Mirages of the Mind
ABOUT THE STORY Vladimir Nabokov called Proust’s enormous novel sequence In Search Of Lost Time “a treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding-place the past.” Something of the same quest is enacted in this excerpt from the great Pakistani writer Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi’s novel Mirages of the Mind.
The protagonist, Basharat, is a Pakistani mohajir—someone who moved to Pakistan at the time of Partition. When, in old age, he loses his wife, he loses interest in the present and feels the call of his roots. The city of his youth, Kanpur, looms large in his imagination as a place of unequalled beauty and splendour. But, as Basharat finds out when he returns to his birthplace, it is not Kanpur that is rich so much as his memory. His treasure-hunt takes on a piquant turn as he is frustrated and confounded at every turn by all that has changed since his departure, from the look of the streets to the very Urdu (“It’s slipped further and further, so now it sounds like Hindi.”) that the city once spoke. Like Rip Van Winkle, he surveys with an almost continuous surprise and wonder the transformations of the place that memory had kept stable for so many decades—an experience made more immediate (and indeed, comic) by Yousufi’s decision to switch the narration from third-person to first-person. But if Basharat feels cheated by the new India, he is at the same time awakened and challenged by it, and becomes once again an active interpreter of life. His alert gaze defamiliarises—and in this way renews—our own view of India.
Mirages of the Mind
Translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad
I.
Lighting The Ruins
THEY WERE TOGETHER for about forty-five years. Let’s call it a half century. After his wife died, Basharat was numb for many days. It seemed like he hadn’t lost someone but that he himself had died. His grown sons buried her. He stood watching stoically from the mound of fresh dirt to the side of the grave. He still carried around the small bag of cardamom she had made for him. The crocheted skullcap he was wearing was the one his dearly departed had made, staying up till two o’clock on consecutive nights so he would be able to go to the mosque for Eid. Everyone threw their handful of soil into the grave, and that was then covered with rose petals. Only then did he step forward, take from his kurta’s pocket several jasmine buds grown on bushes planted by his wife, and throw these buds, which were several hours short of blooming, on top of the bright flowers. Then he looked blankly at his soiled hands. It was so hard to believe that the woman with whom he’d lived with for so long was suddenly gone. No, if that life had been a dream, then this was too. He felt as though she was sure to pop her head around the corner to smile at him. Sometimes in the night’s silence, he thought he heard her footsteps and the clinking of her bangles. This startled him. No one had ever seen him cry. Strangers and relatives alike praised his steely resolve. Then suddenly it hit him. His defenses failed. He started sobbing like a child.
But all miseries pass, just as all pleasures fade. Days clipped by, as they had before. Like La Rochefoucauld said, it’s against our nature to stare at the sun, or at death, for too long. The shock gradually wore off; it was replaced by grief, which then turned to loneliness. When I returned from Miami to Karachi, I found him in this state. Desperately sad. Desperately lonely. Of course, he wasn’t as alone as he thought, and yet it’s also true that you’re only as lonely as you feel. Loneliness makes you think. Wherever you turn, you find your reflection; you fear your own company, and you want to escape. Your loneliness takes you by the hand and leads you slowly back to every thoroughfare, footpath, alleyway, and intersection you’ve known. When you stop, thinking the road has changed course, you realize it isn’t the road but you who have changed. Roads don’t go anywhere. They remain right where they are. But people change. Roads don’t get lost. People do.
According to an old saying, regardless of exactly how many defects old age has, it has one more burdensome than all the rest combined. And that’s nostalgia. In old age, a person prefers to turn back from their unwanted, imminent end to recall the places they used to know. In old age, the past flashes all its dangerous charms. Old, lonely people live in sad houses where they have to have lights on even at noon; and when bedtime rolls around and they put out the lights, their minds are lit by the bright glow of memories. As this glow becomes brighter, so too their desolation becomes more pronounced.
So something like this happened to him as well.
