The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

by HM Naqvi

  “Take this there,” I say, “but you give it to Bakaullah.“

  As I prepare to head out myself to run errands ahead of the expedition—bank, shrine, shopping—Bosco emerges bare chested & groggy like a flyweight after a fight. “Put on a pair of trousers and come along.” After the debacle the other day, I will not leave him home alone.

  “What about our lessons?”

  “We’re bunking today. We should all know when to bunk. It’s an important lesson in life.”

  There is not much of a queue at the bank but the teller, a chubby lass wearing maroon lipstick and a matching hijab like a bathing cap, insists on double-checking the obligatory paperwork, pointing out discrepancies between my signatures on different pages: “one looping,” she points out, “one not so looping.” She might be doing her job—I have withdrawn a small fortune—but is wasting my time. “Allah-hafiz,” she says at last with a smile.

  Stuffing the monies in and around my breadbasket, I reply, “Khuda-hafiz. The correct usage is Khuda-hafiz.”

  “But Khuda could be any god,” she chirps.

  I look at Bosco, and Bosco looks at me. Let it go, he tells me with his eyes but I snap: “And I could hail from any faith. I could worship Ram, Zarathustra, Taus Melak. As a Musalman, you should be doubly, no, triply intent on accommodating others.” Summoning the manager, a small, suited, booted fellow with a shaved head, I declare, “Your teller has a limited worldview. Please rectify the problem before my next visit. The customer, as you must know, is always right!” Marching out, envelope cutting into the soft flesh in the genital vicinity, I mumble, “Important life lesson number two: don’t let the insensible govern your life.”

  We fly across town in one of those new air-conditioned Radio Cabs—I am flush with currency for a change—listening to a programme playing “Casino Classics, Northern Soul” on some new radio channel. I tell the uniformed driver to wait outside the dramatically striped rectangular seaside structure, the shrine of one Abdullah Shah Ghazi (RA). “What now?” Bosco asks as we disembark.

  “Follow me.”

  After purchasing a bagful of wet rose petals from a roadside florist, Bosco and I deposit our shoes at the foot of the carpeted stairwell, then make our way up to the mausoleum. It is a relatively effortless climb because the gradient is not acute and one is stirred in anticipation of the summit. Upon entering the turquoise tiled chamber, Bosco gawks at permutations of himself in the mirrored dome above. The only other pilgrims present are two rosy-cheeked girls playing pat-a-cake on the far side and a bent fellow clad in a long black kurta sitting cross-legged by the foot of the tomb, massaging his temple as if kneading dough. But in the evening, there will be no place to move.

  Parking himself by the aperture that opens to the courtyard below, the blue-grey sea in the distance, Bosco repeats, “What are we doing here?”

  “You have your saints,” I explain, “Saint Francis and Xavier, Valentine, Theophilus the Younger, and we have ours. Five men, good men, honourable men, brothers, settled here a millennium ago to escape persecution. Abdullah Shah Ghazi (RA) was one of them.122 We protected him and now he protects us.”

  As Bosco contemplates the claim, I scatter petals over the marble tomb, kiss the headstone, utter a prayer for a safe, successful sojourn, slip a crisp green note in the deposit box, then make my way down to find my hashish dealer. Mufti, a retired angler with a ready, betel-nut-stained grin, is sleeping with his arm across his face in the shade of the awning outside the limestone cave in the back. When I tickle his ribs, he grins. “You have forgotten me,” he groans.

  “I have been busy.”

  “You are the busiest man I know.”

  “Not busier than you.”

  “I am never too busy to smoke with you.”

  “Soon, friend, but I am on a mission at the moment and need a good pao.”

  Shaking his head in mock disappointment, Mufti reaches inside the rolled shawl he uses for a pillow and pulls out a plastic-wrapped brick of hashish. “Not this,” I say. “I want the strain from the North”—from the near mythical locale called Dara Adam Khel.123

  Dislodging a couple of rocks from the wall behind him, Mufti wordlessly pulls out another tawny parcel, breaks it with long fingers & hands a clump to me. It’s redolent of damp earth, spring in the mountains. “What are you going to do with so much?”

  “It’s a gift for my brother in the Interior.”

  “Who’s the boy?”

  “My right-hand man,” I proclaim.

