Of Smokeless Fire

by A. A. Jafri

  The convoluted tongue, the slurred speech unnerved Mansoor. ‘Tell me from the beginning what happened,’ he asked.

  Noor put the bottle on the side table, sighed deeply and said: ‘Wh . . . at is there to . . . to tell you! Ev . . . ev . . . everything gone. Nothing remains . . . not . . . thing remains. I am a man beaten by . . . by . . .’

  Noor coughed and cleared his throat, wanting to say something but unsure about what to say. How could he tell his son about the distresses of his unhappy marriage of fifty years, that too with this jerky, hesitant tongue? Mansoor realized that there was something wrong with his father. It seemed impossible for him to talk coherently. He told his father to go back to sleep as it was still very early, and he promised that he would bring back his mother today.

  After leaving his father, Mansoor went to the women’s quarter, not entirely sure why. The room was a veritable shrine now. On the marble floor, a beautiful and thick Turkish prayer rug greeted him, its corner folded, prayer beads spread out. In one corner of the room, on a wooden hand-carved Qur’an holder, lay a closed Qur’an. The paintings that had graced the walls of the zenana previously had all been swapped with holy verses printed on black velvet in heavy gold frames.

  For Mansoor’s mother, the worship of God was important; it was always there, but it was rarely noticed. She practiced her faith quietly, abided by it, but it was never unsettling for anyone else. The whole set-up that she had created in her son’s childhood with Maulvi Nazir had been a weak attempt to inject faith, one drop at a time. Mansoor thought that the sacred and the sacrilegious, the rational and the absurd, and the all-important cultural artefacts of his life, had often sparred with each other, but they never came to a head, never threatened to obliterate each other. Even now, he would never trade one for the other. And what had happened to Uncle Zakir? The person who used to be so full of doubts, who believed in bonum vitae, the good life, how could he now suffer from the sense of religious and moral certitude? He had purposely become a man with insufficient imagination, refusing to enter any value system save his own. Obviously, he had played a role in bringing Mansoor’s parents’ troubled marriage to a breaking point.

  *

  The sun had finally come out, and hearing the calls of the vegetable vendors outside, Mansoor decided it was time to pay a visit to Nawab Khan Namaqul’s house and bring his mother back home. Mansoor dropped Sikander home first and told him to take the rest of the day off. He then drove in the direction of his uncle’s house. A balding Athanni, watering his flower beds, greeted Mansoor nervously. His flowing hennaed beard, sans a moustache, was a signifier of his new identity. Wearing a shalwar-kameez, he resembled the rotund Maulvi Nazir. Mansoor’s unexpected appearance threw him off. They shook hands, and after exchanging a few clumsy trivialities, Mansoor asked him about his mother. Athanni’s expression and tone changed immediately.

  ‘She cannot go to that house.’

  ‘That house? That house is her home. I am her son and I am going to take her back. Now get out of my way.’

  This was the first time Mansoor had confronted his former extortionist, and it was the first time Athanni got scared of Mansoor. He quickly moved out of his way. Mansoor went inside the house and saw Farhat in a black hijab, sitting slumped in a chair at the dining table, reading the Qur’an. She looked at least twenty pounds lighter. As soon as she saw him, she froze, as if she had seen his ghost. Realizing that it was indeed her son, she came forward and squeezed him tightly. Tears streaked down her gaunt face and her lips trembled. Mansoor kissed her and hugged her back.

  ‘Let’s go home, Amma.’

  And without a moment’s hesitation, Farhat said, ‘Yes, let’s go.’

  Just then Sarwat came charging in, followed by Athanni. ‘Farhat, what are you thinking? How can you go back?’

  But it was as if Farhat had been waiting for these magic words: ‘Let’s go home.’ She went in and quickly changed her clothes, putting on a beige-coloured hijab, brought her suitcase and got ready to go. After she settled down in the rear seat of the car, Mansoor drove away. But dread filled her heart in the short journey back to her home, and Farhat began to quietly sob again.

