Thus, the letter ‘alif’ fell on top of the poets like a lightning bolt. Everything came to a halt. The audience members lifted the sky, the misra-e-tarah, and the poets on their horns. Moli Mujjan motioned with his finger to Maulvi Badal (the Persian teacher), and whispered into his ear, ‘How does alif scan?’ Maulvi Badal was at first at a loss for words, but then he recited the misra-e-tarah. Now there was a growing fracas. Jauhar Illahabadi wanted to say something, but the time for the poets to speak was now over. All that could be heard were sarcastic jibes, gripes, and curses. Things had deteriorated so quickly that if the earth had suddenly cleaved in front of them, Basharat would happily have consented to being buried inside, along with the Kanpur School poets, and Moli Mujjan (along with his bolster pillow).
This poet and faultfinder gave his nom de plume as Saghar Jalaunvi.
How the Poetry Festival Was Stolen
People had been sitting bored for quite a while when Saghar Jalaunvi’s explosive objection not only breathed life into the dead festival but also led to a great ruckus. No one was in the right frame of mind to consider the validity of the objection. For us, singing and dancing performances, politics, and poetry festivals are selfish arts. All of their pleasure (indeed, their very justification for existing) is that of the solo performance. That’s why shouting slogans in politics, just like shouting praise and insults while marching in a parade or during a poetry festival, has become a necessity, a tradition, and a safety valve. For us, these are the only acceptable forms of audience participation.
The oil in two kerosene lanterns had run out fifteen minutes earlier. And some others had never been set up properly, so they too gave up the ghost. After Saghar Jalaunvi’s moment, some mischief-maker had shaken all the other lamps so that their mantles fell off. Everything went dark. Scuffles broke out. It was so dark that the poets couldn’t be found, and so some innocent audience members started getting hit. Some were cursing out the poets by their names — no, by their pen names. Then someone shouted very loudly, ‘Everyone! Run! Flee! Save yourselves! The Hakim Sahib’s water buffalo is on the loose!’ This incited a melee. No one could see the black buffalo in the dark night, and so those frightened villagers equipped with sticks started beating their neighbours, thinking they were the buffalo. I still can’t figure out how the thieves were able to locate all the new shoes in the pitch-black night. And it wasn’t just shoes; everything that was worth stealing was stolen: a silver tray for serving paan; a dozen hand-towels; Saghar Jalaunvi’s double-sized achkan coat, underneath which there was no kurta or undershirt; one printed linen carpet; all of the white party sheets; the orphanage’s little, wooden donation box with steel lock; the orphanage’s black flag; the master of ceremonies’ silk bolster pillow and eyeglasses (which he was wearing); the silver toothpick and ear swabs that the village revenue officer had been wearing around his neck; and from the pocket of Khwaja Qamruddin, eight rupees, a silk handkerchief smelling of perfume, and a love letter he had written to his neighbour’s wife.13 Indeed, one impudent man reached into Basharat’s skin-tight churidar pyjamas and snatched his silk drawstring in one brazen jerk. Another carried off a kerosene lantern on his head — granted no one could have seen someone carry off a kerosene lantern in that dark, but that was the only possible way. Only a couple feathers remained of the sick chickens. According to Saghar Jalaunvi, some wretch even tried to rip off his moustache, and only his timely scream scared him off. Long story short: whether something was useful or not, if anyone laid a hand on it, it got lifted, snatched, pilfered, or ripped off; it got stolen. And that included the County Treasurer’s assistant secretary Banwari Lal Mathur’s dentures! There was only one thing that no one touched: the poets’ notebooks were in exactly the same spots where they had been abandoned in the scrum the day before.
The villagers who had come to the poetry festival thought that perhaps these were the festival’s closing ceremonies, so they took enthusiastic part in the fighting and stealing. And for many days afterwards, they enquired eagerly to everyone they came across when the next festival was to be held.
The Essence of Many Generations of Worthlessness
The poet who brought about this earthquake, no, who uprooted the entire poetry festival by his moustache, was none other than Basharat’s cook.14 He had received his uniform — an old hat and a cast-off achkan — on the previous Eid. He had the habit of grabbing strangers off the street to recite his poetry to them. If the stranger praised his poem, then he would pull him to his chest and hug him tightly. If he didn’t praise him, then he stepped forward to hug him. He had no doubt that his poetry was inspired. Others also had no doubt that it was very intuitive because no knowledgeable intellectual would be able to write such worthless poetry. In two lines of poetry, it’s hard to fit in so many artistic flaws and blemishes without divine intervention. It often happened that he had not yet completed his couplet when the stove caught on fire and his sauce burned. He had gone to school up to the fifth grade, which was more than enough for his own personal needs. He couldn’t resist using his tiny English vocabulary and writing new poems. If you were in a conversation with him for just ten minutes, he would be sure to weaponize all the English he knew. He had people call him Saghar Sahib, but when he was busy in the kitchen, he went by his real name, Abdul Qaiyum. If you called him Saghar then, he didn’t like it at all. He said, ‘I’ve sold my hands into service, not my pen name.’ Even in the kitchen, he heaped fatuous praise on himself. He said he descended from the family of the top chef of Wajid Ali Shah, King of Awadh. He said that he cooked from 150-year-old family recipes written in Persian. In fact, his tasteless sauces were the essence of many generations of accumulated worthlessness.
But It Requires More Hard Work
He claimed he could cook one hundred and one types of pulao. And this wasn’t wrong in the least. Basharat had him cook pulao every Sunday. In a year, he must have cooked it fifty-two times. And each time he ruined it in a new way. He could cook well only those foods that lay beyond the reach of the ordinary man to ruin, or which look bad to begin with. For example, khichri, mashed potatoes, smoked firni, slow-cooked meat and turnip stew, arhar lentils, khichra, and sweet-and-sour mutanjan rice, in which, along with the sweet rice, he would add meat and lemon juice. Like wives without a knack for housework, he would cover up all the food’s problems with chilli powder. (He removed all the errors of his poetry by reciting them in the tarannum singing style.) He couldn’t cook sweets to save his life; that was because there was no scope to add chilli powder. On moonlit nights, he would sing his ghazals to the geography teacher while strumming on that man’s banjo, and the teacher would remember his beloved, who had married a brass-spittoon maker from Muradabad, and then break down crying. The style of singing that Saghar had unwittingly invented made it quite easy for him to start sobbing.
One day, Basharat teased him, ‘You know, you write such good poems in such demanding metres. How did you ever become a cook?’ He said, ‘That question strikes very close to my heart. I don’t get the same exhilaration after writing poetry as I do after cooking good food. In cooking, you have to make sure that everything’s delicately balanced. If the person eating says it’s bad, you have to accept this. And cooking is harder work. That’s why no poet has ever agreed to work in a kitchen.’
Saghar Jalaunvi never thought of poetry as a way to gain people’s respect, and one reason for this was probably that poetry had been for him a consistent source of humiliation. As proud as he was of his cooking, he was equally humble about his poetry. He openly admitted that Ghalib wrote better Persian poetry in Urdu and that Mir got a much better salary. Then he made sure to add, ‘Sir, those days were different. The Urdu masters only had to write poetry and correct that of their disciples. Not one of them had to make chapatis.’