So, the trees are an altogether different matter. But others too were gradually beginning to recognize me. Maimuna’s eyes had held such unfamiliarity in the early days. And gradually she began to show such familiarity. That morning when the dark clouds had surged, how sportingly she had put the wok on the fire. When she saw the massed clouds ready to burst with rain, she had taken leave from her school, quickly made the chickpea batter to fry the savouries. Hot oil bubbled in the wok and she got down to frying the spicy snacks. For whom was she taking this trouble? The curtain of otherness was lifting bit by bit. In any case, it hadn’t been very long; I had barely set foot on that land and drawn my first few breaths. And a wondrous sight of happiness and surprise was unfurling before me: I could recognize some faces, and not recognize others. And when I recognized someone without any prodding, I would feel such surprise, and so much happiness. And there were so many things that I could recognize only partly. Some were known, others unknown. So there I was … just beginning to know everyone – those who had been separated and I in their midst. Badi Bhabhi had shown undue haste.
Actually, she was the one in a hurry, not me. Be that as it may, my journey was left incomplete. I had seen many things and met many known and unknown people. And the things I had seen, I hadn’t yet seen them properly. My eyes were barely beginning to open. And the people I had met, I had barely had the time to meet them properly. My biggest regret was regarding Khairul Bhai. My meeting with him had remained strangely incomplete. In fact, all my meetings remained incomplete. After all, my journey was all too brief. Rather, I had cut it short and made it brief. But strangely enough, it was expanding now. The more I remembered it, the longer it became. The truth is that I still have not gone into its details. The small details were only just coming back to me. Every detail that I touched turned from a drop into an ocean at the merest touch – just like the fish of Manu1 which was, to begin with, the size of the smallest finger till it grew and grew and could not be contained even in the mighty river Ganga. A memory has no end. One memory is found hidden inside another memory, and yet another memory comes out of that one. And so, a chain of memories is formed, and it keeps becoming longer and longer. Yet, we would like to believe that we retain so little and forget so much of what has happened to us. Memory has its own deficiencies. It has its own niche of forgetfulness; and a great deal becomes a victim of this niche. What remains is no more than a few drops from the ocean or let us say, the few droplets of rain that remain on a leaf after a torrential downpour. And these few drops are sufficient to drench the soul of any human being. But I was troubled by a strange malady: all I could remember were tiny droplets of incidents. Now these droplets were turning into rivers in spate. Some other memory lurked behind a small memory; and hidden behind that small memory lay coiled yet another memory. And in this way, wisps of memories would swell into banks of clouds and heave and pitch across my imagination. And, yes, there was yet another difficulty. Narrow tracks would emerge from these memories and any one of these tracks would widen suddenly and turn into a long and circuitous road. There was no knowing which dense and dark jungle it would enter. Ages and lands would get entangled in it, and yet I would feel as though I had forgotten something that lay in between. When I had set foot in the ruins that was Dilkusha, I had felt the same thing. I had remembered so much the moment I reached there, and I had thought that I had remembered everything. It was only later that I realized, and was troubled by the realization, that I had forgotten something that lay in between. And now that I was remembering that journey, once again I found myself in that same situation. I could clearly remember so many details, and yet I was troubled by the consciousness that there was much that I was forgetting, there was something that had slipped from my mind. Or perhaps it was the way that Majju Bhai was prodding me for details that put the doubt in my head.
‘Ustad, you are hiding something from me.’
‘No, Majju Bhai, I have told you everything that happened to me.’
‘My dear, I have seen something of this world. Moreover, from what you yourself have described, I can tell that some other things have also happened in the middle. You are skipping over those.’
‘I haven’t tried to hide anything, though I can’t say if something has been left out unknowingly.’
‘It may well be unknowingly, but your narration tells me that something else too happened in between. My interest lies solely in that.’
‘Now that’s a problem; if there is indeed something left out in the middle, then I truly do not remember it.’
‘Try … you will remember it. One should know the whole thing.’
Look at my simplicity – or call it my blind trust in Majju Bhai – that I began to believe that if he has felt it to be so, then it must necessarily be so. And I began to make strenuous efforts in real earnest … efforts, that is, to remember what it was that I was forgetting from the middle. In the process, I ended up repeating the entire journey in my mind. And what happened as a result? What happened was what usually happens when you set out to look for a lost object in a room full of things: you don’t find that object, but in the process, you end up finding so many other things that you had never even imagined you had in your possession. By now I had realized that this journey was a journey of another kind altogether. It was far bigger than what I had taken it to be. Strangely enough, I hadn’t been aware of it till now. In a cursory sort of way, I had thought that my journey was incomplete, and that I should have stayed there longer so that I wouldn’t have the sense of longing I was experiencing now, and I might have met those people that I hadn’t met fully, and Maimuna … Yes, I must try and and understand this business of Maimuna by going over it once again. So now when I repeated that journey in my imagination, it had transformed into something else: a journey within a journey, as though it wasn’t a single journey and every journey seemed as though it was without end. It seemed as though I had set out on these journeys and after crossing some stages, I had returned – sometimes due to fatigue, sometimes out of fear, and sometimes because I had faltered. Now I was troubled by even greater regret that my journey had remained incomplete. If only I had completed my journey! And I was suddenly reminded of that incomplete practitioner who had resolved to recite the magical prayer, but had faltered at a crucial juncture.
