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The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

Page 19

by HM Naqvi


  As I peel myself off the ground, sore and wobbling like a zeppelin, the door swings open and the guards enter, braced for a fracas. It’s an opportune moment to escape—Langra’s hands might reveal my spleen next time—but before I turn on my heel and scurry into the harsh sunshine, tail tucked between legs, I tarry by the door a moment, hamstrung by the thought that nothing has been sorted, that the effort to secure the security of my lover, much like all my projects, has been inconclusive. You had better do better than that, Cossack! I tell myself. You must do better than that! “With your permission, Langra Sahab,” I say, grasping the nettle, “I would like to tell you a joke.”

  “What?”

  Taking a deep breath, like a conductor before a concert, I recite one of Pinto’s gems: “So when a horsefly begins bothering this chap, another chap says, You know these things swarm around horse’s arses. The first chap protests: But I am not a horse’s arse.”

  Langra stares at me, poker-faced, leaning in as if he will lunge again if the punch-line is not up to snuff. “You can fool me, came the reply, but you can’t fool the horsefly!”

  There is deafening silence, save gaseous gurgles in my gut, then Langra laughs riotously. “Mota theek thak hai!” he hoots, or You’re okay, fat man! When the guards join in like a Greek chorus, Langra roars, “He’s talking about you!”

  Langra dismisses the guards for the second time and instructs me to sit down. “I might be an honourable man,” he begins, “but I cannot give you something for nothing.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You know, I have heard of your father—everybody knew who he was at one time—but nobody has heard of mine because he had nothing, he was nothing. Nobody would have known who I am, but I worked hard, worked with what I had: my fists and my wits. You think of me as a bad man, some beast, but ask anybody in Lyari about me. They will tell you I do work for them. You think the government does anything for us?”

  “You are a social worker?”

  “I solve problems: if there is injustice in my area or if somebody is in need of employment, accommodation, if there are issues with water connections or electricity—”

  “I have electricity problems—”

  “What have you done for anybody else?”

  “I take care of my ward,” I reply, stoutly, erroneously, “my brother’s children—”

  “I made something of myself, and here you are now, a nobody, performing for me like a monkey.”

  “I am an intellectual!”

  “What do you have now, fat man?”

  Shifting in the seat of the chair, I mumble, “I have my books, my work … my garden … my garment dyeing—”

  And suddenly, I am Archimedes in the bathtub—suddenly, I realize I have something more tangible to offer than my thoughts. But if I do not make a cogent, compelling case, he will surely dispatch his goons after me for hello hi, salam dua. That’s how it works, that’s why Hawkeye suggested an escort. “A thousand years ago,” I begin, pulse racing, “the great Ibn Khaldun wrote that a civilization, like a family, has a life. The life of a civilization is about three generations, give or take a generation—”

  “I do not need some dead Arab to tell me that.”

  “I am at the end of a cycle, but you have your life in front of you—”

  “That is right—”

  “But you will always be known as a gangster—”

  “Watch your words—”

  “A thug—”

  Slamming his fists on the table, he roars, “Enough!”

  “Forgive me, Langra Sardar—”

  “I swear I will pull out your tongue and strangle you with it!”

  “I am just trying to make a point—”

  “What point?”

  “What if you were to become a legitimate businessman?”

  “What are you on about, fat man?”

  “Allow me to explain: I own a garment-dyeing operation that spits out money every month, good money. I do not have much interest in it at this age, but I could sell it to you for a discount. I am proposing something for something: the business for Juggan.”

  “But I can snatch it from you. I can snatch her, kill you, kill her.”

  “You can kill whoever you like but we will all be dead soon, some faster than others. I am an old man. I will be gone soon. What good will I be to you then? Think about the future—you cannot fight forever. Think about your mother—what did she want for you?”

  “Leave her out of this,” he mutters, but I can tell by the tilting of his helmet head, the tapping of his fingers, that Langra is listening.

  Standing up, I declaim, “If you are an honourable man, you will do the honourable thing.”

  And leaving Langra considering the Trajectory of his Life, I stride through the musty corridors into the brilliant sunshine, having silenced one of the most powerful gangsters in the city.

