by HM Naqvi
“Always so thoughtful.”
Whilst Nargis and I do not have an equation, she is probably a good girl, or good enough: she takes care of her family & unlike me, is integral to the household, even if she does not appreciate the Lodge: I have heard her bemoan the seepage, broken tiles, weedy backyard on various occasions. There is no doubt that she would immigrate to the suburban wasteland of the Defense housing schemes if she could afford it. She has my blessings!
As the seven candles are ritually lit,36 I call out to the bacha party, knife in hand like Abraham (PBUH) at Moriah. They gambol in like drunks, howling Hay-pee Baad-deh Too-yoo! They take mousy bites, chew with mouths agape. During the commotion, I fold the deathly collops from my plate into a napkin & shove them into the recesses of my trouser pockets. You do not want to die with cake on your face.
Babu and I sit facing each other afterward, contemplating the walls. I don’t know my youngest brother particularly well—after all, I departed for college soon after he was born—and what do you discuss with an IT manager at a Shariah-compliant leasing firm? “Say,” I begin, “why don’t you play table tennis anymore? If I recall correctly, partner, you excelled at it. You won that trophy—”
“It was for third place, in class seven—”
“That’s qualitatively better than being seventh place in class three—”
“I wanted to talk to you about something, Abdullah Bhai—”
“There is no doubt in my mind that there is a conspiracy to deride the noble sport of table tennis by characterizing it as ping-pong—”
“You know this house, it’s like a clock.”
As Babu wipes his flat forehead with a gesture calling attention to the hair plugs sown across the gleaming surface of his scalp, I shift my weight from one cheek to another, wondering how I fit: am I a hand, spring, tourbillion? “What are you getting at, partner?”
“Let me start again,” Babu says, changing tack. “When Papa, bless his soul, was alive, things were different. And now things are different. Wouldn’t you agree, Abdullah Bhai?”
“You have ably stated the obvious.”
“I mean to say our circumstances have changed, and there’s so much upkeep required in this house, and we can’t expect—”
Before the conversation can scrape further, I’m saved by the bell. But the thak-a-thak-a-thak-a of a Derby cane against the floor undoubtedly heralds another brother, the eldest, Hidayatullah, Major Sahab to you. Although success might have eluded him in recent years—he flipped real estate during the construction boom in the early eighties and has been living beyond his means ever since—he sits on several boards, presides over the Rotary Club, cultivates local consuls general & mandarins in the capital. He is not known to frequent these parts. I’m stuck up, he maintains, it’s the spondylosis. “How old are you, shehzaday?” he asks.
Peeling myself from the sofa and yanking the waist of my sagging trousers, I reply, “Seventy, sir.”
“Seventy, my foot!”
“Does he look seventy?” Babu interjects.
Nargis shakes her head like a new bride.
Whilst I have oft been told I do not look my age—it is, perhaps, one of the few benedictions of corpulence—I sense conspiracy in this easy effusion. “I am flattered—”
“I remember,” the Major continues, “he would be messing about in the house and lawn in the afternoon, nanga-patanga—”
“I wore nappies—”
“I remember you trapped worms and beetles and made those little muddy men.”
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eatst bread,” I mutter, “till thou return unto the ground.”
“You’ve finally started reciting the Koran, shehzaday?”
“Will you have cake, Hidayatullah Bhai,” Nargis interjects, “and biscuits?” Nobody has offered me any biscuits & I do relish a biscuit, a splendid genus, incorporating everything from the modest saltine to the vanilla wafer.37 “Please sit,” she adds, “please sit.”
As the confections are passed around the room, the Major inquires, “What are you doing these days?”
“Me? Oh. Well, sir, I’m working on several urgent projects, essays, articles, monographs—one on historiographical sensibilities, another on culinary anthropology, and of course, the mythopoetic legacy of—”
“I have always said that raw talent is like sewage: it needs to be treated.”
“Sir?”
“When will we see the fruits of your labour?”
“It’s a matter of time.” I notice my red silk shirt is wet in twin crescents under my chest. “I’m ironing out some didactic tics—”
“I’ll be dead soon, shehzaday.”
“Avoid the cake,” I mumble under my breath.
