He thought to himself, ‘You set off to comfort one man, but what is this ocean of sadness?’ Thoughts rushed through his mind, ‘Maulana’s father must have been buried in a wet shroud. What kind of place is this where kids can’t play inside or outside? Where little girls grow up on two metres’ worth of land? After a girl gets married and moves to her in-laws,’ what memories will she have of her childhood and her parents’ house?’ But then he thought, ‘She won’t go anywhere. There’s nowhere to go. She’ll put on her red clothes and walk to some other shack somewhere around here. While singing “Why Did You Marry Me So Far Away, O, My Millionaire Father!” her friends will take her to her new two-metre plot. Then on a rainy day just like today, she’ll be taken from there and laid in two metres of earth, and earth’s burden will be folded back onto earth’s breast. But look here — why are you getting so depressed? Why is your outlook on life so teary-eyed? Trees don’t shrink back from the muck. Do flowers cringe at the smell of shit?’
He shivered, and then he twisted the corner of his lips up into a smile. Those who can’t cry, smile like this.
When he had first seen this filthy neighbourhood, he had wanted to throw up. But now he was scared. In the wet, moonlit night, it looked like a ghost town, and not a part of Karachi at all. In all directions, he could only see the shacks’ bamboo walls and their roofs’ dripping mats. It wasn’t a neighbourhood but the skeleton of one: it looked like what the survivors of an atomic bomb would erect. Every puddle reflected the moon, and the ghostly beams of light were dancing their freak show in the muck and mire. The sound of crickets came from everywhere, and yet they couldn’t be seen at all. Fearing monsoon flies and moths, people had put out their kerosene lanterns. Right above Basharat’s head, a curlew cried as it cut across the face of the moon. The wind from the beating wings seemed to ruffle his hair. No, this was all a terrifying dream. Then just as he rounded a bend, he walked into the smoke of burning incense, and his eyes were dazzled. ‘My God, is this real, or am I dreaming?’ he thought.
Outside Maulana Karamat Hussain’s shack, a kerosene lantern was burning. A handful of people were standing there offering their condolences. And outside the hut, there was his white horse standing on a brick plinth!
Maulana’s polio-stricken son was feeding him a piece of nan that a neighbour had sent to the mourners.
1 Cruelty Cops: The driver called (and cursed) the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) by this nickname.
2 In 1985, with just one twirl of the pen, the government turned seventeen billion rupees from black to white, in the hopes that people would stop their illegal practices. But black money is like the mythological snake with a thousand heads: if you cut one off, a hundred grow in its place.
3 Sankhni: A type of woman mentioned in the scriptures. The dictionary that I have here, Scholarly Urdu Dictionary, says that she’s tall, slim, irascible, and that her tresses and bodily desires are very sizeable.
4 Dhubri: This firni is made in a shallow earthenware pot. The scent of the earthenware is infused into the firni, and this is considered a good thing!
5 Viscosity: This word was implanted so deeply in Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus’s conscious and subconscious minds (MA, BT) that he made it the subject of his thesis: ‘The Viscous in Milton, Josh, Abul Kalam Azad, Allama Mashriqi, Agha Hashr Kashmiri, Abdul Aziz Khalid, and Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi.’ The professor included my name with these famous people not because he wanted to honour me. He bound me to these notables in a three-legged race in order to chastise them and to drive me away. I heard that the professors rejected his thesis’s outline because they didn’t think he could kill so many birds with just one stone! No one took the time to explain to them that Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus doesn’t need arrows, guns, or stones.
Why would a hunter hunt on a horse
When the prey presents itself on its own — their heads bowed low…
6 During the Battle of Zutphen (1586), Sir Philip Sidney uttered these immortal words, as he lay wounded and just about to die, and as he handed his flask to a dying soldier.
7 A green: A 100-rupee note was called a ‘green’ because of its colour. When this note became red, only then did people start calling it a ‘note.’ No one calls it a ‘red.’
The Car, the Man from Kabul, and the Lampless Aladdin1
1.
Obsessed with Horses
Allama Iqbal has expressed his sympathy for those poets, artists, and fiction-writers who are obsessed with women. But my wise friend, the venerable Basharat Farooqi, is counted among those unfortunate souls whose spotless youths were like poetry that is both free of errors and pleasure! Basharat’s tragedy was much worse than that of the poets, artists, and fiction-writers. That’s because the poor guy was always obsessed with something, just never women. In that period that has been inaptly called his ‘crazy youth,’ he was obsessed with, in order, mullahs, mentors, Master Fakhir Hussain, examiners, Maulvi Muzaffar, Dagh Dehlvi, Saigal, and his revered father-in-law. By and by, he lost interest in these people, and so he became obsessed with horses — the story of which I’ve just presented in ‘A Schoolteacher’s Dream.’ That godforsaken thing ruined his sleep, his peace of mind, and his household budget. He had become so sick of daily tickets and bribes that he often said that if he were given the choice of being a horse, a horse’s owner, or a cart-driver, he would say without the least hesitation that he wanted to be the SPCA inspector who gave tickets to all three.
Like those who demonstrate hindsight after committing a serious blunder, in those days he spoke a lot about choices. But where was the choice? Mahatma Buddha said unequivocally that if he had been given a choice, then he would have refused to be born. But I can say with confidence that if a horse were given the choice, he would like to be reborn a horse and not as Mahatma Buddha because a horse would never stoop to doing what Gautama Buddha did to Yashodhara. I mean, he would never leave his sleeping wife for some desolate wilderness, he would never run off with some jockey. A horse is never ashamed of being a horse. The poor soul will never complain about heaven’s unfairness. He will never complain about his chivalrous rider, or about the infidelity of promiscuous mares. It’s only people who are always ashamed of and complain about their humanity; it’s only them who are wallowing in the thought that
‘Being’ drowned me — if I didn’t exist, then so what?
After having bought a horse and cart, and then after having gotten rid of both, Basharat experienced two apparently contradictory changes. First, he started hating horses and everything associated with them, no matter how remote the connection. One single, crippled horse had caused him so much grief — all elephants combined must not have wrecked so much havoc on King Porus! Second, he could no longer live without a ride. Once someone has gotten used to transportation, he starts to feel contempt for putting his legs to their natural use, and he becomes too weak to do so as well. His lumber business had expanded a lot, which sometimes he attributed to his own hard work and sometimes to the intervention of his father’s shoes, whereas his father pointed to the blessings received from the auspicious horse. In any case, what is worth noting is that the inspiration for his advancement never rose above the knees: it was either his father’s shoes or the horse’s hooves. But no one, not even himself, gave credit to his intelligence and foresight. As his business grew, he had to go around town more. So he needed a ride that much more. Back in those days, business didn’t work through bribes; you had to suffer a lot more disgrace and humiliation to get a deal done. The problem with honest public servants in our society is that they don’t consider their jobs safe until they’ve endlessly harassed everyone with their needless strictness, nitpicking, stubbornness, and peevishness. A businessman works easily with corrupt public servants, but he feels scared of honest ones. So what ended up happening was that he had to go five times to the various companies before they would put in an order, and he had to go ten times to collect payments. When the companies cried poverty, he tacked on the expenses of the round-trips and the extra work. For their part, the companies declared the new prices highway robbery and offered instead 10 percent less. So it ended up being even-steven. The only difference was that both parties started thinking of the other as greedy, crafty, and bent on theft. This happens to be the fundamental principle of an alert and successful businessman.