The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

by HM Naqvi

  Collapsing on the floor like Toto, I mull my precarious place in the universe, certain I have been Born Under a Bad Sign, before Barbarossa emerges, transistor tucked under his arm (playing that old number, “Khayal rakhna”), wet rag slung over his shoulder (the one he uses to polish the beaks of cocks with palm oil) to save the day. “Leave me to,” he says in English.

  Kissing my Godsent saviour on the head—he smells of naswar and cockerel and sunflower oil—I rush to brush my dentures, administer a sponge bath, don my lucky red shirt, and splatter eau de toilette across my jowls, only to recall that my trousers remain in the oven. Mercifully, they are not singed.

  I feel pleased with myself, but Murphy, that lout, is relentless: on my way out, I find Chambu in a dark safari suit stretched on the deck chair on the lawn, waving as if we are childhood friends reunited at a beachside resort. “Boss!” he calls.

  It is a matter of fact that you can appraise the Measure of a Man from his teeth and toes: Chambu’s teeth recall yellowing Scrabble tiles, his sponge slippers expose talons, and once he seizes you by the scruff, he will eat your brain like a buzzard.62 “We are both gaseous individuals,” he might begin, “and you know how dangerous gas can be.” You might ask, What to do? “Boil two grains of jaggery and a slice of ginger in water and take a tablespoon before and after lunch and dinner. It will make you a new man, a better man.” What an elegant elixir! you think. It might just revolutionize gastronomy, revolutionize me!

  As soon as Chambu opens the battered portmanteau that always yields a set of ancient files, a tape recorder, a can of olive oil, and a packet of dry fruits—“for the Sex Drive,”63 he claims—I holler, “Not interested in your nuts today!”

  “You know I would never even think to bother you unless there is an emergency, unless Hell is upon us, and to be honest, to be very honest, Boss, Hell is upon us—”

  “Hell is below—”

  “The inspectors are threatening to cut off power,” he continues, brandishing a file, “because we do not comply with the new wattage quota for industrial units—”

  “But it is not an industrial unit—”

  “If you do not come with me this very instant, you will regret the decision for months if not years, because if they shut the power, we lose our contract and if we lose the contract, the workers will not be paid, and if the workers are not paid, they will show up at your place and there will be a riot.”

  “I cannot come right now!”

  “Do not tell me I did not warn you,” Chambu shrugs, turning on his heel. Oh, such blithe skullduggery! “You can deal with them yourself if you like.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “Just a lakh, Boss,” he chirps.

  “I am writing a cheque for twenty.”

  “You know, that might just work if the cheque does not bounce, but I cannot promise—”

  Somehow I manage to make it to Gandhi Garden at the instant the muezzin stridently announces prayer, and slumping on the bench, picnic basket in tow, I imagine the fraternity of animals—the elephants, baboons, wallabies—breaking fast together. The probability of a reunion with Jugnu is arguably as ludicrous. I hum an old tune, cross and uncross my legs, careful not to crease my trousers. But Jugnu doesn’t show. I have only mosquitoes for company.

  Quiet bench, picnic basket,

  I am left bereft in the twilight.

  Come, I say out loud, to nobody in particular,

  Come, if only to leave again.64

  56. It has come to my attention that there is a community of poets outside Our Swath of the World that has adopted the ghazal, concentrated especially in the otherwise insular United States of America: Merwin, Rich, Wideman. Of course, the Yanks, consummate innovators, have altered the concerns of the form—I came across the following verses penned by Heather McHugh, for example, at the secondhand book bazaar at Regal Chowk recently, “Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun”:

  Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person?

  I blame the soup: I’m a primordially stirred person.

  Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings.

  The apparatus of his selves made an absurd person.

  The sound I make is sympathy’s: sad dogs are tied afar.

  But howling I become an ever more unheard person.

  I need a hundred more of you to make a likelihood.

  The mirror’s not convincing—that at-best inferred person.

  As time’s revealing gets revolting, I start looking out.

  Look in and what you see is one unholy blurred person.

  The only cure for birth one doesn’t love to contemplate.

  Better to be an unsung song, an unoccurred person.

  McHugh, you’ll be the death of me—each self and second studied!

  Addressing you like this, I’m halfway to the third person.