Whilst we sit about like a family, discussing this, that, the other, foreign policy, physiotherapy, the flower show, I find myself speculating about the objective of the Major’s visit. The clan only gathers at marriages and funerals, a night or two during Muharram, and on the second day of Eid. The Major’s third wife, a Kashmiri who wears too much rouge, has been to the house a few times, usually for the Childoos’ joint birthday. Nobody assembles for mine.
“We have to think about the future,” the Major is saying, digging into his chair.
“What about the future?” I blurt.
“The past is the past but the future belongs to them,” he says with a vague nod towards his audience, the conspirators. “We have to think about square yardage and equity. We have to think about the Lodge.”
And suddenly it all makes sense. Suddenly, I pass gas; when vexed, I pass gas. It sounds like a bleat and smells like French Onion Soup. I glance at the painting on the wall facing me—a forested vista cut by a winding bottle green stream; regard the adjacent Dutch tapestry depicting cherubs feting each other, which has been in our possession for at least seventy years; and study the porcelain plates beside my arm featuring roundfaced Chinese dames of an arguably homosexual bent inhaling a plucked flower. I notice two heirlooms—the Bohemian cut-glass stallion & the ivory horn—are missing. Presumably, they have been sold. I will not allow myself to be sold!
Rising in a huff, I announce, “There was a Certain Man in Russia Long Ago! He was Big and Strong and his Eyes were Flaming Gold!”
The audience is rendered speechless. I am out the door, however, when I hear Nargis whisper, “Is that cake in his pocket?”
30. After a solid night of drink, Felix is wont to hum the traditional version of “What to do with the drunken sailor? “.
31. It might have been the Guardian Angel or Miraculous Medal Prayer, prayers we all learnt as children, courtesy of our Catholic schooling. One does enjoy the foon fan of Catholicism even if the papacy has been mostly occupied by disagreeable characters, save Popes Francis & John. One wishes our very own Cardinal Joseph Cordeiro, the dark horse candidate for Pope once upon a time, would have been elected. Imagine, just imagine.
32. In case Bosco is unfamiliar with the dish—who knew if his mother made alloo bharay parathay—I volunteer an explanation: “Think of these as pancakes filled with mashed potatoes, sautéed in cumin and chilli powder.” “I know what they are,” he mumbles.
33. I possess issues of Burney Sahab’s excellent Outlook. There is no doubt that articles such as “An Exposé on the American Role in the Dismemberment of Pakistan” have as much resonance today as they did then. I also have clippings of my friend Badruddin Ahmed’s brilliant “Gardening Notes” from the Mirror. One ought to note in passing here that Mohammad Aslam Mian’s Flower Gardening in the Plains of Pakistan is also an invaluable resource, though the prose is somewhat flat. W. Firminger, Woodrow & Johnston have also made meaningful contributions to the field since the Brits have the need to categorize everybody & everything.
34. “They just snip it, man,” Felix once said about cataract surgery. “It’s like clipping your nails.” But then, I rarely clip my nails. It’s a grand waste of time. Ditto for dental health: Doc Rumi, my dentist, was alwa
ys flabbergasted, but squeezing caterpillars of toothpaste over a toothbrush day in, day out is taxing, especially if you don’t have teeth. And barber visits? They say man is evolving toward hairlessness. I look forward to it.
35. “And,” you might recall, “when they were only half-way up, they were neither up nor down.”
36. I prefer those other candles, trick candles, the variety that don’t extinguish in a breath. After all, why do we have to hammer the fact that existence is evanescent?
37. I have recently discovered these scrumptious dark chocolate wafer rolls at Agha’s. I can inhale an entire tin of the confections as a snack, especially after some hash. But I must exert self-control.
ON HOW HISTORIOGRAPHICAL SENSIBILITIES INFORM THE POLITICS OF PRESERVATION
It is said that on the continent of Europe and in certain swaths of the Americas, the Trajectory of History is considered linear. Homer, old Pliny the Elder & that curmudgeon Marx might have posited other paradigms, but since the storied Enlightenment and subsequent Colonial Conquests—the former strangely informing the latter—the Caucasian tribes have broadly believed that history is a Chronicle of Progress.
The Chinese, on the other hand, have always maintained that History is Cyclical. After occupying the centre of the world for an epoch, they experienced an epoch of profound turmoil, barbarism, bloodshed, war;38 after inventing bells, noodles, and printing, plastromancy, metallurgy, and fireworks,39 they were swept aside by insidious opiate winds, a brutal occupation; and after Great Leaps Forward and falling flat on their rumps, they generated muscular economic growth that is eclipsing what the Caucasians call the West (but the Chinese consider the East). The motto of the Chinese could be: We Might Be Eating Grass Now. But Wait a Millennium. Things Will Change.