  When they reached the Kashana, the first thing Farhat did was to go straight to the kitchen and order Budhoo to prepare a hearty breakfast for her son. Then, as if absolutely nothing had happened, Farhat immersed herself in her household chores again. Noor, too, went on doing his things at the other end of the house. Without exchanging a word, without swapping apologies, they carried on with their disengaged routines. Like two sad people living a fractured life, separated by abstractions, they pretended to have patched up their differences in utter silence. Mansoor remained displeased, but what could he do? Under the circumstances, he could not have hoped for a better reconciliation. The cultural fact was that conflicts were resolved through silent affectations, not through exaggerated emotions. Here, silence, and not time, healed all wounds. Mansoor just hoped that their reconciliation would last and that people like Zakir wouldn’t poison their relationship with their adjusted claims and amorphous promises. He also wished that his father would cut down on his drinking, but that was a forlorn hope; he did not remember a single day when his father had not had any alcohol. Noor had recently turned seventy, and to wish that he would change now was a vain hope.

  *

  Since its inception, political disorders and intrigues had plagued Pakistan like waterlogging and salinity. But each turmoil cracked the structural foundation of the country a tad more. The Supreme Court sanctioned every coup, justifying each upheaval as a regrettable requirement, calling it the Doctrine of Necessity. It was as if this was a divine idea, a reverential justice. But Noor was no longer interested in anything, not politics, not philosophy, not Pakistan.

  One July morning in 1977, the wobbly democracy of Pakistan was dealt another blow. The chief of army staff, who had been carefully chosen by The People’s Leader because he regarded him to be a simpleton with limited life interests like prayers and polo, dethroned his benefactor unceremoniously. Pakistan’s history gyrated a full circle and gave the former prime minister a taste of his own despotism. But Noor remained silent. The genius schemer had fallen prey to a devious plotter. An opinion writer in the Daily Hulchul called the latest dictator General Behroopia, a person with many faces. Many people followed the lead and also began calling him that nickname in private. Tyranny continued unabated, albeit with a new look, and the age of religious machination started at full throttle. But Noor remained silent.

  Both Mansoor and his father watched the latest dictator on live television. Displaying a packet of imported Dunhill cigarettes on his desk, the general talked about the corruption of his predecessor and made a promise to the people that he would restore the real Islamic democracy within ninety days. The G.O.D.s applauded his actions, and Zakir Hassan gave him the title of Mard Momin, the Man of Faith. Haider Rizvi wrote a glowing tribute as the managing editor of the Gazette the next day. But Noor remained silent.

  The barrister had lost his mordant wit. The critic of Pakistani politics watched another coup brought on by another military dictator unfold in front of his eyes, and yet, he said nothing. Mansoor read Faiz’s new poem to him, but nothing stirred him. The gridlock in his marriage and the breakdown of communication with his wife made Noor distant from his son as well. He stopped drinking altogether, but that did not impress Farhat at all. After begging Zakir’s forgiveness, she had got back in his good graces and heard his lectures more intently now. Noor was duly informed about this, but he showed no reaction.

  *

  Mansoor and Lisa regularly wrote to each other. Several days before that night at the university pond, Mansoor and Lisa had gone to a party together. It was there that a mutual friend of theirs had taken their picture. It was a picture of love in all its simplicity. Lisa mailed a copy of that picture to Mansoor with her letter. When the airmail envelope arrived in the post, it made Farhat suspicious. As Mansoor opened it, the ph
otograph fell out. Farhat quickly picked it up and began an intensive interrogation: ‘Who is this girl? Why has your picture been taken with her? What exactly is your relationship with her?’ Her rapid-fire questions made Mansoor stutter.

  ‘She is . . . Lisa Reid . . . A friend of mine, Amma,’ he replied with a bumbling hesitancy. ‘The picture was taken at a university party that I went to. There is nothing more to it.’

  ‘Don’t you know it’s a sin to be with girls who are not related to you?’ she fulminated.

  Realizing that the rod of fervency would now fall on him, he frowned. Mansoor regained his composure and replied, ‘Amma, please don’t start this with me now. I am not living in the fourteenth century. And I can’t live in America without mixing with women.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like your father! I have suffered enough from him, and I don’t have the energy to suffer from you, too.’

  ‘Amma, please,’ he pleaded.

