The House Majlis

The House Majlis
Originally uploaded by flickr photographerno1

The single most important aspect of Moharam besides Ashura Chehlum or Athvi, is the annual house Majlis , held by thr Shia families, in memory of the Martyrdom of Imam Hussain. This can be held at home or in an Imambada or the local Shia Masjid.
As my wife Afshaan hails from an old Lucknowi family most of the aspects of Moharam ritual, are followed to the T.
Ghame Hussain is No1 priority .
Nothing comes before or after. The buck stops here.
The kids, my daughter are all in the throes of this funereal atmosphere, my house turns into a citadel of a Shia ethos.
My house is a facsimile of Lucknow, same ancestral values and traditions all imported by my wife who came here at a very young raw age to be married to me a man with an overtly colored past , innumerable skeletons of dissatisfied dehumidified emotional disaster hanging in the closet as tarnished memories of foreclosed romance.
All this changed or maybe not..
Prior to marriage we had a house Imambada at our Colaba home, but my Mom who had become a Bambiya, did not go for the House Majlis aspect..
Ashura and Chehlum .Moharam was over as I remember vaguely.
There was no strictures, we as it is never delved into Music or Films.. we were part of a cosmopolitan neighborhood , and a great stress on tolerance..
My mom loved my childhood friends be it late Keith Kanga , Vimal, Rayo and later other friends who came into life..
The only jarring note was I used to visit the Hindu temples of Shiva and Hanuman and Ganpati which she felt was going a bit far in Tolerance. As a mother she was scared I would get a bit more saffronised.
But she had faith in her upbringing that has stood its test even after her Death.
Well with this background to my Shiasm, the world that my wife bought with her was challenging, very alien, my wife’s Shiasm comes from discourses of Maulana Agha Roohi the Lion of Lucknow.. my mother in law Wassim Qasim Qazilbash a part of a band of his followers known as Tabarahi..

I kept away from any such overt display of my Shiasm, I had scourged my back as a teenager with Firoze Badami of Dongri but that was it…
Alcohol and my dependence on it later in Life was a great stumbling block and the Devil worked overtime on the whetting stone of my Mind.
The Shia ebullience has happened a few years back, exactly the same time I gave up Alcohol for good, my photography bought me closer to my religion and its sanguinity of Rituals, that ever since I saw Athvi and shot the Chup Tazia in Lucknow broke through with an indomitable force and a Shia was Reborn.
With a difference of course...Tolerance instilled Shiasm .
The House Majlis my wife keeps at the Shia Khoja Bandra Masjid..segregated for ladies and gents.
I went for a year or two these pictures are of that time the Maulana Hassan Zaheer of Imambada Meeran Saheb Muftiganj .

After that I have stopped going to the House Majlis completely, I stay away at my shop.
This upsets my Shia friends who attend, but emotional reasons I do not wish to emote at this juncture.
My faith is Intact..
I live in a World that has closed its doors to clerical thought..
My pain is my own..
I was born for that pain.
Ghame Hussain.