Then there is the Musalman. It is said that we subscribe to a third historical paradigm, that of the Golden Age. We hearken to different times, different eras, whether the Caliphate of the Pious (termed CP4 hereafter) or the Splendour That Was Andalusia. Of course, the period of the Caliphate was not particularly rosy: the second caliph cuffed the elected successor to the community circa 632 CE,40 then instituted severe punishment for inebriation; his successor was knocked off by vexed protestors demanding the head of his good-for-nothing governor; and the Mighty Ali (AS) was mired in civil wars before being felled by the first bona fide fundamentalists of Islam.41 In our collective memory, however, CP4 is an oasis in the Sahara of history.42
One would think that the Musalman predilection of looking back would compel them to preserve the past, but that is nary the case. Like children with dynamite, the Bedouins running the Hijaz have been tearing down monuments willy-nilly. In 1924, the graveyard that housed the Prophet’s (PBUH) first wife was razed, and two years later, the mausoleums of the Prophet’s (PBUH) daughter & grandson as well. When we did not protest, the Bedouins blasted the Seven Famous Mosques.43 In their place, they constructed shopping complexes, retail banking outlets, those Currency Dispensing Machines. And imagine: they constructed public toilets on the Prophet’s (PBUH) wife’s house!
Verily, Islam became better the further it moved away from the desert. It is a matter of fact that a drop of water from a secret fountainhead only nourishes land, peoples, civilizations when it picks up momentum. The Torrent of Islam thusly originated in the Hijaz before widening into a river in Syria, Persia, Anatolia, North Africa, then opening into a sea that touched the rest of the world. Unbeknownst to most, Islam first reached the Subcontinent not on horseback but via the coast.
Whilst there has not been any wholesale destruction of the Bedouin variety in the Subcontinent, historical preservation has been wanting.44 My brother Tony told me that his childhood policeman friend, Hur, a.k.a Hawkeye, presently Deputy Inspector General (DIG), narrated the following story: “Yahoodi Masjid, or Magen Shalome, as it was known, came under my watch when I served in Garden. When I heard that the land mafia was eyeing the property, I went to investigate. The caretaker, this old lady named Rachel, said most of her kind had left after the wars with Israel. All her documents were in order—title deed, expense reports45—but when I tried to secure the site, my superior resisted. If I were a better man, I’d have stood up for it.” The synagogue was razed in the summer of ’88. That’s not even yesterday.
Secular constructions, broadly speaking, do not command much interest or attention. Take Mohenjo-Daro, or for that matter, the Olympus. Constructed by my grandfather by 1919, a relic of the First World War construction boom, the establishment was indeed unique, arguably the only aesthetic outpost of the Hapsburg Empire in the Subcontinent.46 I do not believe any Hapsburg availed of our hospitality but if any Raja or Rana sojourned in the city, he would be stationed in one of our Deluxe Suites. Several sipped Scotch in proper Baccarat crystal, played the Baby Grand to an empty lobby, long after the world changed.47
Our fortunes began changing with the dictatorial edict shifting the capital to the Poonjab—occupancy rates fell when foreigners left for greener pastures—and there was also the silly war in ’65, an inept attempt to redress the legacy of colonial gerrymandering. Who visits in a Time of War?
Exogenous shocks aside, the hoteling landscape also changed: the Shadow Lounge lost out to the Intercon’s Nasreen Room, Palace’s Le Gourmet. Moreover, as the boundaries of the city expanded exponentially, we found ourselves relegated to the periphery.
Then there is the Sunset Lodge (named thusly because the vista of dusk from the verandah was said to be spectacular). Conceived by the renowned Moses Somake,48 a local Jew who also designed Uncle Jinnah’s residence, Flagstaff House, the Lodge was fashioned in what they call the Indo-Gothic mode. The central structure, hewed from yellow limestone quarried in Gizri, is flanked by semicircular turrets featuring narrow windows. A stairway ribbons down one side and another down the back, leading to the garage and annex that once housed the domestics’ quarters. There are three bedrooms downstairs plus a parlour furnished with oak wainscot where Papa would host bridge nights on a plush green table (now lodged in the kitchen), and three and a half bedrooms upstairs, not including the garret. Bosco inhabits Tony’s tiny old room which still houses his collection of multicoloured bongs and remains plastered with posters of Hawaiian Elvis Presley and sixties pinups, including Jean Seberg wearing not much more than a hat. My parents’ erstwhile abode serves as my bedroom & library, drawing & dining rooms.
