‘When Husain turned towards the canal…’
People would begin to sob from the first line and, by the time the alam was taken out, the beating of breasts would have started in earnest. The cymbals beating outside, the rising tempo of loud mourning inside – the very walls of the Imambara seemed to reverberate. Head spinning, dazed by grief, mourners would begin to fall to the ground like ninepins, from where they would be picked up by watchful attendants who would lug them outside, place them on settees and sprinkle so much rosewater to revive them that their face, neck and chest would become redolent and wet. The moment the call for the fajir prayer was heard, the cymbals would fall silent after one final resonant clap. The mourners would end the mourning and the alam with its shining, resplendent panja and the streamers speckled with red stains would be stored out of sight in the little room. That served as a signal for the sonorous lamentation to be reduced to muffled sobbing and the occasional hiccup. Soon after, sheer maal would be distributed. I would return home in the pearly twilight, clutching my portion of sheer maal. It would be nearly morning by the time I reached home.
History, too, has its moments of twilight. That year, Muharram fell on one such occasion. It was the last Muharram for Sheikh Madad Ali Sambhali. The son had already announced his intentions of leaving. The family would leave immediately after Muharram. As always, Sheikh sahab began reciting the soz on the eve of Muharram:
‘On the night of departure, Shabbir went to the grave…’
But he was so overwhelmed by the first line itself that he never made it to the next. His sons had to take over and complete the rest of the marsiya. Then, on the night of the eighth day at the majlis for the big alam, the soz that was traditionally narrated by Sheikh sahab had to be recited by his sons. Sheikh sahab took to his bed and never got up again. Within weeks, he was gone. The Sambhali family buried their elder in the bosom of this land and went away forever.
Look how far I have digressed! As I was saying, on that one occasion, I had made it till the Sambhali family’s orchard. Before that, I would be loitering in some alley somewhere near Qayyuma’s shop when I would rouse. Once, something terrible happened. I lost my way. I would come out of one alley and immediately find myself in another. Out of the second, I would enter a third. Allah, save me from this entrapment! What a web of alleys and back streets! My town didn’t have so many streets. Have I, then, come to some other town? But no, it looks like my town. But where have all these streets sprung from? Arre, have I somehow come out in Qazi Khel? If this is Qazi Khel, where is Shavilat? I look everywhere, but I cannot find Shavilat. No, then this can’t be Qazi Khel. It must be Hinduwada, then. Hinduwada had extremely narrow streets, but every house had the figure of Lord Hanuman painted with geru on the whitewashed wall beside the front door. A little ahead you came to a chowk with a well, whose parapet was made of red stone, right in the middle of the crossroad. A few more steps and the alley came to an end. Then you could go towards the road that led to the open-air market. There, right ahead, you could see the pond. If you don’t see all this, this isn’t Hinduwada. I wandered around for a long time, worried that I must reach Karbala. How long will I loiter in these streets? I walk a few steps and the road comes to an end. What is this? Have I walked into a dead end? A dead end? But there was no dead end in our mohalla. I fret for a long time: how could I have reached this dead end? How will I come out? How will I reach Karbala? But what do I see … the dead end has disappeared. Instead, there is a flat expanse of ground. Empty and desolate. Not a living soul around. Ya Allah, where am I? What is this place? I spot a rustic-looking person walking past, carrying a bundle of grass on his head. I hurry to ask him, ‘Where is the holy Karbala?’
‘Karbala? Oh, you mean where the Musslas go with their tazias?’
‘Yes, yes, that’s the place.’
‘Ask a Mussla. This is Ravan’s Papdi.’
Ravan’s Papdi? But there used to be a tall tamarind tree over there. Where has it gone? On those scorching afternoons, when we used to come this way, we would go only till the dharamshala. We would gaze at Ravan’s Papdi from a distance; it was a desolate, eerie place. Not a blade of grass or bush or scrub grew on it. And only one tree. It stood bang in the middle of the field, looking like Ravan himself. As I was saying … My heart began to beat furiously. I wanted to turn away immediately. Arre … I have come to Qayyuma’s shop. I have found my way. Instead of going straight ahead from here, if I turn left I will first come to the lane of the Ghosis, then the ruined tomb, then the old fort beside the hillock … Arre, but where did the lane of the Ghosis go? Has it got lost? I am surprised. And then I awaken.
