Author’s father with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
“Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realising it!” This verse from the Bible, I took very lightly and, in fact, I didn’t give a second thought to it, thinking that such a thing could never happen, at least not in my case or in my home.
My home in Gauhati (now Guwahati) was visited by people great and small. Some of the greatest Indian national leaders like M.K. Gandhi, who was the Mahatma and is the Father of the Nation, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian Prime Minister, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who served as the first Deputy Prime Minister of India and acted as Home Minister during the political integration of India and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, made our Gauhati house their compulsory halt as and when they came to Assam, in Northeast India.
The names of all the political leaders that I just mentioned here were normal and ordinary freedom fighters as my father was when they had visited our house. Much, much later after India’s independence, they started holding very high and responsible political offices. Mr. Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed was an Indian practising lawyer when my father was Secretary of the Congress Party. My father had asked Advocate Ahmed to quit his profession and join politics as a Congress volunteer and he did. Believe it or not, he served as the fifth President of India from 1974 to 1977. He was from Uttar Pradesh but joined politics on my father’s request and later settled in Assam. He often spent hours at a stretch in our home with my father because he considered him his mentor.
During his whirlwind electioneering tour, Nehru raised a large amount of money for the Assam election fund. My father had accompanied him throughout the tour. In the snug back seat of a car were only Nehru and my father – Nehru chain-smoking and reading proofs of his manuscript, Discovery of India. He would now and then merrily gossip just to enliven or to break the monotony.
When the car taking Nehru and my father from then Gauhati to Nowgong (presently, Nagaon) was sighted, the people coming from the town to greet their leader halfway, stopped it. After welcoming Nehru, all turned to my father with grave faces to tell him that my mother (who gave birth to me) had suddenly developed a blood crisis and that doctors had warned my father not to proceed further with Pandit Nehru on the rest of his journey.
Full of the milk of human kindness that his loving heart flowed with, Nehru said, ‘Tayyebulla Saheb, then you should not think of going with me’. He consoled my father through the rest of the journey to the town, up to our house.
After seeing my mother in bed, my father hurried to join Nehru for a quick lunch, and then they parted. My mother passed away, leaving my father with no wife to love or to be loved by, and me a motherless infant. Nehru was in Karachi (then a part of India, now of Pakistan) at the time of my mother’s death. Seeing a press obituary, he sent a condolence telegram to my father from there. Such was the man, Nehru.
About Jawaharlal’s father, Motilal Nehru every Indian knows – his colossal income at the Bar, his legendary princely ways of life, the splendour that was Anand Bhavan, and whatnot. My father’s first contact with him came in mid-1922, when Motilal Nehru visited Assam as the Chairman of the Congress Civil Disobedience Enquiry Committee. On behalf of the Assam Congress with other comrades, my father had received him at the next railway junction from Gauhati.
People from all walks of life came to our home and found rest and peace. The Minister’s Bungalow in Rilbong, Shillong, was known as “Green View”, and my ancestral home in Guwahati was known as “Lake View” at Earle Road and that road was renamed after my father’s death by the Assam government as “M. Tayyebulla Road”. There was no doorbell at our house. Visitors would say, “Hello! Is anybody there?” Before we could respond, we found them cosily seated in the living room. This way many angels came to our home.
(Omar Luther King is a Delhi based author and contributor at The Shillong Times)