The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

by HM Naqvi

  By the time I pull curbside and extricate myself from the seat, Jugnu is inspecting a heap a couple of metres away. There is the smell of burnt rubber in the air and the rot of marsh. We are on the outskirts of Haleji Lake, more than an hour into our jaunt, more than an hour from our destination. “It is a cat,” Jugnu announces. “It is alive.”

  “Oh God,” I cry. “Now what?”

  I watch Jugnu wordlessly gather the carcass and disappear into the bramble—I am certain I hear puling over the whisper of the breeze in the reeds. When I ask what she did, she states, “Animals live, animals die.”

  “But we’re not animals!”

  Jugnu instructs Bosco to fetch my valise from the car. The lad dashes off as if his life depends on it. When he returns, Jugnu pulls out my flask, pours a cup of water into the top, then splashes it across my face. Shaking like a wet dog, I yawp, “Why did you do that?”

  “You need to cool down.”

  The gambit succeeds. And suddenly, I know what to do: dig a grave. I claw doggedly but I have clipped my nails and the crust is hard because the rains are late this year. Pouring water over the earth, I retrieve the cutlery from my valise; a fork and knife can come in handy when fashioning a grave.

  After Jugnu lays the carcass inside, we sprinkle handfuls of dirt on top, read a prayer, the fatiha as I remember it,129 and stick a crooked stick in the ground. There is catharsis in it. There is always solace in ritual.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” I announce. “If I drive again, I will kill again. We camp here tonight.”

  “Aren’t we in the Interior?” Bosco asks. “Aren’t there dacoits in the Interior?”

  “You know about the dacoits?” The boy, a bundle of nerves, nods vigourously. This is not the sort of holiday he would have imagined. “I’ll park inland,” I say. “We’ll sleep in the car.”

  But it’s one of those miserably muggy nights. Since the windows have to be left open, bloody-minded mosquitoes feast on our damp flesh. It doesn’t matter; sprawled on the backseat, arm akimbo, I feel febrile, finished. The last image I remember before lapsing into unconsciousness is of Jugnu perched on the bonnet: she lights a beedi, glistens in the dark.

  When I wake, I am alone, save for a hefty, hirsute, lethargic mosquito—Bosco & Jugnu have either abandoned me or have been taken by dacoits—and feel like runny pudding: sweat soaks the accordion folds of my neck and the pockets under my bosom down to my grape-sized hemorrhoids. The sun, a golden whorl, blinds, and the leather beneath burns. Glancing around, I make out low bushes of thistle extending into the blinding horizon and the only intimation of civilization: a vacant chicken coop with a corrugated tin roof. I angle my arm to unlatch the door. A gust of dust blows in. Good God!

  After a searing, sodden eternity—it might have been minutes, it might have been hours—Bosco appears, disheveled, despondent. “We’ve got to go back!” he says. “There isn’t a tree for a kilometre. I had to poop in the open.” I would like to tell him that there is nothing like evacuating in the wide open but I am too drawn to respond. Then Jugnu materializes and declares, “I’m not going back.”

  “I can’t move at all,” I mumble.

  “What is the matter?” Jugnu asks.

  “I’m dying.”

  “We are all dying, Abdullah.” Placing a hand on my forehead, she says, “You have fever.”

  “You might have sunstroke!” Bosco exclaims. “Or worse, heat tetany! You need salt, Uncle Cossack, salt!”

  “There’s soup in the bag.”

  Using the automobile lighter to light a clutch of twigs in a forgotten bird’s nest, Jugnu prepares the minestrone by boiling water in a discarded corn oil tin—it’s as if she was born in the wild, suckled by wolves. When she feeds the soup to me, I feel relatively revived. “We press on,” I slurp. “After all, Tony and the city are equidistant.”

  “Who’s Tony?” Bosco asks.

  “My brother. You’ll like him. He’s a charming rogue.”

  “But what about the dacoits?” Bosco asks.

  Jugnu says, “I know their kind.”

  After breakfast, after the supplies have been stowed, we are ready to move. But as I take the driver’s seat, Jugnu declares, “You won’t drive.”

  “Then who?”

  “Me.”

  “Have you driven before?”

  “No,” she replies matter-of-factly.

