Inam al Kabir is a storyteller. His chhoti moti kahaaniyaan,as he calls them,have been published and lapped up in popular Urdu fiction digests such as Pakizah,Shabistan and Aanchal. But these days,as the 55-year-old sits in his basement office at the National Archives,where his day job as an archivist has him sitting amidst stacks of files and papers,he sees real-life plots playing out between the yellowed,musty,type-written sheets. Kabir and his team of archivists are poring over rehabilitation files from the Home Ministrys erstwhile Rehabilitation Division. About two years ago,the ministry began transferring these files for the period between 1951 and 1960. It is only after a team of archivists called the Appraisal team visits and checks the files that the Rehabilitation Division papers are moved to the National Archives. Kabir says his team is expecting about 18 lakh files and have already got about seven lakh of them. As Hindu refugees flooded in traumatised by events in West Punjab to the newly independent India,they made their way to the Rehabilitation Division with their claims. Depending on what they were able to show then as proof of the property they had in Sialkot,Lahore,Lyallpur or wherever they came from,they were assigned property in India. These are those files. With property often the cause for disputes,the Archives office has,ever since the files were moved here,seen visitors who come in seeking papers that end up as invaluable annexures as part of court proceedings. Kabir speaks of a man who came looking for documents to prove his claim to his house in Janpath,now worth a fortune,and who was trying to deal with squatting tenants who refused to leave. There was one gentleman whose children came here for the papers and then suddenly discovered in this office that their father had married earlier and had given a substantial part of property to his three sons from the earlier marriage. What they thought would be a routine visit to get hold of some papers,turned into something entirely different. The archivists stood around quietly,some trying to help the family cope with the devastating information they had just received, says Kabir. So,will these fraying sheets and the stories they have hidden all these years of sticky tenants and family intrigues feed the characters in his short stories? He doesnt quite reveal,but hints that we may have to wait for the next story he writes to find out. The Bhopal-born Kabir,who belongs to a Patna family,did his MA in History and then a diploma in Archiving before he joined the National Archives in 1980. He is the son of historian Dr Kabir Kausar,who put together The Secret Correspondence of Tipu Sultan and assisted Sanjay Khan in the making of the teleserial Tipu Sultan. So collecting,sifting and preserving information is something Kabir must have grown up with.
