by A. A. Jafri
‘You men are afraid of educated women.’
‘Yes, many men are, but I am not. If you had really wanted an education, you would have got it yourself.’
‘Are you saying it is my fault? It was men like you who didn’t want women to be educated.’
‘Men like me would have given their daughters the same education that they gave to their sons. You don’t have to go far. Look at my sister. I fought with my father to get her an education, and now look at her! She has a PhD in political science and is a respected professor in Australia.’
Noor did face his father’s ire when, against his wishes, he got his sister, Rehana, admitted at Patna University and then later paid the tuition for her to study at Oxford. His father did not speak to him for three months. In contrast to Rehana, Farhat had received only a primary education, that too at home, and mostly imparted by her grandfather. She studied fifth-standard textbooks, but as was the case for many of her other female cousins, the doors to education were slammed shut on her after that. Obscurantist tradition put a damper on her dreams, and Farhat’s schooling settled on religious education, reciting the Qur’an in Arabic and the Hadith in Urdu. Technically, she was not illiterate, for she knew how to read and write in Urdu. But that was all she could do. She was not exposed to literature; she was never introduced to the discipline of history, or ever had any encounters with the liberal arts.
Tears rolled down Farhat’s eyes as she turned to the other side of the bed. Mansoor felt a rush of blood to the head. He resented his father for treating her so gruffly, and although Noor never abused her physically, he would lash out verbally whenever she challenged him. After a temporary pause, Noor recollected his scattered thoughts and continued with his diatribe, ‘Son, the ruin that ignorance has brought on this nation, especially on women, is unforgivable.’
Mansoor didn’t know who to blame or what to do. Clearly, his mother regretted the fact that she had not received an education, and it was also clear that she had wanted it. He wished he could teach her everything he learned at school. But now, it was too late.
Eight
Haider Rizvi had learned from one of his ‘anonymous sources’ that the coup of 1958 had the backing of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American President who knew about the overthrow of the government even before the Pakistani prime minister did. Haider’s sources also informed him that Zakir had returned to Pakistan to move permanently to Islamabad, the new capital of the country, where he would head a new university rumoured to be funded by the American government. When Noor heard this, he yelled, ‘Mashallah, this is Zakir’s clever way of ingratiating himself with the new dictator. He wants to be the gilli to the military dictator’s dundda,’ he had replied to Haider.
Gilli-dundda is a popular subcontinent game that only needs a big stick, the dundda, and a small stick, the gilli. The objective of the game is to hit the gilli with the dundda as far as possible.
Suspicious of the dictator’s intentions, the barrister had nicknamed him General Dundda Khan, because he was often pictured with a stick in his hand, especially when he donned his grandiose military uniform, the warrior image demanding to be seen in all its sinister glory in order to demoralize his democratic enemies.
*
It had been a while since The Unholy Quartet had had a proper gathering. So, this time around, Haider invited all of them for dinner at his house to celebrate Zakir’s return and his new career as a would-be academic. He wanted to find out from the man himself whether what he had heard from his source was true or not. Haider lived in the north Nazimabad area of Karachi, a newly built enclave originally designed for federal government employees. When the capital shifted to Islamabad, many middle-class families were also allowed to move to this residential area. Since it was one of the best-planned areas in Karachi at the time, designed by Italian architects, Haider had decided to build his house there. It was a modest bungalow without a name—unlike the Kashana-e-Haq—and with a fractional address: 33/8, Block C.
Having no separate men’s quarters, Haider had his friends ushered in by a Bengali servant to his working library. Cluttered with books, some opened, many piled precariously over each other, and with papers strewn all over his writing desk, his library accentuated its value in use. Four large bookshelves covered two adjacent walls. A twenty-four-volume set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and a fifty-four-volume set of The Great Books of the Western World, bookended by a brass horse, occupied much of the space. There were other smaller bookshelves in the room as well, containing an array of books on politics, a Roget’s Thesaurus and two volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. In one corner, an old sitar stood alone, surrounded by two chairs, a dusty reminder that someone fiddled with music in this household.