Once again, I have reached there. Once again, I am surprised. This used to be the ikka stand. And here was Ismail the shoemaker’s shop. So many shoes displayed on shoe racks and a needle forever busy in his hand! Bits of shiny black and tan leather would be strewn all around him. Where has that shop gone? The snake charmer is playing his flute in front of a closed basket. A crowd of people, young and old, is standing in a circle around him. I too stand among them, as though I am a part of that crowd. Finally, the basket’s lid falls open. Two hooded black snakes emerge and begin to sway. Their needle-sharp tongues dart in and out of their mouths. They are coming towards me and their hoods are becoming larger and larger. Suddenly my eyes fall on a grubby boy standing in front of me who has been staring at me instead of watching the snake show. Thoroughly rattled, I look around furtively and slip away from the crowd. I remember that I do not have a passport. I have been roaming around here without a passport. Fear grips me, and now I am all the more terrified of that boy who was staring at me. Has he recognized me? My heart begins to beat furiously. Did he see me slipping away? Is he following me? I quicken my step. I come out of one alley and quickly duck into another. From there, I enter a third. It is deserted. There isn’t a soul around. Two jackals are standing beside the peepal tree and staring at me. My feet feel leaden, each weighing a hundred maund. Then my eyes open and I am awake. It is a good thing that I wake up. God knows what else awaited me! I have been saved. Because I had neither visa nor passport with me. I have only one claim over Guisetown, at least to my way of thinking I do. And it is that I am part of its soil. My umbilical cord is buried here. But what significance does that have? And even if you are part of that soil, so what? The thing that matters is the visa. Without a visa, a man who has left this land can never enter it, even in his dreams. So it was a good thing that I woke up when I did.
This is the only time that I have been relieved on waking up to find it was only a dream. Otherwise, I usually curse myself for waking up and wish that I could have slept some more. So that I could have dreamt some more, even if I had slept longer than the men who went to sleep in a cave and will be woken up on the Day of Judgment.3 It is not as though I were trespassing; I was only wandering around the streets of my own town. Why couldn’t I have wandered around some more? It felt good to be back on those streets. After all, it is only through these nocturnal wanderings in my dreams that I have come to know my city so well. When I lived there and used to see it all with my eyes wide open, it was tantamount to not knowing my own town! How much do any of us see with our waking eyes? Things reveal their true self only in dreams. That is why I was saying that the story called ‘Qayyuma’s Shop’, that someone else wrote, has been thirsting for completion. I must write that story. And I must write it now, now that I have scoured that town in my dreams for fifty long years.
Fifty years is not an inconsiderable period. I mean the dreams of fifty long years. There are so many dreams that it is difficult to count them. Except for that one dream when I did not have a passport, every dream has been such that I have wished I could go on dreaming it forever. I have always regretted waking up because wakefulness brings nothing but misery and wretchedness; sleep brings such release. Save for that once, I have always felt sad on waking up, and also happy, happy because one night’s sleep has given me so much, almost as though my lap has been f
illed with bounty. And sad because so much has been held back from me, almost as though it was within my grasp yet eluding me.
One morning, I felt particularly wretched on getting up. That was the night I had seen Bela. I felt as though I had gone back home. It had been left wide open. And empty. Arre, there is no one here. Where has everyone gone? I climb the stairs to the room upstairs. I open the window that looks out on the back street, and there, across the street, is Lala Pyare Lal’s tall house. I open the window … and what do I see? There, in front of me stands Bela on the roof of her house, drying her hair. She looks so pretty. Bela was never this pretty. She looks like a fairy who has flown down from Fairyland and landed on Lala Pyare Lal’s roof. I feel like jumping across to her roof and touching her to see if she is real, is she really Bela?
