He only had one shortcoming: his unbearably bad looks. He was also a little ill-mannered, which put the customers slightly ill at ease. But when they got used to his bad looks, it stopped bothering them. In fact, some even started taking an interest in him because he was, after all, an amusing fellow. However, their interest didn’t please Hamzah Khan, who thought it was a sham. It was just for their own fun and amusement, to have a good time at his expense.
The customers had christened him Gilgit Khan, not only because he was from Gilgit but also because he referred to his native place far too often in his speech. He didn’t mind his new name at all. While he had no inkling what ‘Hamzah’ meant, he knew quite well what Gilgit was.
It had been a year now since he started working for Shahbaz Khan. During this time it didn’t escape his notice that his employer hated his looks, and the thought gnawed at him constantly.
One day he saw a puppy outside the restaurant—a creature even more unsightly than he was. He picked it up and brought it to his dingy little room above the restaurant, which the owner had allowed him to live in. The room was so small that one more puppy and Gilgit Khan would not have been able to fit inside.
The puppy’s legs were terribly misshapen, its snout awful to look at. Strangely, Gilgit Khan’s own legs, or rather, his lower half, were disproportionately smaller than his upper half. He and the puppy were both bent out of shape.
Gilgit loved his pup a lot. And though Shahbaz Khan hated the sight of the animal and threatened many times to put a bullet through him, Gilgit was not about to part with it, come hell or high water. Initially he kept quiet and listened patiently to Shahbaz Khan. But one day he told his employer flat out, ‘Khu, you’re the owner of the restaurant, you don’t own my friend Tan-Tan.’
Shahbaz Khan eased up. After all, Gilgit was a workhorse. He got up at five in the morning, got the two braziers going, hauled water from the handpump across from the restaurant, and then got busy taking care of the customers.
In three months Gilgit Khan’s Tan-Tan grew into a sizeable dog. He slept with his master in the same room, in his bed in fact, which Gilgit didn’t mind given the punishingly cold nights of winter. Indeed, he felt immensely happy that the dog loved him so much that he didn’t want to part with him even at night.
It was a special customer of Gilgit who had given the pup his name Tan-Tan. Never mind the pup’s terrible looks, the man took an interest in him. Gilgit had saved some pennies from his meagre wages and bought a collar studded with tiny bells for the little pup. This special customer, who was probably a columnist for some daily paper, heard the tinkling bells and started calling the puppy Tan-Tan.
As Tan-Tan grew, his legs began to look even shorter, not unlike his owner’s appearance. Gilgit’s legs also seemed to shrink with amazing rapidity, while his torso grew normally. Shahbaz Khan did not like his appearance, but what could he do. Gilgit was an exceedingly hard-working man who toiled like a donkey from five in the morning till eleven or even twelve at night without a minute’s rest—although during this time he did go up to his dingy quarters three or four times to look in on his darling puppy, now grown quite a bit bigger. He would feed him leftovers from the restaurant kitchen, give him water to drink, cuddle him, and then promptly return to work.
One day Tan-Tan fell ill. The majority of the restaurant’s patrons were students from the neighbouring medical college. Gilgit overheard one of them saying that quail or chicken meat was especially good for someone suffering from a stomach ailment, and that starving the patient was pure foolishness.
Since the dog had diarrhoea, Gilgit hadn’t given him anything to eat since the morning. He started looking everywhere for a chicken but couldn’t find any. No one in the entire neighbourhood raised chickens.
Now, Shahbaz Khan was very fond of quail fights and owned a quail that he cared for more than his own life. Gilgit Khan stealthily opened the cage and grabbed the bird, and slaughtered it while reciting the kalima over it. He then fed it to his dear Tan-Tan.
The sight of the empty cage made Shahbaz Khan very anxious. How could the bird have flown away from its cage, he wondered nervously. The quail was so used to acting on his cues. How wondrously it had won many fights. He asked Gilgit Khan, who promptly replied, ‘Khu, how would I know where your quail went. It must have run away somewhere.’