His Imaginary Past And Purgatory
God had made Basharat’s life in Karachi fuller than he could ever have wished. But after his wife’s death, he experienced a sharp pang of nostalgia, and he began to miss Kanpur terribly. Before this, the past had never had any hold over him. But now he was living exclusively in the past. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with his present, except that, for an old man, the present has the sizeable shortcoming of not being the past.
For quite a while, I’ve wanted to be able to forget
The film of his life, with its every event, began to play backwards through his mind. It was a total reversal, as though a wizened banyan tree had turned upside down to sit in a yogic pose, sending its knotty limbs and deep roots into the sky. After thirty-five years, he decided to go back to Kanpur, his purgatory. He began to miss each and every thing—the lanes, marketplaces, neighborhoods, and courtyards; the roofs that smoldered like young bodies in the summer heat; the desires that spread into the night’s dreams, and the dreams that transformed into the day’s desires. It got so bad that he even began to think of his grade school as a piece of heaven, the very one that as a boy he’d taken so much pleasure in avoiding. All the pleasures, all the memories washed over him. His friends smashed together on charpoys; the shade of neem trees heavy with fruit; the eastern breeze bursting with the sweet smell of mango blossoms and mahua fruit; the tamarind trees with ripe seedpods, and girls looking longingly at them, and boys looking longingly at the girls; forests full of deer; ducks shot from the sky falling 300 feet to land with a thud; screens made of sweet-scented grass; ponds full of water chestnuts; velvety melted ice cream slipping down your throat; mulsari flower bracelets; the thin, flickering tongues of chameleons hidden in the jamun tree’s dense leaves at the height of summer; the lone stag standing on an outcrop with his ears turned alertly into the wind; the surging forth of youth and the despair of first love; the lightly tanned arms that fueled both waking dreams and those of the night; the smell of freshly starched scarves; friends laughing and carrying on. This cache of memories called out to him so strongly that
At once he dug his heels into the ground
And started to turn around.
But he wasn’t a boy any longer. I mean, he was over seventy. It didn’t occur to him for even a second that all these wonderful, romantic things (which Mirza Abdul Wadud Beg, riffing on the phrase “the tools of cultivation,” calls “the tools of rebellion,” and each of which caused him to emit a 100-decibel sigh) were not only available in Pakistan but in certain cases were even better there. There was just one thing missing in Pakistan. His youth. It turned out that after a lot of searching, he couldn’t find it in Kanpur either.
These Boys Are Like Old Men,
These Men Are Like Boys
He’d planted a mulsari tree in front of his house in North Nazimabad, but the mulsari trees of his memory were so much better smelling and more elegant. He was experiencing the state of mind that comes right after old age’s onslaught when suddenly you desperately want to see again your childhood home before you die. But he didn’t know that in the time between childhood and old age an invisible hand interposes a powerful magnifying glass. The wise know not to remove this glass. If it’s removed, everything looks like its own miniature. Yesterday’s gods turn into midgets. If you’ve been away from your hometown for a long time, you should never return for a belated last look. Nevertheless, you go. The scenes pull you like a magical magnet, and so you go. You don’t realize that as soon as you look with your mature eyes upon the wonderland of your youth, its spell will be completely broken. Dreamland’s fairies disappear, and soot darkens The House of Mirrors. You find that the sacred aromas of youth no longer exist. Moreover, where’s the familiar rainbow of the God of Love?
What is this smoke?
Where is the fire of my youth?
You can’t believe what you’re seeing. Why does it look so different? Why does it smell so different? Sound so different? These aren’t the picturesque lanes and marketplaces where everything was fresh and new. What happened to everything? To everyone?
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
When the spell breaks, your imaginary past collapses. You’re no longer counted among the young or the old. You become suddenly colorblind. A peacock might dance in front of you, but you see only its feet, and even at that, you cry! Everything loses its color; dejection reigns supreme.
