In the autumn of 1826, Charles Masson, one of the more enigmatic travellers of his time, having passed through the Rajasthan desert arrived in the erstwhile State of Bahawalpur. Enigmatic he certainly was because under his pseudonym he traipsed around India pretending to be an American when, in reality, he was a deserted of the army of the East India Company. But he was a very gifted person: in fourteen years of travelling, from 1826 to 1840, in Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and Afganistan, Masson emerged as a man of great erudition. To this day he is acknowledged as one of the earliest, and ablest, numismatists and historians of this area.
Time was when people read different meanings in his work. Many assumed he was a spy; perhaps for the Company itself, but ordinary readers have all along only enjoyed and benefited from his four-volume Narrative of Various Journeys. A quarter century ago when I first read Narrative, I undertook several short journeys in Masson’s footsteps to discover for myself the country he had known. One journey remained; and that was to Allahabad, in Masson’s time part of the State of Bahawalpur, now in Rahim Yar Khan district.
Masson had arrived in Ahmedpur, today better known as Dera Nawab Sahib, where he was ‘entirely prostrated’ by an ‘intermittent fever.’ To compound that, the Nawab of Bahawalpur not being available for an audience, he could not get along with a minor court functionary. And so, despite his fever, leaving his meagre baggage behind, he set out for Allahabad ‘taking nothing but my sword.’ His narrative gives not even the shadow of an idea of what the purpose of this visit was. Such secrecy perhaps gave rise to the notion that Masson was spying for someone though it beats me what he possibly could have sought in Allahabad.
He tells us the distance between the two places was ‘twenty cosses’ (about seventy-five kilometres) which is a trifle exaggerated because Allahabad lies just fifty kilometres southeast of Dera Nawab Sahib. But his fever prevented Masson from travelling rapidly and he took over a week for the journey, in between pausing for three days at a roadhouse in the village of Varni. Like most inns of those times, this one was also run by a woman.
He was apparently well looked after by the inn-keeper because he was soon fit to resume the short march to Allahabad. Masson wrote, ‘The approach to this town was more pleasing than I had anticipated, for the jangal ceasing, I came upon a rivulet of running water, beyond which stretched a large expanse of meadow, and in the distance I beheld the cupola of the principal mosque of the place, embosomed in groves of date-trees.’
Over the years I had learned that it is impossible to expect the scenery to be even remotely as described by Victorian travellers, but somehow Allahabad remained fixed in my mind as a village that might still be picturesque. Just outside the village, again overcome by fever-induced fatigue, Masson rested under a spreading pipal tree near which he noted a pavilion. Later he saw several other such buildings and commented on their simple yet elegant style of construction. Allahabad evidently lay in the middle of a shikargah for Masson writes that the Nawab of Bahawalpur used these as hunting pavilions.
As evening fell, Masson left the shady pipal and approached the town. At the entrance he was greeted by a ‘well-dressed person’ who immediately invited him to his home. There this kindly person called the local physicians to minister to his guest’s health. But Masson was not convinced that the ‘conserve of roses and sugar-candy’ could cure his fever and so he got the local barber to bleed him in both arms.
Thereafter Masson recovered quickly. Surely the generous spread that his host Salam Khan Daudpotra daily laid out for him had much to do with his recovery. If his treatment at Dera Nawab was niggardly, this good man left Masson quite breathless with his kindness and largesse. And when it came time for Masson to return to Dera Nawab, he rode on horseback with Salam Khan acting as escort.
Unlike Masson, I approached Allahabad from the south and not on foot but in a car. The ‘jangal’ of his time was gone and the countryside lay fallow after the cotton harvest. From the distance the town, sitting on a high mound, even today looked rather picturesque with its central part dominated by tall brick buildings but the mosque Masson had seen was nowhere visible. Imran, my guide, was waiting for me at the union council office and without wasting any time took me walkabout.
We stopped at a haveli undergoing some repair work. The family had come to Allahabad from Patiala in 1947 and the patriarch, about seventy, mouthed the big untruth that we all like to so believe: ‘This is a tiny house. In India Muslims had the biggest palaces ever.’ Few rich Muslims left their homes in India; it was only the poor and some of the middle class and only after we arrived here and took over evacuee properties did we invent stories of the riches we had left behind. These yarns became gospel for succeeding generations until the unpleasant truth of past poverty was lost in it.
The beautifully carved timber door into the main family room was so thickly plastered with off-white paint that I cringed: it would take serious sand-blasting to restore this one. But I know, even before this building can be rescued for preservations, this door will be wrenched out and sold for a few rupees. In its place they’ll content themselves with a lousy chipboard thing.