On pursuing the matter further, Shahbaz Khan found patches of blood and some feathers by the open drain in front of the restaurant. No doubt was left in his mind that they were the remains of his beloved quail. Anguish swept over him at the thought that some monster had roasted his quail and gobbled it up.
He gathered the bird’s remains lovingly, dug a small pit in the open field behind the restaurant and laid them to rest. Then he recited the Fatiha over the grave. At the restaurant he offered food to the poor, hoping the reward for the good deed would go to his quail.
If anyone inquired about the quail, Shahbaz would tell them, ‘It has attained martyrdom.’
Gilgit pretended not to have heard these words and continued with his work. He was overjoyed to see that his Tan-Tan had recovered fully and no longer suffered from his ailment. As a gesture of thanksgiving, Gilgit fed two beggars at his own expense. When Shahbaz asked him why he didn’t charge them for the food, he said, ‘Khan, a little charity now and then is a good thing.’ Shahbaz kept quiet.
One day a fledgling mynah came flying from somewhere and fell right in front of Gilgit Khan as he was taking the breakfast tray to some college student. He put the tray to one side, picked up the frightened chick and put it in the cage that was formerly the home of his employer’s quail. He began nurturing the chick, and in little over a month it grew quite plump and chirruped a lot. One day Tan-Tan wandered in, saw the chick and became restless: How could he reach it and chew it up?
Gilgit saw his Tan-Tan staring at the chick with such longing, but with no possibility of reaching it. He looked at the cage hanging from a hook on the wall, and without another thought, he took the chick out, wrung its neck, plucked its feathers and offered it to his darling dog.
Tan-Tan sniffed at the corpse of the plucked bird a couple of times, emitted a powerful sneeze, and took off.
Gilgit felt terribly sad. The same day, two college girls who came to the restaurant for tea regularly, and whom Gilgit cared about immensely, arrived. They always talked to him with light-hearted smiles; today, though, they seemed somewhat annoyed. One of them, Gilgit Khan’s favourite, asked him, ‘Why did you kill the mynah?’
Gilgit was confused for a moment but pulled himself together and replied, ‘Khu, I wanted to feed my dog.’
‘So did he eat it?’
‘That swine . . . he just sniffed it and let it be.’
‘So what did you gain by killing it? Before, you killed Khan’s quail and fed it to him. Did he eat it?’
‘Yes, he did,’ Gilgit replied proudly. ‘He even chewed up the bones.’
Shahbaz Khan was standing nearby. The minute he heard this he slapped Gilgit on his neck with all his might. ‘You bastard . . . now you’re admitting it. Why did you keep denying it before?’
Gilgit kept quiet.
Both girls burst out laughing. Gilgit didn’t much care about the slap, but their laughter wounded him deeply.
Shahbaz Khan was beside himself with anger. The blow alone wasn’t enough. He now assailed him verbally, unloading all the obscenities he knew on his employee. And finally, ‘Why do you love that Tan-Tan or Chan-Chan so much, bastard? You call that thing a dog, huh! He’s uglier than you, so ugly it turns my stomach!’
When Gilgit Khan went up to his hovel some time later, his ears were still buzzing with the girls’ laughter. Tan-Tan was lying in a corner with his legs, which couldn’t be more crooked, resting against the wall.
He thought for some time and then pulled out his jackknife and took a step towards the dog. A sudden thought made him snap the knife shut and put it back in his pocket. He called the dog to him lovingly and took him
out for a walk.
The train was fast approaching when the two reached the tracks. Gilgit ordered his loving dog to go stand right in the middle of the tracks. The animal obeyed his master.
The train was considerably closer. Tan-Tan, planted in the middle of the tracks, was looking at Gilgit, his eyes brimming with loyalty. Gilgit glanced at himself. He felt his dog was infinitely better looking than he was.
When the train was almost upon them, Gilgit Khan quickly pushed Tan-Tan off the tracks, but got caught himself in the process. He was turned into minced meat. The dog sniffed at that pile of raw meat and started crying loudly in a heart-wrenching howl.
