I had to walk through his living room and verandah to get to his room, and in doing so, I saw a lock on the door to his music room (in which he had nine or ten loudspeakers surreptitiously hidden). His personal library had been locked for four years: it held hundreds of expensive books whose covers he had had done by the Nizam of Hyderabad’s bookbinder. In that very room he had introduced me to Niyaz Fatehpuri, Maulana Muhammad Ayub of Delhi, Muhammad Hasan Askari, and Salim Ahmad. From there he had held up the phone for a half hour so that I could listen to Ustad Bundhu Khan play the sarangi because he knew that when his friends enjoyed the same pleasures as he did, his own pleasure doubled.
This sarangi story is that his beloved late father Mr Haji Muhammad Yaqub forbade several activities in his house: playing cards, keeping the photos of unfamiliar women (meaning, those of actresses), and eating paan. Music parties were also out. He would say, ‘Son, music is not only forbidden, it’s also bad luck. If you hear the sound of a tabla or ankle-bells coming from inside a house, you can be sure you’ll soon hear the beating of the drum of bankruptcy and foreclosure. Music has wrecked many a house. Believe me, this is God’s honest truth.’ In respect for his father’s solemn counsel, Mian Ahsan Ilahi thus arranged for the playing of whatever inauspicious melodies at the house of yours truly. But thank God the deceased’s augury never came true! Not once did the drum of foreclosure sound in front of the nine houses (in which we’d rented rooms) during those days! Mian Ahsan Ilahi himself allowed music in the house on only three conditions. One, the songstress was not alive, which meant you were listening to a record. Two, the singer (male) must sing alone (without a tabla accompaniment), the audience must be only one person (just him), and the words must be totally incomprehensible and so the music limited to classical ragas. Lastly, the singer (male) must content himself with compliments as payment and so must sing only with the thought of getting his reward in heaven. Mirza says that with these pious rules and regulations in place, just as Mian Ahsan Ilahi’s deceased father had predicted, you might well go bankrupt, but you’ll never experience real music.
My friend was lying groggy in a raised-up hospital bed with a new silk comforter over him. On the wall to his right there hung two pictures from his youth. In one, he was standing next to Maulana Hasrat Mohani. In the other, he was smiling as he held the butt of a gun against a dead nilgai’s snout. Beneath these pictures stood his new wheelchair, and on a tall stool there were arrayed all those expensive medicines of whose inefficacy he lay as half-dead advertisement. And yet his memory was still impressive: he had ordered my favourite jalebis still warm from Fresco and gulab jamun from Mullah Halwai in Nazimabad. To the right of his bed there stood a king-sized teak bed without any pillows on it, as his wife had died two months previously. On the windowsill directly in front of the door there was a small cassette player and next to it were the tapes of all the poetry festivals that had taken place on his lawn over the past thirty-five years. (He had ordered the grass from Dhaka and the roses and palm trees from Rawalpindi and Sri Lanka, respectively.) Due to his condition, a lot of things were prohibited — fans, air conditioning, bad news, and children. I thought maybe his hearing was going too.
***
‘Our dear friend Munawwar Hussain has passed away,’ I said, raising my voice a little.
‘Yes, someone told me.’
His speech was so slurred that I had a hard time figuring out what he was saying. And then I had the feeling that he didn’t want to talk about death.
He could focus on my words for only half a minute, and so it was very difficult to get across all of what I wanted to say during his short flashes of lucidity.
After living in Karachi for twenty-eight years, I had left for London in January 1979, and before leaving, I had tape-recorded the musings and reflections of two friends. (Why don’t we say their names were Mian Ahsan Ilahi and Munawwar Hussain. What’s in a name anyway? A friend’s name will always sound good in your ears.3) I also took detailed notes. When I got to London, I quickly set to work on ten biographical sketches, which I set aside to settle for a couple years, as I usually do with new work. Before rereading the manuscript, I first wanted to get permission to publish from Mian Ahsan Ilahi and Munawwar Hussain, and both gave it to me happily and without precondition. When I pulled out the manuscript to see if there wasn’t some life in it yet, I felt very strange. It was as though someone else had written it. I also realized that it was the fodder for two books. I was separating the manuscript in two when I got a brief note from Munawwar Hussain, in which he said that while he had no personal objection to the sketches, at the same time, he was hesitant because some of his friends and family might not like to see certain things published. So he asked me not to use his name. Unfortunately, before I had a chance to go to Karachi and sort things out, he died, and that just two or three months after I got his note.
After listening to my update, Mian Ahsan Ilahi said in his broken manner that he had no problems with anything and that I should do as I saw fit. Then he said, ‘But it’s been so long. Come back to Pakistan. What’s the point in coming back after I’ve died? I can hardly see anymore. Sometimes I can’t even remember your face.’ Then he broke down and started sobbing. It was the second time in thirty-seven years that I had witnessed him crying.
Actually, I was at a crossroads and didn’t know what to do. The narratives of my two friends had blended so much so that their stories were like Siamese twins, and performing surgery to separate them was now impossible. It also seemed impossible to reveal the name, places of residence, and personal quirks of the one but not the other. So I was left with only one thing to do: I had to throw out the entire manuscript and rewrite it not just with aliases and such but also with an entirely fictionalized framework so that they would both have no connection to it. And that’s what I did.
So in this book’s five story-like sketches, if you begin searching for the events of the lives of my two friends or for any mention of their loved ones and families, you’ll leave disappointed. I humbly request you to read them as nothing other than fiction. If any event or character seems real, then please consider it a bad coincidence. All the events and characters are made up. That being said, if any celebrity should happen to be criticized or spoken of harshly, then take that at face value. It’s the absolute truth that I tried to the best of my ability to capture Munawwar Hussain and Mian Ahsan Ilahi’s unique way of talking, as well as their witty repartee — how the sparks flew when the two got going!
Anyway, what does it matter if it’s real or fake or exactly that combination that nowadays goes as ‘faction’—fact plus fiction? A Chinese sage once said that it didn’t matter to him whether the cat was black or white but whether it caught mice or not.
I wanted to give you this background to make clear my debt to my two friends and to dedicate this book to their memory: they are its inspiration, and they are the reason for its existence. The friendship and years of conversation I enjoyed in their company is very precious to me. They lived life to its fullest, and each moment I spent with them was a joy. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the blessing of their friendship.
***