Master Fakhir Hussain, Basharat’s grade-school teacher, helps elucidate the book’s point of view. Basharat remains quite fond of his teacher, warts and all, so much so that he makes the seemingly outrageous statement that, were he a student today, he would prefer his old teacher’s eccentricity and obvious gaps in knowledge to today’s rational, knowledgeable teacher: ‘Master Fakhir Hussain couldn’t hide his ignorance from even no-good students like me. I’ve met important intellectuals, but if you give me the choice, I’d prefer to learn from Master Fakhir Hussain. Sir, he was a real man. He wasn’t a book. He taught you about life.’ We don’t take at face value, however, the statement that Basharat would prefer an ignorant teacher to a distinguished intellectual; rather we understand his rhetorical emphasis on how learning must take place outside as well as inside the classroom. The last two sentences quoted above sound like an adage, and so something with a pre-approved truthfulness — real life teaches you more than books. Since it is hard for us to imagine loveable ignorance in adults, especially those entrusted to guide children, we treat the entire passage as a type of rhetorical flourish.
But this isn’t the last mention of Master Fakhir Hussain. Basharat then recounts how his teacher had to fill in for a colleague and teach English grammar to ninth-graders and how, despite his can-do attitude, he was woefully unprepared to deal with this subject:
Once he wrote ‘TO GO’ on the blackboard and then asked the boys, ‘OK, then, someone tell me — what is this?’ One boy raised his hand, ‘A simple infinitive!’ He nodded his head approvingly, ‘Exactly right.’ But then he saw that another boy still had his hand up. He asked, ‘Is there anything wrong?’ The boy answered, ‘No, sir. It’s a noun infinitive.’ Master Fakhir Hussain answered, ‘Oh, you mean from that perspective.’ But then he saw that the smartest boy in class still had his hand raised. He said, ‘You still haven’t put down your hand. What is it? Please speak up.’ He said, ‘It’s a gerundial infinitive, but not a reflexive verb. Nesfield’s grammar says so.’ And with this, it was clear to him that
He was voyaging across uncharted waters.
He said in a calm and understanding way, ‘Oh, you mean from that perspective.’ Then he saw that the fluent English-speaking boy who had gone to an English-medium school had his hand up. He said, ‘Well? Well? Well?’ The boy said, ‘Sir, I am afraid this is an intransitive verb.’ So he said, ‘Oh, you mean from that perspective.’ But he didn’t understand the idiomatic expression ‘I am afraid,’ and so he said to the boy in a tone full of love, ‘But, my dear, what’s there to be afraid of?’
He always said that people should always leave the door open to knowledge. But he himself had never opened any of the doors. Find me a teacher nowadays for whose ignorance you feel any love!
Despite the humour of this situation, we are still prone to read Basharat’s avowal of love for his teacher as hyperbole.
But there is a way to understand Basharat’s fondness for his former teacher as being quite real, and this way also helps us resolve the book’s rather ambivalent comments about nostalgia. It involves local, or regional, culture, which we have already suggested is one of the book’s implicit concerns. Master Fakhir Hussain, like all the characters of this book, is nothing if not an emblem of local culture — the good, the bad, and the ugly. This sort of character is what Yousufi means when he refers to ‘common’ people: ‘In all, the characters, whether they be central, secondary, or merely to fill out the scenes, are all by definition “common,” and when it comes to social status, ordinary; for this reason, they deserve extra attention and consideration.’ The word ‘common’ implies a lot: it suggests the poor, the uneducated, and the non-mobile; or the opposite of the wealthy, the well-educated, and the mobile. We think the word ‘local’ describes better the book’s characters. For one, Basharat himself, a business owner, is resolutely middle class, and he is mobile, as his trip to India shows.
The book criticizes intellectuals at several points, and yet, if we weigh this criticism of intellectuals against Yousufi’s professed love for common people, we see no necessary conflict in these terms. To be an intellectual suggests nothing about income or mobility; it only designates a level of education. So, if we are to take these complaints against intellectuals seriously, the focus of these attacks must lie first in their pretensions toward exceeding local knowledge and culture. Basheer, the school servant, whom Basharat returns to see in Kanpur, puts it like this: ‘Today’s scholars are so arrogant that they think of themselves as wisdom incarnate. New things cramp their style, like new shoes. But even though they’ve swallowed the entire ocean with all the oysters in it, they still can’t spit out even one pearl.’
In his afterword, Yousufi states that local people are the true source of what good he finds in life, and that, by contrast, those who, through education and privilege, have escaped narrow cultural confines, risk being less grounded and suffer more often from the ills of egotism: ‘It’s been my bad luck that the “great” or “successful” people I’ve happened to run across have been entirely second-rate, rancorous, and superficial.’ In Master Fakhir Hussain, Basharat sees someone who, even if ignorant, is still honest; and someone who does not seek to repudiate the way that local culture has shaped him. And these local cranks are the characters — indeed, the ‘characters’—that Yousufi loves most.
Nostalgia, then, is good, insofar as it reminds us of a cultural value — the local. Without putting his sentiments into exactly these words, Basharat may appreciate in his old ‘master’ how he represented a time when local ambitions, local personality quirks, and local cultural attitudes weren’t deemed backward, retrograde, or thought of as being contrary to progress and the imperatives of a modern mindset. This book recalls a time when life was, for better or worse, more fully local, and it reminds us how the circumscription of culture held people in closer contact. Values were more locally defined, and people were seen in their many lights at once, and that surpasses what most of us in our fragmented, hyperkinetic, and global mindsets can offer today.
Mirages of the Mind
The Mansion
1.
He’s Human but Don’t Look into His Eyes
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.
He had always been my relative somehow or the other. Before he became my father-in-law, he was my phuppa. Before that, I called him Dear Chacha Uncle. And before that, he must have been something else, but I hadn’t yet learned to speak. My extended family lives in Muradabad and Kanpur, and how everyone is related to everyone else is as mixed up as a pot of sewaiyan. I’ve never met any man as foul-tempered and awe-inspiring as Qibla. When he died, I must have been half done too, I mean, around forty years old. But, sir, his eyes were so threatening that they terrorized me every day of his life, and they will continue to terrorize me till the day I die. His big eyes bulged from their sockets. They were always bloodshot — really bloodshot. As red as pigeon’s blood. I thought the red veins around his pupils would burst in a fountain of blood to spray across my face. He was always as mad as hell, God knows why. He swore as a matter of habit. His writing was as foul as his speech. The pen would start smouldering in his hand. Of course there were some people he couldn’t curse out. In those cases, he would look at them in a way that suggested real physical violence. Well, no one dared disagree with him. And if someone happened to blubber ‘yes’ to something he said, he would flip his stance and start arguing from the opposite perspective.