Martyr-Maker
I am a native of Gujarat, Kathiawar, and belong to the bania caste. Recently, when tanta broke out over the partition of India, I happened to be unemployed. Forgive me for using the word tanta. But does it matter? I should think not. After all, Urdu should accept non-Urdu words, even if they are borrowed from Gujarati.
So yes, I was unemployed, except for my small cocaine business, which still yielded a dribble of an income. When the country split and people from both sides started moving across the border in thousands, I thought, why not go to Pakistan. Even if I couldn’t deal in cocaine there, I would at least be able to set up some other business. So I set out for Pakistan, doing all kinds of small deals along the way.
I arrived in Pakistan with the intention of starting a big business. After studying the situation closely I decided to get into allotments.* I was already adept at easing my way using flattery and bootlicking. I licked butt and sweet-talked, struck up a friendship with some fellows, and managed to get a small house allotted to me. I made a great deal of money by selling this property, and my success gave me the courage to visit different cities and acquire more allotments of residential houses and shops.
Every kind of job requires hard work. I had to run around quite a bit for allotments: sucking up to one person, greasing the palm of another, taking a third to dinner, and yet another to music and dance shows. In short, I had to go through a hell of a lot of trouble. I would wander around sizing up spacious bungalows all day long, scouring the entire city to decide on a big beautiful house whose allotment would bring in a sizeable profit.
Hard work never goes unrewarded. Within a year I’d made piles of money. By God’s grace I had everything now: One of the finest bungalows in the city, hoards of maal-pani in the bank—forgive me for using the peculiar Gujarati jargon, but what’s the harm. Urdu must welcome non-Urdu words. So yes, by God’s grace I had everything that one could hope for: the finest bungalow, servants, a Packard, two and a half lakh rupees in the bank, not to mention several factories and shops. Yes, I had everything, but for some reason my peace of mind had vanished. Even during the days of my small cocaine business I had sometimes felt a certain heaviness sweep over my heart; now, though, it seemed as if I no longer had a heart, or that if there was one it had been pressed under a heavy weight.
What was this weight?
I’m an intelligent man. If a question agitates my mind, I try to look for an answer and always find one. I started thinking with a cool head about what was causing this garbar-ghotaala,* but where was my head?
A woman? Could be. But I had no woman of my own. The one I used to have had met her lord already in Kathiawar Gujarat. However, there were others, but they belonged to other men, for instance, the wife of my gardener. Well, everyone has their own taste. If truth be told, all I care about in a woman is that she must be young—her being educated or a dancer isn’t a must. As long as she’s young, any woman will do for me.†
I’m an intelligent man. Whenever I’m confronted by a thorny problem, I try to get to its root. My factories were running smoothly, my shops were doing extremely well; money was being generated as if on its own. I put all these aside and thought objectively about the matter. All this garbar, I concluded after much thought, springs from my never having performed a good deed.
In Kathiawar Gujarat, I had done many good deeds: such as when my friend Pandorang died, I sheltered his widow in my own home, thus keeping her from selling herself for two full years; or when Vinaik’s wooden leg broke and I bought him a brand-new prosthesis, for which I had to spend forty rupees; or when Jamna Bai came down with venereal disease—saali (forgive me for using it) had no idea what it was—and I took her to a doctor and paid for her treatment for six months. But I hadn’t done anything good for humanity in Pakistan so this had to be what was causing all this garbar in my heart.
So what shall I do, I asked myself. I thought of giving alms. I wandered through the city one day and saw that just about everyone looked like a beggar. Some were starved, others were without a scrap to wear. Whom to feed? Whom to clothe? There were so many. I might just as well have opened an almshouse. But what would a single almshouse accomplish? And where would I get the grain to feed all these people? Should I buy it on the black market? Which begged the question: What’s the point of sinning with one hand and doing a pious deed with the other?
For hours I listened to the woes of countless people about their hardship and suffering. In truth, everyone was suffering: those who slept on shop stoops at night as well as those who slept in their tall mansions. A barefoot fellow was unhappy because he didn’t have a proper pair of shoes, while someone who had a car was losing sleep over not having the latest model. In his own way each person was right about what was eating away at him, and everyone’s needs made perfect sense.