  57. There is no doubt that the flat topography of contemporary poetry requires a fundamental reconfiguration. Who wants to read another poem marrying mundane diurnal rituals that characterize modern life with profundity? Only the other day I came across a peculiar poem entitled, “I Am Intimate with My Brush,” purporting to pertain to love, life, the human predicament.

  58. I’m technically Gujarati-speaking though my Gujarati’s poor. My mother’s tongue was Urdu though she was technically Pathan. We are all fundamentally cultural salads.

  59. Recall the following ancient verse: “Obscenis, peream, Priape, si non / Uti me pudet improbisque verbis / Sed cum tu posito deus pudore / Ostendas mihi coleos patentes / Cum cunno mihi mentula est vocanda.”

  60. We had nicknamed them Gulbadan, or Rose Body, and Badbakht, or Bad Luck, and it stuck.

  61. I have it on good authority that our young friend HH managed a Pavlova in a makeshift tin-box oven in Murree. Man Bites Dog? Ha! How about Man Makes Meringue on the Mountain!

  62. It was not always like this: his progenitor, a good man, a dedicated man, dropped dead of congestive heart disease in the employ of the accounts department at the Olympus. Before his demise, he exhorted us to take care of his son. Who knew the boy would turn out to be a swine?

  63. It’s a misconception that nuts have a salutary effect on the sex drive but Mummy maintained that almonds benefit the eyes, walnuts the brain, and peanuts the earlobes, each shape corresponding to a particular part of our physiology. Sometimes I suspect I am walnut deficient.

  64. I doubt that I would have impressed Jugnu with my doggerel—to be honest, it’s not even entirely mine. The following verses penned by my young friend A. Allawalla, writer, raconteur, might be more apt:

  I should have been born a son-of-a-bitch,

  Not needing to love;

  Instead, here I am, a derelict,

  Upon the shores of sin,

  Unable to even wave at ships floating away like tulips …

  So where to go,

  With your thorn-shred feet and broken bits of heart?

  Where indeed?

  And indeed how,

  Should I fall in love one last time?

  ON CONSEQUENCES OF THE SOCRATIC METHOD

  (or SHADOWBOXING)

  The taper flickering in the parlour downstairs upon my return from the zoo announces loadshedding, and the smell of gasoline in the air suggests that the generator has packed up. I bang my knee on the way upstairs, bruise my rump searching for a candle stub or two in secret drawers in the pantry. Bracing for a dark night of the soul, I settle amid the clutter of my desk—bureaucratic-blue files and calendar diaries dispatched annually by banks; and notepads filled with decades of scholarship in ballpoint ink held down by an onyx ashtray, a round tin of Danish Butter Biscuits, and other provisional paperweights—intending to make meaningful progress on the only project that promises certain succor, The Mythopoetic Legacy of Abdullah Shah Ghazi (RA), but it is still and sticky and I am supremely distracted. I feel like a dotard for lingering at the Reptile House, washing down fritter after fritter with thermos-brewed tea. Oh, the heart’s a hu
ngry huckster! I even missed the Childoos’ bedtime.

  I am known to wander downstairs just before bedtime with idle queries—Anybody interested in these issues of National Geographic? or Anybody notice the geyser rattles like a box of ping-pong balls at dawn?—prompting the Childoos to hop and cry “Cha-cha-Jan” at the same time. They tug me to their room as Nargis steams in the background, sit me down on the edge of their bed, and insist on a story. My repertoire only includes the classics: the timeless adventures of the world-famous mariner Sindibad al-Bahri,65 Podna Podni, the tale of an unjust, uncharitable Raja who is upended by a sparrow,66 and a permutation of The Wizard of Oz,67 in which I substitute the Scarecrow, Tin Man & Lion with the Childoos and me. Typically, I play the Lion but after the fiasco at the zoo I am more like the Scarecrow—hollow & alone.

  But I am not alone! Bosco! I think, “Bosco?” I call. Perhaps he has abandoned me as well—everybody eventually abandons me. The lad is not in his room or the library, pantry, wardrobe. I find him on the roof, perched on an overturned basin, reading in candlelight like young Abraham Lincoln. Alarmed by me, my shadow, a sudden storm cloud, he nearly topples over. “What,” he asks, recovering, “is a moral man?”