I would like to believe that the Lodge will remain when I am gone, rearing successive generations of the clan, but I might be mistaken. Whilst I inhabit the Master Bedroom, I am reminded that I am not Lord of the Manor.
38. There was even a period known as the “Warring States Period.” It went on for two hundred and fifty years! Imagine: that’s as if the American Civil War continued to this day!
39. Whilst researching acupuncture when my back gave way several years ago, I compiled a list at the Club library of the following Chinese inventions: the animal zodiac, pinhole camera, cannonball, landmine, coffin, golf, football, high-alcohol beer (the regular variety was invented in Iraq), lavatory paper, the toothbrush.
40. And Saad ibn Ubayda (RA) never recovered. Madelung’s brilliant Succession to Muhammad provides a comprehensive account of the events subsequent to the Prophet’s (PBUH) death. It will make a Shia out of you.
41. It is no secret that the Khariji Imperative has returned with a vengeance today. Many Kharijis, by the way, settled in Beloochistan. Go figure.
42. Of course, our notions of history are more complicated than the three above paragraphs would suggest: the Great Ibn Khaldun articulated the most sophisticated historiographical analysis known to civilization; Marx was fundamentally a cyclicalist; and we have not even touched the Buddhist or for that matter, the Papuan conception of history. According to the Hindoos, incidentally, we inhabit the Age of Kali.
43. Said mosques belonged to Salman Farsi (RA), Abu B. (RA), Omar the Caliph (RA), the mighty Ali (AS) & his wife.
44. We preserve Sufi tombs but the hund
reds of stupas dotting the land are rotting like carcasses under the sun. It is said that the cremated remains of the Gautama are hidden in eighty-four boxes of silver from Patna to Kandahar. The Biharis have preserved some whilst the Pathans of late are intent on destruction. Between the poles, one of the Last Swaths of the Muslim World to have been colonized, the Scindees of Scinde, practice supreme neglect.
45. Hawkeye mentioned a card that read, “Circumcisions: 4 annas, Bar Mitzvahs: 8 annas.”
46. At the time, more than half of the town’s real estate was owned by the Great Edulji Dinshaw who famously financed schools, dispensaries & the storied engineering college that continues to function & bears his name.
47. If the Brits had vision, the Subcontinent would have been arranged sensibly, like Europe. After all, the Subcontinent was a collection of 572 states. Partition is a preposterous misnomer—what was there to part? The best arrangement would have been a federation of five, six unions: the Republic of the Indus, United States of South Asia and so on. The Bengalis would have been delighted to have Bengal all to themselves. (Ditto for the Poonjabis & the Poonjab.) But the British imposed their bizarre vision for disparate peoples, disparate lands for an area larger than Europe. Europe might be some subcontinent; we are the Continent.
48. One has heard of the renowned architects of the time: J. A. Shiveshankar, Jamsedji P. Mistry, Durgas Advani, M. Nazareth, Gulshan Jalal & Khemji.
VOLUME II
ON ROADSIDE METAPHYSICS
(or THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE PHANTOM FIREFLY)
One afternoon during the Holy Month, I experience that indistinct but unmistakable sensation of being followed. It occurs in the broad vicinity of Empress Market, environs I know like the inside of my pocked, pallid thigh; once upon a time, I would accompany Papa to the landmark to purchase meat & vegetables for the kitchens at the Olympus, clutching an extended finger, cloth bag slung over my shoulder. The structure’s sturdy walls and imposing tower reminded me of a storybook castle. Indeed, some of my fondest childhood memories reside in the stalls and alleys of this sprawling compound—a musty, indeed magical realm,49 inhabited by that spirited, mercurial species: the butcher, Heir of Original Man. If you do not know what you want, he jeers at you like a harlequin, but if you do, and Papa did, he is an obliging djinn: a sleight of hand would yield a cut of clod or silverside. At the time, of course, I could not distinguish tongue from tripe, but I have since developed the sense and sensibility that allows me to appreciate the modalities, indeed, the majesty of meat.