Geetanjali Krishna: Tejaa Khan and his three mosques

It is a scorching afternoon in Paharsar, a sleepy village in Bharatpur. Its narrow winding lanes are deserted as people stay indoors in a futile attempt to stay cool. But Tejaa Khan is oblivious to the heat. Sitting on a shaded parapet, the old man in a once-white kurta and blue-checked lungi is playing with his two kid goats. His face is a veritable map of wrinkles, he has no teeth left, but his eyes are still bright. I complement him on the sturdy kids. "Yes, indeed they're beautiful," he says. "Allah has given me no children or family, so I love these animals as my own!" We decide to stop for a moment to savour the shade, and he seems happy to find someone to pass the time of the day with and relive his past. There doesn't seem to be much else he does these days.
 

Tejaa Khan is one of the oldest men in Paharsar and the custodian of the three old mosques of Paharsar. His life story is so fascinating that we momentarily forget the heat. "The things I've seen in my life," he says, "children read in history books." It turns out that Khan was a young fellow at the time of Partition, when Paharsar was a village of landed Muslim gentry. The Partition forced most of the villagers to flee to Pakistan. "I too fled the village during this time to Agra," he recounts. A few years later, in 1951, Khan wrote to one of his Hindu neighbours in the village. "I'd little hope I'd receive a reply. The Partition had scattered us all far and wide, and we didn't know whether people we'd known and loved were alive or dead." To Khan's surprise, he received an immediate reply and a warm invitation to return to his home.

When Khan returned to Paharsar, he was saddened that there were hardly any familiar faces left in his childhood home. "What was worse, I learned that the Sikhs who'd fled Pakistan and settled in Paharsar after the Partition, had occupied many of the havelis once owned by the Muslims, and had even taken over the three mosques in the village," he relates. With most of the other Muslims gone, Khan found himself in a minority. But he still decided to stand up for his rights, and those of his community. He took it upon himself to go the Waqf Board and dig out all the papers of ownership of the mosques."Armed with these, I fought long court cases to get our mosques back. Finally, I won the cases, and the mosques were returned to my community," he says.

This was years ago, but Khan remains the proud custodian of the mosques till date.Would he show us the mosques, I ask? "Two of them are now half-broken and in no condition to be used for prayer," he says. But the third, and the largest mosque, is in relatively good shape and being repaired courtesy of Bharatpur-based Lupin Human Welfare & Research Foundation (LHWRF). We walk up to it, a slightly crumbling old place with whitewashed walls and ramparts. "I spend most of my time here, tending to the plants and trees and overseeing its repairs," he says.

Khan worries about the future of his mosques once he's dead. "In my lifetime, I've worked to restore this mosque and would dearly like to see the other two being used for community service," he says. "But what will happen after I'm gone?" One of the kid goats nuzzles against him and a toothless smile lights up his face. "Then I think, it's not for me to worry, for Allah will always look after me and the mosques."