by A. A. Jafri
A.A. JAFRI
Of Smokeless Fire
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Part I
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Part II
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Part III
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
To my parents,
Athar and Tara
Part I
‘He created man from dry clay like earthen vessels.
And He created the djinn of a flame of smokeless fire.’
—Qur’an
One
Djinns, the invisible beings made of smokeless fire, are Allah’s creations. Human beings cannot create or beget them, but whether it was a djinn or not, a rumour took birth that day that a djinn had been born at the residence of Noor ul Haq, barrister-at-law.
Farhat Haq, the wife of barrister Noor ul Haq, almost died in labour that day. It had nothing to do with the delivery, wretched as it was, but had everything to do with that horrible midwife, Kaneez, and her piercing screams: ‘Djinn, djinn! Oh Allah, he’s a djinn! Take him away from me. Take him away from me; he will get inside me!’
What a thing to say after such excruciating labour and the relief of finally giving birth successfully after eleven miscarriages! True, propriety had never been Kaneez’s strong suit, but a stupid outburst like that at such a critical hour was something that not even Farhat had expected from that ignorant one-eyed churail.
The well-established superstition is that churails are the most terrible creatures on this side of the Ganga. Born with inverted feet and an ingrained nail in their skulls, these one-eyed Medusas are believed to thrive on children’s livers. Women who die in childbirth are sometimes reincarnated as churails who come back to seek revenge on other pregnant women. Everyone in Pakistan knows this even though the Qur’an doesn’t mention churails.
Everyone in Pakistan also knows about djinns, the invisible beings made of smokeless fire; they exist because they are mentioned in the Qur’an. They are Allah’s creation. Women can’t carry them in their wombs for nine months, nor can they give birth to them. So how could Kaneez utter such nonsense with her loudspeaker-like mouth and broadcast that rubbish to the entire neighbourhood? How do you control a rumour once it leaves her blathering mouth? You can’t! It grows wings and flies into every ear.
*
The malicious gossip that a hideous djinn had been born at Kashana-e-Haq, the sprawling residence of Noor ul Haq, on that fateful day in October 1951 acquired such currency that many people avoided going there for a long time. The day had begun as a scorcher, and no sooner had the sun come out from behind the eastern hills of Karachi than the city turned into a veritable tandoor, broiling everything in sight: buckling up roads, flaring tempers and wilting flowers. It was not even noon, and yet it felt like dozakh, or the sixth circle of Dante’s hell. The chowkidar sat on a concrete bench under a neem tree just outside the front gate of the barrister’s house, dozing off, his head falling forward on to his chest, jerking up now and again. The discarded front page of the Morning Gazette got picked up by the hot wind and caught against his leg, the picture of the first prime minister of Pakistan, with his fist raised, and his title, Leader of the Nation, prominently displayed on it. Suddenly, an ear-splitting horn from a black Hudson Commodore startled the chowkidar. He jumped up and instinctively saluted the car, as the Gazette’s front page peeled away from his leg, carried off by the warm breeze. From inside the vehicle, Noor ul Haq’s driver, Sikander, craned his neck out and shouted at the chowkidar, ‘Oye! Son of Genghis Khan, you are supposed to guard the house, not sleep.’
‘Oye, Quaid-e-Azam, let a man sleep! How am I going to guard this Taj Mahal if I don’t sleep well?’ the chowkidar roared.
The servants shared a spirited relationship, always joking and pulling each other’s leg. The guard’s name was Changez Gul, but Sikander teasingly called him Genghis Khan’s son. Changez returned the favour by calling Sikander Quaid-e-Azam, the Great Leader, the title given to the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It was not because Sikander was the founder’s biggest fan or admired his politics; it was because he bore an uncanny resemblance to him. Tall, gaunt, with a triangular face and a slight gap between his front teeth that was noticeable only when he smiled broadly, Sikander could have passed for the founder’s twin brother. However, that is where the similarities ended and the differences magnified. But to Changez, it was the similarities that mattered the most.
