The end of the Raj had already begun but not for Mr Enn. His fair skin and blue eyes gave him an advantage, even over other Anglo-Indians. So he was still respected as a Sahib, although the empire had already announced its plans to quit India.
“Serious fasad (riots) all over the country, very serious,” he said. The officer, who retired from the Lahore Police as a DIG, was then a sergeant in the Imperial Indian Police. He was patrolling a street near the Golden Temple when he saw a Muslim policeman collecting his laundry from a dhobi.
As the police party turned into another street, “someone cried out in pain. We rushed back and saw the policeman lying on the ground, half unconscious. He had been stabbed by a Sikh,” he said.
Mr Enn, who still walks three miles a day, paused, sipped some water and said: “The Raj was the Raj, even in its twilight. We could not allow a civilian to kill a policeman.”
The autumn sky now looked more red than golden. The colours were so passionately beautiful that I reached out and touched the sky, holding it my hands.
Then I smeared the old man’s face with the colours of the sky and also poured some into my drink. With my index finger, I made a rainbow of joy and grief across the tavern.
The old man noticed the rainbow but moved his teacup away from this streak of light. “I do not mix my drinks,” he warned, pointing his middle finger at me. “I was still young then, in my early 20s. I did not borrow colours from others, I had my own.”
Mr Enn saw a turbaned man running away from the police, so he chased him into a side street called the Karachi Alley. “He was hiding behind a door, so I dragged him out. My constables handcuffed him,” he said.
Mr Enn was told that the other stabber had escaped to the Golden Temple, so with the constables of the Raj he went to the temple and demanded to see one of the administrators. He met one and told him why he had come to the temple.
“In those days, people still considered a crime a crime. So the administrator helped us search the temple but the stabber went out from another door and mingled with the crowd,” Mr Enn said.
I looked out of the window. The autumn sky was in a riotous mood. Red, golden and grey were painted over each other so generously that it had covered the entire universe.
It was beyond description. No words. No brush. No poetry. Nothing could define it. Among all human endeavours to depict beauty, perhaps only music could do some justice to this sky. But then music is not created. It is already there. A successful musician just connects with it.
“Let's play an instrument as bewitching as the twilight and as non-intrusive as the evening breeze,” I said to others in the tavern.
Someone brought a laptop, connected to YouTube and played raga Puriya Kalyan, a melody traditionally played at dusk. Meditative and sombre music filled the room.
The flute drifted out of the room and touched the sky. The colours shuddered and joined the meditation. A child while reciting his evening prayers said,
Evening, o evening, descend from the sky but slowly, ever so slowly. Cover the hills, trees and roofs with your silken shawl. Sit on the walls for a while before entering our rooms.
“This time, let the poor experience the evening before it gets dark. Here, in our poor neighbourhood, the night always comes before the evening.”
Mr Enn was a Christian but he opted for Pakistan, not India because he thought his mother and siblings lived in Lahore. He was wrong. They had moved to India during the Partition but he did not know. When he learned about it, it was too late to change his option.
“Besides, Lahore was like my own mohalla (neighbourhood), so I stayed on,” said Mr Enn. But when his children moved to America, he had to come as well, with his memories of “the pucca Punjabi police.”
“Bahadur, brave, very brave,” he said while praising his Punjabi constables. “Not like American police who need a thousand precautions before moving in to combat a criminal. They never feared anything.”
The music bounced back to the earth after touching the sky. But it spent a lifetime with the falling leaves before returning to the room where we too, were now in a trance.
We held our breath to catch the murmurs of the departing leaves. The wind picked the sound before us and relayed it to the sky, which now displayed a yellowish-brown shade.
Early last month, I was walking under the trees when a bird proclaimed the arrival of the autumn with a hymn for the changing colours of the season. It was there that I saw the first falling leaf of the season and stopped.
The bird stopped its song. The wind paused between the branches. And a nearby stream hushed us all. So, we all observed a moment of silence for the falling leaf.
The next morning, the Wall Street announced that this moment of inactivity caused it to lose billions of dollars.
“It is good to be independent but you cannot ignore the contributions of the Raj,” said Mr Enn. “It connected us to the modern world. It gave us the railways. It gave us the concept of law and order and above all, it taught India the English language.”
A history of the Persian language taught in Iran says that, “the Mogul kings of India had made Persian their court language. It remained the language of the court, even in the Hindu states, till the British banished it after occupying India in the 18th century.”
Abul Hasan Yamin ud-Din Khusrow (1253–1325 CE) – better known as Amir Khusrow of Delhi – was a Sufi musician, a scholar and a poet of the Persian language.
“They say the lion and the lizard keep the courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep: And Bahram, that great hunter – the wild ass, stamps o'er his head, but cannot break his sleep,” says another Persian poet, Omar Khayyam.
“We used to have fasad during the Raj too. But a single police officer, riding across the bazaar on his steed, could cause the entire crowd to disperse,” said Mr Enn.
As he finished, I looked at the sky again. It lifted my spirit but I cannot define how I felt. The golden streak of youth, coming out of the grey clouds, gave me joy. But the encroaching darkness was equally visible.
The excitement of the golden-red and overall serenity of this huge canvass generated a feeling which was neither joy nor sadness. It was a feeling that makes us accept the inevitability of the autumn.