When worried, his wife would ask innocently, ‘And… now?’ instead of asking ‘What are we going to do?’ Coming from her, it sounded very dear. Her words were laden with all her fears, naivety, and helplessness, as well as her faith in her husband’s clairvoyance and charity. Qibla would always answer her in a very confident and dignified manner, ‘We’ll see.’ It consoled her.
The Situation Called for a Steady Hand and Immediate Action
Through each sadness, through each bout of suffering, life reveals something to us. Under the pipal tree in Bodh Gaya, the Buddha underwent a terrible trial. When his stomach had sunk through to his backbone, his eyes had descended deep into their lightless sockets, and while his breath clung tenuously to his skeleton’s bony garland, then Gautama Buddha too discovered something. To the very same extent, depth, and reason that each person suffers, a secret is revealed to them. You have to seek nirvana to find nirvana; and when you suffer for the sake of something, eventually it shows you the way forward.
So after he had wandered from alley to alley and had got kicked out of countless offices, a revelation descended upon his sad heart. Tyrants and their like take advantage of the cowardly. The man who looks for the reins of the elephant will never ride it. The wine glass belongs to the man who has the courage to pick it up and the wine-bearer as well. In other words, the house belongs to the man who breaks its lock. When Qibla came from Kanpur, he brought his savings, his family tree, his switchblade, Akhtari Bai Faizabadi’s three records, a bronze stand for his Muradabadi hookah and pitcher, and, lastly, the padlock from his shop. (He had specially ordered it from Aligarh; it weighed at least six pounds.) After the aforementioned revelation, he chose for himself a nice apartment on Burns Road. It had marble tiles and stained glass windows that let in the ocean breeze. With just one blow from his made-in-Aligarh padlock, he broke the front door’s rusted lock and so claimed the apartment for himself, bypassing all the government nonsense. He redid the nameplate and stuck it back on. It had read CUSTODIAN OF ABANDONED PROPERTIES. In a fit of rage, Qibla yanked it out with the nails still attached. Before his name, he added, ‘Muzaffar Kanpuri.’ His longtime friends asked when he had become a poet, and he answered, ‘I’ve never heard of a civil court case against a poet — foreclosures, either.’
He had been in the apartment for four months when one day, while he was darning the knees of his churidar pyjamas, he heard a rude knock at the door. I mean, the person was rapping on his nameplate. When Qibla nervously answered the door, the man standing there introduced himself as though he were foisting his title directly into Qibla’s face: ‘Officer, Department of the Custodian of Evacuee Properties.’ Then he yelled, ‘Old man, show me your Allotment Order!’ Qibla took from his waistcoat’s pocket a photo of the mansion and showed it to the man, ‘We left this to come here.’ The man didn’t look at the photo but said somewhat harshly, ‘Old man, didn’t you hear me? Show me your Allotment Order!’ Very slowly, Qibla removed from his left foot his Salim Shahi shoe — so slowly that he lost track of what exactly he was doing — but then he struck the man in the face and said, ‘This is my Allotment Order! You want to see its carbon copy too?’ Up till this disgraceful moment, the man had had only bribes thrown at him, never shoes! He never went there again.
The Mansion That Was Our Home
Finally Qibla managed to build a lumber store in Lee Market. He sold the jewellery from his wife’s dowry and his Webley Scott shotgun for close to nothing. Then he bought some lumber on credit. Things were barely up and running when an income tax inspector showed up. He wanted to see the accounts, the shop’s registration, the cash box, and the receipts. The next day, Qibla said to me, ‘Mushtaq, did you hear? For months I wandered around wasting my time at government offices. No one even bothered to ask my name. Now look at their fun and games. Yesterday this fine fellow, a tax inspector, comes strutting in with his chest stuck out like some fan-tailed pigeon. I show the bastard this photo, “We left this to come here.” He pretends he doesn’t understand. He asks, “What’s that?” I say, “Back home we call it a seraglio.” ’
Only Mirza knows if this is true, as he’s the one who tells the story, but it goes like this. Qibla got a photo of the mansion enlarged and framed, and when he was hammering a nail into his apartment’s paper-thin wall, the neighbour on the other side came over and asked whether he could place the nail a foot higher so that he could use the nail’s other end to hang up his shervani. Whenever anyone slammed the front door, the seraglio would swing like a pendulum on the rusty nail. If the mailman came by, or a new washerwoman, he would show them as well, ‘We left this to come here.’
