Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  And though I was more confident in some ways, arriving into the commotion at that low, red-brick house, I felt my courage fail me at an emotional level. Somehow I was a weaker man than I had been four years before when I walked boldly into his life. It was easier then for me to be the person I wished to be with him, to be able to say frankly that I’d like to talk to him alone. Now, even before I walked into my father’s house, I felt myself fall into line with the rules of the place.

  I found my father, as I had always known him, lying on his bed surrounded by family. He didn’t get up, but from the nod and smile in my direction, I could tell that there was no bad feeling. He was in high spirits. At one minute he was answering his phone or laughing as he read aloud a funny text message, at the next he was serious, discussing the price of his shares with his brother-in-law. My stepmother sat on the bed, speaking to friends, organisers, dealing with my sister’s sartorial panics. My two younger brothers came in from a football match on the lawn. An older sister was arriving later that night with her husband, who worked at one of the American banks. It was a scene I had witnessed many times before and occasionally felt part of. It was a scene in which you could be present yet sink into your own thoughts without anyone noticing.

  My stepmother, always very welcoming, managed between many chores to ask me about myself and if I needed anything while I was in Lahore. Over the next few days my father and I came to rely on her to defuse the awkwardness of speaking directly to one another. Our conversation became neutered. In the past, we spoke openly about history and politics, but this time, those topics were off limits. Though I could tell from my father’s manner that he meant to make amends, it was as if an unspoken distance, a sense of my having joined another camp, had arisen between us. I found it strange that, over the next few days, he didn’t ask me once about my trip through the Muslim world or my travels in Pakistan. It was as if he didn’t want to know.

  At last I felt I had to raise the subject and I walked into his room, three or four days after I arrived, with that purpose. He seemed pleased to see me, but after a while, when some of the family had dispersed and I told him what I wanted to talk to him about, his face darkened. ‘It depends on what you’re writing. If it’s another filthy anti-Pakistan diatribe, I want no part in it. I’ve read some of what you’ve written and I don’t think much of it.’

  He said that what angered him about the article I wrote after the London bombings was that I had posed as a Pakistani. He said that he and his father were known as defenders of Pakistan and had been patriots all their lives, that he could play no part in an attack on Pakistan and Islam.

  He lay on his bed as he spoke, occasionally turning to me, but mostly text-messaging. He seemed bored yet irritated. He described the faith as a brotherhood, something he’d grown up in. He said that the other day he’d been in Udaipur where some numbers, ‘786’, were written on a wall. He asked his guide what they meant and the man replied that they were a lucky charm. ‘No,’ my father had said, ‘it’s bismillah rahman e rahim [in the name of God, the compassionate and the merciful].’

  ‘Oh, you’re Muslim,’ the guide replied, and shook his hand.

  ‘So, yes, there is a brotherhood,’ my father said. ‘People are warm to you, they bring you in, show you friendship.’

  I asked him what it meant to be a ‘cultural Muslim’.

  ‘You see it all around you,’ he replied. ‘Everyone I know is Muslim. You see namaz [prayers], and rozas [fasts], all the servants are Muslim, and with Islam, people believe deeply. It happens that I don’t privately, but I wouldn’t dream of criticising Islam. I am not a practising Muslim, but my wife is and it would hurt her feelings.’ He compared it to drinking in front of your friends when you wouldn’t dream of doing so in front of your grandmother. ‘It’s offensive.’

  His description of the ‘cultural Muslim’ seemed hardly different from my earliest idea of it, nothing more than festivals, ritual and language, but my journey had made me feel it contained deeper elements that he was not raising. My first hint of this was my father stressing many times that I was not Pakistani and not Muslim. The way he said it, with relish, he seemed almost to suggest that I wasn’t really his son either. He stressed my not being Muslim so strongly that I became curious about the question with which my journey had begun: how could he be Muslim, if he claimed not to believe? How were we at this strange impasse where he, who didn’t believe in the faith’s most basic law, its Book, was telling me as a Muslim that I wasn’t Muslim when by every law of the faith I was, and certainly if he was? He spoke with such passion, attaching some deeper importance to the idea of being Muslim, that I felt he couldn’t be speaking only of culture.

  During those days I spent in my father’s house, I wanted very much for us to do something together that would help us regain the closeness we had known before I had received that letter. But our conversations now, with all that remained unsaid, reminded me of the first few years when I had known my father. There was the same embarrassment, but it was touched now with lack of interest.

  And then, amid a minefield of family occasions, the perfect opportunity seemed to arise. I received a call from Yusuf, a cousin of my father, and on his mother’s side the grandson of Iqbal, the poet and intellectual founder of Pakistan. It was Yusuf ’s great-grandmother who had rescued my grandfather all those years ago when the plague killed off his family. My grandfather grew up in Yusuf ’s haveli, or mansion, in the old city and I had been in touch with him since I arrived to find out more about my grandfather. Like the publisher, Yusuf had a special feeling for my connection to Pakistan and arranged meetings for me with his ancient uncles, who drank Chivas Regal in the evenings and had known my grandfather. That night Yusuf was calling to say that the famous Pakistani singer, Farida Khanum, was practising in the haveli and would I like to come? I accepted his invitation immediately, then asked my father if he would like to come with me. Even for people who lived in Pakistan, the chance to hear Farida practise was rare.

