Moli Mujjan suddenly changed tactics. He gave the eraser back to Basharat, wiped his hands, and said, ‘The sixty or seventy rupees that you’re telling me you’ve got has come straight from the charity and alms fund, and so the orphans have had to eat less. And this is how you’re paying me back? Sir-e-Syed also had to go through such trials near the end of his life, but he couldn’t survive them. I won’t go easily. Well, anyway, try to have some patience. God willing, I’ll put everything right by selling off the Bakrid hides. You know how things are going for the orphanage. The poor souls climb onto each other’s shoulders to steal a little bit of kerosene from the city streetlights so that they can read at night. The city workers have hung the lanterns from poles as high as palm trees so that no one can use them to read. Someone should ask them, “Have you hung up lanterns or the sun? Do you expect the innocent boys to stitch your fathers’ shrouds in such dim light?” Three or four years ago there was an orphan who fell from a pole. The bones in his hands and in his legs snapped like a raw cucumber. Abdus Salam, the bonesetter, tried his best to put them in place, but they started to suppurate. I took him to Kanpur, and his leg was amputated right here above the knee. His right hand was fixed, but only in the way that relatives patch up their relations after a fight. It bent like a bow. If he’d attached strings from both ends, he could have played it like a sarangi. The crippled boy gradually fell in with the wrong crowd. When I took him by the ear and threw him out, he went to Kanpur and joined up with a band of beggars. When he came back, he tried to lead the other boys astray, “Hey, you should jump off a light pole too. Life’s so fun now. I don’t have to clean dishes. I don’t have to shout my lessons from the top of my lungs. I don’t have to massage anyone’s feet at night. I don’t have to recite every day the ninety-nine names of God on chickpeas for someone’s funeral, and then eat them myself. I don’t have to brush my teeth with charcoal every morning. To smoke a cigarette, I don’t have to go over and over to the outhouse. I can smoke as much as I want, and I can go around puffing smoke like a train. In short, it’s heaven here. If you do something bad, no one’s going to say anything.” The elderly say that his manners marked him as a bastard. Anyway, I was saying that this is your school. Your orphanage. I’m not blind. Even a blind person could see how much of yourself you’re putting into your job. You’ll go far in life. If you continue to work hard like this, then, God willing, you’ll become the principal in twenty-five years or so. I’m not an educated man. I can’t become principal. You see what shape the school’s in. The number of donors has fallen so low that if Sir-e-Syed were alive he would slap both himself and Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk on the forehead. But you all spill your bile on me. What can one man do alone? No man is an island. What we need to do now is to get the nobility, the rich folks, the landowners, and the surrounding towns to know about us. We need to get them all here. Showing just one orphan’s face to them is better than a thousand sermons and a hundred thousand ads. We’re a virtuous institution. We’re not like a circus or one of Agha Hashr’s plays. People don’t care about us. Please believe me, since the teachers haven’t been paid, I haven’t had one night of solid sleep. I’ve been talking nonstop with people to get their advice. I’ve asked you several times to figure out how I can pay you ASAP. After thinking about it a lot, I’ve decided to act on your advice alone. To put us on the map, it’s absolutely vital that we host a terrific poetry festival. People still call Dhiraj Ganj a village. Just yesterday I got a postcard. It was addressed to “Dhiraj Ganj Village.” Dhiraj Ganj Village! God! I couldn’t stand it. For the longest time, people thought Aligarh was a village until the bioscope showed up, and traffic accidents claimed their first victim.’
About the division of labour, he clarified that Basharat would be in charge only of bringing the poets, seeing them off, arranging for their food and lodging, doing the publicity, and arranging for a venue. The rest he would do. That is, he would be the Master of Ceremonies!
8.
Dhiraj Ganj’s First and Last Poetry Festival
The date of the poetry festival was set. Basharat was entrusted with all sorts of responsibilities, which were actually different types of punishment: inviting the noteworthy citizens of Dhiraj Ganj; setting the misra-e-tarah; choosing the poets themselves; making sure all the poets got on the last train from Kanpur (and taking care of them on the trip); getting them back to the station for the first train immediately after the festival; arranging for the poets to be well taken care of (for free) from before the official beginning up to when they recited their ghazals; and other types of responsibilities like these. Moli Mujjan gave Basharat ten rupees for train and horse-drawn cart round-trip fares for the poets and for himself, for food and lodging in Dhiraj Ganj, and for paan, cigarettes, and miscellaneous expenses; and he urged him to return all the unused money, as well as all receipts and an itemized list of expenses, the day after the festival. He also instructed him in no uncertain terms that he himself was to buy the poets each a fifty-paise ticket and that he was not to give them cash to purchase their own tickets. Basharat was about to ask about pocket money and gifts for the poets when Moli Mujjan solved this problem. He told Basharat, ‘Make sure to ask them to give a charitable donation to the school and orphanage. If they’re not embarrassed to recite poetry, then why would they hesitate to give money to a good cause? If you don’t screw things up, we should get some money from each. But whatever we’re going to get has to come before the start of the festival. After they’ve recited their ghazals, they’ll never give anything. The early bird gets the worm. And if any poet says they can’t afford fifty paise, then, by God, he should be admitted to the orphanage too. Why is he sitting around doing nothing in Kanpur?’
Readers will wonder why there is no mention of the principal in this talk of the preparations underway. There’s a very good reason for this. When Moli Mujjan was hiring a principal, he did so upon one condition: that the principal should in no way interfere in the school’s business.
Call it vanity or inexperience, but the misra-e-tarah that Basharat chose for the festival was from one of his own new ghazals. The largest advantage of this was that he would become famous from no effort on his own part. The second benefit was that he wouldn’t have to rack his brains to come up with another ghazal for the festival. It tickled him pink to think that many famous poets would have to write ghazals based upon his own line. He thought, ‘They’ll toil for hours. From time to time, they’ll stamp their feet. They’ll grab at their hearts. They’ll grab at their hair. And then as soon as they finish, they’ll get together and start reciting.’ He invited eighteen poets, including Jauhar Chughtai of Allahabad, Kashif Kanpuri, and Nushoor Wahidi. They agreed out of love for Basharat and their desire to encourage him, but also because Basharat’s job was on the line. Nushoor Wahidi and Jauhar Illahabadi had also been Basharat’s teachers. He didn’t give his line to them. Instead, he asked them to write anything they wished. It seemed that the only criteria he had used to select the rest of the poets was that he shouldn’t suspect that they were better poets than him.