‘Yaar Jawad, you are a real nitwit! You ran away at the first sign of trouble. You should have waited a bit. After all, what are a few more days when you have waited so long? You should have waited to see what appears from beyond the Invisible Curtain.2 Why were you in such a tearing hurry? One has to be patient in order to …’
‘Majju Bhai,’ I cut him short impatiently, ‘What are you saying? It’s hardly my age to exercise this sort of patience.’
‘There you go … being a nitwit again! How does age come into this?’
‘Majju Bhai, age is a cruel thing. No man can escape it; it has to come into everything.’
‘Hmm … Naturally, you will look for some sculpture to embellish.’3
Yes, perhaps this was an attempt to sculpt a dream. Those who get left behind end up becoming Aazars sculpting their statues. But what good is served by such an attempt? Though no good was served by Majju Bhai’s darts and arrows either; his sarcasm only served to reiterate the obvious. The truth is that my real sorrow lay in the fact that I had embarked upon this journey with such excitement and it had ended up being so sour. I had gone back after an age to a place where every nook and cranny, every tree and stone, its birds and its very air had been calling out to me for such a long time. No, they were urging me from deep inside me, they were pushing me there. But when I went there, I lost my head. Every meeting remained incomplete, every outing unfulfilled and what of Shankar in whose house I had gone to stay? What must Shankar be thinking? On the one hand, I had announced my arrival with such gusto and promised to stay with him as his guest, and then I had upped and left with not one backward glance. Anyway, he is a friend. I can always write to him to apologiz
e and mollify him. And Maimuna … anyhow, let’s not talk about her. She was the one who made me run. So if that meeting remained incomplete, it was because of … Anyhow, let us talk of Khairul Bhai … my meeting with him left me wanting more. He didn’t open up at all. Perhaps if I had met him two or three times, he may have opened up somewhat. In any case, Khairul Bhai is a man who stays up all night long. One should meet him only at night, whereas this time I could not meet him for even one night when we could have stayed up all night long, when I could have told him about myself and heard his stories. Khairul Bhai always opened up during the night-long vigils. As the night got steeped with dew and endless cups of tea were consumed … one cup followed by the second, then the third … how much tea Khairul Bhai used to drink! He would announce at the beginning itself: ‘Friends, this first pot is a communal one; we shall all drink from it. Cover the second pot with a tea-cosy and set it aside for me.’ And the real conversation began when that second pot of tea would be poured. As the night waned and the bitter brew from the second pot of tea slid down our throats, Khairul Bhai scaled new peaks as though he had now truly come into his own and began to show his true colours.
At that time, when Khairul Bhai was living the life of a senior student, he was the lodestar for young men like us. For me, he was my ideal. And not just mine. Countless students and educated young men had made him their ideal. Dressed in khadi and extremely individualistic in his dress and demeanour, he would be found holding forth among a gaggle of friends and admirers. If it weren’t for Sandali, his cat, he would have been all alone, for his other brothers and sisters as well as nephews and nieces had all gone away to Pakistan. And there they lived a life of comfort and enjoyed good jobs and good positions, whereas he stayed on in this narrow lane in Meerut, in this large rambling house where he lived in the men’s quarter, and his widowed sister was the sole occupant in the women’s quarter. And his only friend and companion was the cat. Life can show you many strange sights. Sometimes there is such a crowd of people milling about you that it seems as though they will always remain with you. And then, suddenly, the world changes: the crowds disperse, the gaggle of friends and admirers scatter to the winds, and the comings and goings end. And there is silence all around and one is left sitting all alone on one’s perch. And it is much later that you realize that that is the only truth. That day, as I was about to leave, Sandali – who had God alone knows when reappeared and snuggled up to Khairul Bhai – got to her feet suddenly as a shiver rippled through her. To me it seemed as though she would stand on her hind feet and become so tall that she would start … Now, re-imagining that sight, a ripple coursed through me like lightning. So, it was that cat! How did she
appear here? The cat had been in Seville. Abul Hajjaj Sheikh
Yousuf Al-Shabarboli was quite a strange old gentleman. There he was sitting in meditation, far away from the rest of the world. He had spent an age in the confines of those four walls and boundaries, so much so that even his eyelashes had turned white. He did not even spare a glance to notice the tall date tree that had come up beside the well in his courtyard. And yet he had such affection for his cat … Oh, but his cat was black … Such was his affection that he held the cat in his lap all the time. And Abul Hajjaj’s cat was a fine specimen too; it wouldn’t let anyone come close. She would lie in the Sheikh’s lap and purr contentedly, or she would be fast asleep. She recognized saints and mystics. She would growl and snap if a commoner approached. But if an evolved person arrived, she would stand on her hind feet and embrace them. When Sheikh Abu Jafar Aryani came to their abode, the cat jumped out of Sheikh Abul Hajjaj’s lap, went to the chamber next door, sniffed the air and came running back. She looked at the glowing visage of Sheikh Aryani, stood on her two hind feet and embraced the Sheikh. Abul Hajjaj was wont to say. ‘I don’t know the newcomers; it is my cat who tells me who is good and who is bad.’ So now I understood what he meant, and I was surprised too. And, yes, there was a tinge of sorrow too. The very thought was enough to make a shiver run through me. And when the cat ran indoors, I drew a sigh of relief. At the same time, a sense of deprivation came over me as though I had lost the great good fortune of being embraced by the cat of Sheikh Shabarboli, a chance that I had missed by a whisker. And then I promptly forgot all about Khairul Bhai. His cat snuggled deeper and deeper into my imagination, and took me from here to there. She herself seemed to be an evolved soul. The truth is not all cats are alike. And every cat is not merely a cat. Back then I could not comprehend this simple fact. The very sight of a cat used to make my palms itch. I used to pick a piece of a brick, take aim and hit. And immediately I would be scolded by Phuphi Amma, ‘Son, how many times have I told you not to hit the cat? It makes me superstitious, but no matter what I say, it has not the slightest effect on you.’