  As Mufti reclines, crossing his arm over his forehead, canines exposed like a wolf after a meal, he says, “I hear you have been keeping interesting company these days.” I would have pushed, prodded, at any other moment in history, but I do not have the leisure for horseplay and Bosco is out of sorts—I suspect I have somehow upset his delicate Catholic sensibilities. He confirms my hunch in the taxi. “Are you religious, Uncle Cossack?”

  “The call to prayer was whispered in my ear when I was born, and I will be buried with traditional rites, whether I like it or not. So I was born a Musalman, will die a Musalman, but in the interim, I wonder.”

  “What?”

  “I wonder what is good, what is bad, does morality have anything to do with God? I wonder if we all misunderstood the message except the Mandaeans or, say, the Yazidis.”

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know? At the dawn of time, God famously wrought a being out of the dust of the ground and told his angels to bow before His latest creation. One angel stood up, and cried, Surely, you jest, sir! Surely, you jape! I will not bow to anybody except you, my Lord. You can imagine that God was livid, red in the face. You can imagine he turned to the recalcitrant angel—you know what recalcitrant means?—and glowered in a way nobody has glowered before. After an epic silence, God said, ‘You know, you’re right! You passed the test! You are hereby appointed my Vice-Regent on earth!’”

  “That’s not how it goes.”

  “It depends on what you grow up believing, and God knows, I’m all grown up. There might be something outside of us but perhaps it’s just Mother Nature. You know what I mean?” The boy stares out the window vacantly. “Look,” I say, “one day I will present you my magnum opus, The Mythopoetic Legacy of Abdullah Shah Ghazi. It will be a brilliant treatise that will explain everything—”

  “Don’t you know,” Bosco interjects, “my father’s also mixed up with drugs?”

  “Oh,” I blurt. “I only smoke for spiritual reasons—”

  “When my father began using,” he continues, as if he hasn’t heard me, “he sold our flat to a bootlegger upstairs. Now he’s forcing us to leave.”

  Suddenly, it all makes sense. But what to do? What to say?

  As we pull up to the Lodge, I ask, “How would you like to go on holiday?”

  “Where?”

  “It’s a surprise. Pack a couple of things.”

  “I only have a couple of things.”

  “Just don’t tell anybody.”

  “I’m not the talkative type, Uncle Cossack.”

  When we enter, I find Shafqat loitering at the gate, accompanied by a round man sporting a beret & Hitler moustache who does not appear to be an uncle or a mechanic. Surveying the premises like a detective, I lead him to the garage housing the Chevy Impala, the lissome burgundy BMW 1600, and the sunken black Foxy—I dare not borrow Babu’s Starlet again. The air inside is redolent of diesel & leather and afternoons spent playing hide-and-seek with Tony who often hid in the Impala’s vast dickey—a dickey that can accommodate three suitcases, a bicycle, and a goat. Who would have believed then that I would be playing hide-and-seek again at the ripe old age of seventy?

  When the mechanic states that VW parts are the easiest to procure, I tell him I have always been partial to the Impala,124 though the easiest automobile to repair would have been the family’s fourth vehicle, Papa’s sable Toyota Crown Super Saloon. Although nobody was allowed behind the wheel, we all knew that Tony would take it
out on the sly—the odometer always betrayed that he had driven to Xanadu and back. But when it comes to Tony, of course, we had a tendency to “let it go,” perhaps because he possesses that nebulous quality known as duende. Then one day after Papa passed, Barbarossa informed us that the Crown had been stolen. Some suspect that Tony sold it when strapped for currency but nobody made much of it. After all, Tony’s Tony!

  “How long have they been there like this?” the mechanic asks.

  “Ten, maybe fifteen years.”

  “It will be expensive, boss,” he says, sucking his teeth, “and there’s not much time—”

  “I understand if you’re not interested,” I interrupt. “I’ll call somebody else but I hear you’re top notch.” The fellow pulls in his chin. “If you can do the job by five, I’ll compensate you handsomely, more than the going rate. You need to decide now.”

  “Okay, okay,” he says.

  “But nobody can know what’s going on,” I add. “Not your wife, mother, lover, and certainly not anybody you encounter here. This is a secret project. Understand?”

  Returning to my quarters, I find Barbarossa standing like a totem by the exercise bicycle, bearing the same damn fool envelope entrusted to him a few hours back and a lean black cockerel under his arm. The old fox might have lost the way in the wasteland of Defense Housing Society—I myself routinely get lost on those narrow, nonsensically named streets: Badar, Badban, Baharia, Bakwaas. “What happened?” I cry.

