5 Widow’s curry: A sort of curry without little doughballs in it.
6 Hazrat Josh Malihabadi says about ikkas that ‘the whole lot of them is so bad that if you put Alexander the Great in one, he would look like a countryside pimp.’ Setting aside this exaggerated way of talking, we see that the sticking point and ultimate object of contempt is not the pimp nor the prostitute, but the countryside!
7 I asked Basharat, ‘Man, why did you ever agree to catch alive so many different animals, including birds and poisonous insects, for him?’ He said, ‘When I didn’t intend to look for any of them, the more the merrier.’ Then he reassured me that he hadn’t lied by mistake, but rather, by habit.
8 Well, Manto was a boozer. That poor soul had neither the time nor the energy, neither the body nor the mind, to circumambulate that alley of sin. He had as much personal experience with brothels as Riyaz Khairabadi had with booze. Maybe for us personal experience isn’t that important.
9 Translators’ note: A play on the idiom ‘the cat went on pilgrimage after she ate ninety-nine rats.’ This phrase is used when you have been sinning all your life, and then at the end of your life, you renounce sin and do something virtuous.
10 Narphaclass="underline" This word had been very common in Urdu for women’s breasts, bodies, and beauty, but like many other beautiful words it also became a victim of Wahhabian puritanism and surly Nasikhism.
11 Mithun kala: Readers shouldn’t look up ‘mithun’ in the dictionary but instead read Rajender Singh Bedi’s masterpiece of the same name. In that story, Bedi has cut through an entire flint mountain to sculpt an idol, and he has carved it with such skill and with such powerful blows that he never had to use his adze on the same spot twice. (I don’t know the Urdu synonym for ‘erotic art,’ so I was forced to forge this new term.)
12 His ‘homeland’ was in Jalaun (the Lesser), only eighteen miles away. But back in those days as soon as a man passed outside his town, he considered himself a stranger in a strange land. And by ‘homeland,’ people meant only their town and its vicinity; no one considered the county or state their homeland.
13 Out of all the items pilfered that day, only this last was recovered the next day. But it was not only recovered; it was copied out and distributed to every house in town.
14 It’s possible that some readers will think I’m exaggerating because this book’s every third character is a poet, or, at least, he calls himself one. In my defense, I think copying down Hazrat Rais Ahmad of Amroha’s seminal statement ought to be enough: ‘In our society, it was considered a necessity to have a pen name and to write doggerel. In our society, a nobleman without a pen name was considered a male water buffalo without a tail, or an ox without horns. The reign of wealth and the life of luxury and fortune ended quite some time ago. And now, for the older generation, only playing chess and playing at verse remain as remnants of the high life of refinement.’
Author’s afterword
Waking Dreams
‘Ahsan Bhai! Munawwar Hussain’s dead too, you know. Before he died…’
‘Before who died?’ Mian Ahsan Hussain Ilahi asked, looking blindly at the ceiling fan and lifting his one paralysed hand with the other to place it on top of his chest. He wheezed and puffed and feared he was having a heart attack.
This was January 1987. I was having a tough time telling him what I wanted to say. Mian Ahsan Hussain Ilahi had been bedridden for five years. After his stroke, he lay in a coma in a heart specialty hospital for about two weeks. When he awoke, he discovered that half his body was paralysed, that he was going blind, and that he had lost control of his voice. Then his memory was patchy; he seemed to remember only bad things.
If you had seen him then for the first time, you would never have believed that this man had once been a rugged six foot four and two hundred and ten pounds, and how even at the age of seventy-two he would get up at four in the morning to work out for an hour and a half before playing tennis, and then, during the course of the day, he would walk four or five miles. After his first health scare in 1960, his taste for food, fun, and friends only grew. On a trip to London, he raced up every flight of stairs like Ibne Hasan Burney. He said, ‘It’s good for the heart, and it keeps old age at bay. Sixty years ago when I was a boy there wasn’t a tree in all of Chiniot that I didn’t climb.’
Upon doctor’s orders, he was to watch what he ate. He gave up sending to Chiniot for its special pure ghee, as well as its mango pickle, but he continued to eat Chiniot kunna,1 Sindhi biryani, ghee-slathered taftan bread from Burns Road, sajji kebabs from Quetta, almond sweets from Hyderabad, and Multan’s anwar ratol mangos — in short, the perfect prescription for suicide for someone with heart problems. But he wouldn’t listen to anyone.
He didn’t indulge in food on the sly but would call over his doctors and serve them these delicacies with great joy and fuss. He would say that rich food gave the sick the courage to carry on. He stuck to his anti-health regimen without deviation. He also continued to fast as he figured he had fasted since childhood and so why stop now. Moreover, he didn’t start praying five times a day because he didn’t want to give anybody reason to say, ‘Oh, just one heart attack, and Mian’s got pious!’
He also got diabetes. That said, before going to bed, he would eat a big dish of full-cream ice cream. As smart as he was, he was even more headstrong. This was about everything, and health matters weren’t any different. He had peculiar perspectives on things, including ice cream: ‘Ice cream cools the heart and keeps blood pressure in check, just so long as you don’t eat it in moderation. When I go to my in-laws in Sargodha or Sahiwal, I refuse ice cream out of politeness, but all night I toss and turn. Each night I don’t eat ice cream, mosquitos massacre me. In 1970, I went on that trip to Europe, right? When I couldn’t eat biryani for a couple days, I had to have a hernia operation in Vienna! But you’re making fun of my love for food! Look at Ghalib. All his life, especially right before he died, he complained about his poverty and how no one appreciated his poetry. But notice what he got on his deathbed: in the morning, butter pressed from seven almonds along with a sugary sherbet; in the afternoon, broth boiled off a kilo of meat and three shami kebabs; and, as soon as it was nine at night, five rupees’ worth of homebrewed liquor to go with the same amount of antacid.2 My friend, God has given me everything except a lover who’s fond of tormenting me! I might not be dying, but at the same time I don’t get such treats. And, oh, when it comes to liquor, why is it that he drank the homemade stuff rather than Portuguese wine? You know, he drank the strong stuff so he wouldn’t have to drink so much. He had to match his alcohol intake ounce for ounce with the foul antacid. My friend, just get me my full-cream ice cream, and I’ll slam it down the hatch. I’m never going on a diet.’
After getting X-rayed and diagnosed by doctors, he often prepared his own concoctions to treat whatever it was he had. Doctors don’t get mad at patients with so much initiative; they actually begin loving them. When he would start talking with his friends, his spirits improved — a smile would spread across his face, revealing his dimples, and each word seemed to carry its own charming wink. But, in the end, his food and fuzzy logic ended up leading to a severe stroke.