Reflective Text

It is high time; I need to dance to the rhythm of the Dhol. We need to dance to the rhythm of the Dhol. Near the Thames, on the Arabian, sailing across the Red Sea or on the Mediterranean… this could be a Dhol reconnaissance… it is a Dhol reconnaissance.

Gussie, as his friends in the imperial army called him, was posted as a reconnaissance officer in the last trail of his time in World War Two, as a Punjabi Musalman soldier in King George’s Own Central India Horse Artillery regiment – I saw this in a dream maybe, my nana, maternal grandfather Raja Ghaziudin or Ghazi Hyder, aka Gussie Hyder, was smiling at me, and then he laughed a warm and thundering laugh when I told him that him and I had joined to form a new reconnaissance here in London.

This is a reconnaissance with a rhythm of the Dhol, in each beat …we accompany each other with the scraps of his scrapbook, our scrapbook and our lives - be it Lahore or Rawalpindi, London, Basra, Cairo, or Salonika, inside and outside concrete, bricks, shelves and cannons, in spaces that should be rendered nameless so that they can let us be. He spoke English with a British accent and Punjabi Potohari - I speak English with a Pakistani accent and Urdu.

His scrapbook has a life of war in-between opera tickets, tarantella dance, evidence of aesthetic choices, such as Herbert Johnson hatters and Champion and Wilton saddlers, living along… with a postcard from his friend M.P Stott from camp Stalag VII-A, a prisoner of war in nazi Germany. Written in pencil that is fading, Stott started his postcard with “dear Ghazi sorry to… tell you how fed up I am here…”. A suggestion and idea of a reconnaissance with the beats of the Dhol sounds bizarre and leisurely to R.G Hyder, but he held my hand and let us… just be, as that he knows, requires courage.

My flatmate caught me red-handed preparing for the reconnaissance of the bhangra beats, maybe people in the buildings across watched from the windows. Eyes, eyebrows, laugh lines, hands, fingers, nails, hair, ears, spine, the feet fly, arms wrap innn the spaces, argue with them, confront them, and release them… I feel free, the Dhol reconnaissance unearths, shakes, and breathes… the Dhol yells, screams, pleads, and watches, hushes, erupts, explodes and collapses… in silence… like me, it is sick and tired, and weary (or numb) of giving history lessons.

The Dhol reconnaissance is in memory that lives and continues with you and me, in the present and to the future… in every rhythm, matched or unmatched… the Dhol reconnaissance is anti-timeline, in and off, leisurely and in confrontation with history that wasn’t mine and not yours, but was written and drawn… in pencil beneath pen or pen on top of pencil…

This sketch was probably a dream too; in my dream I found it here in London, in a nameless sketchbook that belongs to a British soldier who was stationed in India. He drew this while sailing across the Red Sea, as an officer in the Punjab regiment… pencil beneath pen, pen covering up pencil, he drew the 28^th Punjabis, an infantry regiment dancing to the Dhol, he inked the date and destination, Red Sea 1917, he wrote k-a-t-h-a-k, kathak dance, the 28^th Punjabis danced in raging leisurely abandonment on the Dhol, dhum dhama dum dum…to bhangra…not kathak…