  127. The proprietor of the old Sayfi Apartments—the abode of my Jewish friends—still owns a farm in Malir. After making a left at the temple, you negotiate a filthy warren of alleys until you reach an unremarkable gate that opens into an Edenic compound housing fruit trees and flowers and a small swimming pool. We would swim in the summers there and barbeque by a bonfire in the winters. You can, it seems, make heaven anywhere, even in the midst of Malir. I have wondered: What if after you die, God asks, “So how was Heaven?”

  128. Papa explained to me that the basic model cost the princely sum of $2,600 whilst the full monty set you back $3,000. The latter featured front and rear arm-rests, dual sliding visors, crank operated front ventpanes, an electronic clock (which no longer functions), and the aforementioned Flexomatic six-way power seat.

  129. I believe I also remember another short prayer, one of the quls, but I don’t remember much more.

  ON TRAVELS IN SCINDE IN TIME AND SPACE

  There are two routes into the Interior from the city. One travels through the central districts via a functional four-lane highway patrolled by vigilant police cars. Brush and scrub and the odd keekar tree speckle the relentlessly flat, tawny terrain, broken only by petrol pumps and ramshackle eateries that offer a decent plate of daal. The rocky folds of the Kirthir range rise in the distance, but after the bridge spanning the Indus, the environs turn verdant: muddy aqueducts circumscribing plots of wheat, flappy banana trees, and mango orchards in and around the erstwhile provincial capital of Hyderabad. One passes fluttering black flags on either side of the road—the seal of the House of Ali (AS)—and on each flagstaff, open silver hands reach for the sky. In Scinde, everyone reveres the House of Ali (AS).

  The other road traverses shabby cantons of Currachee populated by recent immigrants from the north and west.130 One passes bus depots, wandering cows, rubbish in heaps, graffiti on the walls. There was nothing in the vicinity twenty years earlier save the Steel Mill, a structure that recalls the failure of the Socialist Enterprise. Beyond the periphery of the city, you can sense the presence of a lake from the flocks in the sky. Unbeknown to most, the sea extended inland early in the topographical history of the region. There is ample evidence for it: if you veer off the road, you find seashells encrusted in rock. One might also come across other relics off road, at Bhambore131—“The Gateway of Islam”—or the sprawling necropolis of Makli, or the ancient town of Amarkot, the only Hindoo kingdom of Pakistan, the birthplace, you will recall, of Akbar the King.

  One understands that there is now a third route off the Super Highway that shoots straight to Sehwan along the range, the seat of the greatest of saints, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. Every evening after the call to prayer (except during the first ten days of Muharram), drums sound in the compound—Dan-da, dun dun! Dan-da, dun dun! Dan-da, dun dun! Dan-da, dun dun!—heralding frenetic movement: men and women from high and nigh in shiny hats & embroidered kurtas sway and shake and shudder to the beat of ecstasy. They have been at it for close to a millennium and will continue to do so for eternity. There is no doubt that the Qalandar was a miracle worker—he is known to have taken to the skies when moved, known to have upended the village on the northern butte with his staff in anger—but the fact that he exerts such power over the fabric of our reality in this time is in itself miraculous.

  Whilst the distance between the city and the countryside might be nominal—not more than an hour on these superhighways now, not more than a day on horseback then—and discourse might suggest that Currachee is integral to Scinde, technically, historically, or sociopolitically, Currachee has been merely
contiguous. It was only in 1795 that it was integrated into the local body politic. The Talpur rulers of Scinde had thrice besieged the entrepôt, and were thrice repelled. How the demonyms of Currachee managed to defy them beggars belief. The hardy populace relented only on the condition that the Beelooch mercenary force, a division of some twenty thousand, would remain outside town limits. Of course, we Currachee-wallahs even managed to expel the Britishers (rascals some if not rascals all) on several occasions before they managed a foothold, cannons blazing, thirty odd years later.132 Independence, then, is innate to the city.