Though the ground floor façade had been painted a similar shade, the delightful brickwork of the first floor was still intact. The arrangement of cut-brick florets in zigzagging lines to create a pleasing array of squares together with pyramids, inverted as well as right side up, caught the eye. Above this panel were five arches, two of them open, two with windows and one blind. Square wrought iron fanlights, eight in all, surmounted the arches and above ran another repetition of cut-brick trimming. We were led to the upstairs rooms to check out the gaily painted ceilings that echo across this country from Sindh to northern Punjab.
This house could not have been built earlier than the 1930s and whoever it was that spent a pretty penny on it from his hard-earned money, sadly could not live very long in it. I wondered if the real owners had ever returned for a visit. Would they have wept? Or did a strange equanimity come over them? Do they still keep their ownership documents and hope they can one day return in better times to reclaim what is theirs? To reciprocate, will these people return to Patiala to the untruth of the palaces they very likely do not wish their children to know?
We checked out a number of other havelis, but all of them in advanced stages of dilapidation were locked and abandoned. Imran, my young guide, said it was too expensive to restore these buildings inside the narrow alleys because the only way to get building material in was either to man haul or by donkey. A two-rupee brick, he said, could cost as much as eight in the central part of town. Consequently people were simply moving on, letting these priceless buildings, raised by others, to fall to pieces.
Imran walked me around the entire central part of Allahabad. The narrow streets of the bazaar were roofed with tattered jute matting to keep out the intense summer heat, just as Masson had seen it. Otherwise, the shop fronts now had steel shuttering instead of the old-fashioned timber doors. Everywhere we saw abandoned buildings in various stages of decay and heaps of debris. The new children of Allahabad who mostly seem to have come from Patiala have not looked after their town well.
Since the Daupotras are now also surnamed either Abbasi or Kalhora and because I wanted to meet with a descendent of the good Salam Khan who tended to Masson, I asked if any of the two clans lived in Allahabad. There was one Kalhora who was ‘more than a hundred years old’, said Imran. This man lived some ways outside the town, but he could reportedly not remember anything. My guide did not know of any other old Daudpotra family native to the town nor had he ever heard anyone flaunting the name of Salam Khan.
This thing about a plethora of centenarians in Pakistan is hogwash and when I said so, Imran told me there was one who was a hundred and twenty-five years old. A local journalist was called who had interviewed the man only six months before my visit and his Urdu newspaper piece, which he brought along for my edification, said so. I said it could mathematically be proved that this was nothing but rubbish and so with the journalist in tow we drove a few kilometres from town to meet with this marvel.
The man was clearly about eighty or so. He said his age was forty-five and I thought we had another gaga on our hands. But then he corrected himself: ‘One hundred and forty-five.’ On my prompting, the journalist said the last time he had seen him, the old man had said he was a hundred and twenty something and now, within the space of six months, he had aged twenty years. The man did not remember if he had been interviewed, but he insisted he remembered the onset of the First World War when he was in his ‘thirties and married with grown children.’
A little bit more quizzing and I realised that it was the Second World War the man was talking about. I tried to tell him that if he was in his thirties in the First and nearly a century and a half now, we must be living in the year 2029. Simple arithmetic not being their forte, no one seemed to understand what I was carrying on about. Also everyone being so proud of having such a Methuselah amongst them, they did not wish to believe otherwise. I tried another angle and his son, about my age, shut me up saying he was already seventy therefore his father could not be any younger than he said he was.
The usual tripe about pure and good food was trotted out. I angrily turned on the man about what good food a poor man could afford. A hundred years ago, a handful of millets was all anyone as poor as they said they were could get for a meal a day. Good food, I cruelly rubbed it in, meant fresh fruit, vegetables, beans, dairy and some meat. But reason shall not prevail. We left the octogenarian and his son convinced that the man was a century and a half old. Indeed, even the journalist was not impressed by the sums I did to show that the man did not know what he was talking about.
Allahabad keeps some of its old flavour, but Masson would scarcely recognise it today. What little remains will be lost in a few years. If it were within my province, I would declare Allahabad a national heritage site, acquire some of the better homes and set them up as show pieces. But then dreams are not horses.
Fellow of Royal Geographical Society, Salman Rashid is author of several books including jhelum: City of the Vitasta and The Apricot Road to Yarkand, Riders on the Wind, Between two Burrs on the Map, Prisoner on a Bus and Sea Monsters and the Sun God. His work - explorations, traveling and writings - appears in almost all leading publications. 
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