  ‘Don’t “Amma please” me. If you marry a non-Muslim girl, I will never forgive you. NEVER!’ She then started to weep. ‘My kismet is so bad; I am so unlucky.’

  Mansoor knew that she had deployed her ultimate weapon, emotional blackmail, but not wanting to aggravate the situation any further, he remained quiet. He knew he would never forgive himself if he picked a fight with his mother before leaving for America.

  With the high court closed for summer vacations, Noor quit going to work altogether, never telephoning his office and refusing to accept his clients’ calls at home. All day he stayed in his bed and slept for long hours, waking up just to eat. His missing work like this worried Mansoor, but the two-day-old stubble on his father’s face concerned him more, for Noor had never skipped shaving for as long as Mansoor could remember. The son offered to shave his father’s stubble, or have the barber come home, but Noor refused. So with great trepidation, he asked, ‘Abba, why have you taken a vow of silence?’

  Instead of replying to the question, Noor gazed blankly at the window and then, after a long moment of silence, recited one of Ghalib’s couplets:

  Rahey na taqate guftar aur agar ho bhi

  To kis umeed pey kahiye kay arzoo kya hai

  (When the power of discourse is gone, but even if it hasn’t

  With what hope shall I say what desires I still possess)

  Finally, he had said something without stuttering, without faltering. Every word of that beautiful couplet was enunciated distinctly; the pathos of Ghalib’s deflated hope and the state of Noor’s existence fading in perfect unity. For Mansoor, the return to normality in his father’s speech was a good sign. Even though Noor had not picked up a book of poems in a long time, his ability to retrieve relevant couplets from memory, that too at will, still amazed him. After Sadiq’s murder, poetry had lost all meaning for his father. There was no one with whom he could talk about Mir or Ghalib or Faiz any more. Was his father coming back from the dead now? He was not dead, but he did not seem alive either. Mansoor had read about the concept of death-in-life in literature. Eros is the desire for life; Thanatos, the wish to die. But when a man is neither alive nor dead, his being is a zinda laash, a living corpse. Was this the state his father was in now?

  Mansoor remembered Sadiq Mirza once discussing Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ with his father, and how a part of one particular stanza summed up the conditions of Pakistan. His memory of the discussion was a bit hazy, but he did remember Sadiq giving him his copy of the book, nicely bound in cloth. Mansoor suddenly realized that he had never returned the book. Feeling guilty, he went to his room and rummaged through his disorganized bookshelf. And there it was: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: In Seven Parts.’ When he opened it, he saw the name M. Sadiq Mirza embossed on the title page. He wasn’t sure which line or stanza Sadiq had been referring to that day, but as he read Part II, he came upon some lines and wondered if this was what his father and Sadiq had talked about:

  Day after day, day after day,

  We stuck, nor breath nor motion,

  As idle as a painted ship

  Upon a painted ocean.

  He closed Sadiq’s book, promising himself that he would treasure it for the rest of his life.

  *

  On that fateful day in August, when the hot wind, called the loo, dried out the vegetation and brought heat exhaustion to many, Noor stayed home again. It was his fifteenth day of absence from work. Like the previous days, he stayed in bed, doing nothing, looking vacuous and inert. Sometimes, he would cover his face with a muslin dulai, a summer quilt; sometimes, he would just gaze blankly through the window. Mansoor tried to cajole him to eat, but he refused. He attempted to regale him by reading from the Morning Gazette and the Daily Jadal, but Noor’s mind wandered off into space, not even Coleridge’s poem made him blink.

  When Budhoo announced that lunch was ready, Mansoor dragged Noor out of his bedroom to the dining room. Farhat had already started eating since she was getting late for Zakir’s lecture. As the three of them sat there at the dining table, Noor put the first morsel of food in his mouth, but then he forgot about it, chewing only when Mansoor prodded him. What was going on in his father’s mind? Was he even thinking about anything? Mansoor’s train of thought was interrupted by a woman’s voice. Someone was talking to Budhoo in the kitchen. It was Mehrun. In a few minutes, she entered the dining room.

  ‘Salaam Sahib, salaam Begum Sahiba, salaam Mansoor Babu.’