  His eyes brightened. ‘Farida Khanum in the haveli ?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then, inexplicably, his mood changed and he declined. It was the way it always with us: we were forever on the verge of doing something that might deepen our relationship so that it might be relied on, but it never happened.

  So, I went off that night to Yusuf ’s haveli on my own. It was in the heart of the old city, which, after the still heat of the day, had come alive. A great doorway and a red-brick drive rose out of the tightly packed streets, leading up to the house, full of courtyards, slim balconies, leaning trees and a collage of old city houses peering down at the scene below. I found Farida Khanum in a room reached by a narrow staircase. She sat on the floor, in a pistachio green sari, eating mangoes. She ate them with her hands and off the skin, her dark red lipstick smudged. She was large and old, with dyed black hair, her skin drooped, but her every gesture was touched with femininity and whimsy: the gentle theatrics of an ageing star. When, finally, she began to sing, all that melted away. Her voice was insistent, filled with regret and seduction. She seemed to notice that she’d moved a new, young admirer nearly to tears and decided to drive the knife deeper. Yusuf had told her when I came in that I was my grandfather’s grandson and now, helped by him, she put one of my grandfather’s poems to music. Awakening his ghost in this house where he’d lived, she gave me, couplet by couplet, the one thing of my grandfather’s that all poets hope will remain of them.

  As soon as she finished singing, Yusuf slipped away. He returned a few minutes later and said he wanted to give me something. He held a beautiful handmade watch with a grey face and a shabby black strap. He said that my English great-grandfather had presented the watch to the head of Yusuf ’s family when my grandparents had got married. The watch had come down to Yusuf, and though my father had insisted on having it, Yusuf wanted to give it to me because I’d been Dr Taseer’s only grandchild ever to ask about him. He warned me that it would probably cause more p
roblems for me at home, but that I should stand firm. I was thrilled to have the watch. I already felt a connection to my grandfather, in part because he was a poet but also because I had been named after his main work.

  The next morning, my stepmother said, ‘Please don’t tell Abba. He’ll be really angry. He really wanted that watch.’ Her mother suggested I give it to him for his birthday, but I decided, recalling the affection with which it had been given to me the night before, that I would wait. By now, it was as if everyone in the house sensed the strain between my father and me.

  In the breakfast room, newspapers strewn everywhere, I found my father sitting in his blue cotton nightsuit with his legs up on the sofa, sometimes flicking through TV channels, sometimes playing with his phone. He was always up early and I was hoping to catch him alone, but a few minutes later, my elder sister, my stepmother and her father, who was old and in a wheelchair, joined us. A conversation began about a circle of homeopathic doctors in New York to which my sister belonged. They had received a group email about Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust.

  ‘I never respond,’ my sister said in a loud voice, ‘but this time I said, “There’d better have been a Holocaust because the only people who’ve paid for it for the last fifty years have been Muslims.”’

  My father sniggered. ‘All the Germans paid was the gas bill.’ He felt that the number of people who had died in the Holocaust was wildly exaggerated. Even if the Germans were working day and night through the whole war they couldn’t have killed as many people as it was claimed. ‘The job was too big. I’ve seen Belsen by the way,’ he sneered. ‘I was expecting a big warehouse or something. It was hardly bigger than this room. There’s no way they could have fitted in more than three hundred people a day. Then they brought them in a train, which had to go back and forth . . . I’m not denying the Holocaust, the Jews were definitely gassed, but not so many.’

  He said that the people who trumped up the Holocaust were like those who said the Pakistanis killed a million people in Bangladesh in 1971. He was about to use the same argument he did for Bangladesh, about to ask where the graves were, when he must have remembered that the Nazis hadn’t bothered with graves.

  I had said nothing so far because I had the incredible suspicion that he was needling me. I say ‘incredible’ because if this was needling what possible ‘us and them’ theory could be behind it? What group was I part of that made it automatic for me to object to a derisive attitude towards a well-documented genocide? But he must have been right because the satisfaction, with which, my sister made her remark, and the pleasure my father seemed to derive from downplaying the Holocaust, disgusted me. It was not just disgust at their hatred for the Jews and Israel, but at the smallness of my father’s world, the homogeneity of the place, in which people voiced ugly opinions without challenge: a safe area for casual hatred.

  My father, returning to the subject of the Holocaust, made the point more than once that he was not denying the Holocaust, just objecting to the figures. At last I became curious as to what number he could have arrived at that made the Holocaust not such a bad thing after all.

  ‘So, how many?’ I asked.

  His amber eyes shone with irritation. ‘I don’t know, but the eight million figure people quote is rubbish.’

  ‘Six?’

  ‘No, and by the way, there were Romanians and Gypsies too.’

  So what? I wanted to say.

  ‘Four and a half million Jews?’