  152. Can you imagine that for the first time since the aftermath of the First War of Independence in 1857, reforms were introduced in 2002, effectively insulating the police from political shenanigans? Can you imagine how many shenanigans occurred during the Era of Our Stiff Upper Lipped Overlords, not to mention after?

  ON THE BONA FIDES OF MANHOOD

  (or RAZOR’S EDGE)

  Felis catus is a singularly disagreeable species—haughty, lazy, capricious, ungrateful—most unsuited to human companionship. Whilst dogs guard the hearth, hunt game, tend sheep, lead the blind (and, as recent research in Reader’s Digest suggests, sniff out cancer and other seismic events), cats spend the day licking their funky orifices, rubbing against animate & inanimate objects, and chasing the winged ants that appear after the rains. Only sovereigns as profligate as the Pharaohs could have been responsible for subjecting mankind to such wretched creatures. Jugnu’s mangy cat bites the hand that feeds it. I have seen it myself, and that’s not the worst of it.

  One afternoon, I gift Papa’s sterling silver mother-of-pearl shaving kit to Bosco, reckoning if he shaves regularly, twice a day, he can manage a nice even patch of growth to replace his trademark parentheses. If you look like a man, Papa once told me, you might behave like one. I demonstrate the proper technique as best I can, even if I only shave every blue moon, stropping the blade against a leather strap, dipping it into a mug of hot water & Dettol, then frosting the badger-bristle brush with cream. Bosco watches me like I would watch Papa, chin nestled in the crescent of his palms.

  When I hand the razor to him, he exclaims. “Boy, oh, boy!”

  “Mano a mano,” I say.

  “Like this, Uncle Cossack?” he asks.

  “No, like this,” I reply: “Hold it at a thirty-degree angle. Put two fingers on the tang—this is the tang. Yes, like that …”

  As I observe his technique in the mirror, I glimpse an unholy spectacle: a triangular pile of excreta that recalls a slice of moist chocolate cake in the bathtub behind us. “Jugnu!” I holler in horror. “Jug-noo!” Arriving at the scene, she laughs. “So?” she says.

  “So!”

  “You never flush after you piss.”

  “Why should I waste water?”

  “We all have bad habits—”

  “I will no longer abide that infernal cat!”

  “You need to atone for yourself,” she laughs again.

  “I have been atoning for myself all my life!”

  Marching out in a huff, I head to my refuge, the vegetable patch, barefoot, trousers rolled up to the ankles.

  The soil, rich, wet, and wormy, is pleasing to the sole but the plot is in a pitiful state: the rains have swept the beds away and saplings lay strewn hither thither. Only wild mushrooms sprout in the shade.153 The first order of business, then, is to turn the soil, an exercise that demands stamina at the best of times, and the tap water is like tea today—I can fry an egg on my head. Mercifully, Bosco appears before I collapse, exchanging his parasol for my spade. Digging in, he says, “Can I ask you something, Uncle Cossack?”

  “Ask me anyt
hing, my boy.”

  “Is it better to be like, I don’t know, Socrates or Sam Spade?”

  “There was a time when I would have been inclined to advocate the former, but I have been reconsidering the proposition. It’s not a binary consideration: a thinking man who does not act is useless, and a man of action who does not think is no better than a thug.”

  “I want to go home to help my mother.”

  “You will soon,” I say, “but you know you always have a home here at the Lodge.” The assertion is at least half true—I have been peddling half truths all day: I told Jugnu earlier that I sorted matters with Langra, neglecting to mention that I proposed a business transaction to a gangster. Who is to say that he will not commandeer the property, settle the matter through the barrel of a gun?

  “I want to become a man of action, Uncle Cossack.”

  “Then let’s make compost!”

  We have not read together or taken our evening walks since our return from the Interior but, I reckon, at least we can tend to our roots. “What do I have to do?” Bosco asks.

  “I need you to collect cardboard, tea bags, eggshells, fruit, vegetable scraps, and weeds, leaves, uprooted saplings, newspaper, chicken manure—”

  “Chicken manure?”

