Look How the Rainy Season Is Celebrated, Friends!
While Basharat’s father asked Chaudhuri Karam Ilahi to help him change the position of his paralysed leg, he would often say that in his youth he had played the harmonium so well that the masters of the craft acknowledged his superiority. His love of music reminded him of those days when the Bombay Theatrical Company had come to town and he had watched the same play every day for a month, and for the rest of the year he had gone around mouthing lines from it. Beginning in 1925, he had watched every show from the orchestra pit, which was considered in those days the height of all connoisseurship and status. He had learned to play the harmonium from one theatre company’s retired harmonium player who was called the peti master. He said that to keep his finger-joints and the veins and muscles of his fingers nimble he had the habit of wrapping cracked-wheat halva around his fingers for months on end. He was light-skinned and delicate. Despite being ill for so long, even now his cheeks were rosy in the winter. His velvety eyes looked even more beautiful when he closed them. He wore a white achkan coat. His churidar pyjamas clung to his thick calves. During his youth, he was a very handsome, well-dressed man. Now any mention of his youth caused him to writhe in pain.
You shot an arrow at my heart! Oh, oh!
How full of longing it was when each day bloomed like a new lotus! ‘When the shadows were green, and the sunlight rosy…’ Just thinking about them made his breathing speed up. The days, months, and years of the past started to swirl around him like autumn leaves. Oh my! Ustad Faiyaz Khan’s wild, whirlwind-like alap gaining momentum; Gauhar Jan’s crystalline voice; Mukhtar Begum’s rich voice! Basharat’s father measured his youth in these memories. Then these dream fragments began to melt away. The river of memories flowed on, but it descended into the mirages of the mind. A heavy rain started to fall. A fragrance rose from the earth, and a hot, intoxicating odour wafted off the body. Thin kurtas, soaked through and through, couldn’t hide anything. The clouds erupted; the rain carried with it everything in its path.
The clouds rise from the breast, the rain falls from the eyes
It’s not the rain of Phagun, which lasts a moment then dies
It’s Bhadon’s rain — a downpour that never dies
(Insha Allah Khan Insha)
While it rained cats and dogs—jham jham jham—Basharat’s father would play the harmonium with both hands — sometimes he played the snake charmer’s songs and sometimes the light-hearted and soul-searching dirges of Ustad Jhande Khan; people said that the black cobras would come out of their holes and start to dance, and the moon would appear in the window. Somewhere else, on roofs that were still sizzling from the rain, the scarves of the girls looking out at the rainbow took on the rainbow’s colours. Somewhere else, despite their best efforts, the pinch-marks and stains from cheap chunri scarves wouldn’t leave girls’ pretty arms. When the melody sped up, the surroundings echoed—jhun jhun jhun—as though someone had ecstatically picked up both heaven and earth and smashed them together like a pair of cymbals, and now their reverberations coursed through everyone’s bodies and couldn’t be stopped.
7.
A Newspaper Hat
Three or four months passed without incident. The kids’ school closed for summer vacation. One day Basharat had the horse yoked to the cart, and, for the tenth time, went to the Municipal Corporation Building to get approval for his plans. As he left, he said to Maulana that he wouldn’t return until he got approval. Enough is enough. How can the bastards deny him again? This wasn’t just empty boasting. He had already plied them with all sorts of examples, ratiocinations, and arguments. Now he was going with five ‘greens’7 because the sword of wealth cuts through all riddles and burls. He had to go from alley to alley because there were few roads left in Karachi where a horse-drawn cart was still allowed. Horse-drawn carts were considered worse than rickshaws, and so they were in operation only in those extremely poor sections of the city that, while they were in the city, weren’t considered to be part of it. Who would have thought it? He left Kanpur dreaming that one day, by the grace of God, he would sit with an Italian blanket on his lap as his phaeton went through the streets and people would ask who that fine gentleman was. But the world had changed so much that by the time his dream came true, not only did he have to operate the cart on the sly but, while seated in the cart, he also sat slouched over. If he had had his way, he would have covered himself from head to foot in his Italian blanket so that no one could recognize him. Whenever he went out at day, he would sit with The Dawn newspaper spread out covering his face and torso so that only his legs peeked out as though they were appendages to the paper itself. One day, Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig said that he should make a hat out of the paper so that no one could see his face — a hat just like the horrible ones that criminals wear before they’re hung. He went so far as to say that only newspaper-hats should be worn by criminals walking to the gallows so that the editors too might learn something about life.
A Horse’s Long Jump
The Municipal Corporation Building was still some five hundred metres away when they saw a funeral procession coming around the alley’s corner. When Basharat had hired Khalifa, he had given him strict instructions to avoid funeral processions. But Khalifa’s mind was on something else, and the funeral procession was advancing menacingly upon the horse. Basharat threw the newspaper down and yelled at the top of his lungs, ‘Funeral! Funeral! Khalifa, funeral!’ And so Khalifa started whipping the horse. The horse reared and started neighing. Khalifa lost his wits. Basharat took the reins in hand and tried to turn the horse around. But he turned stubborn and started kicking with his hind legs. Basharat didn’t know that this was the very spot where Khalifa would tie up the horse before leaving to set up his haircutting business. Basharat yelled, ‘Hit him hard!’ In front of them, the danger (meaning, the funeral procession) was inching forward. He was terrified. Guessing from Basharat’s disturbed state, the funeral procession was now within the same ‘range’ that, several months earlier, according to the steel businessman,
The story finished with one long jump of the horse.
Now Basharat was more scared than the horse because he was trying to kick the horse in the side. The horse’s neighing was drowned beneath Basharat’s yelling. Khalifa was whipping the horse like a madman. When the whip struck a heavy blow, the horse reared. Khalifa was beside himself with anger, and when he twice cursed it, ‘May your owner die!’ Basharat was speechless. But at that moment he was busy trying to bring the horse under control. He scolded Khalifa, ‘Khalifa, why are you whipping him like a wussy?’
Upon hearing this, Khalifa got down and then, like a fast bowler in cricket, took a running start at him. With his teeth bared and his eyes closed, he lashed down with the whip with all his might. The whip’s tip caught Basharat on the mouth and on his eyes. He felt as though someone had drawn a line on his face with acid. Later he said, ‘It would be an understatement to say that everything went dark. It felt as though I was blinded.’ In just one sentence, his curses jumped from ‘idiot’ to ‘asshole’ to ‘motherfucker.’ How he then got to Khalifa — whether it was by vaulting over the horse or by ducking beneath his legs — no one knows; but when he got there, he grabbed the whip from Khalifa and whipped the horse so hard that it wondered what was going on.