  Unlike the history of Currachee, the history of Scinde is fundamentally the history of the River Indus. Although the trajectory of the subsequent pages might be informed by my occasional meanderings over three quarters of a century through the province, I have travelled in my mind up and down the mighty Indus over the years & across millennia, from the Sapta Sindhu of the Vedic texts to the angular sunbaked streets of Mohenjo-Daro, the Singapore of yore:133 one can surmise from the infrastructure that there was no spitting or paan chewing permitted in the city-state run by the solemn priest-king. When the river shifted dramatically one fine day, however, order crumbled.134 The great Chach rulers, ensconced downriver at Debal, not to mention the citizens of my ancestral hometown of Thatta, would also suffer shifting tides & accompanying fortunes. The Indus has undoubtedly made & unmade civilizations, men: after navigating the length of the river for the first time in recorded history, Alexander the Greek was ultimately undone by it,135 and that shifty spy Alexander Burnes, famously the toast of the colonials, paid for his betrayal of the river, of the land, in blood. This is why the Indus is both feared & revered.

  I have pilgrimaged at the shrine of the River God, Odero Lal. You enter the unimposing white-washed structure, ringing a bell before proceeding to either a dim, carpeted room that serves as a mosque, or a tomb surrounded by painted walls featuring frescoes of Dutch windmills, or a temple housing images of said deity riding the waves of the Indus on the back of a giant fish. At the annual celebrations, thousands converge. Tough dames sit on the low boundary walls in tight saris, sucking beedis. Inside, devotees chant bhajans to the tune of “Mast Qalandar.” Uncannily, Musalmans also participate in the festivities. I have never come across anything like it in all my travels.

  Of course, Scindee lore could easily fill all twenty-six volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Dieties repose in rivers, djinns populate the trees,136 and mermaids emerge from the lakes. When Ram, the slight caretaker of the Varun Dev temple on the Island of Manora, told me that he hosts the River God Odero Lal several times a year, I spent a night with him in the hope of an audience with the deity. We sat side by side on the beach, gazing into the swelling sea, heels dug into the damp sand. After we dined on whole fried mushka fish, one of the finest in the sea, Ram pointed towards the surf. “He wades through the sea to the shore, not trailing a grain of sand. We talk all night. He always leaves before daybreak.” What do you do the rest of the time? I inquired. “I wait.” Of course, He never showed that night (& Ram asked me if I could employ his son), but imagine—just imagine—if He had.

  One of my formative childhood memories, however, involves a corporeal though no less magical marine creature. Accompanying Papa on a business trip to Sukkur, I was shown the famous blind dolphins at the Lloyd Barrage. “Fishes,” he explained, “swing their tails from side to side. But this is a mammal.” A mammal, I repeated. “Mammals flap their tales up and down.” It was a revelation.

  Whilst my father had close ties to the Interior, commercial and personal, from the Mir of Khayrpur (who hosted the biennial boar hunt) to the formidably moustachioed Rana of Amarkot (one of the most urbane gentlemen one has come across), the relationships have since lapsed (and the Indus has since been dammed), but Scinde continues to occupy a special place in my consciousness. My last trip to the province might just confirm it.

  130. They live in Pipri, Razaqbad, Qazafi Town. I know because Barbarossa fights cocks in these localities several times a year.

  131. There is nothing there, save an unimpressive stone foundation of the Circular House (which did not appear particularly circular to me), the smooth checkered floor (of the first mosque in the Subcontinent) that recalls a discothèque, and broken ramparts overlooking a green lake in which wizened anglers lazily cast nets. If you like, you can search for ancient seashells and pieces of turquoise pottery, the odd lingam, amongst the rubble. If you have had something to smoke, however, you might be able to conjure the wrinkled lip & sneer of cold command.

  132. They established a factory in 1800 only to be closed down in 1801. The Brits would conquer the province three decades later, slaughtering ten thousand souls with machine guns.

  133. Most recently, I’ve read about a dig at the site of Chanhujo Daro in Sakrand, first conducted by R. C. Majumdar in the thirties and now by an attractive French lass and her serious-minded cohort. I can imagine walls emerging from the ground, pottery with patterns more elaborate than Art Deco. Why did Man require patterns five thousand years ago?

  134. Science suggests that the sea level will inevitably rise one day to sweep that expertly administered island away.

  135. The second time it was navigated was in 1978 by Hamid & Naeem & KM—a distance of some three thousand kilometres.

  136. Our friends in Mirpur invited us to commemorate Muharram once. One remembers the sweet scent of burning incense pervading the bungalow, though there were no incense sticks & the distant thump of beating chests, though nobody was home save our host. One was told djinns gathered on the roof annually to mourn the Prophet’s (PBUH) grandson.