He opened the wrought-iron gate and let Sikander drive the car into the front porch. The driver had just returned home after bringing fresh naans for the luncheon that Noor had organized for his circle of intellectual friends. After closing the gate, Changez returned to his seat and twirled his thick black moustache. Then, leaning his head back against the brass nameplate set into the gatepost behind him, he closed his eyes again. The name, Kashana-e-Haq, meaning the House of Haq, or, in English, the Abode of Truth, had been carefully chosen by barrister Noor ul Haq. It was the only house on the street with a name instead of a number. No one knew if the name was a statement of sorts or if the barrister wanted to establish his aristocratic credentials in his adopted country. His house was in the Bihar Housing Society, a comparatively new and planned neighbourhood of Karachi. Uprooted from their homeland with the partition of India in 1947, the refugees brought pieces of their ancestral hearts to Karachi and built pockets of memory markers, giving them names like Delhi Muslim Society, Hyderabad Colony, Bangalore Town, Rajputana Colony and Agra Taj Colony.
The streets of Bihar Housing Society, usually swarming with people, were deserted that morning. Most Sunday mornings were greeted by the discordant clamour of kids playing cricket in the park nearby, or the cacophony of snarled traffic and the competing calls of hustling pedlars. But that day, the heat muzzled the urban symphony; it swept away all memory of the floods of July and drove everyone away, except for a lone subzi-wallah, a vegetable hawker, who pushed his rickety cart to establish his monopoly in the neighbourhood.
Inside the Kashana, the ceiling fans recirculated hot air at full speed while the heavy silk curtains, drawn in every room, struggled to keep the house cool and dark. The mouth-watering aroma of tandoori meat, wafting out from the kitchen, was the only reminder that not everything had gone to hell. In the background, the radio blasted a hit song from a recently released Indian movie.
When the song ended, three loud beeps signalled the start of the midday news broadcast: ‘This is Radio Pakistan: The news, read by Mukhbir Alam. We have just received information from our weather bureau that the temperature today has already reached a 110 degrees Fahrenheit and is expected to go up to 120 degrees later in the day. There is no relief in sight. The government has promised that it will leave no stone unturned to provide assistance to the heat-ravaged needy. In other news, the prime minister will be making an important speech today about . . .’
Barrister Noor had just finished a long, relaxing shower, but he felt like returning to the bathroom again when he heard about the temperature on the radio. He
had come out into his bedroom wearing a white bathrobe, monogrammed distinctively with his initials, NUH, embroidered in navy blue, his greying chest hair visible above the robe’s lapels. The room was too dark, so he turned on the bedroom light, only to be rebuked by his wife.
‘Oh ho! Why did you turn on the light?’ Farhat asked, still lying in bed in her nightclothes, her massive belly, her puffy face and the dark circles under her eyes all attesting to the full term of her difficult pregnancy. Letting out a loud sigh of irritation, she slowly turned over, carefully holding her lower abdomen as she did so.
Noor switched the light off and asked sheepishly, ‘How are you feeling?’
There was no reply, so he asked her a different question, ‘Do you want your lunch in bed?’
She snubbed him again, the silence in the bedroom shattered by the piercing call of the subzi-wallah outside: ‘Very, very cheap! So many treats: potatoes, spinach, cauliflower, beets!’
‘Don’t you want to eat anything?’ Noor persisted.
‘I’ll eat when I am hungry. I don’t need your constant nagging.’
‘I am just concerned about you, my jaanum, my life. You should be eating for two.’
‘Leave me alone and go to your dear friends.’
‘They are not here yet. Can I get you anything before I go?’
Farhat did not feel like answering such stupid questions, especially when she was so miserable. They seemed more like apologies-in-advance for the day-long neglect her husband planned to inflict on her. The mocking of the wall clock became louder as she watched Noor put on his silk kurta-pyjama.
