The East bow’d low before the blast
In patient, deep disdain
She let the legions thunder past
And plunged in thought again.
And in this arrogant meditation, centuries slip by. The most hypnotic and deepest form of intoxication available to humankind — the one that makes you indifferent to your surroundings — takes place through an admixture and imbrication of your thoughts and dreams. If you know this high, then everything else is A-okay.
A thousand miseries will dissolve into one great dream
The story goes in the Mirat-ul-Khayal [The Mirror of Thoughts] that when Sarmad was sentenced for heresy and public indecency and led in chains to the slaughterhouse, he saw the executioner with his drawn sword, smiled, and then said, ‘I sacrifice my life to you, God! Come on, and come fast. In whatever disguise you come, I’ll recognize you.’ Then he recited the following Persian couplet, put his head beneath the waiting sword, and departed for the eternal rest:
A noise woke me from the dream of non-existence
Still the night of tribulations! I closed my eyes again.
An ancient Chinese custom for making fun of someone was to smear white paint on the person’s nose so that he would look like a fool, regardless of how profound were his words. This is more or less the same fate that humour writers suffer. If he takes off his dunce’s cap and throws it to the ground, then someone is sure to pick it up, dust it off, and put it back on his head. I don’t know how I fared in the Alley of the Usurers — I mean whether Zarguzasht was a success or not — but in any event, here you will have foundthe subject, tone, and treatment different. A subject — that is, the experiences to be recounted — determines its own manner of expression. Iqbal couldn’t very well have presented to God his ‘Complaints’ in his teacher Fasihul Mulk Dagh Dehlvi’s racy and flirtatious language. If you translate Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada and Manto’s short stories about prostitutes in Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s gnarled language5 and force prostitutes to listen, then, believe me, it will take no more than a page to get them to abandon their profession. But not just them, me too! I would abandon my writing career because today it might be them, but tomorrow it will be me. In any event, the matter, mood, and modulations of this book are quite different. I wrote what I saw — a mystic witnesses, and then talks.
A storyteller of the old style, meaning a storytelling mystic, may be proud of his art and forthrightness, and he may take great pains to shave off every last hair on his head, and yet it’s an old habit of the weavers of words that in the course of telling the story — in the course of interposing the warp and woof of the story — they suddenly change its tone, plot, and pleasures. It’s also possible that in the course of storytelling, the storyteller himself changes: he’s no longer the same man. Something like that happened to this sinful storyteller.6
Take this instrument away from me
Because I’m done
My song has turned into blood
And flows from the harp’s strings
This is neither a boast nor an excuse but rather a statement of fact.
Praise be to God that I’m at that point in my physical and literary life where I’m so indifferent to gold stars and black marks that I wouldn’t even mind admitting to errors I haven’t committed. Despite my insistence that ‘if they don’t get the joke, they’re not from around here,’ I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’m a gloomy and quite feeble person by temperament, habit, and principle. Perhaps pessimism is the fate of humour writers. Jonathan Swift, the father of humour writers, used to experience bouts of madness: his gloomy moods were so deep that he would decree that his birth was a tragedy, and so for his birthday he would dress in black mourning clothes and fast. Mark Twain also got depressed in his old age. Mirza says that I resemble these celebrities only in mood, but in any event one advantage I’ve found to premature despondency is that it eliminates the fear and sting of failure. In fact, it’s tradition in many famous wrestling families that the fathers mangle the ears of boys who show pugilistic promise so that when the boys face off with nefarious opponents and these good-for-nothings tear at their ears, the boys will feel nothing. I think of humour as a defense mechanism. It’s not the sword but the chainmail that you put on after being horribly wounded. Zen Buddhism says that laughter is a rung on the way to enlightenment. But a more telling demonstration of the difference between high and low comes when you climb a pole and someone takes away the ladder you used to get there. There’s another saying I’ve heard: when a monkey falls from the top of a tree and lands on the ground, it’s still a monkey.
***
‘The Mansion’ tells the story of a dilapidated, abandoned mansion and its hot-tempered owner. ‘A Schoolteacher’s Dream’ is about a depressed horse, a barber, and a secretary. ‘Two Tales of the City’ is the story of a small room and the eccentric man who lived there for seventy-five years. ‘The First Memorable Poetry Festival of Dhiraj Ganj’ presents caricatures of one teacher and the founder of an infamous country school. ‘The Car, The Man from Kabul, and The Lampless Aladdin’ is a long-winded series of anecdotal sketches about a ramshackle car, an illiterate Pathan lumber merchant, and a lying braggart of a driver. In all, the characters, whether they be central, secondary, or merely to fill out the scenes, are all by definition ‘common,’ and when it comes to social status, ordinary; for this reason, they deserve extra attention and consideration. All that I’ve seen, learned, and loved about life has come through such people. It’s been my bad luck that the ‘great’ or ‘successful’ people I’ve happened to run across have been entirely second-rate, rancorous, and superficial. Some wise man once said that if you look at how God made the common people in such great number, you can see that it must have given him pleasure or else why would he have made so many? Why would he have kept on making them eon after eon? When we begin to love them and hold them dear, then we finally begin to accept ourselves. The Arabian Nights of their lives doesn’t end at the thousand and first night. Every person is like an unread page. How can we read them all?
It’s possible that some readers won’t take to the minutely detailed nature of this book and its scarcity of what you might call plot. I’ve already stated in some other context that plot is the purview of films, drama, novels, and conspiracies; if you look for it in the everyday, you’ll be looking for quite some time. But details and close observations are neither some disease nor something to celebrate. If they aren’t extraneous and pedantic, but rather are true and interesting, then they tell their own story; there’s no need to force-fit them into some fictional frame or to push them into whatever ideal form you have in mind. Gogol, Chekhov, and Claude Simon all threw random details onto their literary canvases, and Proust made a novel out of his extremely detailed memories of a single dinner party (this is perhaps the best literary example of total recall).7 The greatest example in English of a plotless novel is Ulysses—the story from eight in the morning till the end of the day, June 14, 1940. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is also kind of like this. I mention all these masterpieces only to point out that if my book stumbles, it’s not the technique’s fault but entirely my own. If I get lost counting the trees and miss out on the forest’s beautiful sweep, it’s all on me. In order to appreciate the magnitude and awe of Niagara Falls, you need to go beneath it and look up. Every time I look up, my jaunty hat (stuffed with my ego) falls at my feet.