Your world is insipid
And your religion is cast in doubt
Wherever He Lived, He Grew Sick Of It
So this childish old man went to Kanpur and mourned. For thirty-five years, he had lamented why he had left heaven for Karachi, and now he gnashed his teeth, “My God! Why didn’t I leave earlier?” He regretted that for no reason he had wasted a good third of his precious life regretting the wrong thing! If he was looking for things to cry about, there were 365 great ones easily found, and that was because there were just that many disappointments (days) in a year. He left no stone unturned in his dreamland, but
Those pangs no longer excited his heart
Those feelings were no more.
Thirty-five years of nostalgia collapsed, and now everything looked desolate and rundown. The wide, crocodile-filled river into which he had fearlessly jumped from the crown of a mighty banyan tree? Well, when he went back, he saw only a seasonal creek full of frogs. And the gigantic tree itself? A bonsai specimen.
He couldn’t recognize himself in what he’d left behind
II.
One Big Pigeon Loft
BUT ENOUGH OF MY PHILOSOPHIZING. Let’s hear the story from our hero, Basharat, as his storytelling leads to a different sort of pleasure.
Although this story is quickly told
It has all the charms of those of old
Sir, when I saw my house, I was shocked, “My God! That’s what we lived in? And, more than that, we loved it!” The most pitiful and incurable type of middle-class poverty is when people have nothing but feel as though they lack nothing. God be praised—we were nine brothers and four sisters born one after the other. I use the phrase “one after the other” knowingly because, whether playing, eating, lying down, or sitting, it would be more appropriate to have say “one of top of the other.” Everyone’s name ended in the letter “t”: Ishrat, Rahat, Farhat, Ismat, Iffat, and so on. My father designed the house himself on the small school slate of the brother immediately older than me. He also kept over 100 pigeons, and each was of its own unique race, with its own unique heritage. He didn’t let male pigeons mate with female pigeons of other breeds. He had a lumber store. built all his pigeon lofts, bearing in mind the size, bad habits, and length of each pigeon’s tail. Sir, now that I’ve seen it again, I can tell you his worthless hobby made the house look like one big pigeon loft. In fact, we should call the house a crude version of the same.
My father was very perspicacious as well as practical. He realized that after he passed, his children would argue over the division of property, so as soon as another child was born he built a separate room. The problems implicit in this construction strategy were many. For one, part of the plan was to make each subsequent son’s room smaller than the previous. By the time I rolled around, my room was so small that I couldn’t stand up straight. It took seven years to build the house. And in this time, three more sons were born. When the walls for the eighth son’s room went up, no one could tell if it was going to be a bathroom or a bedroom. With the arrival of each newborn, he would sketch out on the slate the necessary amendments (the added room) to the house’s blueprint. The courtyard slowly disappeared. It became the cells we were going to inherit.
Buzary Replaces Bourgeoisie
Sir, you can’t compare our Karachi house with its air conditioner, carpets, and fresh paint with that ruin, in which, if you happened to cough, plaster would slough from the wall. It hadn’t been whitewashed in over forty years. In my cousin’s house in Kanpur, I saw a plastic tarp used as a ceiling covering. No one in Karachi or Lahore knows the proper words for this ceiling covering, or for “awning.” On the ceiling covering, there were three spots marked with nail polish with big multiplication signs (X). This meant that you shouldn’t sit underneath; the roof leaked there. In Kanpur and Lucknow, I found my friends and relatives fallen on hard times. Those who were white collar still were, but now their collars had faded to gray. They’d become proud of their indigence; they’d turned self-sacrifice into an art. At a private gathering, I made some superficial remark about this, and a junior lecturer who taught economics at a local college got bent out of shape. He said, “You owe your wealth to the United States and the UAE. Our poverty is our own.” (To this, a man recited in what sounded like Arabic, “Alhamdulillah …”) “I hope you’re happy piling up debt! The Arabs aren’t wrong when they say the Third World is full of beggars.” I was a guest. I wasn’t in a position to argue. He went on for quite a while reciting couplets in praise of poverty, its noble mindset, and its coarse bread. He recited some couplets about Hazrat Abu Zar Ghaffari. I made sure to node appreciatively. I was a guest, after all. Whether Indian or Pakistani, today’s intellectuals have replaced the love of making money with the love of not making money.
