka’s exposed nails as they sat between heaven and earth going in circles around the girls’ college. It’s said that the secret to happiness in life is that once you’ve found a space big enough to stick in your thumb, you should stuff in your entire body.
Collision with a Road-grater
The passengers sat coiled amidst one another’s curves. When the ikka, complete with horse and passengers, got stuck in an open manhole, then, according to folks from Delhi, ‘the fruit got all squished.’ The passengers’ limbs were entangled and strung together like shirtsleeves and drawstrings in a washing machine. When someone had to get out, everyone else had to unfasten their locks and chains, and only then did this adventurous soul become freed enough from that bony vicegrip that he could jump six feet down while still cross-legged. Body parts got so mixed up that if someone’s calf itched, they would scratch it till it bled without remit, and yet the itch would still remain. And that was because it was someone else’s calf. If an ikka got into an accident, nothing and no one was the worse for wear. That’s because, for one, the ikka didn’t have any parts whose breaking or losing would matter at all. And, second, the offending car or bike would slide beneath the ikka’s bottom so smoothly that not even the horse would notice anything amiss. Sometimes the entire mass of passengers would fall to hit the ground with a thud like in one big rugby scrum. I saw something like this with my own eyes. It was Aligarh, 1944. It was during World War II. I had to go out to find a razorblade, which was rare in those days. I went from store to store asking in vain. Suddenly in the middle of the road I saw seven or eight black parachutes landing. I was told that an ikka carrying girls from the girls’ college had had a head-on collision with a road-grater, and, with the help of their air-filled burqas, the girls were descending safely from the ikka’s great height. Moreover, boys wearing fezzes and shervanis buttoned up to their Adam’s apples were standing there, ready to lift up the wounded, perform first (non-)medical aid, offer human sympathy and service to fallen humanity, and proffer themselves as potential lovers.
To Start with a 100-Horsepower Curse
In the back of an ikka, there were so many passengers crammed in together that should the horse have tripped or passed out from fatigue, even then the horse wouldn’t have fallen to the ground: the weight at the back-end of the cart was so great that it would keep him propped up. There was no custom of putting cushions inside the ikka. The wood inside the cart shone more brilliantly than any of the most expensive pieces of wood because there was a very different method of polishing. Every day, for at least ten or eleven hours, the wood had been polished by the asses of graduate students. (Undergraduates sat on the laps of graduate students.) If anyone had used cushions, at the very first jerk the passengers would have slid out of the ikka as though on a flying carpet and then land on the heads of the passers-by. Passengers weren’t allowed to grab ahold of the ikka from outside and so get carried along. This would have slowed it down. It would be wrong to say that the ikka was powered by the horse’s strength because what happened was that the ikka driver would get down, push from behind, and issue a 100-horsepower curse to start it; only from this would it wobble into action. The horse had no ability to stop this at all.
‘Khushamdeed!’ [‘Welcome!’]… Correct Spelling
The Dhiraj Ganj school-kids had decorated the train platform with colourful little flags in the same way that a careless mother ties a bright ribbon in her girl’s hair without first washing her face. As soon as each poet descended from the train, a marigold garland was draped around his neck, and he was handed a single rose and a glass of boiled milk, which, once it was in hand, he gasped, ‘Where should I put it?’ The greeters would ask the newcomers, who had come from Kanpur, which was twenty-five miles and one hour away, ‘How was the journey? How’s the weather in Kanpur? After you wash up and rest, you’ll feel better.’ In reply, the guests would say, ‘What time is the evening prayer here? Dhiraj Ganj is famous for its hospitality. What souvenirs are good? How many chickens can you get for a rupee? Are Muslims here as poor as they are in the rest of India?’
The two o’clock train had brought to Dhiraj Ganj the eighteen poets and five groupies, whom one poet had brought with him. The Light of Islam Orphanage Band had started playing three hours before the train’s arrival, but as soon as it arrived, sometimes the drummers would stop, sometimes the flute players, sometimes the trumpeters (whose instruments looked like elephant trunks), and sometimes all three sections would stop at once. Only the bandmaster continued waving his baton. The reason was that these instrumentalists had never before seen a train engine up close. Seeing it, they fell into a trance during which they forgot to play their instruments. With the engine stopped so close to them, they could see its each and every mysterious detaiclass="underline" the whistle; the coal shovel; the sharp odour, like that of Western medicine, coming from the sizzling, crackling coals in the boiler; then next to the fire’s flames, the Anglo-Indian driver’s beet-red face and the blue tattoo of his wife on his wrist; the black handkerchief wrapped around the Muslim coal-stoker’s head and the coal’s zebra lines on his face; and the long iron rods that connected the wheels to the engine that looked exactly like the boys’ arms did when they played, moving them back and making the ‘chuk chuk’ sounds of the train. Steam sprayed across the boys’ faces. The boys saw the milky smoke released from the engine’s chimney turn to the colour of ashes and then to a thick black. They liked the smoke’s bitter taste in their throats. The hissing black dragon of curling smoke passed beyond the last compartment and rose into the sky with a restless quivering motion. The band’s boys were silent, completely silent, as they wanted to see up close, as up close as possible, the train’s whistle as it released its steam. When they had to go, they wanted to leave their eyes at the station. If you had wanted a band of boys to play music, it would have been best to get a train without an engine.