The Intoxication Grows When One Drunk Meets Another Drunk
One of his oldest and most loyal of friends, Fida Hussain Khan Taib (the Penitent), came every Friday to ask after his health. Once upon a time, he had been a very social and jovial sort. He had used to drink on the sly, but only when it was free. Drinking on the sly is a sin that has one benefit: you get as drunk on one shot as you would otherwise on a hundred bottles. He had one odd and nasty habit. Whenever he got really drunk, he left off all other conversation and would only talk about Islam. Because of this, he had been beaten up three or four times by drunks. But Shaikh Hamiduddin, with whom he drank, didn’t mind this choice of topic. Mr Shaikh put a lot of effort in his drinking parties. He served the best whisky from Czechoslovakian crystal, along with spicy liver and kebabs, and Riyaz Khairabadi’s poetry. And there was a towel. Because as soon as Taib got drunk, he would think about his first wife and start sobbing away. He would use the towel to wipe away his tears. If he hadn’t drunk for a while, he would rush back to the bottle, thinking,
It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a good cry.
When he got extremely drunk, he would wander around his house or through the neighbourhood on moonlit nights thinking about his dead wife, moaning and crying so much that his present wife joined forces with neighbours to get a water carrier to douse him with water. One January, he was doused with such cold water that it led to him coming down with a fever, and then pneumonia after that. From then on, his wife made sure to put a fez on his head before dousing him with water.
Fida Hussain Khan Taib
Fida Hussain Khan Taib must have been around sixty, but he had never stopped ogling women. According to one source, he looked at other people’s daughters and wives in just the way that his wife was dying to be looked at herself. What happened after the birth of their third child was that, as happens in our culture, the child acted as a roadblock for conjugal love. His wandering eye was not content with just one wife. For a long time, he had sought out nirvana in the happy bed of prostitutes. Until he could afford to take the wrong road, he left the narrow confines of married life to ambush what he might find outside of it. His long-suffering wife put up with it, as she thought
My husband needs bigger pastures in which to roam.
People couldn’t understand why he had chosen the penname of Taib. What defect of character didn’t he have? In the end, what had he renounced? But then people just figured that he had probably renounced all good.
Once upon a time, Taib had worked and written poetry at Cooperative Bank. He tried to compose poetry with the accounting books as well and so was fired on the charge that he had embezzled money. He still wrote poetry, but only one day each year. After he turned fifty, he had written his epitaph (in a quatrain) on the first day of the new year, and yet for a dozen years not one had been put to use. His poetry was elegant and simple; his words were well-chosen and full of poetic imagery and foreboding. During the year, should one of his friends or acquaintances die, he would scrunch in their name and hand over the quatrain, saying,
Thy need is yet greater than mine.6
His poems were neither natural nor baroque. They featured only dead people. Basharat’s father praised his poetry in a bizarre way that can be imitated but never fully described. It was something like an imbalanced mixture of forced appreciation, social grace, intentional sarcasm, and spontaneous laughter. His laughter was such that if someone should hear it from a distance, they wouldn’t be able to tell if he was laughing or crying. That is, he was laughing bitterly.
Due to the substitution of other people’s names into his quatrains, some lines had broken the metre, but he considered this permissible under the demands of poetry and death. Some of his friends who were on the brink of dying put it off simply out of fear of his quatrains. Basharat’s father began to dislike Mr Taib’s visits. One day he said, ‘Why is this bad-luck charm hanging around here? I think he’s hoping for the worst for me. He wants to stick this year’s quatrain to my head — no, to my gravestone.’ Then he wrote a special will that stipulated that, even though he would never let it come to pass, if we consider the impossible possible, then if he should die before Fida Hussain Khan Taib (which he would never let happen), then affix the quatrain to the foot of my grave. From those headstones with epigraphs containing the quatrain, the name of the deceased, and Taib’s penname, it was never that clear who actually was buried there. Or, in the words of Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus, it was hard to decide whether the grave was that of the dead person or that of the poet. Many wondered, as they looked at the epigraphs, why one poet had been buried so many times. But after reading the words, they saw that it was entirely appropriate. A poet once said that after poets die, many live on in their words. The poet dies; the words don’t. This has been to the detriment of Urdu poetry.
A Party of Ear-Scratching Music
Not a single day passed when Basharat’s father didn’t threaten dying. Like General Sher Ali, he had bought a plot in the cemetery where he had had built a mausoleum that had been unoccupied for a long time because he had avoided moving in. Often he would make himself depressed then recite the couplet,
Any time now I’ll leave the world behind
The world will watch in amazement as I go.
In this, there is a play of words regarding one’s imminent demise. By playing with the gender, he wants to show simultaneously the delicacy of language, the agony of the last, dying breath, and the fun of figurative speech. According to Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig, you can tell from this that Basharat’s father eventually died due to his taste for spiciness. It was as though he had dug his own grave with his tongue. God have mercy on him. He used idioms and everyday language religiously.
When the horse began to participate in his ear-scratching music parties, Basharat’s father got his old silk brocade achkan coat undone and, out of that, he had the tailor make a sheet to cover his harmonium. Khalifa would push in and out the harmonium’s bellows, and Basharat’s father would press on its keys with trembling fingers. Sometimes when the spirit really moved him, he would involuntarily begin to sing as well. At times, it was difficult to figure out whether his voice or his fingers were quavering more. As soon as he started singing the song’s second line, his neighbour, the retired excise inspector, Chaudhuri Karam Ilahi, would waddle over. He had lost his vision to glaucoma a long time ago. He had special-ordered a bright red terracotta pot from Gujarat and on it had painted Sindhi hala tile designs. He said that at least others could see them. Whenever he accompanied Basharat’s father’s singing on the pot, he rolled up his sleeves and wrapped a jasmine garland around his big wrists; and he cast a deep spell. He would often say that ever since he had gone blind, God had given him countless secret powers in classical music and in matters olfactory. After they had finished singing the gammat, the sweet fragrance of their ragas would waft over everything and everyone, and Basharat’s father would say, ‘Wow, Choi Sahib, you play so well!’ And Mr Chaudhuri would close his lightless eyes in ecstasy and say, ‘You too were playing really great!’ And what in fact could you call this other than great art? Two disabled, old men were swaying away as they played simultaneously their own songs on their own instruments. I mean, the one played in raag darbari, and the other, in a syncopated rhythm, played mahiya. As they accompanied each other, it was hard to tell who wasn’t following whom.