He stooped a little to see his face in the mirrored dresser and began applying Brylcreem to his thinning salt-and-pepper hair. Then, methodically and with purpose, he combed his hair. Picking up the white bottle of Old Spice cologne, he slapped a few drops on his clean-shaven face and looked at himself in the mirror again. As he leaned towards the mirror, he noticed the bluish bump on the left side of his head—a mortifying reminder of the fall he had had at the Sindh Club two nights ago. It still hurt a little when he touched it. The memory, although a bit blurry, shamed him. He had drunk way too much that night, but then it was hard to resist a single malt Scotch whisky, especially when it was Balvenie and paid for by a client. Rumour had it that the founder of Pakistan used to drink the same expensive Scotch daily. The thought brought a proud smile to his face; he was in good company.
When he had tripped and fallen at the Sindh Club that night, it was his ever-so-loyal driver, Sikander, who had brought him home and helped him to bed. Farhat did not even want to be anywhere near him. A drunken Noor always became untouchable to her. She had left him all alone in their bedroom and moved to the zenana, the women’s quarters, for the night. Ashamed and penitent, Noor had promised her the next day that he would never come home drunk again, but most promises are made to be broken, and deep down in his heart, he knew that.
That Sunday in October, Noor had invited his friends for some tandoori venison and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. The same industrialist client who had treated him to Balvenie at the Sindh Club had sent him another gift: a haunch of venison. Wild game meat, Johnnie Walker, and cerebral gupshup, or bullshit, with his intellectual friends were what Noor lived for. It gave him some respite from the tedium of droning on and on about corporate tax laws with his wealthy clients; it also provided him with an opportunity to lash out against the religious direction that Pakistan had started to take of late.
To Farhat, however, alcohol, deer meat and irreligious conversations were all satanic pleasures, and Noor’s friends were, in her words, ‘the Shaitan or the devil’s comrades-in-arms’; she hated them with the same vengeance with which she hated his whisky breath. It repelled her whenever Noor tried to kiss or hug her after coming home drunk. Even a hint of that dreadful abomination would force her to rinse her mouth and perform the ritual ablution to purify herself again since alcohol was strictly forbidden in Islam. To Noor, however, these satanic pleasures were the best gifts that the British had given to their former subjects, not to mention their empiricism. He could fulminate against British colonialism and compliment them on their rationality in the same whisky breath. To him, religion and rationality did not go together. And so, as religion began to permeate the public sphere in Pakistan, Noor’s hostility towards the country increased exponentially and whisky became his nightly ritual, his closing argument.
‘I have asked Sikander to bring Sarwat over, to give you company . . . while my friends are here,’ Noor offered apologetically.
Indignant, Farhat turned around and snapped at him tearfully, ‘Should I thank you for arranging to have my sister over? Or should I thank you for being busy with your friends?’
Entertaining his friends was nothing new for Noor, but Farhat wished he would spend more time with her, especially during these last days of her pregnancy. According to her, the more care and attention she needed, the more insensitive he became.
‘Sikander will be here all day, in case you need to call Dr Minwalla,’ he said.
‘For God’s sake, just leave the room,’ Farhat snapped.
Her tough pregnancy had given her the licence to mock him, to rebuke him and to kick him out of the room. Never before had she spoken to Noor in that tone.
‘I promise that I’ll keep the party under control this time.’
Noor was acutely aware that things would not stay under control once his friends arrived and the bottle of Johnnie Walker was opened, but he blamed his drinking on the stress of his ‘rotten profession’ and the agony of living in what he called an ‘obscurantist country’. The partition of India and the consequent creation of Pakistan in 1947 had driven him out of his birthplace in India and turned him into a forced refugee and a reluctant exile. He had repeatedly declared to his wife that ‘this mullah-land’ was withering his soul, to which his wife would always reply, ‘Those who don’t have a soul can’t complain about its withering.’