  He shrugged. ‘When I hear people go on about the Holocaust,’ he said, ‘I just shake my head and keep silent because the whole might of the Judaeo-Christian lobby will come down on you.’

  My sister said that she objected to anyone who doubted the Holocaust being labelled anti-Semitic. I had heard that before, but usually it was framed as an objection to anyone criticising the State of Israel, not the Holocaust, being labelled anti-Semitic. Knowingly or unknowingly, my sister distorted this little bit of college speak. But it was a revealing error: it prompted my curiosity about what lay behind this wrangling over numbers.

  ‘What has made you adjust these numbers?’

  ‘What I’ve seen,’ he answered, ‘and what I’ve read.’

  I knew the historians who refuted the Holocaust. When I thought of my father, who read vast amounts of history, reading these discredited historians, I thought that he would have had to go against all his better instincts, abandon all the ways in which he formed his other historical opinions, to believe what those books said.

  I heard the Muslim denial or downplaying of the Holocaust many times in my journey, especially during the cartoon riots in Syria. It was done because the Holocaust was thought to have played a part in the creation of Israel. Muslims felt Jews had occupied a Muslim country and that their cause was taken up by the West in part out of guilt that the Holocaust had taken place. The politics of faith then, produced a distortion that was both ugly and magical: the Holocaust never happened or was grossly exaggerated; it was a myth concocted by the enemies of Islam. The chain of Islamic logic ended with Muslims denying a well-documented genocide that they hadn’t committed.

  The deeper reason, I felt, that my father chose the Holocaust was that in the West its memory was sacred. Perhaps he thought he would provoke me, show me how it felt to desecrate something sacred. He made a mistake for two reasons: I wasn’t Jewish or from the West, and the Holocaust was committed in the West by the West. For the West then, to hold up the Holocaust with near holy dread, forcing itself never to forget the evil of those years in which it considered itself, not just the Germans, as complicit, was one of the most important treatments of history in modern times. It could not be reduced to the founding of Israel; it hadn’t happened with a political end in mind; and it happened as much for the sake of the victimisers as for that of the victims. For me, on the outside, not from the West, to see the beauty of how another part of the world could move forward, could grow from such a terrible history, was a testament to history standing alone. You didn’t have to be Jewish or European to accept the truth of it.

  It was precisely the opposite of how the faith viewed history. Throughout my journey, this was the obstacle I had encountered: history fused with faith; the robbery of the great Islamic past, the pain and resentment that followed. It was what I, with my small idea of the faith, could not have acquired. It didn’t need faith but, like faith, it had to be felt. And it was the reason why I had come to believe that there was more to being a ‘cultural Muslim’ than was apparent from the description.

  ‘The real horror of the Holocaust,’ I said, surprised at the tone in my voice, ‘is not whether two, three or four million were killed, but that it was a mechanised, systematic exter mination of a people. The state of Israel was many years in the making. It’s possible to pry apart the causes for the creation of Israel from the fact of the Holocaust. You don’t have to deny a Holocaust you didn’t commit just because you hate Israel.’

  Suddenly I looked round the room and felt bad. I thought, I’m making such a nuisance of myself. My sister and stepmother looked worried about the direction the conversation was taking. My stepmother’s father, his mouth open, was staring at me, wide-eyed.

  My father nodded, then began on Israel and on the massacres in Sabra and Shatila, how women and children were killed, and what made that so different from the Holocaust. I didn’t say any more. I had begun my journey asking why my father was Muslim and this was why: I felt sure that none of Islam’s once powerful moral imperatives existed within him, but he was Muslim because he doubted the Holocaust, hated America and Israel, thought Hindus were weak and cowardly, and because the glories of the Islamic past excited him.

  The faith decayed within him, ceased to be dynamic, ceased to provide moral guidance, became nothing but a deep, unreachable historical and political identity. This was all that still had the force of faith. It was significant because in the end this was the moderate Muslim, and it was too little moderation, and in the wrong area
s. It didn’t matter how someone prayed, how much they prayed, what dress they wore, whether they chose to drink or not, but it did matter that someone harboured feelings of hatred, for Jews, Americans or Hindus, that were founded in faith and only masked in political arguments.

  Later he confessed that though he didn’t believe Lahore drawing-room talk that 9/11 was a conspiracy, unanswered questions about the size of the hole in the Pentagon and Muhammad Atta’s passport turning up at the crash site, produced doubt in him. ‘I just don’t know what to say when people bring up these things.’ The 9/11 conspiracy theory was being added as the most recent article of faith for believer and non-believer alike.

  I rose to leave the room. It was if a bank had burst. My father and I, for the first time, were beyond embarrassment.

  I returned a few moments later to say goodbye to him, but he had left for the day without a word. The now empty room produced a corresponding vacancy in me that was like despair. I wanted somehow to feel whole again; not reconciliation, that would be asking too much, just not this feeling of waste: my journey to find my father ending in an empty room in Lahore, with the clear light of a bright morning breaking in to land on the criss-crossing arcs of a freshly swabbed floor.