There’s nothing that Indians don’t make. Not just Kanpur, but every city is bursting with factories. Textile mills, steel factories, car and airplane factories, even tanks are made there. They exploded an atom bomb a long time ago. They’ve sent satellites into space. It wouldn’t be surprising if they go to the moon. There’s that perspective. Then there’s another perspective, which is the following. One day I was on my way to Inamullah the Loudmouth’s. I took a cycle rickshaw. My rickshaw guy looked like he had TB. I could see his ribs through his tank top. His breath reeked of syrupy Banaras paan. He scooped the sweat off his forehead with his index finger and flicked it out in an arc. His sweat made his face and hands gleam, and in the hot sun it looked like he’d applied Vaseline. He was barefoot. He wore a watch on his bony wrist whose face was bigger than his wrist. He had a sexy photo of Parveen Babi on his bike’s handlebars. Pedaling made him double over, and so he kept prostrating himself before Babi. We went one mile, but guess how much he asked for? Sir, all of seventy-five paise! My God, seventy-five paise! When I gave him that and a tip of four rupees, twenty-five paise, he couldn’t believe it. He started to smile. Gradually his smile spread so wide I could see all his paan-stained teeth, which looked like pumpkin seeds. He looked greedily at my coin purse and said, “Sir, are you from Pakistan?” I answered, “Yes. But for thirty-five years I lived over here in Hiraman.” He gave me back my money, “Sir, how can I take money from you? You’re my neighbor, after all. I’m from there too.”
Now the Poor Grumble
And the population? God help us! It’s like a big fair. The earth spurts up people from everywhere. You can’t take two steps into a shopping area without wielding your hands and elbows. You could call it doggie paddling on land! And where you don’t have enough space even to wield your elbows, you get to where you’re going simply on the force of the crowd’s pushing. It seems like everyone sleeps on the sidewalks. They grow up there, and they die there. But these people can’t be bullied or bossed around. No one even checks to see who’s nearby before they start complaining about the government. In our day, the poor were humble. Now they grumble. They’ll let a cycle rickshaw through, but they won’t budge an inch when a car comes by. Azizuddin the lawyer was saying that our country is very politically aware, but God knows. What I’ve seen is that pigheadedness increases in direct proportion to poverty. There are many conmen there too, but no one dares flaunt their wealth. I’ve seen women of rich families at weddings wear cotton saris and flip-flops. If they didn’t have vermilion in the parts of their hair, I swear to God, you would take them to be widows. They don’t wear any makeup at all, but we won’t touch a chicken leg until it’s had rouge applied to it! Sir, you must have seen the violent red chicken tikka of Tariq Road? In Kanpur, I saw cane beds and sofa sets in rich people’s houses, and some of those were the very ones we had used to lounge around on thirty-five years ago! Sir, you’ll find that Hindus have a leg up on us when it comes to Islamic simplicity!
What Was Going To Happen
Has Happened, My Bearers!