  “I went, came back.”

  “With the same envelope and a cock!”

  “Same envelope,” he replies, exposing his gums, “but different letter inside.”

  Snatching it from his hand, I read: “(1) Your request is hereby granted provided you deliver a month’s rent. (2) You owe funds of Rs. 46,000. (3) Remuneration required in cash forthwith.”

  Raging—“Dash it all!” I cry—I pace furiously up and down the verandah like Hajra Between the Hills, red in the face and unctuous with sweat, until Barbarossa grabs me by the arm and says, “A sound of the broken pot will never ring true, my son.”

  What pot? What sound? It doesn’t matter. Kissing him on the forehead, I say, “There’s one more thing you need to do.” Jamming a wad of currency in his hand, I instruct, “Give this to Bakaullah. He wants the rent? I’ll give him the dashed rent. And leave the cock in the back for God’s sake.”

  Then I retrieve Papa’s leather valise from the powder room. I pack two shirts, two pairs of trousers, the knickers drying like dried flounder on the clothesline, along with my toothbrush, a bottle of cologne, a week’s supply of insulin, and the block of hashish. I throw in a box of powdered minestrone soup I enjoy for its addictive synthetic tang, a set of cutlery, a corkscrew, a candle stub, and a packet of AA batteries for good measure. I might have thrown in the toaster if there had been space. I am not known to be an expert packer. I never go anywhere.

  As the afternoon lapses into evening, I have clipped my crispy nails, shaved the hairy growth on the pudgy periphery of my ear, and sponged my damp crevices—I am ready for anything, everything—but the car is not ready at five or six but seven, and at seven rounding Gandhi Garden is complicated. The intersection at the Sayfi Apartments is an impasse because they always station some damn fool copper there, a dogsbody from Gujranwalla who, in the midst of an epic jam, can be found probing the inside of his nose.125

  Stashing the valise in the back, I hand the mechanic an envelope and arrange myself behind the wheel. “Not enough, boss,” he says, thumbing the notes. “The fuel pump alone—”

  “You know where I live, and you can ask anybody in Garden: the Cossack always keeps his promise”—an aphorism I coin on the spot.

  Just then I perceive movement in the parlour, a ruffling of the ancient floral curtains. Who is it? Nargis? Bua? Babu would not take kindly to an expedition involving the family heirloom. “I have to go,” I exclaim. “I have to go now.”

  Bosco jumps up front, sporting a pair of russet drainpipe pants, Bata joggers, and the trilby (that Jugnu somehow sized for him). Stroking the leather seat, he says, “Cool wheels!”

  “Life lesson number three,” I mutter. “Travel in style when you can.”

  Barreling past the automotive spare parts distributors, the life-sized statues of the giraffe and Asian elephant, and the small, green-domed shrine—traffic is strangely thin—I turn the corner at the frayed grey bungalow that marks the boundary of Garden. I stall curbside before the tollbooth, surveying the avenue leading to Lover’s Bridge. Jugnu is nowhere to be seen.

  “Why’s it so quiet?” Bosco asks.

  The tollbooth seems abandoned and the sole paan-wallah is shutting shop. Something is indeed awry. I attempt to honk the “Lullaby of Birdland,” our proprietary Morse Code, but since the horn has not been repaired, I just bang on the steering wheel like a bongo drum; I cannot play the role of the forlorn lover with dignity; I am not Ranjha, Ror Kumar, the canonical type.126 I roll down the window for a breath of air. The warm breeze carries the tincture of rubbish and smoke in. Perhaps there is a fire somewhere?

  “What are we doing here?” Bosco asks.

  In the rearview mirror, I espy four ruffians marching in the middle of the street, swinging hockey sticks like scythes. They might be boys looking to join a game; they might be gangsters. We are, after all, a stone’s throw from Lyari. “Lambs to the slaughter,” I mutter.

  As I prepare to escape, Jugnu, my Jugnu, emerges like a shadow, clad in a charcoal shalwar kurta buttoned to the neck, and a driver’s cap that recalls a picaro. “There’s trouble in the neighbourhood,” she says, getting in the back. “The war has begun.”

  And we are off.

