Wow! You Can’t Praise Enough This New Earthen Jar!
Basharat’s introduction ends here. Now please listen to my rendition. It will be punctuated by Basharat’s narration and the words of others — accurate or not.
Qibla had a lumber store first in Bansmandi and then in Cooper Ganj. It provided the façade of a livelihood; it was really his means to torment humanity. He also sold a little bit of firewood, but he never called it ‘wood.’ He called it ‘timber’ or ‘faggots.’ If someone unfamiliar with his quirks called his store a ‘wood lot,’ he would race after them with a two-kilo weight. When he was younger, he had used a five-kilo weight. He used stone weights his whole life. He would say that foreign weights were heavy and inauspicious. To lift a stone weight, you had to gather it in your arms and then rest it against your chest. Leave alone doubting his intentions, no one had the courage to test his weights to see if they were really as heavy as he said they were. After getting back change, no one dared count it. At that time, I mean, in the twenties, lumber wasn’t in great demand. Sal and pine were the most popular. People used rosewood only for doors and doorframes. Teak was used only for two purposes: the rich used it for their dining-room tables, and the British used it for coffins. There was no such thing as furniture back then. In fairly well-off homes, a charpoy was passed off as furniture. As far as I can remember, chairs were used only on two occasions. First, after the hakim, ved, homeopath, saint, fakir, and exorcist failed to cure the patient, the doctor would be called in. He sat on the chair and used his stethoscope to see how much closer to death these men had already brought the patient with their medications, amulets, and charms. In those days, wherever oranges, five grapes wrapped in cotton in a wicker basket, or a doctor wearing a pith helmet arrived (the patient’s caretaker in front of him carrying his leather bag and shooing away the children), then the neighbours quickly ate and prepared themselves to offer condolences and walk in the funeral procession. In fact, doctors were called in only when the patient was in the worst way possible, just as two thousand years earlier people had tried Jesus. The second and last occasion was when the chair was used during circumcision. The boy in question would be dressed up like a bridegroom, given an earthen toy, and seated. Just seeing this execrable chair would cause even the most courageous boys to blubber. For this same ceremony poor people would buy a new earthen jar.1 They would turn it upside down and cover it with a red cloth.
The Charpoy
The truth of the matter is that if you have a charpoy, you never have room for furniture or any reason for it. If England’s weather weren’t so awful, and if the English had discovered how to build charpoys, then not only would they have saved themselves from the nuisances of modern furniture but they also would never have had the inclination to leave their charpoys, go outside, and conquer the world. Thus the ‘overworked’ sun would have been saved from shining over their empire for a century. (Also, they would now have something appropriate to lie down on when they retreat to their bedrooms to protest the state of the world.) One day I said to Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus, MA, BT, ‘You say the English invented everything. That they love comfort and are relentlessly practical. So why didn’t they come up with the charpoy?’ He said, ‘They can’t stand tightening its ropes.’ In this writer’s opinion, we must keep one fundamental difference in mind. That is, Europeans use furniture only for sitting; but we don’t sit on anything we can’t also lie down on. For instance, rugs, quilted mattresses, carpets, picnic blankets, white sheets, charpoys, a favourite alley, or a lover’s lap. There was only one thing we used exclusively for sitting. That was the ruler’s takht [throne]. But after the ruler was executed on it, the takht was called a takhta [bier], and this reversal was called a coup d’état.
The Bad Fortunes of the Station, Lumber Market, and Red-Light District
The purpose of this tedious introduction was simply to say that wherever charpoys are in vogue, the furniture business suffers. In fact, the entire lumber industry was lethargic, and the number of stores exceeded the number of customers. If someone showed up in the lumber market, and by his gait and comportment, the shopkeepers suspected this man of being even remotely interested in wood, then they fell upon him. Most customers came from the countryside around Kanpur. They needed wood only twice in their lives — to build their homes and for their last rites.
Those readers familiar with the Delhi or Lahore railway stations as they existed prior to Pakistan’s coming into being can easily imagine the following scene’s mad scramble. It was 1945. The train from Delhi arrived in Lahore. As soon as any traveller stuck any body part outside the door or window, a porter would grab him and, lifting him onto the palm of his hand, would transport said passenger through the air to land him on the platform on top of a hookah or thin-necked jug. Those passengers who were pushed out of the cabin were subjected to the same harsh treatment that a new Urdu book gets from critics. People made off with whatsoever fell into their hands. Then the second phase began. The hotel touts sprang upon the travellers. They wore white suits, white shirts, white handkerchiefs, white canvas shoes, and white socks. Their teeth were white too. And yet you couldn’t quote Muhammad Hussain Azad’s line that ‘a pile of jasmine flowers lies nearby laughing.’ While just about everything about them was white and clean, their faces weren’t. When one laughed, it looked like a frying pan was laughing. They rushed upon the travellers as rugby players pounce simultaneously upon the ball. Their purpose was not to secure anything for themselves but rather to prevent anyone else from securing anything. The Muslim touts were recognizable due to their fezzes. They immediately identified folks from Delhi and UP by their special water pitchers, their women in niqabs, their large number of children, and the rancid smell of meat-stuffed parathas. They shouted out, ‘Assalam Alaikum, brother!’ and hugged them tight. Only the Muslim touts could lasso these folks. The tout whose hand ended up on the strongest part of the traveller’s outfit would grab ahold and pull him out of the pell-mell. And those touts who laid hands on the threadbare portions of the traveller’s outfit would later use these pieces as hankies. The half-naked traveller, being subjected to further disrobement with each step, arrived outside only to fall prey to an endless string of wrestlers, who, having found the wrestling pit an insufficient arena, had taken up the profession of driving horse-drawn carts. At this point, if the traveller wore any cloth remnant at all, these men would tear it off to decorate the backside of their carts, as though it were Ramchandraji’s sandal. If a driver got ahold of the drawstring of the traveller’s churidar pyjamas, he would be towed along without any resistance. One driver would pull the traveller’s kurta from behind, and another man would pull it from the front. In the final round, one muscular driver would yank on the traveller’s right hand, and another brawny soul would grasp his left hand to begin their tug of war. Before the two opponents were able to rend him into two separate parts, a third nimble driver would hunch down between the traveller’s spread-eagled legs, and then, quite suddenly, get up, and, with the traveller on his shoulders, throw him into his cart and disappear.