You’d have to say that Urdu speakers still speak Urdu, but I noticed a strange change. It’s not just the common people, but it goes all the way up to professors and writers: they don’t speak like we used to. The crisp tone is gone. It’s slipped further and further, so now it sounds like Hindi. Singsong. You know what I mean? If you don’t believe me, listen to the Urdu news on All-India Radio and compare it to Radio Karachi, or to me. When I pointed this out to Inamullah the Loudmouth, he got really offended. Seriously, sir, he made it personal, “Look, bub, what about your Punjabi accent? You don’t notice, but I do. Don’t forget that on August 3, 1947, I went with you to the train station to see you off. You were wearing a black Rampuri hat, white churidar pajamas, and Jodhpuri slippers. You cupped your hand delicately to say, ‘Hello, hello! Greetings!’ Right or not? You had paan bulging from your cheek, kohl lined your eyes, and the scent of itr-e-gil came from the folds of your muslin kurta! Right or not? Back then you said ‘cha’ for ‘chai,’ ‘ghans’ for ‘ghas,’ and ‘chanval’ for ‘chaval.’ Right or not? And when the stationmaster blew the whistle, you had a jasmine garland around your throat, you were pouring hot ‘cha’ from your cup into your saucer, which you then blew on before slurping it down. You used to call Karachi, Karanchi. Right, right? Now after three decades of decadence, you come from your Karachi concrete jungle with a head full of white hair, wearing a billowing, haji-style kurta that goes down to your ankles. You come on your little pilgrimage, and now we all look like Pandits and Pandeys? Have you forgotten?” Sir, I was a guest. I let him have his moment. Then I got up silently, found a rickshaw, and went home.
Pick up the palanquin
& take me home!
At Times I Kept Quiet, At Times I Laughed
Lucknow and Kanpur were Urdu centers. They had countless Urdu newspapers and magazines. Sir, I know you don’t agree with me, but I’m telling you our language was pure. During my visit, I didn’t see one Urdu sign in all of Kanpur, and not in Lucknow either! Whenever I mentioned this to someone, they sighed or turned away. It was my bad luck to mention this at a party. It really got under this one man’s collar. I think his name was Zaheer. He was on the city commission—a lawyer. Who knows how long he had been storing up these feelings, “For God’s sake! Please have mercy on us Indian Muslims! Let us be. Whenever someone comes from Pakistan, as soon as they get off the plane and exchange their money, they start in with this refrain. Everyone’s eyes fill with tears, and they start reciting elegies to the city’s death. Sir, please! How can we show you the Kanpur of a half-century ago? Nonetheless, everyone weighs the present against the India of that time. When they’re done with that, they compare it against contemporary Pakistan. They scare off the other person’s horse and end up winning both races!” He kept on talking. I was a guest. What could I say? It was just like the old Sindhi saying, “She went to get her horns cut and ended up cutting her ears as well.”
But one thing must be said: however miserable their lives, Indian Muslims are sincere, as well as full of grace, self-respect, and confidence.
I had long chats with Nushur Wahidi. He’s the embodiment of love, sincerity, and feebleness. Poets and writers hang out at his house all the time. Intellectuals go too. (The word implies intelligence only, not wisdom.) Everyone agrees that Urdu is very stubborn, and intellectuals profess that its future is not bleak at all. They organize enormous poetry festivals. I heard that at one festival more than 30000 people came. Sir, I can’t agree with you when you say that poetry can’t be understood by 5000 people at once—if it is, it’s not poetry but something else. They have numberless annual conferences and symposia. I heard that there are some Urdu writers who have won the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awards. I asked what the meanings of “padma” and “bhushan” were, and they answered by stating how much each prize was worth! Even today Indians use Urdu in film songs, double-entendres, qawwali, and when fighting. There’s an emphasis on Sanskrit words. But you can’t curse out the average Joe in Sanskrit. You can only do that if you’re talking to a Sanskrit scholar. Sir, I heard someone say that cursing, counting, whispering, and dirty jokes are fun only in your mother tongue. Anyway, I was saying that the Urdu intelligentsia is hopeful. When Indira Gandhi has to use official Hindi, she often slips up, and this gives heart to Urdu lovers.
Who Can Hold Off Time?
