He wrote poetry, but he hated poetry festivals. He said, ‘These days poetry and poetry appreciation are practiced in the same fashion. I mean, without understanding. I’m not even talking about the proper way to praise someone. Today people don’t even know how to hoot properly. Poetry isn’t fit for festivals. It’s something to be read in solitude, then understood, repeated to oneself, and suffered through. If poetry is in a book, then no one can hurt the poet. I can show you not just one or two couplets but a couple hundred from Mir’s Collected Poems that would result in the loss of his honour and his turban if he read them at a poetry festival today. He would also be lucky to return home with his head on his shoulders.’ He remembered only these couplets of Mir. He remembered only those couplets of the other masters in which he perceived some flaw or another. Basharat got this friend to write a half dozen random lines that were then distributed to those notorious youths; they were asked to get ready to recite during the festival as well. And the trick worked. It’s been observed that a poet who is expecting to get praised by other talentless poets will never hoot them off the stage. It’s been said that the best way to stop thefts is to make the thief the police chief. In this, I see that in addition to the virtue that he won’t let others steal, there’s one more difference: the things that he had obtained with great difficulty through burglary in the middle of the night would now be brought (happily and willingly) as bribes to the police station by the homeowners themselves.
From Between the Lines to Between the Loins
Under the same ruse, Basharat had got Hakim Ahsanullah Tasleem to write five random ghazals on the promise that in the winter he, Basharat, would get the good doctor fifty starlings, twenty partridges, five green pigeons, and two geese for his witch’s broth. And that on Bakrid, he would get him five castrated goats for half price in Dhiraj Ganj and send them on, as well as the brains of a hundred debauched male sparrows for his sparrow halva, and one dozen live black desert scorpions (which he would catch himself) for the doctor’s aphrodisiac for the rulers and nobility of the princely states.7 Hakim Ahsanullah Tasleem was not only the special doctor for the prostitutes of Mool Ganj, but he was also a poet who wrote ghazals for them to sing. When a prostitute was pregnant, he would write smoothly flowing ghazals so that at no point would she have to stop abruptly and shake her hips. In any case, back in those days, prostitutes mostly sung the verses of Dagh, and beggars sang those of Bahadur Shah Zafar. If he took a fancy to a particular prostitute, he would fill in her name in the ghazal’s last, signatory couplet and give her the poem in full. Some prostitutes, for example, Mushtari, Dulari, and Zehra, would get famous poets to write them ghazals, and they received praise not just for their singing but for writing the ghazals themselves. Hakim Sahib also corrected their pronunciation. The rest went beyond what he could correct; I mean, all those things couldn’t be helped. In those days, it was a literary fashion to try to reform prostitutes and their worshippers. Actually, society wasn’t obsessed with this; it was just writers: whether these works purged society of this evil or not, the writers themselves enjoyed writing about these women. The recounting of sin is more delicious than the act itself, as long as the narration is longwinded and the narrator himself is weak in both body and mind. Émile Zola’s Nana, Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada, Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas’ paintings of prostitutes and brothels are the first moments of sexual realism; whereas Qari Sarfaraz Hussain’s The Beautiful Beloved [Shahid-e-Rana] was the first example of preachy exoticism that was then taken up by Qazi Abdul Ghaffar in his grandiloquent but totally ignorant romance Laila’s Letters, which was furthered by the affected simplicity of Ghulam Abbas’ Anandy, and then Manto’s apparently rough realism.8 Yet these are all inverted romanticism. For us, stories about prostitutes are usually ones about special prostitutes. About them, childish wonderment, fanciful thoughts, rumours, and romantic notions (picked up from anyone, anywhere, and in whatever amounts) are lumped together and dumped onto the reader so that you start seeing parrots and mynas hopping around and chirping happily; and you can’t find a real prostitute anywhere. Under the romantic debris, you can’t even hear one prostitute’s ankle-bells. The immature sentimentality of the acned faces of youth gives life to these myths and will keep the blood running warm in the veins of scholars for many years to come. The prostitute born in this City of Desire has thrown her chastity belt into the river and fears no one, not even the writer, not even herself.
From her head to the tips of her toes, good heavens, she’s pure ice—
This started sixty or seventy years ago, but it’s equally true today. The middle class considered prostitutes despicable and worth hating, but at the same time their mention gave rise to a vicarious pleasure. Using social reform and the issue of prostitution as an excuse, writers satisfied these contradictory bourgeois impulses. The poetry and fiction, but especially the fiction, of the first half of this century is a reflection of this changing love-hate relationship with prostitutes. It gave birth to a double meaning in which even reproach became an excuse for pleasure. Under the banner of social realism, the amount of praise that prostitutes got from Urdu fiction writers surpassed what they got from their nightly customers. But in the last thirty years, English fiction has stopped writing between the lines and now writes openly between the loins.
When the Gentleman Grew Old
In Mool Ganj, Waheedan Bai had a brothel where you could always find an old man passionately grinding spices on a slab. People said that thirty years ago he had come to the brothel after Friday prayers in order to tell Waheedan Bai to mend her ways. But back then this dish was at her spiciest, and so his mission continues unabated today:
My mission is endless, O wait for me!
By the time Waheedan Bai retired (she wasn’t fit for her line of work anymore, anyway) and renounced her chronic sin, this gentleman’s beard had grown white and extended to his belly button. Now he helped her daughters in the kitchen and in selecting their customers and their ghazals. The gentleman had grown old. Well, in 1931 when she went to Mecca on pilgrimage, he was the only representative of the nine hundred rats to accompany her.9
When a Daughter Was Born in a House
Hakim Ahsanullah Tasleem claimed that he had inherited his wealth, medical practice, and poetic talents. But he freely admitted that the first was much reduced. His father Hakim Ahtesham Hussain Rana had such a large estate in Kannauj that it couldn’t fit onto one map! He mentioned this with great pride and exaggeration. Now he was in possession of the map, and moneylenders were in possession of the land. Hakim Ahsanullah Tasleem treated debauched royals, as well. He could tell which magnate it was just by looking at his pee. And as soon as he felt his pulse, he could tell from which brothel the magnate had caught which bug. It’s understandable that if a boy was born at a brothel, his entire household would cry and carry on. Hakim Tasleem had a family recipe that ensured a baby girl would be born. This powder was wrapped in the paan that was given to nightly VIPs. You can guess the efficacy of this powder by the fact that in Kanpur whenever a woman gave birth to a girl she began to pester her husband that he must have eaten paan at one of the hakim’s brothels.
However beautiful and seductive a prostitute may be, Hakim Sahib was tempted only by her money. The prostitutes respected him a lot. The rumour was that they were eagerly awaiting his death so that they could build him a marble shrine where they would go every year to celebrate his anniversary in great style.