‘Are you working on a story, Haider?’ Sadiq asked, noticing all the handwritten notes that lay scattered over the writing desk.
‘Actually, I am working on a book on the representatives of Muslims in the partition of India.’
‘Oh, really? What are you going to call it?’ Noor asked.
‘Representatives of Muslims and the Partition of India.’
‘A scholar amongst us?’ Noor asked.
‘We already have a scholar amongst us, and his name is Sadiq Mirza,’ Haider clarified.
‘Oh, yes. I forgot about your books, Sadiq. Sorry!’
‘Don’t worry, Noor; I am trying to forget about them, too,’ Sadiq replied.
Although everyone laughed at his joke, one of Sadiq’s books, Poetry of Rebellion in the Urdu Tradition, had already been hailed by the critics as path-breaking work.
After a few rounds of London Lager, the conversation turned to Pakistani politics, a requirement as usual. Two years into power, the field marshal, the first military dictator, had issued a public proclamation designating 27 October—the anniversary of his coup—a public holiday to commemorate the day as the ‘day of revolution’. In one of his radio broadcasts, he declared: ‘My beloved citizens, my ultimate aim is to restore democracy. I declare this to you, unequivocally, in the presence of God.’
‘The man doesn’t even know how to spell democracy,’ Noor complained to his friends.
‘Give the general a chance; don’t be so quick to judge him,’ Zakir defended the man.
‘Give General Dundda a chance to do what? Ruin the country? Establish tyranny?’
‘Is this the face of a tyrant?’ Zakir asked.
‘The face of a tyrant doesn’t always resemble Stalin’s, and the gulags are not always in Siberia.’
‘You just need an excuse to criticize anything and everything about Pakistan. Show some patriotism, my good man!’ Zakir got fed up with Noor.
‘“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious,” said Oscar Wilde,’ Noor replied. After a pause, he continued, ‘If I criticize Pakistan, it is not out of hate, it is because of love, and if you don’t criticize your country for its faults, you don’t take your country seriously.’
A dead silence took over the room. It seemed that Zakir’s confrontations with the barrister had begun to happen with greater frequency and with increasing zeal.
The call to dinner by Haider’s servant came at a fitting moment, forcing the friends to move to a different room and shifting the conversation from the infuriating to the banal. During dinner, Zakir revealed that he had actually resigned from the FAO and was going to join the Planning Commission that Dundda Khan had set up. No wonder he was defending the government. Now that he has to wipe the field marshal’s ass, he will not accept any criticism of the government, Noor thought.
Corruption in the country continued with reckless abandon as General Dundda promoted himself to become the Chief Martial Law Administrator (CMLA). To Noor, CMLA was really an acronym for ‘Coordinate My Lies Accordingly’. After a slight hiatus, when the general appointed his cronies to write a new Constitution, Zakir hailed his decision as something wondrous, the outcome of which would usher ‘real democracy in Pakistan’. Zakir’s joining of the general’s governmen
t created an uneasy distance between him and the rest of the group. From then on, the other three regarded him as a government mole.
*
Mansoor’s education continued as planned by his parents, but Noor remained oblivious to the religious teacher’s existence. Maulvi Nazir, a corpulent, grizzled-haired man, in the image of Sancho Panza, sans the donkey, his clothes smelling of spicy food, had endeared himself to Mansoor. His two-hundred pounds, sitting precariously on a five-foot, three-inch frame, shook with his deep rumbling laughter every time he told a joke. In between these jokes, Maulvi Nazir mostly scared Mansoor with threats of punishments of the grave. He told Mansoor that drinking alcohol was the root of all evil, and that the penalty for this sin was eighty lashes.
‘You should never enter a place where alcohol is stored or served. If they ban sharab in this country, all evil will disappear like this,’ the maulvi snapped his fingers.
The pronouncement made Mansoor so uncomfortable that he thought it best to change the subject.
‘Maulvi Sahib, are djinns real?’
‘Of course, they are real! What kind of a stupid question is that? Everyone knows they are real. If they weren’t, would they be mentioned in the Qur’an?’
‘Can you tell me more?’
