[Oxen-driven cart]
Harrappan civilization
We lived in a relatively quiet suburb of Lahore where life stirred a bit more leisurely than in the center of town. It was always much after sunrise that the street noises penetrated our inner sanctum.
Many street sounds animated our childish imaginations. Someday I might talk about them. But for now, one sound that particularly thrilled us was a lilting, musical cry pleading and haunting at the same time. It said:
“aalay pohlay lay lo, aalay pohlay lay lo”.
(Please buy my aalay pohlay)
It belonged to a girl of unspecific age with brown eyes that seemed bigger than they were because of the thinness of her oval face. Her features were obscured by a mop of matted raven black hair pleated in two pony tails. Her head was set atop an emaciated body.
The waif was a tappar wassee. Tappar wassees are an itinerant folk living in flimsy, impermanent shelters and lean-tos formed out of old, discarded sacks stretched across poles dug in the ground. For this reason these gypsies are called tappar wassees which in the local jargon literally means dwellers under burlap.
To this day I do not know the exact meaning of aalay pohlay. My closest guess is that it meant trinkets. I believe it was a word the girl had cleverly concocted as a collective brand name for her wares; a rudimentary marketing technique.
[Whistle in the shape of a bird]
Harrappan civilization
The girl toted a bagful of miniature horses, donkeys, rams, oxen, carts, flutes and whistles baked from reddish clay. The musical toys actually produced notes. She had other knickknacks of baked clay in assorted shapes and sizes. There were ladles, spoons, chuhlas (make-shift hearths), cooking pots and animals of dubious lineage and provenance.
We were much intrigued, and amused, by something she called a ghughoo. It resembled a frog that someone had accidentally stepped on and then punctured its front end with two adjacent holes. The form and function of the ghughoo have remained a bit of a mystery. When the girl aligned her lips properly along the holes of the ghughoo and forced the air through, the contraption did produce a loud, wailing “hoo, hoo” sound that may have come in handy to warn of an approaching danger from man or beast, most likely from one of her fantasy animals..
But today it is not the etymology of aalay pohlay or ghughoo that is stirring in my thoughts. My mind, as you will soon notice, is in a speculative mode.
Back to the gypsy girl. Mother would ladle out generous scoops of flour into her kashkol, the wooden bowl meant to collect alms. In return mother would be favored with an appropriate number of aalay pohlays dug out of the all-purpose bag.
These would be placed immediately in our eager hands to become the favorite toys till the girl’s next visit.
The gypsy girl preferred to be paid in flour, lentils, grains, rice, spices and such like provisions that could be quickly converted into a family meal. She had difficulty reckoning the value of her trinkets in coins, she said. Bartering came naturally to her.
The significance of the aalay pohlay toys did not dawn on me till many, many years later. In some capacity or the other, I was invited to visit the 5,000 year-old sites of the Indus River Valley civilization ~ Harrappa in the Punjab and Mohenjo-Daro in the Sindh. It was in the museums of these sites that the possibility of that significance first arose in my mind.
In these vast and cavernous halls there is much to see that has been painstakingly excavated, lovingly preserved and reverently displayed. There one observes and admires many a wondrous article. But lo and behold! some of the terra cotta, steatite and burnt clay figures and objects hailing from three centuries before Christ that I beheld there appeared no different from the aalay poohlays that mother had bought for us from the gypsy girl against a few cups of flour!
[Animal figure. Holes possibly held wheels]
Ram; holes possibly held wheels. Harrappan civilization
It took my breath away that the artifacts of antiquity bore such a striking resemblance to what the gypsies are baking in crude kilns at the outskirts of Lahore. (That is, if they are still plying that calling). The aalay pohlay oxen and horses have the same build, are of the same size, display the same squat look and stand or trot on similarly triangular legs as their much cherished, prized, pampered and preserved counterparts in museum vitrines; the bird whistles appear to be no different and the carts and donkeys roll on similar wheels.
I could not help musing if the children of yore thrilled to the sound of their bird whistles or the flute as we did to that of our gypsy girl? Did they, like us, also have mock races with their oxen-driven carts and rolling donkeys?
But more intriguingly, I thought that these tappar wassees are disenfranchised, marginalized, uneducated, illiterate, non-numerate beings, existing on the farthest fringe of society, eking out a precarious, fragile, uncertain existence by foraging, rag picking, peddling, begging and the occasional pilfering.
They cannot by any stretch of imagination have even a suspicion of what flourished 5,000 years ago and they surely have not seen what now lies ensconced behind (for them) the unscalable walls of the dauntingly sophisticated museums.
So how are they able to replicate with such bluffing exactitude that which they do not know existed or exists?
[Indus bull figurine, clay]
Indus bull; Harrappan civilization
And here I pause to ask myself:
Is it possible, even just barely, that unbeknownst to them (~ and to us ~) the tappar wassees I knew as a child, are the descendants of the builders, engineers, constructors and artisans of the Indus River Valley civilization and thus the custodians of their knowledge and techniques?
Anthropology anyone?