  “Cock droppings should do. Ask Barbarossa. Cat manure won’t—that creature is absolutely useless.”

  As soon as Bosco embarks on the scavenger hunt, mouthing the required items under his breath, I stretch across the deck chair in the shade of the eaves. And when I shut my eyes, penumbral flowers blossom before me—voluptuous geraniums, gardenias, moth orchids—and beyond, over the horizon, I can sense a golden sea. I could be anywhere in that moment—the South Pacific, San Remo, Ceylon—and anyone: a botanist, a sailor, a monarch (recall that after the occupation of the Great State of Hyderabad in ’48, one of the mightiest leaders in the world set sail for Australia to till the land).154 I might not be a king but I could follow him Down Under.

  Floating on the gentle wave of the reverie, I experience a tickling sensation—a spider web adrift, the wings of a butterfly—but as I lazily swat the air, my fingers graze against flesh, possibly, and rather unexpectedly, a bosom. Opening one eye, then the other, I find Badbakht Begum leaning over me in a floral kaftan, fragrant hennaed tresses unraveling over the ivory crest of her ample chest. “I didn’t realize you were so forward.”

  “One reaches for low-hanging fruit.”

  “There you go,” she says, popping a fleshy fruit the size of a ping-pong ball into my mouth.

  “Prunus!” I choke, spitting out the pit.

  “You’ve lost weight. You’re looking good. How did you manage?”

  “Dengue. You should try it. What are you doing here?”

  Settling on the ground, she replies, “I brought some fruit for the house.”

  Whenever Mummy’s cousins-in-law would turn up, Papa would mutter, The cows have come to graze, for Badbakht & Gulbadan have famous appetites, especially for exotic fruits. Since there was never much left over, I compensated with milky Bengali sweetmeats—ras malai, rus gullahs, sandesh155—undoubtedly contributing to my blood sugar. I have always suspected that Badbakht has been making amends since. Gulbadan, on the other hand, does not seem to care.

  “We don’t see your sister anymore,” I say.

  “She plays bridge at the Gymkhana five nights a week with bachelors and widowers.”

  “If she were to find a man at this age, it would surely augur Judgment Day.”

  “Don’t be mean, Abdullah.”

  “Tell me, sweetheart, after all these years, the passing of the elders, the family’s virtual dissolution, why do you still visit the Lodge?”

  “I have a history with this place, Abdullah.”

  “There’s history elsewhere as well.”

  “Your mother was the loveliest person I’ve known—her door was always open for us. And she told me before she passed to look after her youngest son.” Although I can appreciate the imperative, although I can imagine the scene—Mummy grasping Badbakht’s hand on her deathbed—I wonder why I was excluded from the arrangement. I need looking after as well. “Of course, I also love the children.”

  “They’re wonderful, those Childoos—”

  “There’s also another reason, one you should discern for yourself—”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me all this before?”

  “You’re so busy with yourself, you never notice anything else.”

  “You might have noticed that I might be homeless soon.”

  “If you ask,” she says, standing up, brushing her ample rump, “somebody might take you in.”

  As she strolls off, buttocks swinging in the kaftan, I consider calling her back—Listen! I could say, What do you mean? or Another plum please—but Bosco returns, bearing two fetid plastic bags, announcing, “This will be the best compost in horticultural history!”

  “Well said!” Hoisting myself out of the chair like a cripple—my foot has fallen asleep—I stumble to inspect the contents. “And a job well done!”

  We go to work—digging a shallow ditch (not unlike fashioning a grave for a cat), before carpeting the bed with straw and twigs and twine. Depositing the contents of one of the bags like treasure, I explain, “You have to layer the wet and dry material alternately.”

  “Like compost cake!”

  “Exactly, Bosco, exactly!”

  By the time the throaty azaan rings in the violet sky, the task is more or less complete, and there is always tomorrow. Lumbering barefoot towards the gate, sweaty, muddy, and reeking like cut onions, I spot the bhutta-wallah stationed across the street, blistering cobs over charcoal. When I cry “Oye!” over the traffic, he runs over with a nice long specimen, brushed with lemon, clumpy salt, and red chilli powder.