I keep looking at her like a moron. Then I go close to her and say, ‘Bela? You are Bela, aren’t you?’
‘No, I am Beecha.’ She gives a peal of laughter, then turns around and slams the door shut. She slammed the door so hard that its deafening sound woke me up.
I never saw her again. How I longed to see her in my dreams again! But dreams come of their own volition. And they come suddenly, unexpectedly.
After that, I thought of Bela on many occasions, but always with regret: why did I never see how pretty she was in those days? Why did I always make awful faces at her? Whenever I would spot her on her roof, I would start making hideous faces at her and she would call out to her mother, ‘Ma, look, that Mussla is making faces at me again.’ I would immediately duck behind the window.
Once, on the occasion of Holi, a troupe of dancers and singers had come from the nearby villages. I spotted Bela, standing in the crowd and watching the Holi revellers beating their drums and singing and dancing. I went and stood close beside her. She was so engrossed in watching the dancers that she didn’t even know. This was the first time I had had the opportunity to stand so close to her. I said to her, very sweetly, ‘Bela.’ She turned around with a start, saw me, hissed, ‘Get lost, you Mussla!’ and was gone.
Then, there was a dream that made me laugh, and also saddened me. We are leaving Guisetown. As we are about to turn the corner, my eyes fall on the roof of our house. How black it has become under the onslaught of wind and rain and also how dilapidated! A kite comes and lands on its parapet. A paper kite, with its torn string dangling behind it, swims in a lazy current of air. Its crimson string skims the parapet as it floats past. My heart begins to sink. The ikka turns the corner and, within a single beat of my heart, the blackened, tumbledown parapet of my house disappears from my sight.
I laugh. What a dream! It was only the sooty, moss-encrusted, half-broken parapet of our old house, not the arch of the Alhambra Mosque! And it is not as though I am leaving Cordova behind me! It was only Guisetown. One may well sigh when one is leaving something precious behind, not when one is leaving something as commonplace as Guisetown which could never make a place for itself in history. How I laughed! Then I sobered down and that sooty, moss-encrusted, half-broken parapet swam before my eyes for a long, long time. And then it occurred to me: had I actually left that place, or was I still there, left behind? After a very long time, I feel like laughing. After so many dreams, that moss-encrusted, broken-down parapet has finally revealed itself to me! Once again, sadness overwhelms me. Swimming before my eyes are all those kites whose strings others had cut and I had grabbed while standing on that parapet. And also those other kites which had eluded my grasping fingers and outstretched hands, and simply floated past. And also all those other kites with long dangling strings that must have skimmed past my parapet. Someone else must have grabbed them. A kite whose string has been cut is bound to be grabbed by someone or the other. Such is the fate of a kite whose string has been cut by another kite. There are very few kites that manage to elude the grasping fingers and outstretched hands of eagle-eyed little boys, and find a safe haven in the tangled branches of tall trees.
Anyhow, I am not about to write an epic on the rise and fall of kites. Such a story would be long and also quite heartrending. Neither do I intend to write the history of my fifty-year-old dreams. I can’t, in any case, write that since I do not remember any of my dreams in their entirety. Every dream rises before me in my subconscious as though there is a great deal preceding it that I have already seen and whatever I am now seeing is actually only a dream, and I am slipping, slipping through the circle of sense and sensibility. And then the dream ends, or rather doesn’t end; it simply dissolves. In any case, a dream is not a short story or novel that it ought to have a plot with a well-defined beginning, middle and end. Even so, my dreams are unusually unconnected, unrelated. I mean the dreams I have dreamt in these past fifty years. Or so I think. It is almost as though every dream is a link in a long chain. Yet all my dreams are so separate, so unrelated. That story about Qayyuma’s shop that I have been wanting to write again … suppose that turns out to be equally unconnected? My story is not like a proper story; it is like the telling of a dream. Actually, it is so pitiable that a real, living city should be reduced to a dream. Guisetown existed fifty years ago, and fifty years later it is still there. If anything, it is more real. Because in these fifty years, the towns and cities of this subcontinent have made great progress in terms of trade and commerce. Great new plazas, shopping malls, housing colonies, apartment blocks and bungalows have mushroomed. Guisetown, too, has grown in proportion to my imaginary contretemps. That is, it is no longer the Guisetown of Qayyuma’s time. Now this town has grown and spread so much that it is difficult to describe it within the framework of a short story or novel. Be that as it may, I still have to rewrite that story – whether fully or partially. As the writer has said, while writing ‘Qayyuma’s Shop’, he forgot to describe the real character of his story. All the characters described in that story were minor characters. Qayyuma himself was a minor character. The day he closed his shop and left Guisetown, he became a minor character.