  ON CONFRONTING MORTALITY

  (or MAN AND MOSQUITO)

  The landscape is flat and still like a canvas. On either side of the dirt road, geometric plots brim with slender yellow-green stalks of sugarcane. We take in the air, bracing & fragrant with wet soil as Jugnu expertly negotiates the winding track and Bosco breaks into verse: “When streams of light pour down the golden west, / And on the balmy zephyrs tranquil rest / The silver clouds, far—far away to leave / All meaner thoughts, and take a sweet reprieve.” It is most unexpected and most apt, even if there are some fallow patches and in the distance, an unsightly hedge of bramble. A couple of kilometres into the estate, after sighting a solitary banyan festooned with scarlet ribbons like a bride, we come across a boxy, whitewashed cement structure, bounded by a high wall. Once upon a time, it was possible to peer into the orchard inside, the branches sagging with ripening mangoes. Things have changed but it doesn’t matter; although feverish, I am at peace: I will be reunited with my boon companion soon.

  I have been to Tony’s twice, once when there was nothing save a sere expanse, and once after he settled in—for his fiftieth. I don’t believe he has visited the Lodge more than twice or thrice since he abandoned it to pursue a Bachelor of Arts at a university in the United States of America, Tony being the first of our clan to venture to the New World. After graduating, he spent time in sin in the City of Sin, running a five-star enterprise known as Chucky Cheese. When he returned sporting jeans, velvety hippie locks, and a cocky smile—a gay blade—dames, including the likes of Badbakht Begum, would say, Your brother has bedroom eyes. “Ain’t she darling,” he would drawl in the characteristic Yankee manner. But upon immigrating to the Interior, he traded his rakish ways for farm work, his faded jeans for starched shalwars. It’s been donkey’s years. It will be an event.

  As we approach, however, an epic clamour rises from the compound, as if the very Hounds of Hell have been unleashed. Since the horn does not work, Jugnu hoots. Perceiving shadowy movement in the grilled port above the formidable iron gate, I proclaim: “I am Abdullah of Currachee, son of Karimullah, brother of Fazlullah. I demand that you introduce yourself.” After a gravid pause, a tinny voice hollers, “Sayien not here.”

  “You call Sayien,” I shout. “You call him now.”

  The gate slides open after an eternity. A dark sinewy man with
piercing kohl-rimmed eyes, shotgun slung over shoulder, ushers us into a short dark passage that leads to a horseshoe-shaped gravel driveway, demarcated by white bricks. Jugnu parks the Impala by the fountain featuring two interlocking fish spouting water through skyward mouths, a relic appropriated from the Olympus. Jugnu and Bosco help me out and up the steps into the anteroom. “Good buoy,” Jugnu says in English, settling me on a settee.

  “Good driving,” I say. She is a natural and knows it. After a fit & start and driving for sixty kilometres at thirty kilometres per hour, Jugnu barreled down the highway, horning, overtaking lorries, and braking for the odd goat crossing the road. Of course, I did edify her on the fundamentals.137 I disclosed one of my most effective tricks: driving with the indicator on. When conventions are inverted, etiquette confounds.

  After tea is served, there is rumbling outside, the crunch of gravel beneath tyres, the thump of heavy car doors, then the swish of starched cotton announces Tony. “Thought I recognized that sweet jalopy!”

  “Hands off, kid!”

  “How the hell are you, Abdu,”138 he says, embracing me, wafting cologne, dung and the sun, “and the hell you doin’ here?”

  I could tell him that Comrade Bakaullah has returned from the desert, that I have arrived to rally support for the Lodge, that gangsters are out to jump Jugnu, and possibly me, that we escaped by the skin of our teeth from the city, but instead, broach a more pressing matter: “I turned seventy and didn’t even receive a dashed card!”

  “I sent flowers!”

  “The wreath? You sent the wreath? Wreaths are for the dead!”

  Sweeping his salt & pepper locks back, Tony says, “Sorry about that, Daddy-O, but my man organised it. I was dealing with all this shit—I’ll tell you about it later—but first you gotta tell me what happened to you: you look like you’ve been in battle.”