They had been exchanging letters about the money for quite a while. Who knows why, but one day after Khan Sahib had sent from the Peshawar Post Office a registered letter, he went straight home, packed his bags, and left for Karachi. He got there three days before the mail, and, in fact, he was there to snatch the letter from the mailman’s hand, rip it up, and give the envelope to Basharat. He stayed at Basharat’s, as well. In those days, it was customary for brokers or wholesale merchants to stay at the homes of those with whom they were doing business. In any event, Basharat and Khan Sahib got along well. Basharat liked Khan Sahib’s affectionate and entertaining manner, and Khan Sahib enjoyed listening to Basharat’s endless tales.
They squabbled during the day. Then in the evening, when they went back to Basharat’s house, everyone treated Khan Sahib so well that it seemed as though the day’s disagreements had meant nothing. Basharat’s family left no stone unturned in extending their hospitality. And yet Khan Sahib complained that his eyesight was growing weak from eating Karachi’s thin gravy. He began to walk with a limp. He said, ‘The gravy’s descended into my knees!’ After dinner, he always demanded cracked-wheat halva. He said, ‘If I don’t eat halva, my ancestors come to me in my dreams to scold me.’ He missed his hometown cuisine, and, as he remembered all the thighs he had eaten, he sighed a lot. His stomach was a graveyard for all the high-quality rams. In the afternoon, Basharat ordered for him thigh meat and chapli kebabs from the Frontier Hotel. Mirza repeatedly said that it would have been better to pay him the 2573 rupees, 9 annas, and 3 paisas and be done with it; that that would be cheaper. But Basharat said that it wasn’t a question of money but of principle. And Khan Sahib too considered it a matter of principle and ego.
The devotion and focus that saints show when praying was nothing compared to that which Khan Sahib demonstrated while eating. He often said that if anyone interrupted him while praying, sleeping, eating, and insulting someone, then he would shoot him. When going to meet a stranger, an enemy, or an untrustworthy friend, he would tuck his.38-calibre revolver into his cartridge belt. People said that he had his revolver hidden somewhere beneath his pilgrim’s robes when he circumambulated the Ka’aba. God knows if that’s true. He brought with him a ten-kilo sack of cracked wheat as a gift when he came to Karachi. He ended up asking for Basharat’s wife to make it into halva. Every day Basharat would peek into the sack, and every day he would be shocked to see how much was still left. Khan Sahib said that the next time he would bring a big sack of fresh jaggery from Mardan Sugar Mills because refined sugar made his blood run thin. One day Basharat started to get this foreboding feeling, and so trying to figure out his intentions, he asked him, ‘Khan Sahib, what can you make out of jaggery?’ Easing another handful of halva down his throat, he said, ‘Ask your wife. At the moment, I’m not able to focus. The thing is that business losses, fighting, jaggery, and Ramadan make me lose my mind. I get into fights only during Ramadan. It’s because you’re not supposed to swear while fasting.’
Human Legs vs. Charpoy Legs
Khan Sahib’s hospitality and cooking were famous. Basharat had the chance to go to Peshawar and stay at his house. For every meal, he was served goat or ram thighs, though for breakfast and for tea it was chicken legs. Basharat never saw hide nor hair of any cut of meat beyond thighs and legs. Nor did he ever see vegetables or fish because, after all, eggplants and fish don’t have legs. It’s hard to say what Khan Sahib would have said in Pashto had he seen the Folies Bergère or Lido Chorus Girls’ Legs Show in Paris. But it’s safe to say that he wasn’t interested in any legs that he couldn’t roast, eat, and serve.
Although Khan Sahib loved leg-meat, he absolutely detested Karachi’s bong nihari stew, as well as the head-and-leg dish that was eaten there. He said, ‘I can’t bear to think of eating soup made from filthy, dung-caked cattle hooves. In our Frontier, if an old man should happen to marry a young girl, then the doctor and neighbours serve him this fiery concoction. He gets a GI-track disease and dies. I heard that in England they make glue out of hooves, not gravy. You guys are really something. Goat legs, sheep legs, ram legs, cow legs, cattle legs, water buffalo legs… I guess you leave charpoys alone because their legs are too clean.’
A Statue from the Previous Century
Khan Sahib was a commanding personality, and he had a remarkable frame. There was even something weighty to his babble and prattle. He was about six and a half feet tall, which came out to seven and a half when you added in his cap and turban. But he looked eight feet tall, and he thought of himself that way too. He was in such good health and he was so fit that you couldn’t tell how old he was. You can guess how big he was from the fact that he had to wedge himself into an armchair, and how, when he got up, the chair went with him! He had a golden moustache and light brown eyes. There was a crescent-shaped scar on his left cheek without which his face would have seemed incomplete. One of his index fingers was missing down to its second joint. When he had to warn someone, or when he had to call on the heavens to be his witness in the midst of some dispute (which happened several times a day), then he would raise his tiny ‘warning’ finger and address them. Yet this finger was bigger than any of my fingers. He was both far- and near-sighted, but he avoided glasses as far as it was possible. He used them only when writing his name on checks and while looking at the faces of the objects of his displeasure after he had just cursed them out; in both cases, before he took them off, he quickly checked the surroundings. This geographical surveying was enough to last him the day. There was a hint of mischievousness in his eyes. When he burst out laughing, his face opened up like a pomegranate. After the effects of laughter had left his face, his stomach still jiggled from the laughter’s interior aftershocks. On top of his pure yellow cap, his turban’s starched crest stood permanently erect like his wounded ‘warning finger.’ He wore a dark brown Turkish coat, and his gold-laced Peshawari sandals were each large enough to fit both my feet front to back! And he wore an enormous, billowy white shalwar. Khan Sahib was an awe-inspiring, graceful man cut from the cloth of the previous century. For encomiums, caricatures, and statues, you need to be at least one-and-a-half times life-sized. Khan Sahib was his own statue.
The chain of the golden watch that he kept in the pocket of his waistcoat must have been two feet long, as that was the distance between the waistcoat’s two pockets. In the time it took to string his shalwar’s drawstring, you could go to Hyderabad and back. His nerves were so strong that he never got nervous. Normal pains, normal worries didn’t affect him. Once the washerman found in his shalwar’s waistband a small pencil! He ate a lot. He never spoke while eating, nor did he drink water, because he figured that they wasted precious time and space. He considered lentils a Hindu invention and an open encroachment on the rights of cattle. Fried meat didn’t mean only that it was cooked in a frying pan; rather, it also meant that he would eat the entire frying pan’s worth of meat. It’s lucky that in those days people weren’t in the habit of cooking their meat in buckets, because then he would have eaten buckets of meat. He considered spitting out partridge and quail bones, as well as spitting out grape seeds, orange seeds, and watermelon seeds, to be a feminine affectation. His big body (we should really call it his frightening form) frustrated him. He liked to go on walks, but with the one condition that after every forty steps or so he could take a break and eat something so that he had the strength to continue (meaning, for forty more steps). I agree that Khan Sahib was not so nimble that he would be able to rush forward to attack the enemy, but should he have simply fallen on top of the enemy, his foe would have had no recourse. That is, without even being able to wriggle his hands or legs, his foe would have expired on the spot. Whenever he came to Karachi to collect his debts, he never wore his cartridge belt. He said work got done the same without it. The cartridge belt had left a diagonal line across his chest and stomach that divided his upper torso into two identical isosceles triangles. He used to say that men can’t sleep without mountain-winds and the sound of gunshots.