  Biting the soft kernels, I feel right, feel whole—I reckon I can even toss the cob into the compost pit, the cherry on the cake so to speak—but just then two wild-eyed bounders materialize beside me like Ateed and Raqeeb. Grabbing me by the arms, one snarls, “If you do anything untoward, you will be sorry.” A white Suzuki with a cracked headlight pulls up curbside and I am shoved in. The cob drops.

  153. When I was seven, the sous chef poisoned me, sautéing up wild mushrooms from the garden. Since I was too scared to tell Papa, I told Barbarossa, majordomo, who took me to Civil Hospital where my stomach was pumped. When we returned, Barbarossa threw the sous chef out on the street. I’ve never had mushrooms since, but if I happen across the odd growth in the patch or, for that matter, the tinned variety at Agha’s, I do wonder what happened to that poor, loutish sous chef.

  154. The project would turn out to be a disaster of epic proportion. Tending to the earth requires innate talent, but “the gods taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill.” Nobody can say that about me.

  155. For those who do not know, Sandesh, essentially a curd, is so sumptuous that even the gods devoured it by the kilo—it figures prominently in the Ramayana. But mere mortals like me have oft enjoyed it, and then some.

  ON A CONSPIRACY OF THIEVES

  (or SAVING THE DAY)

  Some might recall that the potato-chip king was kidnapped for ransom from the vicinity of Cosmopolitan Society in ’93. The family was told that if they involved the police, the victim would be shot. In any case, the police were not to be trusted then. A few years earlier, however, a retired justice (whom we all knew from Garden) and several stalwarts from the business fraternity founded what might be characterized as a Gentlemen’s League of Crime Fighters. The man on the ground wore large spectacles and trousers across the stomach but was sharp as a knife and hard as a hammer.156 Within twenty-four hours, he retrieved the victim from a rented house in Metroville and within a fortnight, the entire gang was hunted down and put away. By the turn of the century, the Gentlemen’s League had contributed to dismantling the infrastructure of kidnapping in the city. The city would experience a renaissance thereafter—plays, concerts, art
exhibitions, film festivals were advertised on the cramped poster board at Agha’s Supermarket. But then the detritus from the Wars in the North—guns, germs,157 goondas—began flowing downstream again. I am neck-deep in it.

  Wedged between two bounders smelling of cowhide, I am terrified—I do not want to spend my last days amongst the barbarians in a squalid quarter furnished with a mattress, prayer rug, and a pair of sponge slippers too small for my muddy feet. I want to die at the Lodge, on my bed, but not yet; there is much to be done: securing patrimony, matrimony, Bosco’s security, The Mythopoetic Legacy of Abdullah Shah Ghazi (RA). I need to impart some choice wisdom about life to the Childoos: (1) Avoid toffees—we have sugar in the family (2) Self-discovery is key to discovering the world around you (3) Don’t watch too much TV, especially the morally-dubious-if-not-bankrupt Tom & Jerry variety. I need to throw a going-away party with balloons and curlers and a big band, the Caliph of Cool strumming duddud-daada-da-da-da, duddud-daada-da-da-da.

  As we hurtle through traffic, however, I wonder how long I have left: hours, days, a week? Who will save me—there are no gentlemen anymore—and who will pay the ransom? The Major? Comrade Bakaullah? Babu? Badbakht Begum? And where on earth is Tony? Those who can, will not, and those who will, cannot. When the announcement of my demise appears as a boxed advertisement in the paper—PRAYERS FOR ABDULLAH K. AFTER SUNDOWN—people will turn the page to read about the Bumper Cotton Harvest or the Demise of Field Hockey.

  I am certain that the kidnappers are Langra’s goons—he must have issued directives from the confines of Central Jail—but we do not seem to be headed into the narrow gullies of Lyari. As we skirt the grounds of Holy Trinity Church, past the moustachioed dwarf who sells balloons, I decide to speak up. What does it matter—if I am to die, I reckon, I die. When I ask, “Where are you taking me?” the driver, a bald chap with a pinched face, glances at me in the rearview with quick, slanted eyes and replies, “To hell.”

 

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