The dead come back to perform a miracle.
There wasn’t a shrine within fifty miles that she hadn’t visited. She would stand near the grave’s head and cry and cry. In fact, she must have cried more than the friends and family had when attending the funerals of these men so long ago. In those days, whether the dead were miracle workers or not is one thing, but at least you could be sure their corpses were in their tombs. It’s not the same today. Now we don’t know what’s inside. The best scenario is that nothing is in there. Then the yearly commemoration, which is held with much pomp and circumstance, is celebrating nothing more than nothingness. That said, not a day goes by in Karachi without another newspaper ad along the following lines: ‘Today offerings will be made at such-n-such holy shrine. At five, the holy water will be taken out to head the procession. Then the anointment of the holy shrine will be performed. Holy food will be distributed afterwards.’ I’ve seen so much emphasis placed on the word ‘holy’ in reference to the shrines springing up for newly discovered saints that my mind is awash with all sorts of doubt. I’m neither gullible nor a Wahhabi, so I have to say that when it comes to the one shrine in Karachi whose construction I’ve followed, I’m ready to believe that everything about it is holy, except the body inside.
Actually, Qibla thought of himself as nothing less than a living saint. When he learned that his wife was secretly going to shrines, he got very upset. And in this condition, he never ate regular meals. He went to the sweetshop to order rabri, moti choor ke laddu, and kachori. But the next day his wife put on her cornflower blue scarf and whipped him up his favourite food in an effort to win him over: do piyaza, super-sweet zardah, and extremely spicy dahi bade. He offered portions of these delicacies to his Persian and Arab ancestors, although he made sure the dahi bade weren’t too spicy. Then he placed restrictions on her going to shrines. When his wife started tearing up, Qibla relented a little. He said she could go on the one condition that the saint wasn’t from the kamboh caste. ‘Women must stay away from ghazal poets and kamboh men, whether they’re alive or not. I know just what they’re like,’ he said. His enemies liked to say that Qibla himself was a poet during his youth and a kamboh on his mother’s side. He liked to say, riffing on a proverb, ‘A kamboh’s death is a festival by itself.’
The Alley Cat’s Collar
Gradually his wife grew accepting of her lot. Then they had a girl. Qibla grew fonder of her by the day. He grew so content that he took to saying that God was merciful and kind. ‘If I had a son like me, his life would be rough. And if he wasn’t like me, I’d disown him.’
However darling a grown daughter may be, she remains an enormous burden resting on the collective chest of her parents. Even though some people write in their daughter’s matrimonial ad that she is good-looking, well-mannered, and knows how to run a household, for Qibla’s daughter, this was actually true. But who would dare ask him for her hand? I don’t have personal experience in jumping into Nimrod’s fire, but I can say for sure that it’s less dangerous jumping into that than into his family tree. I mean, as I have mentioned, Qibla was the uncle many times over to my friend Basharat. They were neighbours, and their shops were next to each other. Basharat’s father didn’t have any objections to his son marrying Qibla’s daughter, but he didn’t initiate the conversation since he figured that he could live easily enough without a daughter-in-law but would look awkward without a nose and legs. Basharat threatened to commit suicide by tying himself to the railroad tracks — the wide-gauge ones — when an express train was set to come through. (The ropes were to prevent his changing his mind at the last minute.) But his father said, not mincing words, ‘Then you put the collar on the alley cat.’
Qibla was not only famous for being arrogant and insulting, he really was. He respected hardly anyone. He always found some reason to insult others. For example, if a man was only a month younger, he would call him ‘kid,’ and if a man was only a year older, he would call him ‘gramps.’
