The ascetics who were lost for centuries within the labyrinth of form and eroticism were made of dust, and to dust they returned. But their dreams remain. You won’t find such dreamers, such wanderers and kidnappers of the soul, anywhere today.
Now there is no one in the world, O Ghalib,
To mix reality with dreams…
But look at what nonsense I’ve written! I started with Hakim Ahsanullah Tasleem, weaved my way through the brothels, and ended up in Ajanta and Ellora. But what can I do? This is how my elegant friend talks. He weaves seamless stories from the rays of the sun and moon.
In this section, I’ve tried as far as possible to retain his words and his ADD style, with no additions or subtractions. He says to me, ‘You can’t guess how bad it was in my time — the suffocating atmosphere, the pious deprivations, and the horny piety. Between us, there lies a gap of a generation. Twenty years.’
And he’s right: between our generations lies a prostitute.
10.
Who Stole the Show?
Setting aside Jauhar Illahabadi, Kashif Kanpuri and Nushoor Wahidi, it was very difficult to determine who should read first and who last, because of all the other poets, invited and local, everyone thought themselves equal to everyone else, and it was such a fierce tug-of-war that it was hard to say who was spouting the least absurd poetry, and so who would be asked to read last. But it was solved in the following manner: poets would recite in reverse alphabetical order. That meant that Yawar Naginvi would be hooted off the stage first. The problem with the correct alphabetical order was that Basharat’s revered teacher, Jauhar Illahabadi, would then have to recite before him.
At the venue, there was a lot of confusion. Contrary to all expectation and forecast, scads of people came from the surrounding countryside. There weren’t enough rugs or water. Later, people wondered whether it had been Moli Mujjan’s enemies who had spread the rumour that at the end of the festival, laddoos and dates were to be given out as benediction gifts, as well as small packets of medicine for malaria and ranikhet (a deadly chicken disease). One country bumpkin brought his dozen chickens in a big bag because he was fearful they might not make it till morning. Similarly, a farmer, full of hope, washed his water buffalo and brought her along. She only had boys, never girls. Someone had said that Hakim Ahsanullah Tasleem, of prostitute fame, was coming. The majority of the audience had never been to a poetry festival and never seen a poet. The festival started quite late, which is to say, ten o’clock, which was like two in the morning for the country crowd. The young men serving as volunteers (and who the local crowd called ‘young quails’) were in charge of the lights, but, full of zeal, they had lit the kerosene lanterns at six and by nine they had gone dark. Then it took an hour to refill the kerosene in the lanterns because, as this took place, the naughty boys wandering through the festival had to be told off, each according to their age and degree of naughtiness. But the festival crowd was so loud that no one could hear these curses. That day, the district magistrate had called the County Treasurer to his office. And so, in his absence, the naughty boys felt emboldened. By midnight, only twenty-seven poets had read. Some wiseacre had taught the master of ceremonies, Moli Mujjan, a unique way of praising the poets, so instead of saying, ‘God be praised! Wow,’ Moli Mujjan said, ‘Encore! Encore!’ This meant that the twenty-seven poets took the time of fifty-two! The hooting also was doubled in effect. Qadir Barabankvi had read only his first couplet when the audience started hooting and hollering. He was so frustrated that he said, ‘My dear friends, please listen! That was a couplet not a curse!’ But the crowd only grew more restless. Yet Qadir Barabankvi didn’t relent. He asked a man for a bidi, lit it without the slightest rush, and said, ‘My dear friends, once you calm down a little, I’ll recite the second couplet.’ According to Mirza, this was the first poetry festival in the history of Urdu poetry where the audience stole the show.
Saghar Jalaunvi
It must have been midnight. The crowd of four hundred was unruly. Scared of the din, the jackals at the village’s edge didn’t dare make a sound. A local poet, whose each and every couplet had earned him hoots and hollers, was now going back to his seat with his head bowed low, when a man, approaching on his knees over the stage’s white sheet, came up to the master of ceremonies. He greeted him with his right hand, while his left hand was twirling the ends of his mutton chop moustache, which was peppered with grey. He spoke, ‘I’m a poor man, and a stranger here.12 Please let me recite my humble poetry, as well.’ (Someone shouted from the side, ‘Let Mr Humble recite some too.’) The man said that if there was any delay in letting him on stage, his status would rise on its own accord and soon he would be thought of as equal to the great masters. He was given permission. He rose to standing and greeted the audience to the left, right, and centre. His cream-coloured achkan coat of tussore silk was so long that it wasn’t at all easy to tell if he was wearing anything underneath or not.
Earlier on, when the crowd had knocked straight his black velvet hat, which had been placed at a rakish angle, he took it off, blew into it, and set it back on his head at an even more rakish angle. During the festival, this man had sat in the sixth row praising the poets in a strange way, shouting, ‘God be praised! Wow! God be praised! Wow!’ After everyone else stopped clapping, he would start, and he clapped in such a way that it seemed as though he was slapping together some chapatis.
He bowed very deeply from the waist to show his thanks, and as he made his way back to his seat to pick up his notebook, he raised his achkan coat so high that it was like in the rainy season when snotty, well-dressed ladies, being lavished with men’s steady regard, lift up their pant legs so as to avoid puddles that even an ant couldn’t drown in. They walk around with a fussy sort of contentment that makes the onlookers pray that
Please, God, let it rain for two more days!
From his seat, he picked up his notebook, which was actually an old school attendance register in which he kept his ghazals, which he had written on old test-booklet paper. Hugging this to his chest, he took it to the master of ceremonies, as he was ready to begin reciting. There was a lot of hooting; it wouldn’t stop. It was a strange type of hooting: it started before each poet got on stage and continued after he had left. He looked very closely at his broken pocketwatch once before he sat down and once afterwards. Then he tapped on it like on a small kettledrum and put it to his ear to see if it still wasn’t working or if the drubbing had caused it to start up. Then he turned to the audience and said, ‘My dear friends! Your shouting has made my throat go dry.’
He addressed the master of ceremonies and the audience, ‘For a special reason, I want to recite a ghazal without the misra-e-tarah that we were asked to use. But I don’t want to tell you the reason!’ Hearing this, the audience shouted, ‘Tell us the reason, tell us the reason! If not, hang him for treason!’ When the demand grew, the man unbuttoned one of his coat’s buttons and said, ‘There’s an error in the line that was given out.’ He scanned the line to prove his point. The word ‘maraz’ [illness] was shortened to ‘marz’ to match the metre of ‘farz’ [duty]. He said that the festival would be remembered forever because that night the poets of Kanpur had made immortal a common linguistic error. Then, from the last row in the crowd, a bearded elderly man stood up not only to confirm this but also to throw another spark into the fire in saying that the letter ‘alif’ didn’t scan either!