NARRATIVE DIGRESSIONS
Yousufi’s style is situated between the oral and the written, as it toggles between the recitation of anecdotes, third-person accounts, and intellectual asides. Yousufi himself functions as the narrator and scribe whom Basharat occasionally addresses in the course of telling his stories. This oral-textual style appears immediately in the first chapter, ‘The Mansion’: ‘Long Live Qibla! When I first met him in 1945, he was as old as I am now. But since I’m talking about my good friend Basharat Ali Farooqi’s father-in-law, it would be good to let Basharat say a few things. I’ve heard the stories dozens of times. Now it’s time for you.’ Here, Yousufi writes in the first person. But he immediately passes the narrative task to a new storyteller. This back-and-forth between Yousufi and Basharat continues throughout the book, and it creates the story-within-a-story texture familiar from classic Eastern, or Oriental, tales.
Yousufi’s narrative style favours the anecdote, the vignette, and the digressive. The book is episodic and picaresque. Its chapters are arranged not in strict chronological order but associatively, providing, in toto, the story of some fifty years of Basharat’s life, and doing so in the way that events are recalled in conversation. Yousufi has chosen this form self-consciously, or, perhaps, it has chosen him:
Writing about Basharat’s love for phaetons and horses has brought me far afield. My mentor and master Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig once shared with me a great piece of wisdom: ‘When you slip on a banana peel, you should never ever try to stop yourself or put on the brakes because that will only cause greater injury. Just slip without a care in the world. Enjoy it. In the words of the great poet Zauq, “Go as far as it goes.” When the banana peel becomes tired, it will stop on its own. Just relax.’ So I use this principle not only when walking but also when writing and thinking. But why shouldn’t I go ahead and tell you the whole truth? All my life, the banana peel and the banana peel alone has been my sole means of conveyance. If you happen to notice a youthful spring to my step, it’s due to the banana peel. If my pen happens to slip, then I go along with it happily.
Not only does his own writing lead to digressions, but he also presents characters that prefer this method of telling:
Now listen to the rest of the story as told by Basharat in his circuitous way. (The fun of it is not ‘long story short’ but ‘short story long.’) In so far as my pen and my memory allow, I will try to recreate word for word his special idioms, his way of talking, and his lilt and stutter. Whenever he starts telling a story, his digressions and random asides start telling their own story. He doesn’t even let you catch your breath.
Digressions are so thoroughly interwoven into the fabric of the book that it would be wrong to consider them secondary to a supposedly primary narrative. The book’s reading pleasure is found in ‘short story long’ and not ‘long story short.’ Not only does Yousufi, the narrator-cum-scribe, intrude upon Basharat’s stories to offer his own opinion, but two other characters also frequently provide commentary, though they themselves never appear within the stories themselves. Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig, mentioned in the quote just above, and Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus, MA, BT, offer comments in every chapter. Both pretend to be fonts of wisdom, and their comments demonstrate varying degrees of ridiculousness. In a way, they resemble Statler and Waldorf, the two hack critics from the Muppets, who provide inappropriate commentary from the balcony and yet find themselves intensely funny.
CULTURAL NOSTALGIA
Nostalgia is the feeling of loss over what has disappeared; it can range from innocent daydreams to a deep and persistent desire to return to the past to recover what has been left behind. These attempts are almost always futile: what has disappeared is not simply a person or a place, but that person and place in time, as they existed then. Outside of that time, they are not the same, and the difference between the two — the one known and the one returned to — is enough to frustrate any sense of recovery. Strong nostalgia can disable a person. But most people live with a weak sense of nostalgia, a tendency to think back to past times, people, and places, and to reminisce fondly.
Yousufi contextualizes this book as, in part, a critique of nostalgia. It goes without saying that the partition of the subcontinent created cultural nostalgia for many displaced people, and so this book can be read as another volume of Partition literature, a dominant subgenre of north Indian and Pakistani letters. While Yousufi’s general critique is never directed explicitly toward those displaced by Partition, inevitably those characters at which he pokes fun for their symptoms of nostalgia are these very ones. Perhaps as a defense mechanism against the real losses that immigration entails, including those of the ‘muhajirs,’ or Urdu-speaking Indian Muslims, to the new state of Pakistan, he criticizes the tendency, especially prevalent among the elderly, to long for the ‘good old’ times and the places and experiences of youth. Examples of this outward critique are numerous. In his afterword, he likens nostalgia to a drug:
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, and the heady rivers of memory descend into the mirages of the mind.
Nostalgia, he writes, is like a drug, or a mirage, something that promises much and delivers only a paltry version of that promise, if at all.
‘Two Tales of the City’ deals directly with Basharat’s nostalgia for Kanpur, his hometown. After his wife’s death, a sharp pang of nostalgia overwhelms him:
According to an old saying, regardless of exactly how many defects old age has, it has one more burdensome than all the rest combined. And that’s nostalgia. In old age, a person prefers to turn back from their unwanted, imminent end to recall the places they used to know. In old age, the past flashes all its dangerous charms. Old, lonely people live in sad houses where they have to have lights on even at noon; and when bedtime rolls around and they put out the lights, their minds are lit by the bright glow of memories. As this glow becomes brighter, so too their desolation becomes more pronounced.
So something like this happened to him as well.
And yet when it comes to characters suffering from nostalgia, Basharat or otherwise, Yousufi treats them so gently, and their depictions are so endearing that we can’t take the author’s stated objection too literally. Certainly, those who suffer from nostalgia are easy, and rewarding, targets of humour, as who, other than the truly enlightened, hasn’t looked back from time to time with a sense of longing for yesteryear? Furthermore, Yousufi himself suffers from a sort of nostalgia — his penchant for antique words — which he acknowledges without regret:
‘Mirza often taunts me about this,’ I replied. ‘He says that I’m one of the very few who hasn’t filed a claim for property abandoned back in India, and the reason for this is that before coming to Pakistan, I dug up all the local Rosetta Stones, stuffed them into my travel-all, and headed over here. He was just kidding, but, in fact, if I’m able to resurrect one word — yes, just one word — then I’ll consider my life’s work done.’
It seems as though Yousufi’s position is bound in situational irony: either he intends for his admonishments to be taken at face value and thus he too is subject to them, or his scolding is like between friends and so without real bite. Despite his occasional protests to the contrary, we’re left with reading the book in quite different terms from those of an express critique of nostalgia. It reads more like a sympathetic portrait of the same.