‘Mushtaq Sahib, I’m sorry, but you were the one who told me this story. My lord, why don’t you get off your high horse and stop making fun of others? Anyway, what do you know about horses? You don’t even know what a blacklegged thoroughbred is. Or how to crossbreed a donkey. Or what a curry comb looks like. Or where on the head the horse’s ears are. Or where to prick an ox with an awl. Or from which language the word “pine nut” comes.’
The last two statements finished our conversation. Seeing how personal it had become, I decided not to say anything. His banter wasn’t pleasing to me in the least; I didn’t know the answer to a single one of his questions. He’s not a difficult person by nature; he’s soft-spoken and sweet. But when he gets derailed like this, he drags me along in the mud for quite a ways. He said, ‘If you haven’t ridden a horse, you’ll never be happy, high-minded, or lion-hearted.’ He must have been right because he himself had never ridden a horse.
Keep Far Away from Funerals
The horse filled a spiritual vacuum that had existed in him for quite a while. He was very surprised to think how (and why) he had made it up till then:
I wonder by my troth what thou and I did till we loved.
(Donne)
This love for the horse had grown so much that he agreed to buy from the businessman a horse-drawn cart as well, and that for 450 rupees, even though he didn’t like it at all. It was really big and bulky. But what could he do? There wasn’t a single phaeton in all of Karachi. The businessman wanted to sell the horse and cart together. Well, not just those, but he also forced him to buy two sacks of grain, five lots of hay, the horse’s framed photo, digestive salts, a long tube to administer medicine orally, a curry comb, and a nosebag. This lot cost twenty-nine and a half rupees, and the businessman called this swindle a ‘package deal.’ He had to overspend for the horse too. If he had asked the price straight from the horse’s mouth, it never would have been what he paid—900 rupees. And throughout this, Basharat also had to put up with the businessman’s pet interjections—‘you know’ and ‘fucking.’ After he had made the down payment and had taken the reins in hand, and thinking then that nothing in the world could prevent his dream from coming true, Basharat asked why he was selling such a good horse — was there some hidden flaw? The businessman answered, ‘Two months ago I was on Lawrence Road going to the market. I must have been in front of the City Workshop when a fucking funeral appeared in front of me, you know? It was a fucking police officer’s. The horse shied all of a sudden. But the people in the fucking procession freaked out even more. For no reason at all, they took off, you know? The body was dropped right there in the middle of the fucking road. And I stood watching it like some dumb fuck. From that day, the horse hasn’t been worth the grain it takes to fucking feed him. I’ve fallen out of love, you know? So there’s nothing really wrong with him. Just keep him away from fucking funerals. See ya!’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘Why didn’t you ask before? See ya—’
2.
I Wandered the World like a Will-o’-the-Wisp
He hired a driver named Rahim Bakhsh. He agreed to the salary that Rahim Bakhsh proposed: forty-five rupees, food, and clothes. He had bought the horse after seeing its colour, teeth, and thick tail; he was so satisfied by those parts that he didn’t think it was necessary to inspect anything else. He hired his driver in much the same way. That is, based only on his way of talking. He was a master of the tall tale. His face looked like a horse’s. When he laughed, he looked like a horse neighing. From living among horses for thirty years, he had taken on all of their habits, defects, and bad odours. If a horse had only two legs, it would walk exactly like him. He would amuse kids by wiggling his left ear. When he scored a goal in soccer by kicking the ball backwards off his heel, kids would erupt in applause. He stole the chickpeas intended for the horse. Basharat said, ‘The ingrate also steals hay and eats it. How could one horse eat so much? That’s why his hair is still black. Don’t you see? The bastard has had three wives!’ Whatever the conversation was, Rahim Bakhsh expressed himself using a groom’s vocabulary, and at night he slept with a whip. Whenever a horse (male or female) should come within two miles, he would immediately start flaring his nostrils to get its scent. If he should happen to cross paths with a good-looking mare on the street, he would stop, wink at the driver, and ask how old she was. Then he would peel back his horse’s leather blinders and say, ‘Take it in, buddy. She’s something to remember!’ Then he would start singing a tune of his own devising in a voice like Pankaj Malik’s to the beat of the horse’s hooves, ‘I wandered the world like a will-o’-the-wisp,’ and then head off down the road. Mirza says that he was a horse in his last life and that he will be a horse in his next life; and that only great prophets, sages, and saints have the good luck to be the same thing in former and upcoming lives. The rest of us have no such luck.
I Went Along Hugging the Wall
Call it what you will — the horse and cart’s unveiling, its confirmation ceremony, or its breaking in — but Basharat’s father took care of it. After he turned seventy, he was almost always sick. After he moved to Karachi, despite his best efforts, he couldn’t get a house or any other property through the Allotment, and his attempts at going into business failed. At heart, he was a very simple man. He would have considered himself an absolute villain had he changed his time-honoured principles and out-of-date views to match his new circumstances. So instead of being disappointed or embarrassed by his failures, he felt a kind of pride and satisfaction. He was the sort of person who took failure to be the absolute proof of his goodness and integrity. He was a hypersensitive, introverted, and self-respecting man. He had never asked for handouts, not even from a palm reader; but then that changed. He had never offered false praise; this too fell by the wayside. But nothing worked. In the words of Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig, ‘When high-minded, principled people suffer a lot beneath the Wheel of Fortune, they become demoralized and so try to implement clumsily the tricks of the successful, and yet this only worsens the situation.’ Then suddenly he suffered a stroke. His left side became paralysed. He developed diabetes, allergies, Parkinson’s, and God knows what other maladies. Some said that his battered ego had taken refuge in disease and that he himself didn’t want to get well because then no one would feel any sympathy for him. Now he wasn’t as sad about his failures as he was about his turning his back on his time-honoured principles. When people came by to console him and suggest ways of improving his situation, his eyes filled with tears.
You’re living the life of Riley, and yours truly is left with nothing
The biggest fall from grace, indignity, and dishonour that anyone can experience is when you have become worthless in your own eyes. So he too passed through this hell.