Nushur Wahidi was all warmth and love. Even after chatting for four hours, when I got up saying I should go, he took me by the hand and sat me back down. And I was glad he did. His memory is weak. One time he kept asking about you, “How is he? I heard he’s writing humor essays. Really, it’s too much!” You know that he’s always been thin and sickly. He weighed seventy-five pounds. He must have been just as old. His nose dominated his face. His sickly frame reminded me of Kanpur’s chunia bananas; they had exactly the same shape. You can still get them, so I special-ordered some. I was disappointed: they’re not even close to being as good as our Sindhi spotted bananas. One day I happened to say that our Sargodha oranges are better than those of Nagpur, and Nushur whipped his head around, “That’s not possible!” So Nushur is (God protect him) still nimble-witted and spry. He looks better than he used to. That’s because he’s lost all this teeth, which used to stick out of his mouth this way and that like garlic cloves. You must remember how well the actress Suraiya used to sing, but her big overbite ruined the moment. I heard that after going to Pakistan, she had her front teeth pulled. I looked at a current photo of her in a film magazine; then I cursed myself for doing so. I made sure not to listen to her records, for fear of remembering how she looked. Aijaz Hussain Qadri has all the records from that time along with a horn gramophone. Sir, it’s amazing that this gramophone was the height of science, music, and luxury! He played a couple songs of that era’s Emperor of Music, Saigal. Sir, I was shocked to realize that his nasal singing had released such romantic feelings in me. Moti Begum’s face is a mess of wrinkles and looks like a raisin. Nushur said, “Now, why are you feeling so bad for others? Get out your passport from ’47 and compare how you look now.”
Who can hold off time?
No mountain can, nor any blade of grass.
There wasn’t a national poetry festival to which Nushur was not invited. And there probably wasn’t another poet who got as large a fee as he did. People really respected him. Now, through God’s benevolence, he has furniture. But he still kept to his old ways. His health was as usual. Meaning, very bad. Whenever I arrived at his house, he sat up from where he’d been lying down on his woven-rope charpoy. He never changed out of his undershirt, and he always squatted on top of a pillow. I could see the charpoy’s imprint on his back. One day I mentioned that I’d been on the train platform when it was announced in official Hindi that “the train, from its scheduled time, will be extenuated by two and half hours” and, by God, I had no idea what the train was doing—whether it was coming or going or simply taking its own sweet time. Hearing my story, he lost his temper. In the heat of the moment, he kept slipping from his pillow, and in one such instance, he slipped with such force that his big toe slid through the charpoy’s hold. He dug it in and lashed himself upright. Then he started talking, “It’s not easy to get rid of Urdu in India. In Pakistan you don’t have as many poetry festivals in five years as we do in five months. Crowds of 20000 are nothing. A good poet can rake in 7000 rupees. And that’s not including all-expenses-paid transportation, food and lodging, and the adoration. Josh acted too quickly. He left for no reason. Now he regrets it.” I didn’t think it was the right time to tell him that Josh was getting 8000 a month (and a car) and that he was sponsored by two banks and an insurance company. Or that the government had given him a house and a monthly stipend, although the money was so little as to be an insult.
These days Nushur loses his breath when he recites in tarannum. He recites haltingly. But his voice carries the same depth of feeling; it has the same resonance. His big eyes still flash brilliantly. His manner and attitude are bold and fearless in the way people get when they don’t care about anything anymore. He recited a dozen new ghazals. Amazing. One time I was about to tell him to put on his dentures before reciting. You’ve heard him many times. Once he created a stir all over India with his ghazal, “This is a secret, but the priest drinks too.” Now audiences ignore him for lines like “Wealth never liked Islam, capital never wanted to be Muslim.” Audiences have changed. Their silence is a type of ridicule. If Master Dagh or Nawab Sayal Dehlvi recited today some of their poems that used to blow people out of the water seventy or eighty years ago, they would be fed up fast with the tastelessness of the audience and then leave. But Nushur has changed too. He still runs away with each poetry festival. He still walks to the beat of his own drum. But he said he doesn’t have the same passion, the same desire. To me, he always seemed sick, weak, poor, and happy. Nothing has quelled his dignity and pride. He holds his head high in the company of the rich. Sir, that generation was a different breed. Those molds have been broken in which such rare characters were formed. Tell me—who could be more haughty and egotistical than Asghar Gondvi and Jigar Muradabadi? Their livelihood? Selling glasses! Not in a store, mind you, but wherever they wandered. I’ve been friends with Nushur for just forty or forty-five years. At first, it wasn’t that. At first, I learned Persian from him at the Madrasa Ziaul Islam in the butchers’ neighborhood. And, yes, butchers there don’t wear long coats with glass buttons anymore, nor do they wear fancy red patent leather shoes. In those days, you had to wear the clothes that everyone in your community wore; otherwise, you would be excommunicated.
