’[Syeda Hameed] has spent her life working for the poorest, for
women and for secularism. I witnessed her work for ten years as
Member, Planning Commission. Her story opens new vistas and a
new vision for all who read it.’-Dr Manmohan Singh
’This is more than a memoir. This is history. Not as chronology, not
as pedagogy, not as apology but as a soul’s life-story drawn by the
wing-flaps of bitter-sweet recall on the skies of truth-telling.’- Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Syeda Hameed was nine years old when her first story was published in
Shankar’s Weekly in 1951. It was the start of a prolific writing career that would
include the translation and editing of four volumes of Maulana Abul Kalam
Azad’s works, and translations of Hali, Ghalib, Faiz and Sarmad Shaheed.
But the story, ’You Have to Learn to Make Friends’, also held within it the
seeds of much that was to define her life in years to come. Born of an incident
when she was boycotted by the neighbourhood children because her name
was ’Syeda’, it made her aware of her Muslim identity for the first time and,
in time, of the need for peace between Hindus and Muslims, Indians and
Pakistanis. To this end, she went year after year with iconic journalist Kuldip
Nayar and others to the Wagah border to light a candle on the stroke of
midnight on August 14/15, and in 2000, took a ’bus of peace’ to Lahore, and
met women who, like their sisters from ’the other side’, yearned to forge
bonds of friendship.
Before this, returning to India after 17 years in Canada with her husband, Syed
Mohammad Abdul Hameed-a marriage of both happiness and heartache-
she had built her life around the fight for human rights. As a Member of the
National Commission for Women and, later, the Planning Commission, she
travelled across the country listening to the dispossessed, and taking up their
causes-among them, Sajoni Kisku, a Santhal woman who was beaten and
tortured for the ’sin’ of picking up the plough when her drunken husband
could not; 19-year-old Maimun from Nuh who was gang-raped for marrying
outside her gotra; and Tang Kumar of the Andamans, who lost his entire family
at sea and built a new life for himself as ’captain’ of his village.
Syeda writes of many such encounters that gave meaning to her life, and of
some extraordinary people who shaped it: her mother, Aziz Jahan Begum of
the royal Rampur family, and her father, the educationist Khwaja Ghulamus
Saiyidain; her uncle, the writer and cinema legend Khwaja Ahmed Abbas;
Indira Gandhi, with whom she worked briefly; and Khushwant Singh, the
grand old Sardar who was her literary mentor.
Sensitive, deeply human, intimate and often moving, this is an inspiring record
of a remarkable Indian life. 
