From Race Course to Horse-Drawn Cart
As his business started to do better, his desire to have a phaeton only grew. Basharat spent months looking for a horse. It seemed as though a horse meant everything to him, and, like Richard III, he was ready to give up everything for one:
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
His neighbour Chaudhuri Karam Ilahi told him that he should go to the police stud farm near Sargodha because the police breed thoroughbreds and other top-notch horses there. If the father is a purebred, then its son is bound to be as well. The saying goes that a son is like his father, and a horse is like its father as well, and if not in features, then at least in feelings. Basharat said, ‘I don’t believe that. The fact is that any horse born from the police’s breeding and midwifery can never be purebred. It will only be a police horse.’
Hearing this talk of horses, Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus, MA, BT, recited that famous couplet (and, as usual, his choice was quite out of place), in which a narcissus flower cries for thousands of years in the fear of the complications attendant upon the birth of a sage. Mirza says that Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus always looks foolish when he interrupts others to impart some nugget of wisdom. And if he doesn’t say anything, he looks even more foolish, thanks to his normal facial expression, which is as though,
If I speak, it’s meaningless; if I don’t speak, the same.
As for his normal expression, it is the flush of blood that comes over his face when he sees someone’s zipper stuck halfway down.
Finally Basharat took a liking to a horse owned by a businessman who had a steel rerolling mill. He went to see the horse three or four times, and each time he returned liking it even more. He was taken so much by its white coat that it was all he talked about: he loved talking about it. When I asked if it didn’t just have a little white on its forehead and hooves, he scoffed, ‘Even a water buffalo can have that. A horse isn’t revered just for having a little white here and there. All eight leg-joints should be strong. All four ankles and all four knees should be strong. This isn’t some hired horse. It’s from a family of racehorses.’ The businessman also showed him the brochure of the Karachi Race Club that was printed by Associated Press and that noted that this horse not only had run in such-n-such race but had won as well. The brochure had a picture and notes about the horse’s character, as well as a family tree, which went like this — White Rose, son of Wild Oats, son of Old Devil. From the moment he set eyes upon this magnificent horse, Basharat stopped feeling any pride about his own ancestry. According to him, the horse’s grandfather had won three races in Bombay. He was running in his fourth when he had a heart attack and died. His grandmother was a real slut. She had relations with all of the most famous English stallions of that era. Thanks to these stallions having held onto the hem of her chastity, she gave birth to six colts. Each took after his father. A degenerate nobleman had owned White Rose before the businessman. This man was building for his Anglo-Indian wife Alice a mansion called Wonderland on Bath Island. He bought rebar from the rerolling mill, and yet after several months had passed he still hadn’t paid his bill. He went bankrupt from racing and gambling debts, and so the construction of Wonderland stopped. Alice hastily left him, hooked up with a landlord from Multan, and then took off with him to Europe. The day that the businessman heard that one of the man’s creditors had gone to Wonderland’s construction site and had taken away sacks of cement and rebar, he sent his manager with a mercenary troupe of five guards armed with clubs with the instructions to take whatever at all they could get their hands on. That meant the horse. And a Siamese cat, which they stuffed into a gunnysack and brought as well. To drive home the point of the horse’s tragedy, Basharat expressed his sympathy for me: ‘This horse was hardly born to be yoked to a cart. The businessman didn’t treat him right. But that’s fate for you. Sir, three or four years ago, who would have guessed that you would be stuck in a bank? You could have been Deputy Commissioner or District Magistrate, and now look at your tiny bank teller’s stool!’
A Kingly Ride
He had fallen in love with the horse at first sight. And love is blind, even when it comes to horses. It never occurred to him that the couplets of the Urdu masters that he had a penchant for reciting at inappropriate times didn’t have anything to do with those horses that pull carts. There’s no harm in admitting that a horse is a kingly ride. The image of kingly pomp and splendour is incomplete — nay, half of itself — without a horse. If you put a king on a horse, then at last he looks as tall as a regular man. But if you look at it closely, a horse is only the second of kingly conveyances. That’s because a king’s favourite ride is always actually his people. Once they’ve gotten a chance to ride them, then there are no wells, no ditches, no fences, and no obstacles in their way. Blinded by power, they don’t see the writing on the walls. They’ll be able to read only after it’s rewritten in Braille. What kings think of as their court is really their Bastille, and this prevents them from understanding that if you just let the headstrong horse neigh a little, then all will be well. But you can’t rely upon this means of conveyance because this piebald horse doesn’t walk at a consistent gait:
Often it got testy and difficult to ride.
Kill the Poor on the First Day
But those rulers who are clever and who understand human nature and statecraft kill the poor on the very first day and thus teach a lesson to the elite.
Kill the poor on the first day
But the elite (and the dignitaries of state) don’t need a warning, or to be pricked with an elephant goad. They are always ready to become the show elephant for whoever gives them a gold canopy, silver bells, and a brocade elephant covering strung with a lanyard of medals. First, they are obsequious and willing to do anything. The next day, their lips are sealed. And the next day, they are relegated to the outhouse.
Their life is four days long. Two days are spent yearning for power. And two days are spent as Yes-men.
Our Camel Saddle
One day I happened to vent a little contempt toward horses, and Basharat got hot under the collar. I had satirized the historical example that when the Mongols rode out in the thousands upon their horses, the stench was so putrid that you could smell it from twenty miles away. He replied, ‘Excuse me, but you grew up in Rajasthan where you only saw camels, starched white Rajputi turbans, thick beards, and guns ten-feet long; and below this, the Jat servants walking with their clubs resting on their shoulders and freshly made, oil-soaked leather shoes hanging from those. You saw horses for the first time when you came to Pakistan. Mian Ahsan Ilahi is my witness. He was there when you told the story of the feudal baron who was a cavalry officer in the king’s camel platoon. When he retired and returned home — what was that place called? — oh, yes, Udaipur Torawati — he had a dozen or so reed stools set up for visitors and, for himself, his old government saddle from his camel Jung Bahadur. And on this saddle, he sat fidgeting from dawn till dusk wearing his platoon’s vermillion turban and his medals on his chest. One day, as he sat fidgeting while recounting the exploits of Jung Bahadur, and as his medals tinkled away, he had a heart attack. From the saddle itself, the bird of his soul flew from the cage of the elements. At the moment of death, he was smiling with the name of Jung Bahadur on his lips.