K.I.S.S. or Four Blanks
Basharat had just taken his BA exams and was waiting for the results. He thought he had a 50–50 chance of passing. He said ‘50–50’ with such gusto, pride, and certainty that it was as if he were challenging his examiners to find any fault in his merely passing competence. In the meantime, he had absolutely nothing to do. He played carom and coat pass. He spoke to the dead, asking them questions he didn’t dare ask the living. He spent days filling in the blanks in Nazir Akbarabadi’s Collected Poems that Munshi Nawal Kishore Press had put in for fear of violating the Indian Penal Code. While talking to others, he finished each sentence with a poetic petit four. He was also deep in the throes of writing short stories. In those days, Niyaz Fatehpuri’s ornate phrases and Abul Kalam’s swirling prose had taken possession of even the best writers’ minds. In some cases, the style shone out like bright wedding jewellery; in other cases, it rose up like the many scars on a washerman’s body; and in yet other cases, it was like the girlfriend tattoos with which English sailors decorated their bodies. Urdu prose was suffering from elephantiasis. Once it recovered a little, it was struck by Tagore and his ecstatic flying carpets rising toward the heavens. One of Basharat’s stories had a climax something like the following: ‘Anjum Ara’s beauty, charms, and flirtatious gestures filled his body’s every pore with their fragrance. Tripping forward, she was the epitome of modesty, cowering behind her satiny arms, stealing glances here and there. Salim took Anjum Ara’s henna-dyed hands into his steely clutches, and with an awestruck aspect stared shamelessly at her diamond-chiselled wrists and crystal calves, and then on her rosy lips he planted a big _ _ _ _.’ In those days, the word ‘kiss’ was considered obscene, and so the four blanks. Basharat was punctilious about using what the era considered the correct number of blanks; prevailing standards of modesty, as well as ideas of the heroine, determined this. I remember how the Urdu Progressive Writers’ magazine published an article in which Maulvi Abdul Haq had replaced that word, for propriety’s sake, with its letters spaced one by one, and thus, how contrary to his intentions, had only increased the reader’s attention and pleasure. But I don’t mean to make fun of him or my dear friend; each era has its own style. Sometimes words are dressed up in angarkha gowns, sometimes in floor-length cloaks, sometimes in scholarly turbans, sometimes in dinner jackets, and sometimes in fool’s caps. Sometimes words wear anklets, and sometimes they wear fetters. And sometimes they are like trained monkeys that dance on a showman’s command.
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad wrote about his birth like this: ‘I, alien to time itself, born into the wrong era, a stranger amidst my own people, raised by pious folk, ruined by desire, named Ahmad, called Kalam, came from the world of non-being into the world of being in 1888 (1305 Hijra), and thus was accused of living.’
People don’t write like that anymore. People aren’t born like that anymore. Not even a C-section takes that long and causes that much suffering.4
A Leap into the Volcano
Then one fine morning, Basharat took upon himself the task of writing to Qibla, and he sent the letter through registered mail even though his house was right next door. The letter ran to twenty-three pages and contained at least fifty couplets, of which half were Basharat’s and the others were those of Andleeb Shadani, who was friends with Qibla. In those days, such letters were written with saffron, but this letter would have used up more than an entire field and so he used saffron only for the salutation and parting and otherwise used a wide-nibbed fountain pen and red ink. Then, for those parts he meant to draw special attention to, he used blue ink and wrote really small. Although he was being quite presumptuous in writing, his tone was worshipful and his points, flattering. He praised Qibla’s good manners, affectionate nature, pleasant company, fair business practices, compassion, soft-spokenness, and handsomeness — in short, all those things that were entirely absent in the real man. Then he went on to chastize all of Qibla’s enemies man by man. This called for special skill to accomplish in under twenty-three pages. Finally, Basharat drew up the courage to say that he wanted to get married, and yet he didn’t have enough chutzpah to specify to whom. No doubt the point of the letter was difficult to decipher, and yet Qibla was pleased to hear himself praised and his enemies slandered: no one had ever told him he was handsome. He read the letter twice and then handed it to his secretary with these words, ‘Read this and tell me who this prince wants to marry. He’s described me quite well, though.’