I Want To Pay The Bribe Again
You can no longer recognize the old shopping districts. But I’ve never met such polite shopkeepers. They made me feel good. As soon as I stepped inside, they would put a cold drink in my hand. I wasn’t used to dealing with such ruthless salesmanship. It felt very rude to accept a soft drink, drink it, then leave empty-handed. So I ended up buying a lot of what the salesmen brought out, and I was left without money for the things I had set out to buy. You would never believe that a respectable shopping district—The Mall itself—had once existed before all this elbowing and jostling, screeching and crying, as well as the swirling noxious odors. Sir, the British made sure to build such a mall in each
town—a fashionable mall with high-class stores. It seems like just yesterday, but there was a time when the Mall’s sidewalks were lined with acacia bark so that the police inspector’s son could trot his horse without difficulty. A groom followed on each side so that the boy would not fall off. When they got winded, the boy would double over laughing. We got to know this boy well. Once he took fifteen or twenty of us friends for a hunting trip in his village near Bahraich. It was five people per tent. At the back, there were the servants’ pup tents at a respectful distance. We slept in big tents. I can’t tell you how much fun it was. One night there was a dance performance. The prostitute was so pretty that even her bad pronunciation seemed cute. Professional hunters would bring us meat, and cooks would roast it on an open fire. Our responsibilities were limited to digesting the food and telling them what kind of game we wanted to eat next. It was the first time I ever ate sambhar deer. On the last night, they placed onto the picnic blanket four whole roasted black deer. In each deer, there was a goose, and in each goose, a partridge, and in each partridge, a chicken egg. We stared in utter amazement: how could we eat all that? This police inspector was very capable, shrewd, extremely likeable, and utterly corrupt. Sir, conmen, rapists, and drunks will always seem well-mannered, friendly, and likeable; it’s because they can’t afford not to be. This boy didn’t end up doing much with his life. He died of cirrhosis. His younger brother came to Pakistan. Somehow he got a teaching job in a school in Maripur. After a couple years, he found me. “I don’t have a Bachelor’s,” he said. “I can’t get by on nothing. I live in Saudabad. I have to change buses twice to get to Maripur. Half my income is swallowed up in this. Please keep me here as your secretary.” He had three girls coming of age. One caught her clothes on fire and burned to death. There were all sorts of rumors. He himself had two heart attacks that he had covered up at school for fear of losing his shitty job.
Back in the day, the police chief used to rule the town, including the criminals. I mean, he could do anything to anyone. Sir, Mirza’s right. After studying 150 years of public records, he decided that three city departments have been corrupt since Day 1. First, the police. Second, the PWD. Third, the Income Tax Office. For my part, I’d add the Anti-Corruption Department. They accept bribes only from those who accept bribes. Corruption is rife in India as well, and I’ve a little experience with this. But, sir, even when a Hindu accepts a bribe, he does it with such humility and forbearance that, I swear to God, I feel like giving him another!
And, sir, no matter if an Indian is Hindu or Muslim, young or old, they are the epitome of humility when they fold their hands together in greeting. The most famous politicians do so before and after their speeches, just as the most respected musicians do before and after they play. Once at a poetry festival, I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears the great Ali Sardar Jafri recite a dozen or so long poems, put his hands together contritely, then leave the stage. (Well, in this case, I can understand why he begged for forgiveness.)