I had seen his photos countless times. They were all blurry. But Qibla’s strong storytelling skills made up for this. In fact, the past has a way of surrounding everything with a romantic halo. Even past pains feel pleasant. When everything’s been taken from you, you either become a wandering Sufi or you take refuge in some fantasyland.
Without this sustaining illusion, you die
His family tree and the mansion were his refuge. It’s possible that looking at the photos, a person with an unsympathetic eye would only see a ruin, but when Qibla explained the mansion’s architectural niceties, suddenly the Taj Mahal itself seemed nothing more than a crude mud house made by kids. For example, there was a doorway on the second floor that had lost not only its door but its frame as well; Qibla called it French windows. If there had been French windows anywhere in the house, it would have been those windows (in whose frames mirrors had been inlaid) through which the entire East India Company had come, spritzing the locals with dust from off their shoes. The gateless entry leading to the foyer was a Shahjahani arch. Above this was a decrepit ledge where a kite was relaxing after lunch. Qibla said that this was all that remained of a princely gallery where in his grandfather’s time Iranian carpets had been laid for the performance of Azerbaijani qawwali. In those days, when the last hours of night set in and everyone’s heavy eyes began to droop, rosewater was sprinkled from time to time on the VIPs from silver rosewater dispensers. The walls, as well as the floor, were covered in carpets. Qibla liked to intone, ‘There are just as many flowers on the rugs as in the gardens outside.’ On top of a gold-embroidered Italian velvet carpet rested crystal spittoons with intricate gold and silver designs, and after the men had chewed the silver-wrapped paan they spat into these spittoons’ throats where they watched the spit fall like mercury in a thermometer.
It’s So Crowded There’s No Room for Thoughts
He had some interior close-ups too. Some were actual photos, and some were by way of his imagination. In one photo, there was a three-window arcade, and where some of its Byzantine-era bricks had fallen, local birds had built their nests. Qibla referred to it as Moorish arches. A lamp-niche in the wall had sunk at such an artistic angle that he imagined Portuguese influences. To its side, there was a wooden stand for a water pitcher whose design his grandfather had stolen from Shah Jahan’s special bathroom. Whether that was true or not, the table was definitely Mughal, or so its broken-down state suggested. In all the photos, there was no trace of the servants’ quarters, but in one neighbour’s account these were crammed with elderly relatives fallen on hard times. The mansion’s northern section had a roofless part: having thrown off the ceiling’s yoke, a pillar had been standing there insolently from time immemorial. This was, according to Qibla, a rare example of Roman pillars. While it’s a wonder the pillar hadn’t fallen down before the roof fell in, one reason could have been that it was surrounded by so much junk that there was no place for it to fall. On one dilapidated wall, there leaned a rotten wooden ladder in such a fashion that it was difficult to say which was holding up which. Qibla said that before the second floor had caved in, a grand Victorian staircase had led up to it. Qibla pointed toward the nonexistent roof where iron beams had supported an Albanian chandelier in his grandfather’s time. It was in the golden light of this chandelier, he said, that they had listened to the music of jingling tambourines brought by the women who had arrived inside litters on top of two-humped Bactrian camels. If his running commentary had not accompanied the presentation of his photos, I would never have imagined that a ramshackle ‘mansion’ of fifteen hundred square feet could have had so many architectural features and borne witness to so many cultures, so many that they hardly left a person any room to think. The first time you saw the photos you would think that the photographer had shaken the camera. Then after a moment you would begin to wonder how on earth such a wreck had remained standing for so long. Mirza’s opinion was that it didn’t even have the strength to fall down.