hospice of baba farid

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THE HOSPICE OF BABA FARID

Ranbir Sidhu

When I spent several summers working in Israel as an archaeologist I never imagined that in my travels I would find anything that connected me to India and the India of my parents. But on my first stay in the Old City of Jerusalem I bought a tourist map and was surprised to see on it the name "Indian Hospice." It was a small black L-shaped figure and sat in the Arab Quarter's residential section.

I knew what a hospice was: a sort of boarding house for religious pilgrims. What I didn't understand was why Indians would have a hospice here. I decided I had to find out.

That same afternoon, I went out to look for it. This was 1989 and the height of the Intifada, the Palestinian strike against the Israeli occupation of their lands. The young Palestinians often hated tourists as much as they did the Israelis because they believed that with our foreign currency we were helping to support the occupation. The Arab Quarter was the spiritual heart of the Intifada, and when I began walking among the quiet, residential streets, I felt immediately uncomfortable.

I never found the Hospice that time. The streets were literally covered in the rubble from the stone-throwing battles with security forces, and when I passed groups of teenagers they stared with anger and threats in their eyes. According to the map, I kept passing where the Hospice should be, but I could never find it. Finally, I gave up and walked up and out through Herod's Gate.

I worked in Israel over the next several summers, and every now and then I would resurrect my search for the Hospice. I asked people in the Old City, people who had lived there their whole lives, but no one had seen or heard of it.

It was during my last visit that I found it. I was growing afraid I never would answer the mystery of its name and started showing the map to everyone. I knew something had to be there, even if it whatever was the Indian Hospice had long since disappeared. Finally, someone said he knew that part of the city well, but where the Hospice was indicated, there was now a United Nations complex.

I had remembered seeing some UN signs but had ignored them. Now I went back, hoping that the UN might hide the secret of this name.

Much of the rubble that had littered the streets had been cleared away and in many places the pavement was visible, rising in slow steps up the shallow hill. I found Herod's Gate and there, facing the gate, was the large sign reading UNRWA. There were no guards and I walked casually inside. A man was washing the stone steps to a large building using a bucket of water and an old raggedy mop. He looked at me curiously but didn't stop what he was doing.

To the left of him, well inside the complex, was a small hand painted sign. It read, simply, Indian Hospice. Below the sign was a closed wooden door. I stood staring stupidly at the sign for some minutes. I had spent four years searching in an odd and roundabout way for this sign, and now that I had found it all I could do was smile dumbly. There seemed nothing Indian about this place at all.

I tried asking the man washing the steps about the sign, but he shook his head. He spoke no English. He stood and disappeared into the large building, but when he appeared again a few moments later, there was another man behind him, tall, fair skinned, balding, dressed in a light gray suit. The man approached suspiciously. His eyes searched across my body and face.

“I was wondering what this was, I asked, offering my hand nervously. “I saw the name on a map but I had no idea what it was.

The man took my hand. You are Indian? he asked, sounding a little confused.

I nodded. Yes. At least my parents are Indian. I'm from the States.

I'm the caretaker here, he said, now more at ease. And then, Please come in. Have some lemonade. He opened the gate and led the way inside.

Through the door a large garden opened up, lush and green, and in the center a group of small children played noisily in a wading pool, flailing their arms and letting great splashes of water spill over its edges. My grandchildren, he said with obvious pride, smiling for the first time.

He led me into a modern living room. Pushed up against two walls were a pair of plush leather couches and between them a glass topped coffee table. My host sat down in a large leather armchair while I sat in one of the couches. He called out a name and a young woman appeared. My daughter, he said and she smiled at me and then the two spoke quickly in Arabic and she left. On the walls was a collection of Indian miniatures, though they all looked like the cheap copies I had seen available in the suk. A TV and VCR dominated the room, and on a small side table, a tiny, frayed Indian flag sat encased in glass. His daughter returned with two tall glasses of lemonade and placed them on the coffee table between us.

As I was drinking the lemonade, he told me about himself and the Hospice. He spoke precisely, in a practiced, though weary, voice, as though imparting this information was one of his duties. Still, from what he said, it seemed as though I was the first visitor he had seen in quite a few years.

His name was Munir Ansari, the director of the Hospice. The Hospice was founded four hundred years ago. It was when the Sufi saint, Sheikh Baba Farid Shakur Ganj, had visited here from India. The Ottomans had declared his two rooms a waqf, a permanent religious grant, and named this a site of Muslim pilgrimage. Sufis were believed to leave a little of their divine energy, their baraka, wherever they traveled and stayed; the greater the Sufi, the more intense his baraka and the longer it lasted over the centuries. It was to visit his shrine that Muslim pilgrims traveled here from India. Even later, Baba Farid's mystical poetry was included in the Adi Granth, the holy book of the Sikhs.

Over the years the place expanded. "Before '67," he said, "we would have several hundred Indians here every night." I couldn't imagine it. That many Indians in the Old City. I had seen almost none in all my summers there. Ansari said that now his family was the last Indian family in the West Bank. No Indians had come here for over twenty years.

His directorship was an inherited position. His father had been the first director here. It was after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One and no one knew who would take care of the Hospice. The Turks asked the Muslim Religious Authority in India if they would, and so in 1922, Munir's father, Nazer Hassan Ansari, came over. His family came from Scharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. During World War Two, the Hospice was used as a leave camp for Indian soldiers fighting for the British. Munir had taken over in 1953. I was surprised by that date. He didn't look particularly old, but now that I examined him more closely, I could see not so much an age in his flesh, but an exhaustion, as though the world itself was crushing him down.

Insha'allah, he said, My son will take over.

In the 1967 war the Hospice had been bombed. When he talked about the war, he spoke with a vestigial anger still ringing in his words. They ruined everything, he said, talking about the Israelis. Six members of his family had been killed and Munir himself had spent several months in a field hospital. His voice became almost vicious. This place will never open again, not like it was, not in my lifetime. Most of the buildings had been destroyed. What remained was rented out to the UN and another building used as an Islamic kindergarten.

Finally, when I shook his hand and left, I felt strangely jubilant. I walked quickly out of the UN compound and into the hot Jerusalem air and felt its warmth the way a lover feels the skin of a beloved for the last time: with an urgent, nostalgic feeling. I was surprised by not only having found the Hospice, but having found it still alive. Munir told me that if ever the political situation stabilized he would open the Hospice to pilgrims again. And if he did, I felt sure I would come, even though I wasn't Muslim. In the small coffeeshops near Herod's Gate, old men sat on stools puffing quietly from their hookahs, and the city seemed so peaceful I could not imagine that peace wouldn't come soon.