The protagonist of the story is the person who stayed behind. At that time, it did not occur to any of us that he was not leaving with us. He was rooted in that land; he did not budge when the rest of us were leaving. The writer did not think of him even when he was writing his story; he simply went on describing Qayyuma. It was only later that it occurred to us that that person who was one of us was no longer with us. Where is he now? He used to sit on the stoop of Qayyuma’s shop. And now that Qayyuma’s shop is closed, where is he? Has he found a new perch? No one seems to know his whereabouts.
I have come to know every little detail about my town through my dreams. And it is so strange that he has never appeared in any of my dreams. He is the only one who has never appeared in my dreams. Except for him, there is no one from Guisetown who has not, at some time or the other, come in my dreams. Even Bela has come in my dream on one memorable occasion and shown me a tantalizing glimpse of herself. What a glimpse that was! There she was drying her hair! Such long hair! Fairies are said to have such beautiful long hair. And what a lovely, full bosom! I must have been blind when I lived there. I was so busy making faces at her that I never saw the beauty she was. Anyhow, had I seen her beauty, this story would have become Bela’s. So it was a good thing that I never saw her for what she was. But why has that person never appeared in my dreams?
I have suffered defeat in my dreams on only two counts. One, I have never ever been able to reach Karbala in any of my dreams. And, second, I have never been able to find that person in my dreams. For fifty years, I have been wandering in this dreamscape. Are these my dreams or the Fourth Corner of the world? Once, a world-weary all-knowing king said to his son: ‘Conquering the world has been the glorious tradition of all great rulers. So go out and conquer the world.’ At the same time, the old father, who had seen the ups and downs of life, cautioned his son, ‘Go to the Three Corners of the world, but do not ever step into the Fourth Corner for here lies endless hardship for the conquerors of this world.’ The young prince heeded his father’s sage
counsel. But once, while chasing a deer, he unwittingly entered the Fourth Corner. The deer soon disappeared and the bewildered prince found himself alone in the terrifying lifeless jungle.
My dreams are my terrifying lifeless jungle. I have been wandering alone in this jungle for so long. But my destination is as far away as it has always been in my dreams. I can see the spires of Karbala and I am on my way there when the thread of my dream snaps. And that lost person … what about him? There has never been any news of him.
Aah ko chahiye ek umr asar hone tak
(It needs an age to make a sigh come true.)
But an age has passed. Fifty years are an age. Now I shall ask He who grants life to grant me another life. Karbala is still so far away. When will I find the person who has been lost? When will I see that one dream, the hope of which has been sustaining me all along? When will that dream be united with my wakeful self? When will I write my story? Or will I forever circle round and round in a gyre?
Sleep1
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Zafar was amazed at the sight of him. ‘Arre, Salman! You? You have come back? But how?’
‘Don’t ask how. I’ve come back. That is all.’
Zafar didn’t know what to say next. ‘To come back alive from there … it’s a miracle!’
‘Yes, consider it a miracle. I was meant to live longer, so I have returned.’
It wasn’t just Zafar who was amazed at his return; Salman himself could barely believe it. ‘I can’t believe that I have come away from that place.’
The Death of Sheherzad Page 2