III.
What Happened To The Red-Light District
AND, SIR, WHEN I SAW MOOL GANJ, I got very sad. There used to be a red-light district there. You must think I’m a strange character. I’ve done the hajj twice, I’ve a permanent tattoo on my forehead from praying so much, and yet in every story I tell I’m sure to sing the praises of prostitutes. What can I do? Our generation suffered from all sorts of unrequited passions. In the old days, prostitutes ruled our bodies and minds. You couldn’t tell a story without one, nor could you become a man without one. And bear in mind as well that a whore was the only woman you could look at for as long as you liked; women suitable for marriage always wore veils. I’ve noticed that today’s prostitutes act and look like housewives. Someone needs to explain to them, “You’re well behaved, but good behavior was what drove miserable husbands to you in the first place!” The purity and monotony of the household bored them to the point that they came night after night to stay at the Exotic Body Inn. Now this refuge is no more.
So I was saying there used to be a red-light district in Mool Ganj. After being pushed further and further out, prostitutes are now hidden back in Bakers Alley. Mool Ganj is nothing more than a filthy gutter. I also went back to where Mian Tajammul Hussain and I used to eat kebabs right off the skewers as we hunkered in shame next to the wall. That was fifty years ago. I’ve never found kebabs as good as the spicy ones we got back then in the red-light district. Except in Lucknow’s Maulvi Ganj. Mool Ganj had good flower bracelets too! Oh, and I’ve discovered an excellent kebab cook on Aslam Road. Before you leave for London, I’ll get you some. Sir, I always went out to eat kebabs but chewed homemade paan. Have you ever eaten paan made by a prostitute? But you’ve said that you haven’t seen a prostitute dance since your circumcision ceremony, and for years you remained under the impression that before watching anyone dance you would have to undergo the same trial! A prostitute’s paan doesn’t stain your lips. I’ve noticed that paan doesn’t stain the lips of old people, babblers, and poets. But now you’re looking at my lips! Thank you! Before going home, Mian Tajammul would vigorously wipe his lips and swallow some jintanpills to mask the odor of the kebabs and onions. Haji Sahib, his father, had recently come from Chiniot, and he considered kebabs and paan to be among the debaucheries of UP. He would say, “Son, whatever you do, do it in front of me.” But, for the sake of argument, if Mian Tajammul had indulged in these things in front of him, his father would have split his head with an axe, and this would have been a piece of cake because for years he had held to an exercise regimen of chopping ten kilos of wood after morning prayers. If there was a storm, he would go to the men’s section of the house and swing around his colorful, ten-kilo mace. When he left Chiniot to look for a job, his father, meaning Mian Tajammul’s grandfather, gave him a thousand-bead rosary, a set of maces, an axe, and a wife to keep him from straying from the straight and narrow. And this was all well and good. Putting all these tools to use saved him from doing bad, if they didn’t amount to much good.
But for God’s sake! Please don’t take my words the wrong way. I keep bringing up prostitutes and brothels, and yet it’s not like I believe all your problems get solved at a whorehouse. With God as my witness, I never did anything more than eat paan and kebabs and stare with envy at the stream of men going inside. Mian Tajammul would say, sighing, “Look how lucky these men are! Their ancestors are either dead or blind!”
It was another era altogether. As the young grew into their bodies, the old lost their minds. Everyone in town thought it was their duty to keep track of the bad behavior of everyone else.
We watch over them, and they watch over us …
At each and every turn, the old generation was making sure that our youthfulness couldn’t be put to use. I mean, all the old people spent their lives bent over like prayerful wicketkeepers trying to expose our missteps and mistakes. I couldn’t figure out what the purpose of youth was if it had to be like that!
Sir, I spent my entire youth doing pushups and drinking buffalo milk. If that’s not madness, then what is?