I Remember When You Came Barefoot to My Roof
A couple steps removed from the mansion’s main gate (where in the present photo there was a trash heap on top of which stood a black rooster crowing with his neck puffed out), you could see the remains of a raised sitting platform. Plants shot through cracks in its stony joints in their relentless search for light. One day he pointed at this structure and said, ‘European goldfish used to swim here. It was once an octagonal pond of the purest water, encased in red sandstone. Arif used to make paper boats out of the Pioneer and float them here.’ Telling the story, Qibla got so worked up that he hoisted himself up with his walking cane, then used his cane to start outlining the pond’s octagon on the frayed rug. One side came out crooked, and he erased it with his foot. He pointed with his cane toward the preferred spot of one rowdy fish that liked to fight with the others. Then he pointed to where one nauseated fish hid in the corner. He didn’t come out and say it (I was younger than him, after all), but I understood that this fish was craving sour things and dirt — that is, she was expecting.
When Qibla got really wistful, he had the habit of reciting to his only good friend Rais Ahmad Qidwai how he still remembered the times when a beautiful young gal used to brave the May and June afternoon heat to come onto his sultry roof. Mirza never could figure out this scenario because the mansion was three storeys tall and yet the houses on either side were only one storey. Even if the girl was barefoot and brazen, something was still amiss. Unless, of course, she was not only beautiful but also possessed the power to levitate.
Pilkhan
In one photo, there was a sad-looking mushroom-shaped pilkhan tree3 in front of the mansion. His great-great-grandfather had brought its seed hidden within his embroidered cloak when he had arrived on the back of a black stallion from Damascus in a time of great famine. The story goes that Qibla’s great-great-grandfather used to recount the following story: ‘I came in a state of dire want. I was an embarrassment to the human race, to my ancestors, and to my country. I came with my head exposed to the heavens, my feet exposed to the earth, my rump exposed to my horse’s back, and my sword drawn and held in my bare hand. I vaulted over the stripped and crushed Khyber Mountains and arrived in India.’ Although Qibla told the story with great pride, it actually showed that the old man had only had the horse’s tail to cover his ass. His property, his seraglio, his servants, his wealth — he had left it all behind. Yet he managed to bring his most valuable assets, I mean, his family tree and the pilkhan’s seed. Like the man riding him, the horse was a purebred fed up with his homeland; it fidgeted beneath the weight of tree and seed.
On Each Branch of This Tree Sits a Rare Genius
Life was an endless ordeal. Because they had lost their land, the family’s coming generations took shelter beneath these trees, real and figurative. Qibla was very proud of his family’s brains. He considered his each and every ancestor a rare species of his time; on each branch of his family tree, a genius sat, nodding off to sleep.
In one photo, Qibla was standing beneath the pilkhan tree in exactly that spot where his umbilical cord had been buried. He said that if any bastard doubted his ownership of the mansion, he could go dig up his umbilical cord for proof. He said that when a person doesn’t know where his umbilical cord is buried (and his ancestors’ bones too), he becomes like a plant that can’t take root anywhere but in pots. Talking about these matters — umbilical cord, family tree, pilkhan — got him so worked up that he lost track of what was what.
Ancestors (Imported) and Nose (Grecian)
Things were different back then, including standards of class. No Indian Muslim considered himself noble if his ancestors hadn’t been imported, that is, if they hadn’t come through Transoxiana and the Khyber Pass. Ghalib even imported from Iran a fake Persian teacher (named Mullah Abdus Samad) so that he could brag about it. When Qibla’s ancestors left their homeland due to unemployment and poverty, their eyes were brimming with tears and their hearts were heavy. They slapped the flanks of their horses and, according to one spellbinding storyteller, they pulled on each other’s beards and wailed, ‘God forbid! God forbid!’ Needless to say, they charmed everyone they met in their new land.
First they were like a new lover, then a great lover, then an even better lover
Or, these fine folks became
First middle class, then upper middle class, then upper upper class.
Like the mansion’s designs, Qibla’s diseases were royal. As a kid he got an abscess on his right cheek during the mango season, and this left a scar. He said, ‘The very year, no, the very week, I got this Aurangzebi abscess, Queen Victoria became a widow.’ At sixty, he started to suffer from Shah Jahan’s disease, which made it hard to pee. He said Ghalib was Mughal royalty, and although Ghalib killed his lover with the poison of love, he died by the same disease, the enlarged prostate, which Qibla also suffered from. Ghalib wrote that he drank wine drop by drop and peed that way too. If Qibla’s asthma let up enough for him to catch his breath, he boasted that Faizi suffered from the same disease. He wrote in a quatrain, ‘I’ve swallowed two worlds inside my chest / but I can’t seem to suck down even half a breath!’ Qibla said his father died of a royal disease. Indigestion. Or, in other words, TB of the guts. Aside from his family diseases, he claimed royal provenance for even his big nose. To him, it was Greek.
3.
The Dead Come Back to Perform a Miracle
Qibla had two sorrows. The first I’ll get to later, since it’s too heartbreaking to mention now. The second was not so much his as his wife’s, as she was dying to have a son. That poor soul had promised countless acts of charity if only her prayers were met. She made Qibla drink cold concoctions with naqsh charms dissolved in them. She put amulets beneath his pillow. She secretly went to saints’ shrines and draped sheets over their tombs as offerings. In our country, when people are this disappointed with life, only one hope remains: