Also, the British are extremely well-mannered and sympathetic. Drivers are so well-behaved that should a single pedestrian indicate that he would like to cross the street, drivers would rather create a mini traffic jam than not let this soul cross. Yes, Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig is the height of sentimentality. When he sees someone stop for him, he feels so honoured that he has to restrain himself from rushing into the crosswalk and bowing to each and every car before crossing the street. In short, my corner of the cage is comfortable enough.
O, Hunter, I’m OK in this cage
Except how I want to fly away.
***
No writer can create a vivid piece of writing — one that comes out of the pulsing crucible of lived experience — when they are cut off from their loved ones and fellow writers, as well as the life and times of their country and its popular traditions and culture. Ninety-nine out of a hundred Asians living in Britain can’t tell you the names of the beautiful trees standing right outside their houses (the other one didn’t even notice the trees), and they can’t tell you the names of the colourful birds that sing at dawn and dusk in these trees. They stay up all night yakking their heads off in broken English with their British girlfriends, and yet they don’t know the words for the colour of these ladies’ hair — golden auburn, copper brown, ash blond, chestnut brown, hazel brown, burgundy brown? Right. Don’t ask.
They look around dazzled at everything and swear they are beautiful without knowing what in fact they are. A foreigner’s understanding of a nation’s cultural life, as well as the problems facing its society, is so facile and superficial that they never get beyond what they glean from museums, art galleries, theatres, and nightclubs; from wandering the bright night-streets of Soho; from suffering an inglorious mugging in the East End; or from getting quickies from the prostitutes of Charing Cross. If they manage to perform the impossible and get British citizenship, then they lose the modicum of respect they had as tourists or guest workers. Or if they marry some British lady in order to get a British passport and ‘avenge the helplessness of their homeland,’ then they think that they have all of Britain by the balls.
The British racial stock is very good. Their physique and colour, as well as their chiselled features, make them beautiful. Mirza says that an ugly British woman is rare indeed — you’ll find but one in a thousand, but leave it to an Indian or a Pakistani to marry just that one! At the same time, marrying a British woman won’t result either in fitting in or in understanding the country. Moreover, in time you’ll realize that you don’t even understand your wife. So an exiled writer (whether they have chosen exile for more salutary pay but less salubrious environs, or they went abroad to live the life of Riley under the excuse of personal or political reasons) ends up writing about a bygone era that the passage of time, psychic disconnect, and physical distance have rendered out of focus and steeped in glamorous nostalgia. Exile White Russian authors are the best example of this. But Urdu writers living (short- or long-term) in London aren’t far behind:
No one willingly leaves her elegant party.
Forced away, he keeps looking back.
I haven’t recounted what happened to me in London — I mean what befell this poor soul, and what doors to enlightenment were opened to me, a story that involves some shady characters that dance in and out of the shadows. If it is God’s will, I will soon compile that in another book. The fact of the matter is that after the publication of Zarguzasht [My Long Flirtation with Banking], I had meant to start a new book from where I had ended my disgraceful story in the Alley of the Usurers. But, in the meantime, several things got in the way: London, a new banking job, back pain, and this book. Some other nettlesome issues cropped up: specifically, I got worried that my colleagues might think that my banking career was nothing but camouflage or some type of excuse. (Actually, when I got my first job on January 1, 1950, I was up to no good. My sole intention in involving myself with that forbidden occupation was to experience some things that I could transform into humorous pieces of autobiography.) The second reason I got so discouraged that I never started the second volume of Zarguzasht was that we live in the golden age of Urdu fiction. That is, these days the best Urdu fiction is being written as autobiography or travel narratives, and short stories and novels lag far behind. Too bad I’ve experienced so few things that the most important event of my life was my birth (and the most important event of my childhood was that I grew out of it). You see how hard it would be for me to reproduce this as a racy three-act play! The third reason that I didn’t deign dip my pen into the ready-and-waiting inkwell was that I happened along the way to read the memoirs of Lord Contin, the president of Trinity College, Oxford, and the chairman of the board of British Libraries — a man well respected by the British intelligentsia and a man in whose personal library you can find more than twenty thousand books. He says that he never puts autobiography on the same shelf as biography, but instead puts them with humour! For weeks I admired how he had been able to arrive at this perspicacious nugget without reading my own offerings! Thank God wit survives yet today!
Most of the characters in this book are lost. They live in the past and avoid people at all costs. They suffer from nostalgia for a different time and place, and they suffer from this individually and collectively. When someone falls in love with the past and stops anticipating the future, they get old fast. (Bear in mind that anyone can age before their time — even the young.) If they can’t get drugs, then the depressed and defeated can find their last refuge in the intoxication of memories and fantasy: just as the determined and diligent use their iron will to shape their future, the dead-to-the-world use their imagination to lose themselves in visions of their past, the heady rivers of memory descend into the mirages of the mind. Winding underground and then aboveground, irrigation canals water fields, and so too does the act of memory keep alive its dervish (the imagination) before suddenly it splits through the time-fabric and people are resuscitated.
Sometimes countries get stuck in their past. If you look carefully, you’ll realize that this obsession is the real villain in Asia’s problems. The nations that are the most backward, sluggish, and altogether miserable are the very ones that in an inverse ratio find their respective pasts glorious and worthy of endless trumpeting. As soon as anything bad happens, they bury their heads in the past. And this isn’t the past that really happened, but the one that they fashioned to suit their whim and taste — a fantasy past. In the background of this reconstructive history project, it’s worth watching the peacock dance of the injured ego: a peacock not only creates his own dance but his own forest as well, and there comes a magical moment when the entire jungle begins to dance, and the peacock stands still to watch.
Nostalgia is the story of that moment.
How and where the defeated ego finds solace depends upon a number of things — your taste, your skills, your ability to put up with failure (your patience), and the available means of escape:
Mysticism
Renunciation
Meditation
Liquor
Humour
Sex
Heroin
Valium
The Fantasy Past
Daydreaming
Whichever form of intoxication you prefer. At the moment of imminent colonization, Arnold wrote about the ability of the navel-gazing East to withstand defeat: