This was to a man who’d been brought up in a wealthy, liberal Indian family in colonial Bombay. Among the many children, Father was the prince of the family, inheritor of the family talent. “Isn’t he a magnificent man?” Yasir had said to me. “Your grandfather told me to look after him always.”
Dad had been educated in California, where he’d established himself on the college circuit as a champion debater and skillful seducer of women. He believed he had the talent and class to become a minister in the Indian government, ambassador to Paris or New York, a newspaper editor or a university chancellor. Dad told me he couldn’t face more of this prejudice, as it was called then. He had “got out,” gone home to the country he had never known, to be part of its birth, to experience the adventure of being a “pioneer.”
As we drove around Karachi-him tiny behind the wheel of the car-he began to weep, this clean man in his white salwar kameez and sandals, with an alcohol smell that I got used to and even came to like. He regretted it, he said, the fact that we as a family weren’t together and he couldn’t do his duty as a father. Mother wouldn’t live in Pakistan, and he was unable to live in England.
If he had left us in Britain, it was, he added, as much for our sake as for his. It was obvious we would have more of a chance there. What should have happened, he said, was that his family should never have left India for Pakistan. India was where his heart was, where he’d belonged, where he and Yasir and his sisters and brothers had grown up, in Bombay and Delhi.
He now realised that Bombay, rather than Karachi, was the place where his ideals could have been met, crazy though it might be there. In Pakistan they had made a mess of things. He admitted it could have been predicted by a cursory reading of history. Any state based on a religious idea, on one God, was going to be a dictatorship. “Voltaire could have foretold, boy. You only have to read anywhere there to realise.”
He went on: “Liberals like me are marginal here. We are called the ‘high and dry’ generation. We are, indeed, frequently high, but rarely dry. We wander around the city, looking for one another to talk to. The younger, bright ones all leave. Your cousins will never have a home, but will wander the world forever. Meanwhile, the mullahs will take over. That is why I’m making the library.”
Packages of books from Britain and the US arrived at Papa’s flat a couple of times a week. Dad didn’t unpack them all, and when he did, I noticed that some of them were volumes he already had, in new editions. With Yasir’s money, Papa was building a library in the house of a wealthy lawyer. Such a darkness had fallen upon the country that the preservation of any kind of critical culture was crucial. A student or woman, as he put it, might want access to the little library, where he knew the books would be protected after his death.
Dad insisted I go to meet his older sister, a poet and university lecturer. She was in bed when we arrived, having had arthritis for the last ten years. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said, pinching my cheek. “This will be difficult, but there’s something you need to see.”
We got her up and onto her walking frame, and accompanied her to the university, which she was determined to show me, though it was closed, due to “disturbances.” She, Dad and I shuffled and banged our way through the corridors and open rooms, looking at the rows of wooden benches and undecorated, crumbling walls.
She taught English literature: Shakespeare, Austen, the Romantics. However, the place had been attacked frequently by radical Islamists, and no one had returned to classes. The books she taught were considered haram, forbidden. Meanwhile madrassas, or bomb schools, were being established by President Zia. This was where many poor families sent their kids, the only places they would receive education and food.
When I wondered what it meant for my aunt to teach English literature in such a place, to people who had never been to England, she said, “They’ve gone, the British. Colonialism restrained radical Islam, and the British at least left us their literature and their language. A language doesn’t belong to anyone. Like the air, anyone can use it. But they left a political hole, which others fill with stones. The Americans, the CIA, supported the Islamic revival to keep the Communists out of the Middle East. That is what we English teachers call an irony.” She went on: “It is the women I fear for, the young women growing up here. No ideology hates women more than this one. These fanatics will undo all the good work done by women in the 60s and 70s.”
She would return to the university when the time was right, though she doubted that she’d live to see it. “A student said to me, ‘We will kill 10,000 people, which will destroy this country’s institutions and create a revolution. Then we could attack Afghanistan and go upwards…There will be the believers and there will be the dead. The West will defeat Communism but not Islam-because the people believe in Islam.’”
Meanwhile my aunt was content to remain in her room and write poetry. She had published five volumes, paying for the printing costs herself, the Urdu on one page, the English on the other. She adored the Saint Lucia poet Derek Walcott, who was her light. “His father, I’m sure, was a clerk in the colonial administration, like so many of our educated.” He had taught her that she could write from her position-“cross-cultural,” she called it-and make sense. Other local poets met at her house, to read their work and talk. They wouldn’t be the first poets, nor the last, to have to work “underground.”
“I envy the birds,” she said. “They can sing. No one shuts their mouths or imprisons them. Only they are free here.”
Language; poetry; speaking; freedom. The country was wretched, but some of the people were magnificent, forced into seriousness. Dad would have known the effect this would have on me.
Our lives had been so separate. Dad had never visited our schools or even our house when he was in Britain; there’d been no everyday affection. But as he drove about Karachi, he did ask me, “What is it you really do?”-as though he needed to know the secret I’d been keeping from the anxious enquirers at the dinner parties.
I didn’t have much of a reply: I said I was going to do a Ph.D. on the later work of Wittgenstein. I’d say this to anyone who enquired about my choice of career, and I did so to Papa. He could show me off or at least shut the questioners up. I had, after all, graduated with honours-whatever they are-in philosophy.
My claim, though, was only for the benefit of others, and Dad knew it. When, in private, he called me a “bum,” which he did from time to time, often appending other words, like “useless” or “lazy” or, when he was particularly drunk, “fucking useless lazy stupid,” I tried to defend myself. I was not bringing shame on the family. I did want to do some kind of intellectual work and had even considered doing an M.A. But really I considered philosophy only as the basis of intellectual engagement, a critical tool, rather than anything that seemed worth pursuing for itself. Who can name a living British philosopher of distinction? Later, psychoanalysis came to interest me more, being closer to the human.
This was all too vague for Papa, and the “bum” taunts didn’t stop. He’d say, “Your other cousins, what are they doing? They’re training to be doctors, lawyers, engineers. They’ll be able to work anywhere in the world. Who the fuck wants a philosophy Ph.D.? Yasir was like you, doing nothing, sitting in pubs. Then our father, who was in Britain, kicked his arse, and he opened factories and hotels. So: you can consider your arse to be kicked!”
How could I put pleasure before duty? What could be more infuriatingly enviable than that? Papa had kicked my arse. Where had he kicked it to? I felt worthless, and glad he hadn’t been around in London: one of us might have killed the other.