Sir, sometimes it didn’t even take talking to him — sometimes a simple ‘hello’ would send him into a tizzy! No matter how rational or straightforward you were, he would be sure to refute whatever you said. He considered it unbecoming to agree with anyone. He started each sentence with ‘no.’ One day I said, ‘It’s really cold today.’ He said, ‘No, tomorrow will be colder.’
He had been my uncle several times over, and he became my finger-pointing father-in-law, but even as he lay dying I couldn’t muster the courage to look him in the eyes while speaking to him. At my wedding, he had sat next to the officiant. The officiant asked me, ‘Do you accept her?’ In Qibla’s presence, I didn’t have enough courage to say ‘yes.’ I nodded respectfully twice, but the officiant and Qibla didn’t think that was enough. Qibla erupted, ‘Boy, why don’t you say something?’ Being scolded made me more nervous. The officiant hadn’t yet had a chance to ask me again when I blurted out, ‘Yes, I accept!’ My voice was so loud it surprised me, and the officiant hid behind my wedding garland. Everyone started laughing. But Qibla was furious. He interpreted such a loud ‘yes’ to be an insult to his family. He was like this till he died. All my life I suffered beneath one bellowing blast or another.
He had just one child, a girl. His wife had high hopes for her daughter’s marriage. On the day before the wedding, when the female members of my family were just about to slather unguents over my body to make it glisten, Qibla sent a message: ‘The bridegroom will not reveal his face in my presence. He will dismount from horseback two hundred feet in front of me and walk to the marriage hall.’ He made ‘marriage hall’ sound like our Faiz’s famous slaughterhouse. And the truth of it was that I was so terrified of Qibla that even the nuptial bed seemed a gallows. He also made sure that after wolfing down the pulao and zardah, the wedding guests would never complain that there hadn’t been enough meat in the pulao and that the zardah hadn’t been sweet enough. He said to me, ‘Listen, keep your band away from my house. If you’re thinking about having a bachelor party, it will be over my dead body. Go ogle whores at your own whorehouse.’
There was a time when Rajputs and Arabs thought a girl’s birth inauspicious and a sign of God’s displeasure. They couldn’t stand the thought of the marriage procession coming to their house. Not wanting to have a son-in-law, they would bury their newborn daughter alive. Qibla was against this barbarian custom. He wanted to bury the son-in-law alive.
Looking at his face and comportment, you would think he was a police chief. Who would have thought that he owned a very ordinary-looking store in Bansmandi? He had a towering frame. When he walked, he would stand up straight and stick out his chest and glare at people. Sir, it’s best not to ask. I never dared look at him directly. And when I found the courage to do so, all I saw was his beet-red, bloodshot eyes. His stinging glance spewed fire, O, Asad! His skin was light coloured like yours, Mushtaq Sahib. You say that it looks like the wheat that Adam ate that led to his being immediately kicked out of paradise with his wife. He was always spitting and fuming. He had no control over his temper, tongue, or fists. Because he was always shaking with anger, bricks, stones, sticks, bullets, and curses could never find their mark. He would twirl the ends of his moustache before and after insulting someone. When he got old, he started doing the same with his eyebrows. His athletic frame looked very good in a muslin kurta. His kurta’s sleeves were meticulously pleated, and his dopalli hat was in even better shape. He used itr-e-khas cologne in the summer. The folds around the ankles of his kekri pyjamas were so many that all you saw were folds and no pyjamas. The washerman didn’t hang these on the line to dry, but, like fine gloves, he put them on a bamboo drying rack. If you happened to go to his house at two in the morning, even then he would answer the door wearing his churidar pyjamas.
My God! I have a hard time believing that even his wet nurse would have seen him in anything but these pyjamas. Their tight fit looked so good on his shapely calves. Tied to the hand-woven silk drawstring of his pyjamas, his keys would jingle with his movements. He continued to keep keys for locks that had been broken long ago. In this bunch, there was even the key for a lock stolen five years ago. The neighbourhood talked about that for years because the thief had taken only the lock, the watchdog, and a copy of Qibla’s family tree. He said that only a close relative could have committed such a dastardly crime. By the end, this key ring had become so heavy that his drawstring's knot would frequently come undone on its own and his pyjamas would fall down. When occasionally he bowed while shaking someone’s hand, his other hand would hold his key ring. In May and June, when the temperature reached 43 degrees and the hot wind slapped his face, he would use his pyjamas as air conditioning. I mean, he would soak his pyjamas up to his knees, put a hand-towel on his head, and eat watermelon; he couldn’t afford a sweet-scented grass screen and ice water. He didn’t miss them, though. He never closed his store on account of the heat. He would say, ‘This is a business. How else are you going to eat? Do you think your gut cares about hot or cold?’ If an unfortunate customer happened to show up, he would thunder at him and drive him away. Yet the customer would have to come back. That was because nowhere else in Kanpur could you find such good lumber. He said, ‘I never sell bad wood. Wood shouldn’t be blemished. Blemishes are becoming only on lovers and teenagers.’
A Word’s Flavours and ‘Outside’ Paan
He ordered tobacco, qiwam paste, watermelons, and embroidered kurtas from Lucknow; hookahs from Muradabad; and locks from Aligarh. He got halva sohan and idioms, like those of Deputy Nazir Ahmad, from Delhi. (After he lost his teeth, only the idioms passed through his mouth.) That said, his curses were always local; in fact, they were homemade. They rolled off his tongue quite easily. While they were original, they weren’t very precise — they only gave a vague idea of what he meant. He ordered scarves and Salim Shahi shoes from Jaipur. Mushtaq Sahib, your Rajasthan is really great! What were all its rarities that you enumerated the other day? Khand, sand, bhand, and rand? It’s very funny that Marwaris add retroflexes to the names of everything they love. I couldn’t believe that you said a ‘rand’ means a beautiful woman. You really don’t have a Marwari word for ‘widow’? Or are all widows there like the houris of paradise? But it’s also true that up till one hundred years ago the word ‘randi’ [prostitute] meant a woman. As men’s intentions toward women worsened, this word’s flavour changed as well. Sir, I also very much appreciate the three exquisite gifts of Rajasthan — Mira Bai, Mehdi Hasan, and Reshman.
So I was saying that whenever Qibla went out, he took his purse as well as a little box of paan. He never ate ‘outside’ paan. He said, ‘Only widows, degenerates, and Bombayites eat that.’ Sir, I learned my refinement and fastidiousness from him. His paan box was silver. It was engraved, heavy, and completely solid. It had dents; these were impressions left by human heads. When really pissed off, he would often throw this box at people. In the aftermath, no one would know whether the red meant blood or a paan stain. He got his purses from your hometown, Tonk. He said, ‘Tonk’s leatherworkers are so good that their leather purse straps open with just the slightest pressure, just like a sycophant smiles at almost anything.’ He got gutka from Bhopal. But he didn’t chew that. He said, ‘Sweet paan, thumri songs, gutka, and novels are for teenagers.’ He didn’t particularly like poetry. He couldn’t stand free verse. Someone said that free verse is like a tennis game without a net, and that person is probably right. But it’s also true that he had memorized all Urdu and Persian poetry that mentions wood, fire, smoke, bullying, fighting to the death, failure, and disgrace. When arguments started to get out of hand, he would quell these fires with couplets. In his last days, he was a recluse and a misanthrope; he left the house only to walk in his enemies’ funeral processions. He liked cornflower blue, and his wife liked cream. He always wore a cream-coloured coarse silk shervani.