‘Well, djinns were Hazrat Suleman’s slaves, who employed them to make his castles and buildings.’
‘What do they look like?’ Mansoor asked.
‘How would I know? I haven’t seen his castles!’
‘No, I mean the djinns.’
The maulvi paused, closed his eyes and drew a deep breath before starting his sermon. ‘God created men from earth, angels from light and djinns from smokeless fire. He created the djinns two thousand years before he created Adam. They are invisible creatures, but they can take the shape of animals and humans. Some djinns are Muslims, while others are infidels. The Muslim djinns pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan and perform the hajj.’ He said all this as if it were a memorized lesson from his childhood.
‘What do the infidel djinns do?’
‘How would I know? I don’t hang out with them.’
‘Who was Hazrat Suleman?’ Mansoor asked.
‘Hazrat Suleman was a prophet of God, the master of the djinns, their king.’
The maulvi took out a red handkerchief and blew his nose.
‘Do you remember that night last spring when it rained furiously?’ the maulvi continued, his voice becoming dramatic now.
‘Yes,’ Mansoor replied.
‘Do you remember the loud thunder we heard throughout the night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, all the evil djinns were having a farting competition. That’s what it was.’ He looked at Mansoor and then laughed so hard that his whole body started to shake. Just then, a muezzin called the faithful for prayers from a nearby mosque. Maulvi Nazir abruptly stopped laughing and hurriedly left for the mosque, leaving Mansoor wholly bewildered.
That night, before his father returned from work, he asked his mother, ‘Amma, the thing that father drinks . . . is that sharab?’
‘No! Absolutely not. Who told you that? Don’t you ever use that word in our house! The thing that your father drinks . . . that’s his medicine.’
But Mansoor was not stupid; he knew of his mother’s attempts to cover up his father’s addiction. And he knew that his father had no medical problem whatsoever. Mansoor couldn’t remember ever seeing him sick. But even though his doubts didn’t go away, he did not pursue this line of questioning any further. As it happened, Noor came home that night while Farhat was praying, and although it was a bit late, he was surprisingly sober. Farhat looked at the ceiling, smiled and thanked God. Her prayers were working. If you beseech Allah humbly and earnestly, He answers all prayers.
*
Weeks passed by. When winter came, it swiftly clipped the autumnal drag, and what remained of the year whizzed past. For Farhat, the new year brought no respite from what she called ‘a donkey load of problems’ for her. First, there were Pyaro and Joseph, who continued to live in her premises for what seemed to be forever now. When Farhat prodded Pyaro for the millionth time, the woman told her that the new hut that Joseph and his uncle were building was almost ready. After a long pause, she said, ‘We will move back as soon as it is done, Begum Sahiba.’
‘This constantly hearing the word “soon”, it has infected my ears,’ Farhat told her.
And then there was Mehrun, who became a little too visible around the Kashana for Farhat’s comfort. Since schools were closed for the winter break and Kaneez was mostly occupied at Dr Minwalla’s clinic (the doctor’s business had suddenly boomed; rumours were rife that the general was going to launch a forced sterilization drive in the country as part of a family planning programme, so families had begun to try having as many children as possible before the men became namard, impotent), Mehrun showed up at the Kashana with Jumman every day, staying from morning till late evening and eating all her meals there. To make matters worse for Farhat, Noor conveniently left for the capital city to argue a case at the Supreme Court.
The presence of all these undesirable lodgers at the Kashana forced Farhat to visit her father on that frigid January day. Mansoor, feeling a little sick, had stayed back in his room and was whiling time away by fiddling with his Meccano set. He was always clumsy with all the nuts and bolts the set had. According to his mother, ‘the boy has never successfully constructed anything from the set ever since his father bought it from England.’ Getting frustrated now, Mansoor put all the green pieces back in the box and pushed it under his bed. He picked up Gulliver’s Travels from his desk and began reading it, but soon got distracted by Mehrun, whom he could see from his bedroom window, sitting under the guava tree with a book in her hand. Usually, the girl’s mere presence would have been enough of a gravitational pull to get him out of his bedroom. But with a book in her hand, it was simply too much to resist. So, despite being down in the dumps, Mansoor decided to go out and see what she was up to. With neither of his parents around, this was the perfect opportunity to fraternize with that ‘lowly outcast’ freely.