I had once heard Ameena Bai Chitlekar of Solapur—may God have mercy on her—recite one of Ghalib’s ghazals, a line of which has stuck in my memory: Kis ki haajat rava kare ko’i (whose need should one fulfil). Forgive me, this is the second line of the she‘r, or maybe the first.
So there I was, wondering whose need I could take care of when a hundred out of a hundred were in need. Then again, the thought occurred to me that almsgiving wasn’t really a meritorious act. You may not agree with me, but honestly, my many trips to refugee camps and my close scrutiny of the conditions there convinced me that welfare aid had turned many refugees into perfect slobs who sat around doing nothing all day, or wasted their time playing card games or jagaar (forgive me, jagaar means gambling), shouting obscenities at one another, and freeloading—what role could these loafers possibly have played in giving strength to Pakistan. I concluded that almsgiving was absolutely not the right thing to do. But then what could I do that would be a virtuous deed?
People were dying from cholera and plague in great numbers in these camps. The hospitals were bursting already. The dearth of medical facilities tore at my heart. I thought I might establish a hospital, but on second thoughts decided against it even though I’d already devised the whole plan in my head: I would call for bids for the hospital building and a lot of money would pour in from prospective shareholders. I’d set up my own construction company and accept its bid. My idea was to spend one lakh rupees on the building. Obviously, it would have been built for only seventy thousand and leave me a neat thirty thousand. But the whole scheme came crashing down as soon as it dawned on me that my effort to save the dying would only lead to overpopulation in the country.
If you thought about it deeply, you would know that all this lafra was caused by overpopulation. Lafra means problem, dilemma, one that leads to scandal. Still I haven’t been able to capture the entire range of its meanings.
So yes, if you thought about it deeply, it would turn out that all this lafra was caused by overpopulation. It was not a given that an increase in population would, by some magic, result in a corresponding increase in the land area or in the expanse of the sky, or in a precipitous increase in rainfall so fields would yield more foodgrain. Well, I decided that building a hospital was definitely not the good deed to undertake.
Then the idea occurred to me that I might build a mosque. But thank God I was saved from the foolishness by the sudden memory of a she‘r sung by Ameena Bai Chitlekar of Solapur—may God have mercy on her—namely: Naam manjur h
ai to faij ke asbaab bana. She used to pronounce manzur as manjur and faiz as faij. The whole she‘r went like this: Naam manzur hai to faiz ke asbaab bana / pul bana chaah bana, masjid-o-taalaab bana.*
What wretch was after celebrity or a good name? It wouldn’t be a virtuous act for someone to build a bridge if the underlying motive was to earn a good name, would it? Not at all. I told myself that the idea of building a mosque was entirely wrong. The presence of too many mosques, far away from each other, could in no way be good for the country. It would split up the population into many factions.
In desperation, I decided to go for the hajj. Just as I was making preparations for the trip, God Almighty showed me a way. A rally took place in the city which ended in a terrible commotion and in the ensuing stampede thirty people were trampled to death. The next day’s papers carried the news of the incident and mentioned that the victims hadn’t died, they’d achieved martyrdom.
That got me thinking. But I didn’t just think, I also consulted several maulvis. They enlightened me about the fact that victims of accidents received the status of martyrs—the loftiest status a mortal could ever achieve. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, if people didn’t die but, instead, achieved martyrdom? Dying an ordinary death was like dying in vain. If people died as martyrs, well, that would be something—wouldn’t it?
I gave this delicate matter still deeper thought.
Wherever you looked, you only saw people in pitiable shape: pale faces, ground down by sorrow and worries over their livelihood, listless and with sunken eyes, tattered clothes, lying about in crumbling huts like kandam maal* or wandering around bazaars aimlessly with their heads sticking out in front like stray cattle. They have no idea why they’re alive and for what, or for whom or how. An epidemic breaks out, thousands die. If not that way, by starvation and thirst; freeze in winter, shrivel up in summer. Lucky the one whose death provoked a few tears, but the majority remained unmourned.
My Name Is Radha Page 35