Monks’ Fantasies
So again Mool Ganj. And prostitutes. This was Basharat’s favourite topic of conversation, which our readers must already be thoroughly familiar with (and disgusted by). He always brings them up in even the most serious conversations, thereby ruining them. But it’s certainly true that he’s another sort of man:
He walks through the market, but buys nothing.
Just like some people with allergies suddenly come down with hives, prostitutes pop up with their ankle-bells jingling in his conversations, and that without regard to situation or circumstance. He prays tahajjud at three in the morning. Long ago he became a grandfather, but prostitutes haunt him. Once I scolded him, ‘In the old tales, the souls of heroes and monsters would hide in the bodies of parrots. But, for you, in every story, every character’s soul hides inside a prostitute!’ He said, ‘Forget about my stories. Have you seen any movie heroes praying nafils these days? Books are the same. It’s no longer necessary to put in a prostitute if you want to talk about sex. A girl from a respectable family will do fine. Yet prostitutes still make fiction-readers and cinemagoers perk up like patients going for the big raisins in the hakim’s witch’s brew! Actually, you have to understand Unani medicine if you hope to understand prostitutes. And the opposite is also true. For us, Unani medicine and prostitutes are as necessary as they are reviled.’
And Basharat was right. Perhaps it’s difficult to understand today. But, like forbidden pleasures are wont to do, prostitutes used to possess the minds of rich men. And that wasn’t true just of that one age. It’s said that the great emperor Aurangzeb wanted to get rid of the world’s oldest profession and so announced that if prostitutes hadn’t married by a certain date they would be forced into a boat and then sunk in the Jamuna. Most prostitutes preferred drowning over the trials of the kitchen, and they preferred the jaws of crocodiles over husbands whose lovemaking was like an obligatory prayer session. I mean, compulsorily, and with no passion and love! Only a few prostitutes reluctantly married.
All calamities are now passed, O Ghalib!
Now only a hasty marriage remains…
Now just take a look, two hundred years later, at the Tazkira-e-Ghausiya. Its compiler, Maulvi Ismail Meruthi, quotes a true story about his most respected spiritual master and guru: ‘One day, he said, “When I was staying in Zinat-ul-Masjid in Delhi, one dervish friend of mine — Yusuf Khan Kambalposh who wrote The History of Yusuf, or, The Wonders of the West, the first Urdu travel narrative about England — invited me to dinner. We left after the evening prayer. He took me to a brothel in Chandni Chowk and then disappeared. At first I thought that perhaps the food was being prepared. But then I thought that he had taken me there for no reason and then simply left. I thought, ‘Why the hell did that good-for-nothing bring me here?’ After a couple hours, he came back laughing, ‘Sir, I left you here so you could overcome your qualms!’ After that, he took me to his house and fed me.” ’
Please bear in mind that Kambalposh was a very free-spirited and whimsical person. This story is from the time when, in the company of his spiritual master, he experienced a transformation of heart. Just imagine — if this was his autumn, then how fun the spring of his life must have been!
Then, look at a thumbnail version of what came after this by one hundred and fifty years. When a poet like Josh — skilled, of noble birth, and of refined, nay, exquisite, taste — sketches a picture of the pleasures of life and its infinite happiness, then look at what magic his graceful pen gives rise to—
Life put her hands on her hips and started to sway and dance.
There’s no harm in putting your hands on hips and starting to sway and dance, provided the hips are your own. Also, dancing like this should be part of your job description. It shouldn’t be just for fun. I mean, what’s objectionable to in someone putting your hands on your hips and dancing? But, if you dance like this, people will know your caste.
So Mool Ganj was the red-light district. People back then had just as bad morals as they do now, but their eyesight wasn’t as bad, and so they didn’t call the area with prostitutes the ‘beauty market.’ They called a whorehouse a whorehouse. Nowhere else in the world have the horrid cells of ugly prostitutes, who sell STDs along with their nasty bodies, been so glamorized. Later on, the phrase ‘the beauty market’ was popularized by writers who would never have touched a prostitute with a ten-foot pole. But personal experience was probably not needed. Riyaz Khairabadi wrote poems praising alcohol his whole life long, but his drinking never advanced past sherbet and fresh-squeezed lime juice. But it wasn’t just then. Poets today write romantically about gallows, gibbets, hangmen, and nooses; you don’t have to be hung to write about it. If you don’t have the courage or the wherewithal to praise debauchery and to wander the alleys of the night, then ‘lust sears its secret images into your heart.’
And the truth is that the images are much better. Why? Simply because they’re imaginary! The frescoes and statues of Ajanta and Ellora’s caves are their classical examples. The artists made such sexy, erotic bodies. And once they decided to make them sexy, they didn’t stop at anything. The voluptuous bodies are carved with sensuous lines, so much so that it’s hard to find one straight line anywhere on them. In fact, the noses aren’t even straight! The sculptures of these sexy women and nymphs reveal the obsessions of the sculptors: lips as plump as orange slices; full breasts that made the sculptors themselves horny; curvaceous hips sporting a water pitcher that at every curvy step threatens to overspill its water — like the on-lookers’ hearts that threaten to leap out of their bodies; waists that curl and twist amidst all these zigs and zags; bellies that look like the ocean’s receding waves; and legs, which Sanskrit poets compared to the trunks of banana plants. Their knowing and shameless bodies, their desirable, exaggerated curves, and their beckoning breasts were all made by (and for) those horny celibate monks for whom sexuality was forbidden and who saw women only in their dreams. While they were dreaming, when a woman came close by, and they felt their blood begin to boil, then they immediately awoke, rubbed their eyes with the palms of their hands, and began to carve their dreams into the stone.
Dream-catchers
Compared to the art of these monks, the entire tradition of Western porn and erotic art seems childish and insipid. The bodacious narphal breasts10 of these hourglass bodies — which ripened on the very branches of desire and in the heat of the imagination — could only have been made by monks who, leaving their Yashodharas asleep, had come in search of truth and nirvana. But in the damp and dark caves where they spent their entire lives, and where they could only see their dreams, they cut into the stone to give life to their dreams, I mean, women! This wasn’t the work of a couple years, or even a couple eons; rather, these enlightened ones spent a full thousand years making this very mithun kala art.11 When all the statues were done, and each statue had achieved its dreamy form, then the sculptors stepped confidently outside the dark caves only to find that the sun of religion and truth had long since set and now there was nothing left but layer after layer of darkness. So, frightened by the darkness outside and its tumult, they put their hands over their eyes and rushed back to the familiar darkness.