The dry, brownish grass of the lawn and the absence of any flowers made the backyard look dead. The only thing that coloured the landscape was Mehrun in her pink shalwar-kameez and a bright red sweater with a gaping hole at the elbow. Unperturbed by the bone-chilling wind and undisturbed by the dark winter cloud in the sky, she remained glued to her book.
‘What are you doing?’ Mansoor asked, walking up to her. ‘It’s so cold out here!’
‘Are you a wimp? It’s not cold.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Can’t you see I am reading?’
‘What are you reading?’
With pursed lips and a frown on her face, she reluctantly showed him the book. The English Reader: For Urdu-Medium Students.
‘Read to me what you were reading.’
‘No!’
‘I swear I’ll not make fun of you.’
‘No!’
‘I promise.’
‘No!’
‘Please.’
‘If you make fun of me, I’ll kick your ass. Twice.’
When Mansoor persisted, she started to read one of the book’s stories, ‘Mrs Ahmad Goes on a Shopping Spree’, haltingly.
‘Mrs Ahmad told Mr Ahmad that she went to Bohri Bazaar in her motor car to shop for a biloo saree.’
‘Blue saree,’ Mansoor corrected her.
‘Biloo saree,’ she repeated.
Mansoor puckered his lips to sound the word ‘blue’. As Mehrun imitated him, she began giggling. After a bit of merriment, she continued to read more, making more mistakes, feeling the traps of her mother tongue, unable to tackle the nuances of the foreign language, moving her lips, dancing her tongue under Mansoor’s guidance. After she got the hang of the words, she beamed and said, ‘Mansoor Babu, you are a good teacher. Why don’t you teach me English?’
‘I can if you want me to, but
I have a better idea. After the vacation, when Zaidi Sahib comes back, why don’t you ask him to teach you too? He can give us both English lessons.’
His eyes lit up when he proposed his grand idea, but Mehrun did not seem thrilled. In fact, she seemed bothered about that proposal, and after a pause, she said, ‘Did you eat charas for breakfast? Where will I get the money to pay him for the lessons?’
‘Oh, he is a nice man! He will teach you for free.’
Mansoor declared this with much confidence, as if being Zaidi Sahib’s pupil had given him an insight into his teacher’s complex mind. And Mehrun, though still not so sure about Zaidi’s benevolence, started imagining about chattering away in English, watching English movies, reading English magazines, and best of all, giving orders to people in English. Dreams of becoming a high society begum started to percolate in her mind. Ah, the begums she had heard so much about, the begums who did nothing all day long but gave orders to servants like her, the begums who ate delicious chocolates and wore beautiful clothes and shopped at Elphinstone Street, or Elphi, as they so lovingly called it. She had heard about them from her mother, who was well acquainted with them from being on the rounds with Dr Minwalla to deliver their babies.
‘They stay at home and smoke cigarettes and talk git-pit git-pit in English,’ her mother had told her.
Kaneez had raved about their grand houses, their expensive furniture, their spoiled children and their servants, all in one breath. Yes, indeed, the first step was to learn their language; the rest would come later.
Joseph, however, shattered Mehrun’s fantasies about these begums. He sauntered towards Mansoor and Mehrun from his new living quarter, singing the hit song from the Bollywood film Awaara:
Awaara hoon, awaara hoon
Ya gardish mein hoon aasman ka tara hoon
(I am a loafer, I am a loafer
Or perhaps an orbiting star in the sky)
Holding a bidi in his fist, he inhaled it with gusto, as though it was his last bidi before his execution. After exhaling, he continued with his song. He offered the bidi, ever so nonchalantly, to Mansoor, who declined it, and then to Mehrun, who accepted it as if it was the most natural thing to do. Mansoor was surprised at Mehrun’s apparent ease in handling the bidi; he had never seen a girl smoking, let alone somebody who was only a few years older than him.