  Noor stared at her blankly, while Mansoor and Farhat said wa-alaikum assalam in unison.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Farhat asked, her voice stern and her mood belittling. It was the same chilly tone that she specifically reserved for Mehrun that returned to her without any hesitation now. Mansoor felt the distance in that tone. So much for ‘Abba and Amma would be thrilled to see you.’

  ‘My husband was going away on a business trip, so I decided to visit my father in Karachi.’

  ‘Sit down, Mehrun, have some lunch with us.’

  Farhat glowered at Mansoor when he said that. What was he thinking? Bewaquf kahin ka, what an idiot. Did he want to stir things up? Did he want to wake his abba from his distempered gloom?

  Of course, Mansoor’s words had absolutely no effect on Noor, even though they almost killed Farhat. So what if the girl had trapped a rich man and was now rich herself? Who was she to come here uninvited, Begum Banarsi saree? And that revolting diamond snare around her neck! So tacky! So garish! Her father was still a servant, and she was still a pukki churail, a true churail, or had she forgotten?

  An awkward silence followed Mansoor’s invitation, but Mehrun wisely eased the crisis by politely refusing the offer. ‘Thank you, but I already had lunch. I just came to see my father and convey my salaam to you all,’ she said.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ Mansoor asked.

  ‘At the Palace Hotel.’

  ‘Why don’t you stay in our guest room?’

  ‘Mansoor! Has your brain rotted? Is this what you studied in Umreeka?’ Farhat remonstrated, looking thoroughly shocked.

  ‘I think I’d better go,’ Mehrun interjected.

  Without saying goodbye, she left in a hurry, leaving the stuffiness of the dining room intact.

  After she left, Farhat shouted at Mansoor. ‘Remember your position and her position in life before inviting her for lunch or offering the guest room.’

  ‘What do you mean, Amma?’ Mansoor asked, chewing his roti. ‘Mehrun is an important person now. She has money and she has status. What else do you want?’

  Mansoor saw a faint smile on his father’s face, or so he thought, as he challenged his mother.

  ‘Don’t you dare mock me! A churail will always remain a churail.’ Her face inflamed with anger, she left the table without finishing her lunch. Mansoor could feel the boiling fury hissing through her body.

  Noor remained reticent, oblivious to the tension, hardly eating and barely moving. And then abruptly, he too stood up. Without washing his hands or rinsing his mouth, as was hi
s habit, he returned to his bed. Mansoor felt as if his parents had walked out on him. Had he made the situation worse? His stomach churned; he wished he had not provoked his mother. Setting aside his plate, he walked to the guest bathroom and washed his hands before following his father to his bedroom. Noor was stretched out on his back, his eyes closed, breathing heavily. Not sure what to do, Mansoor quietly settled himself on Noor’s favourite chair and picked up Ghalib’s book of poetry from his father’s bedside table and began to leaf through it. Farhat came into the room wearing a turquoise hijab over a light blue shalwar-kameez.

  ‘Khaleel is waiting for me outside; I am going to the dars,’ she announced without looking at either.

  Noor opened his eyes, tilted his head towards her and recited a couplet from a poem by the Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, himself an exile, written a few days before his death.

  Dar-o-Deewaar pay hasrat se nazar kartey hain

  Rukhsat ai ahl-e-watan hum tau safar kartey hain

  (At the door and the walls, I gaze longingly

  Farewell, my countrymen, for I leave for my journey)

  As if he had mumbled something in Sanskrit, Farhat stared at him for a moment and then left the room without saying anything. Mansoor noticed a tear run down his father’s cheek towards his ear. Noor closed his eyes again and began breathing heavily. After having lain like this for what seemed like an eternity, he unexpectedly got up and sat upright, as if priming himself to go somewhere. Noor then swivelled, shuffling to the edge of the bed, and gazed at the floor, as if thinking about what to do next. Mansoor asked him if he needed to go to the bathroom. Noor did not reply. Instead, he collapsed back on the bed, his feet still on the floor. Mansoor stood up. He could hear the wheezy air moving through his father’s constricted airways. After a few moments, Noor became agitated. He got up and staggered towards the bedroom door, as if trying to catch Farhat, but before he could reach the door, he fell and banged his forehead on the marble floor. Mansoor ran, a fraction of a second too late, to grab him.