  Struck by the odd, unexpected query, I squat for the second time in twenty-four hours. “A moral man,” I reply, warm tar clinging to my slippers, “is a man who does good things.”

  “But what is ‘good’?”

  What on earth has gotten into this boy, I wonder? Although we have come across each other in the last few days, we have only exchanged greetings and nods, as if we have been revolving in proximate but parallel orbits. There is no doubt that Master Bosco has spun out of control since. “Good,” I sagely continue, “is what is beneficial to yourself and to others.”

  “Does it have to do with justice?”

  It occurs to me that this peculiar, problematic line of enquiry is a youthful malady, an intellectual infection, a virus borne by gadflies. “Sure,” I begin, “but justice is not a samosa. It’s an idea. It has a certain genealogy and context: in the jungles of the Papua, for example, justice dictates devouring an antagonist. Justice might be characterized as collective consensus—those dashed Saudis, they hack limbs, and I can tell you, lad, it doesn’t always work. In the United States of America, the mecca of civilization itself, blacks are wrongly incarcerated, routinely sentenced to death. You tell me: is that justice?”

  The candle flickers; Bosco fidgets. I notice his shoes, beige-brown joggers, are punctured at the toes. “But,” he blurts, “what about the angler?”68

  “Ah, the dialectical angler! And what about the tinker, tailor, the famous candlestick-maker?” The whole creaky hermeneutic apparatus—not unlike the jurisprudential tool of qiyas, I might note—is intrinsically flawed. One could spend the entire night in the company of dimwits, exchanging parables. I’m a large, untidy man with a proclivity for public debate as of late. What of it? Recall the Goblet of Hemlock, the Rule of Thirty Tyrants? Timocracy? “In this time, in this country,” I continue, “I believe the role of a ruler is to provide order.”

  “What kind of order?”

  “We could talk about social and political order but why not discuss environmental or economic order? Everybody evacuates into the sea from Rio to Bombay. That’s why Bombay duck tastes so good—you taste yourself in it. I could make a moral case against inflation, and her grotesque sibling, hyperinflation. Inflation kills but nobody talks about it. It’s a conspiracy. We all talk about democracy, about freedom, but you can’t eat freedom.”

  I pause to allow Bosco a retort but he does not interrupt because the matter, the discipline, is obviously outside his purview, not to mention the purview of those chatty Athenians. It had also been outside mine until I developed gout: I picked up economics mostly from discussion programmes on this new CNBC channel in the waiting room of my GP’s clinic.69 “I want to read the treatise of that philosopher,” I continue sententiously, “who champions economic enfranchisement over political enfranchisement.”

  Although I am pleased with my exegesis, Master Bosco shrugs. The boy has undoubtedly overdosed on the cerebral acrobatics of the Greeks—we all have—but perhaps he is prey to something else. There is no doubt that he too is suffering a dark night of the soul. I must distract him. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?” I ask.

  “I go to an all-boys school.”

  “Hobbies?”

  “I forgot my yo-yo at home.”

  “What’s really vexing you?”

  When the lad looks up, I behold that rabbit face, the powdery parentheses on either side of his mouth suggesting a moustache, a pair of bulging black eyes conveying contempt, disdain: What would you know, he seems to say, you sad, fat old man? I want to tell him that I wasn’t always like this, that I was somebody else once, young, energetic, full of promise; I was known, a scion of a great family. I ran the Olympus, one of the most prominent institutions in one of the most animate cities in the world. Instead, I begin, “Divorced from experience, ideas are meaningless. I suggest staying away from the philosophy section in the library for the time being. Read literature instead. I will put together a reading list for you. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth.”

  Scrutinizing his holey joggers, Bosco says, “If I can’t put things right, if I can’t do what I should do or must do, I’m no longer a good man. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

  Nodding, it occurs to me I have it all wrong: the matter is not theoretical. It could have something to do with his parents, presumably the father. The two might have quarreled. I can imagine a rancorous exchange, a slap, a scene—the boy walking out, slamming the door behind him. Or was he thrown out? In either event, I know a father’s ire. I want to embrace the lad, put his head against my heaving bosom, but instead, say, “We will have to visit your home.” As his custodian, it is my responsibility to investigate.

  “Not a good idea, Uncle Cossack.”