  122. They were, in no particular order, Jumman Shah of Garden (RA), Noori Shah of Liaqatabad (RA), Alam Shah of Jaa’ma Cloth (RA), Misri Shah of Defense Phase 6 (RA), and of course, Abdullah Shah Ghazi of Clifton (RA). Some might claim Ghayab Shah of Keamari ought to be included but I believe otherwise.

  123. Although not as foul as the stuff known as the fakirs’ pitch, a powdery number mixed with henna & saliva, it’s not as fine as the truckers’ stash. Tony is a connoisseur. When he was in town, broke & broken, he discovered many sources: a pimp at a brothel past the Chinese dental clinics on Napier Road, seaside musicians at Boat Basin, and one Khan Baba, vagrant vegetable seller who could be found once a week on an empty plot in Gulshan.

  124. The front grille suggested a dinosaur’s grin to me as a child. As a teenager, its contours suggested a spaceship from Amazing Stories—one might still be able to get copies at Khori Garden—a conception of the future grounded in an aesthetic of the past. One has oft mulled an “Ode to Americana” that would begin, Thou foster child of art & mechany … Tony put it differently: “She’s a real piece of work, ain’t she?” The Impala is undoubtedly a voluptuous machine: if automobiles today invoke the waifish lasses on the covers of magazines at doctors’ offices, the Impala evokes the Ava Gardner variety of dame—beautiful, buxom, full of grace.

  125. I am fairly certain that the traffic police manufacture jams so that they can justify their loutish existence. I’ve seen them stopping traffic at roundabouts. You don’t need Johnnies posted at roundabouts. That’s why roundabouts were invented.

  126. Recall that there are seven legendary sets of lovers in our mythopoetics: (1) Heer/Ranjha, (2) Momal/Rano, (3) Dhaj/Ror Kumar, (4) Lila/Chanesar, (5) Noori/Jam Tamachi, (6) Sassi/Punnu, and (7) Umar/Marvi.

  ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF FELICIDE

  (or HEGIRA TO THE INTERIOR)

  When the city becomes unsettled, shops shutter, traffic thins—the Great Involute Urban Machinery comes to a halt. You stay indoors and listen to the transistor, to bulletins concerning “miscreants riding pillion” and busses set ablaze in far-flung cantons. When you turn off the news because the news upsets, the news is bad, you hear only the whistle of kites and the protest of crows. Sometimes, you can perceive smoke on the horizon, sometimes nearer, but the next day or the day after that
, it is as if nothing happened, as if a storm has quietly passed. The city is vast: it could rain in Federal B and remain sunny in Pipri; there could be picnickers frolicking on the beach when there’s gunfire off the highway. You have to read the signs, take caution: if you happen to be on the streets, you do not stop at red lights; you drive through and drive fast.

  Although the main arteries seem clear—we pass the airport, the temple in Malir, the Lanewallah farmhouse127—the drive could still prove to be treacherous: swathes of Scinde are tricky after dark; dacoits famously patrol the roads unencumbered. It’s Out of the Frying Pan & Into the Fire. As we hurtle into the darkness, I ask, “What war?”

  “The war of succession,” Jugnu replies.

  Naturally, Langra’s incarceration has consequences for the dispensation in the area, but that does not explain the scene at the tollbooth. “Who,” I ask, “were those boys with hockey sticks?”

  “I heard Langra’s men are looking for me.”

  “Why?”

  “They want to get to me before the police do.”

  Good God! The dame’s in a proper pickle. What if we were followed? What if we are stopped? I only possess a corkscrew for defense. I have also not slept in twenty-four hours, the meat in my lower back has turned brittle (as the Impala’s Flexomatic six-way power seat128 is jammed), and after the Steel Mill, I encounter Stygian gloom. It’s not just that there are no streetlamps or moonlight; no, it’s my cataract eye. I should have had surgery years ago but I do not want to die of septicemia in a hospital. I want to die at the Lodge. But not yet.

  Jugnu says, “Abdullah?”

  “Yes?

  “Thanks you,” she says in English. “You are the hero.”

  Grinning like a schoolboy, I run over a passing mammal: there is a bump followed by a crack—the fracturing of a mongoose skull or snapping of a feline spine. The Impala skids violently, veering left then right before spinning to a halt. Jugnu, who possesses the reflexes of a lioness, is unscathed, but Bosco grazes his head on the headrest. I am buffered by my gut but my soul feels mangled: I do not need a carcass on my conscience—I am not a dishonourable man.