They have clean bodies and dark hearts like herons
Crows are better — what you see is what you get
Qibla said, ‘Thank God I’m no hypocrite. I know what sins I’ve committed.’
His shop was closed for two years. When he got home from jail, his wife asked, ‘And what now?’ He said, ‘My dear, you’ll soon see.’
My Sweetheart’s Lips
His business picked up so much so that not only others but Qibla too was surprised. He set up shop in his blind, that is, his cabin. He leaned against a bolster in the same haughty posture as before, except now he spread himself out even more, with his legs directed less toward the floor than the sky. Before his jail residency, he had called out to customers by gesticulating politely. Now he ordered them near with just the slightest wiggle of his index finger. His finger moved as though it was changing a wayward kite’s direction. For his hookah, he got a pipe that was one foot longer. He smoked on it less; he used it more to produce gurgling sounds. He exhaled the foul-smelling smoke rings so that they pierced the noses of his customers and hung there like nose rings. He liked to say, ‘Wajid Ali Shah, The World’s Beloved, was unparalleled in giving beautiful names to things. He gave his hookah a lovely name — My Sweetheart’s Lips! If you’ve ever seen a hookah up close, you can guess which sort of lips these were. When he was dethroned, he took only his hookah to Matiya Burj. He left all his beloved Fairy House girls in Lucknow. That was because girls don’t gurgle when you grab them by the waist.’
I’ll Hang You from This Pole
Qibla got the calligraphist from Munshi Daya Narayan Nigam’s magazine Zamanah to write on his fence with coal tar a famous couplet from Urfi:
O, Urfi, don’t worry about your rivals’ plots
Dogs may bark, but beggars get their daily bread just the same.
(I sense racial profiling and discrimination in this couplet. If dogs wrote poetry, the second line would be something like this: Beggars may cry, but dogs get their daily bread just the same.)
Several days after Qibla’s return, his lame enemy — Mr Wrestler — closed his shop for good. Qibla started threatening people over almost nothing. He said, ‘I’ll hang you from this pole, just like I did that fucker!’ Everyone was so scared of him that Qibla didn’t have to motion a customer over; all he had to do was look in his general direction, and the customer was his. If a customer happened to enter someone else’s store by accident, that store’s owner wouldn’t show him anything. One day a man was walking down the street when Qibla wiggled his finger at him. The owner and assistant of the store in front of which the man was passing grabbed this man and pushed him into Qibla’s shop. Inside, the man beat back his tears to say he was on his way to Mool Ganj to watch a kite-flying competition!
5.
This Is Not the Tree I Was Looking For
Then suddenly business dried up. He was a diehard Muslim League supporter, and this affected things. Then Pakistan came into being. The rallying cries he had been shouting came true, and he paid the price twice over. Customers turned away. The mice of the lumber market turned into lions. The friends and family with whom he had constantly bickered (and whom he hated) left one by one for Pakistan, and he realized suddenly that he couldn’t live without hating them. When his daughter and son-in-law sold their shop and left for Karachi, he too cut the cord. He sold his shop to a broker for next to nothing. People suspected that Mr Wrestler had used the broker as an intermediary to buy the store. Qibla suspected as much. But he couldn’t have cared less. In a flash, his ancestral connection to the place was severed, and he left his homeland and headed toward the new dreamland.
Qibla had always been proud as a peacock. But when he immigrated to Karachi, not only did he find the land strange but his own feet as well. Somehow or the other he managed to open a shop on Harchandrai Road in Lee Market. But things didn’t work out. There’s a phrase in Gujarati that goes, ‘You can’t put a new rim on an old jar.’ He had left for greener pastures, but his old eyes couldn’t spot a pilkhan tree. No, he couldn’t even find a neem tree. What people called a neem tree was really a hoop tree. In Lucknow, Hakim Sahib-e-Alam prescribed its fruit for dysentery or piles.
This is not the tree I was looking for!
The fussy teak buyers of Karachi were nothing like the countrified customers of Kanpur. In fact, what troubled him most was how there wasn’t one person in the vicinity — i.e. one person that fell beneath his terrifying shadow — that he could curse out without reason and without fear of retaliation. One day he said to me, ‘Here, carpenters cut with their tongues. Four or five days ago, this saucy carpenter was in the store. His name was Iqbal Maseeh [Messiah]. I said, “Hey, stand to the side a bit.” He said, “Jesus Christ was a Turkhan too.” I said, “This is blasphemy! I’ll hang you from this pole!” He said, in dialect, “That’s what they said to Jesus too.” ’
Mir Taqi Mir in Karachi
From the very start, Qibla couldn’t stand Karachi, and vice versa. All day long he would nitpick. His complaints ran like this:
‘Man alive, are these mosquitos or man-eaters? Even DDT can’t kill them. They only die when they land inside the hands of a clapping qawwal singer. If one happens to bite a poet, they go crazy, and then go sterile, and then die. The reprobate Nimrod died when a mosquito went up his nose. Karachi’s mosquitos are all related to that murderous one. Listen to the way they speak. For the first time in my life I heard a man call another man by what I thought you said only to dogs. In fact, he was addressing his servant.
‘Mir Taqi Mir didn’t say anything while he sat in the cart that the camel was pulling toward Lucknow. He didn’t talk to his fellow traveller because their way of talking would have polluted his own. If Mir had lived in Karachi, I swear to God, he would have bound his mouth shut for good. He would have ended up getting arrested in conjunction with some thievery just because of his suspicious appearance. I swear! People in Tonk call guavas “safri,” and I’ve heard that too. But here people call them “jaam.” Where I was from the name “Victoria” meant Queen Victoria. Here, if you can get a dozen people onto a horse-drawn cart, they call that a “Victoria.” Once I was in Lahore for two days. There you call the red-light district the “diamond district.” There’s a new craze for calling singers “music men” and writers “pen men.” Sir, in our day there were only good and bad men, and that didn’t have anything to do with their jobs!