  “Good ideas don’t always work. That’s what the Greeks never understood. That’s why it took two millennia for them to understand the digestive system.”70

  Before repairing to the Lodge, Bosco blows out the taper, then looks up searchingly at the sky. Hobbling on pins and needles, I point out the buttery impression of a crescent in a cloud. It is exquisite.

  65. I have it on good authority, incidentally, that said sailor was a local, a denizen of Scinde. There is no doubt that our heroes have been forgotten, neglected, or appropriated.

  66. Those familiar with the story—and most of us are—are aware that the fable is thrice punctuated by the following rhythmic refrain: “Sarkando ki gari bani / Do maidak jotay jain. / Raja mari podni / Hum larnay marnay jain.” Ha!

  67. When they are older, I will explain to them that the story is really an atheist allegory—the Wizard, after all, turns out to be a fake, a fraud—although I understand that there is a vocal constituency of economists that maintain that WOZ concerns the politics associated with abandonment of the Silver Standard: the Gold Road gets you nowhere. But economists, like mechanics, are not to be trusted.

  68. I might mention in passing that history books ignore the fact that after Plato’s death, Aristotle took up marine biology on the island of Lesbos. After years of yapping, he eventually got down to more meaningful matters.

  69. I ought to mention that I stopped frequenting my GP a few years back—it’s too late in the day to jumpstart my batteries. I should also mention that I am not entirely unschooled in the Discipline of Economics: I have read Rosenthal’s translation of Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun, the Father of Sociology, Anthropology & Economics.

  70. Instead of sitting on their sore, sallow rumps pontificating, the Great Greeks should have put scalpel to cadaver to learn the functioning of the circulatory system. It would have changed the trajectory of scientific enquiry. It wasn’t until the advent of Islam that anybody did any hands-on work. Bad air! Four humours! Ha! And imagine: doctors the world over today actually take the Hippocratic Oath. Hippoc
rappus!

  ON MATER FAMILIAS

  (or THE MAN UPSTAIRS)

  As our rickshaw rattles past the sprawling police station and the old tram station on Commissariat Road that has since become the Coast Guard headquarters, past Prince and Capri cinemas71 and the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital where Tony was born, towards the residential end of Saddar, I find myself speculating about the boy’s relationship with his father: Bosco is a serious, sensitive, decorous sort—another Master Unusual—and his father, like mine, might be impatient, imperious, one who does not suffer fools gladly. There is the distinct possibility, then, that he might not countenance me either. The boy does not let on either way; riding in front with the driver since there was no space in the back, he has not uttered a word since we departed.

  There had been a scene at the Lodge earlier: Bosco refused to take me, and refused to say why. He might not have known himself. When pushed, however, he declaimed, “It’s not that I am not thankful for your hospitality, I am, but I don’t want to be here and cannot be there.” The lad only relented when I bribed him with a first edition of The Long Goodbye (a veritable classic in the annals of literature), one of Papa’s beautiful old felt trilbies (at least a size too big for the circumference of Bosco’s head), and the promise to make him a good man (even if my experience is spotty). It seemed to have worked.

  We disembark outside a narrow, grey, four-storied edifice wedged between a surgical supplies store and an abandoned lot, a stone’s throw from the familiar pink Gothic spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, undoubtedly one of the finest constructions in the city.72 I have attended baptisms and marriages at the institution in the old days, and Midnight Mass with Uncle Ben, City Collector and Cointreau-maker.73 The event took place around the back, beneath a marquee because the structure could not accommodate all the teeming faithful. I mouthed all the words to the hymns that rang into the night—we are, after all, products of a Good Christian Education.74

  We enter via a sliding steel gate that leads to a dim corridor wafting disinfectant, Bosco cryptically mumbling something that sounds like nonchalance. The stairwell is dauntingly steep. I am certain that I will die in a stairwell one day: the headline will read, LARGE MAN FALLS DOWN ON THE WAY UP. Hoisting my trousers, I haul myself up the flight fitfully like a circus elephant only to realize at the stairhead that Bosco is not behind me. It occurs to me then that he must have mumbled no chance as I had forged ahead. I have no choice but to continue on my own—second flat, he had said, on the second floor. When I knock on a set of splintered double doors twice, and once again for good measure, a lady’s voice peals, “Yes?”