He remembered the last time his friends had come over to his house. Their discussions began with the sublimity and the scepticism in Mirza Ghalib’s poetry and soon degenerated into jokes about the erotica in Wahi Wahanvi’s writings. All his friends got so drunk that they passed out after dinner and spent the whole night at the Kashana. Farhat was so cross with him the next day that she gave him the silent treatment for three full days. To remain angry for more than three days was forbidden by Allah; it would make her a partner in sin, and of course, she did not want that. Three days of living with a taciturn wife would have typically been a welcome relief for Noor, but he couldn’t take that chance now, not when he was so worried. Farhat’s eleven failed pregnancies had left him hollow inside. This time around, Noor was particularly concerned. He had this haunting feeling that something was going to go wrong again. For a man who prided himself on his rationalism, these creeping absurdities were puzzling.
‘Inshallah, soon we’ll have a child, a healthy child,’ he said, emphasizing the word ‘inshallah’ for her benefit.
Darting out of the bedroom, he wistfully stole one last glance at Farhat. This pregnancy had drained her spirit the most. Seeing her like this, he began regretting the invitation to his friends so close to her delivery date. But then the venison had to be eaten and the whisky had to be drunk. From the hallway, Noor called his servant, Budhoo, and instructed him to bring his friends to the mardana, the men’s quarters, as soon as they arrived.
‘And listen, Budhoo . . . bring me my cup of tea,’ he ordered.
He ambled to his study to look for the wooden plaques that he had recently got custom-made for his friends as an inside joke. He remembered that he had put them in one of the drawers in his mahogany desk. He opened the drawer and found the four plaques with the inscription ‘The Unholy Quartet’ inside. This should make them chuckle, he thought, smiling. Thinking about irreverent titles had become a pastime for him. As he lifted the plaques out, he noticed at the bottom of the drawer a copy of the short-lived literary ma
gazine that he used to edit back in India, Taraqqi Pasand Aadmi, The Progressive Man.
Life had not turned out for Noor as he had thought it would. In an ideal world, he would have been a scholar of either comparative literature or philosophy, who could move seamlessly from Ghalib to Milton and from Spinoza to Ibn Rushd. He kept Ghalib’s book of poetry on his bedside table, imagining that someday he would write a bold reinterpretation of the master’s poetry for an open-minded audience. But while he could fascinate his uninitiated friends with the originality and freshness of Ghalib, to write about poetry had become challenging. The only things he could write about with any fluency now were his legal briefs. The trauma of the forced migration from India during Partition and the manic urgency to succeed financially in a country he still considered foreign had deeply affected his psyche.
He picked up the plaques and went to the elegantly furnished mardana, which was almost dark except for that single rarefied beam of sunlight piercing through a slight opening in the middle of the curtains, highlighting the dust motes swirling in the air. The table, set with four whisky glasses, a silver ice bucket and the big bottle of Johnnie Walker, waited anxiously for Noor’s friends, or so it seemed. On one end of the table lay a copy of the latest issue of Time magazine. The cover page had the picture of a burly Joseph McCarthy, his bright eyes searching for secret communists.
Noor picked up the magazine, slumped into a chair and began reading about the red-baiting senator from Wisconsin. American democracy, with all its imperfections, fascinated the recusant lawyer that he was. He thought about the nascent democracy in neighbouring India, and wondered why it eluded Pakistan. His reading was interrupted by Budhoo bringing in his tea. As he began sipping it, Noor noticed the smudges of dust on the framed picture of his late father on the wall.
‘Budhoo, dust the frame, it has streaks all over.’
The servant pulled the dishcloth hanging from his shoulder and began cleaning the frame. He stopped and gazed at the picture for a while before continuing again. Budhoo had come to work for Noor’s family as a young man. Nobody knew his real name. The moniker, Budhoo, which in Urdu meant simpleton, stuck to him because of his childlike manners.