‘Phuphi Amma, why do you feel superstitious?’
‘My dear, you never can tell with these cats … you don’t know which cat is what, especially black cats. You should never raise your hand to hit a black cat.’
‘Phuphi Amma, what happens to a black cat?’
‘I don’t know what is the great mystery associated with a black cat; I have always heard it from my elders. All I know is that, on one occasion, a wretched black cat put its mouth in a pitcher of milk. I threw a stick at it in anger and it disappeared from sight within the blink of an eye. But for the next three days, she kept appearing in my dreams. Then I read the qul three times and blew it all around me before going to bed. Only then did that black cat leave me alone.’
But Khairul Bhai’s cat was a sandy brown, the colour of sandalwood. Yet I fell into doubt as soon as I saw it. While I knew Khairul Bhai well enough, his cat was different; an air of mystery surrounded her. But for him, she seemed to be a better deal in exchange for all his friends and relatives and all past and present companies. How grandly and how contentedly he sat in his place, having bid adieu to everyone. At the time, I hadn’t understood anything; I was simply too confused. And now, suddenly, I understood so much. That dark and narrow desolate lane in Meerut was no longer merely a dark and narrow lane. It had travelled and led to such a strange place. And that evolved cat had taken me from here to there …
And when Ibn-e Habib finished eating the fresh-from-the-oven naan, he took a bowl from Abdullah the naan-seller and poured himself some water from the clay pot and drank it. Then, he thanked the merciful God and wept a little as he was reminded of something. For far too long he had been wandering, alone and desolate, in this strange territory amidst a crowd of pain and poverty. He would eat whatever little he could find and lie quietly. After several days, today he had found himself in a place where he had a roof over his head and a fire lit in an oven close beside him. The heat from the fire warmed him and the scent of freshly-baked naan drenched him with its redolence. And Abdullah the naan-seller – who had guessed his troubled state from one glance at his dishevelled appearance – placed a bowl of saalan and a freshly-baked naan in front of him, and – with great affection – invited him to eat. And when Ibn-e Habib had eaten his fill, he remembered those who had been separated from him, whom he had so far not been able to remember due to his troubled state, and he wept.
In an attempt to console him, Abdullah the naan-seller said, ‘O stranger, your troubled state and your helplessness is amply evident from your appearance. I was silent. But when you cried, you stabbed my heart. Now it is imperative that I ask about your circumstance. My dear, the heart feels lighter if you talk about your troubles and the listener too gets a chance to share the other’s sorrows if he is good hearted. So tell me which country do you come from?’
Then Ibn-e Habib took a grip of himself and after a moment’s pause spoke thus, ‘My dear consoler, this unfortunate wanderer who is roaming about in this dark desolate place without a roof over his head is from Maalaqa in Syria. But the truth is this desolation is not new to this unfortunate soul. For generations, it has been the misfortune of our tribe to be lost and wandering. Let it be known that t
his wretched person is from that land of desolation known as Seville. The skies would not have known a land such as that. Its fame was known from Rome till the Levant. Enthroned in this land of learning and wisdom were names greater than Aristotle and Galen, whose learning and wisdom was revered even in Baghdad. In this land of plenty, our ancestor Sheikh Abul Hajjaj Yousuf Al-Shabarboli occupied an exalted position in much the same way as a gem sits in a ring; the realm rang with stories of his miracles. Our ancestor lived till the ripe old age of a hundred years. But his cat had a longer life, for when Seville was being emptied, she was present at the scene of devastation. What happened to it thereafter and when she bid farewell to this transitory world, God alone knows better.
The Sea Lies Ahead Page 23