The truth of the matter was that Qibla couldn’t recognize how the times had changed; he lacked the necessary parts of a personality to do so — tolerance, patience, gentleness, and flexibility. The fact was that these qualities weren’t considered attributes in feudal society. Strictness, wilfulness, haughtiness, harshness, and a bad temper were all thought to be the strengths — and true qualities — of a feudal character. But this wasn’t true just for feudal landlords; even scholars took pride in being this way.
I’m neither a fragrance nor a flower
I burn like a fire wherever I go
Things began to deteriorate quickly for Qibla. His friend Mian Inam Ilahi, who had a lot of influence over him despite being younger, advised him to get rid of the shop and buy a bus because that was a good way of earning income while sitting at home. He said he would take care of getting a route permit. Then he said, ‘You can earn a tidy sum.’ Qibla took this amiss. He said, ‘You can earn good money playing the tabla and sarangi. There’s a time-honoured tradition in my family that even if you’re destined to fall into ruin and disgrace, it’s better to do so in the family line of work. I don’t give a damn about tidy sums!’
Now whatever heaven has in store for me, I’m not going to take it
Even if it’s this world and the hereafter, I’m not going to take it
It doesn’t give it the way I want it
The way it gives it to me, I’m not going to take it
Last Curse
His business wasn’t just in a slump, it was dead. His mood was similar. He moped all day. He went to the shop not because business required him to, but for psychological reasons. He dreaded the thought of closing up and sitting around at home. Then one day it happened that his new Pathan servant Zarrin Gul Khan was several hours late. He tried not to be upset, but his old habit got the better of him.
Several months earlier he had hired a sixty-year-old accountant on half wages. This man had worn a long ochre robe. He had sat barefoot and cross-legged on the floor while he did his work. It was against his belief to sit in a chair or on any raised thing. He was devoted to a saint in the Warsi order. He was dutiful, honest, regular in his prayers and fasting, hypersensitive, and completely useless. Once Qibla had got upset and cursed him, ‘Filth merchant!’ Qibla didn’t care about his white beard either. This man had replied very calmly, ‘Exactly, sir. What else can this old man peddle if that’s all you sell? Goodbye.’ And he left. The next day he didn’t come back, and Qibla stopped using that term for good. But that wasn’t the only insult he knew.
So when he got mad at Zarrin Gul Khan, an insult slipped from his lips that had once been his favourite. The curse’s terrible echo reached all the way to the Adam Khel Mountains where it resounded in the valleys. That’s where Zarrin Gul Khan’s widowed mother lived. His mother had lost her husband when the boy had been six. At twelve, he had promised that after he grew up he would move to Karachi for work and once he had enough money he would buy her brand-new sheets and send them to her.
No one had ever insulted him like that. He was young and headstrong. Qibla had insulted his honour and Pakhtun pride. Zarrin Gul Khan snatched Qibla’s hat from his head and threw it to the floor. He brandished his knife and stood at the ready. He said, ‘You old fool. Get lost. Or else I’ll rip out your guts and eat your liver raw. Then I’ll hang your filthy corpse from this pole!’
A customer disarmed the man. Qibla bent down, picked up his velvet hat, and, without wiping off the dirt, put it on his head.
Look How You Break Down
Fifteen minutes later he shut down the store and went home. There he told his wife, ‘I’m not going back anymore.’ A little while later, he heard the call to prayer coming from the neighbourhood mosque. After only the second iteration of ‘Allah hu Akbar,’ Qibla washed his hands and feet and, for the first time in forty years, stood ready to pray. His wife’s jaw dropped in amazement. And he too froze because he realized that he could remember only two chapters of the Quran! He couldn’t even recall the invocation of prayers! So, he finished up quickly.
He couldn’t have imagined that a person could break from the inside. And to break in this fashion! When you break down, you make peace with your friends and family, with strangers, and even with your worst enemy — that is, you make peace with yourself. Then enlightenment becomes possible. The book of true wisdom opens.
If you have eyes, the world’s a house of mirrors
You see faces everywhere you turn
There are those cautious types who ensconce themselves within the protective walls of inaction in order to escape the trials and tribulations of life. Like heavy, expensive curtains, they too eventually fray. Then there are those overly serious people who crack like walls: tiny cracks appear that could easily be painted over or covered with decorations, but these cracks reveal that the walls are collapsing slowly from the inside. Some people crack like porcelain. They’re easily fixed with glue, but all you see are the cracks. On the other hand, there are shameless sycophants made of unbreakable stuff. They are like chewing gum: regardless of how much you chew them, they don’t break. They bend but never break. If you contemptuously spit them out, they stick to your shoes and won’t let go. You’ll stop to question why you spat in the first place: at least when they were in your mouth, you were able to chew on them! These people are not really human, but they do understand human psychology. These are the successful ones, the lucky ones. They observe, test, and measure people, and when they find them useless, they turn their backs on them. The vagaries of time place a crown of spume on their heads as they sit for a moment on a wave’s flying throne.
There are also people who are like windshields. When they are whole, they are as clean and transparent as a mystic’s heart: through them, you can see the whole world. And when they suddenly break, they do so completely. They don’t ding, chink, or split. Rather, they shatter into a thousand pieces so that there remains no evidence of the mystic, the world, or the glass. Nor is there any fear any longer; the only thing that remains is mystical ecstasy.
There are egos that break like the fortune of tyrants, or like Solomon’s staff, against which he was leaning when the bird of his soul flew from the cage of his body. His lifeless body stood for many years, and no one suspected that he had died. He was dead and soulless, but because his authority had grown so overwhelming, the affairs of state continued as per usual. Termites were eating away at his staff, and one day it snapped in two. Solomon’s empty body fell to the earth. That was when his nation and his people learned that he had already died.
So that evening Qibla’s ego broke like a termite-infested staff, one that he had long been using as a crutch for his anger, that had allowed him to live a carefree life, and that had been the source of his vanity, as well as his vim and vigour.
I Burnt, but I Never Turned into Coals or Ashes
That night Qibla couldn’t sleep. The muezzin was announcing the morning prayers when a watchman from the lumber market came to his house. He was panting and trembling, ‘Sir, your shop and lumberyard are on fire. The fire engines got there at three. Everything’s burnt to coals. Sir, fires don’t start on their own!’ By the time he got to the shop, everything was, in the government’s terminology, ‘under control.’ That was due to the firemen’s prompt action as well as the fact that there was nothing left to burn. The forked tongues of the leaping flames were now black. But the pine boards were still burning and sputtering, and they were showering the environs near and far with their heady scent.