After praying, he would take off his kurta and preside over his court. Most of his undershirts had big holes in them. He said, ‘What can I do? Undershirts my size are smuggled in from Russia. Sometimes I can get them in Landi Kotal. Then I’m very happy. Some of the undershirts are so pretty that I really want to wear them on top of my kurta.’ When he breathed deeply or when he laughed, penny-sized holes grew to the size of Ping-Pong balls, and his flesh popped out like blisters. Whatever the heat, even if he took off his kurta, he never took off his headgear. He said, ‘As long as I’m wearing my cap, I don’t feel naked and shameless. But this is why the British tip their caps immediately upon seeing a woman!’
One night, due to overloading, one charpoy collapsed to the ground with a dozen Pathans on it. For a good five minutes, the men couldn’t get themselves untangled from the mosquito net and the charpoy’s ropes. Inside the net, they kept jumping, hopping, and wriggling over one another like fish on the dock. One of the charpoy’s legs broke, as did the wrist of a Pathan from Kohat. Once this man figured out that his wrist was broken, he thanked God because his wristwatch had escaped. The next day, Aurangzeb Khan had a white sheet spread out in his room, and he rolled up his bedding into a bolster pillow. This white sheet was the one that Basharat used during his regular Sunday poetry gatherings. Khan Sahib went to two such gatherings. If there was the slightest difficulty in the couplet, he turned to the man sitting next to him and asked what the poet was trying to say. When this man explained to him, then he would shout loudly, ‘What the fuck?!’
The Ripped White Sheet and the Genitive Hater
After the second poetry gathering, Khan Sahib asked with great surprise, ‘This is what a poetry reading is like?’ The answer came: ‘What else?’ He said, ‘I swear to God! So many lies have been told on this sheet that it’s not fit for praying! The corpses of these lying poets should be washed in hookah water so that the angels won’t come to their graves for three days.’ There were tiny holes on the white sheet wherever the poets had extinguished their cigarettes, and these holes grew to be quite large during the gatherings when the poets stuck a finger in while worrying over a line or while praising other poets. The white sheet was ripped in several places. When Khan Sahib mentioned praying on it, Mirza issued a very odd decree. He said, ‘Only Zuleikha can pray sitting on Joseph’s ripped hem.’ Khan Sahib replied, ‘There’s a real bad word in Pashto for Zuleikha’s husband.’ For Khan Sahib, such a large gathering of poets was nothing less than a wonder. He said, ‘In the tribal areas, there’s only two possible explanations for such a large crowd to gather in front of a man’s house. One, there’s a tribal counsel to discuss a man’s bad deeds. Or the man’s father has died.’
When he liked a particular couplet, though this happened only once in a blue moon, he said, ‘Yaoooww!’ Then he would close his eyes and start to sway back and forth. But when the poet would begin to recite the same couplet again, Khan Sahib would signal abruptly for him to stop because he was interrupting his pleasure.
One day a young poet objected to another that he had composed a ghazal using his ‘zameen’ [prosody]. The other poet said, ‘It’s Sauda’s — not your dad’s!’ He also shot back that the first had messed up the genitive. They kept on arguing for quite a while. At first, Khan Sahib couldn’t understand what they were fighting over: if it was over agricultural land [‘zameen’], then why were they using words to fight? When I explained to him the meaning of ‘refrain,’ ‘rhyme,’ and ‘genitive,’ Khan Sahib was speechless. Then he said, ‘What the fuck? I’m so illiterate. I thought a ‘genitive hater’ was someone who took bribes or ate pork. Then I thought, “No, that’s not it. One of them cursed out the other’s father. That’s why they’re fighting.” I’ve seen fighting over fake land for the first time today. Can they leave this land to their children as their inheritance? Can they say, “Son, we’re moving on. Now it’s time for you to watch over our land. Sow the seeds of rhymes, and make a jelly of genitives, and eat them to your heart’s content!” There’s a real bad word for this in Pashto.’
O Ghalib, It’s Fine If I Don’t Live Out My Natural Life
Often I saw him singing and whistling to himself out of happiness. His lively, undulating voice kept returning to a note in his lowest register — a bass note like on a tambura that was very pleasant to listen to. In his younger days, he had a particular liking for the tang takor raga. I mean, his expertise in music was enough that he knew he sang out of tune. He said, ‘For us, the elite consider it a defect to sing well. I mean to sing badly.’ Flawless singing was excusable only in the cases of professional singers, prostitutes, mirasi performers, and beautiful dancing boys. He knew a lot of songs. But his favourite was one Pashto song, and, singing it, he had ruined many a cloudy day and moonlit night. Its first line went something like, ‘Look, my dear, for your love, I killed my rival with my steely sword.’ After developing this with the repetition of the phrase, ‘God, I sacrifice myself to you!’ (during which time he put his hands to his ears), he sang with such ardour and passion that it became clear that the pleasure he got from loving wasn’t anywhere close to the pleasure he got from killing. He sang this line with such brutal zeal and blind infatuation that his shalwar billowed with air.
He said, ‘Without hatred and revenge life becomes purposeless, useless, and absurd. It’s as though,
Life is absurd enough as it is; don’t make it any more so.
You have to have at least a couple enemies. If you don’t have enemies, then how can you seek revenge? Without enemies, what’s the point of getting up early in the morning to work out, drinking buckets of milk, and sleeping with a pistol underneath your pillow? All our weapons would be useless. And, instead of dying a respectable death, all the respectable people will die with asthma, vomiting, and diarrhea! Only those animals that sharia laws forbid us to eat like crows, turtles, vultures, and donkeys will live out their natural lives! Until one of your ancestors has been mercilessly slaughtered you don’t know the pleasure of revenge. The only people no one kills are beggars, mullahs, eunuchs, mirasi performers, childless men, and poets. There isn’t anything more shameful than having an enemy who doesn’t consider you worth killing. Blood will be shed. I swear by my faith! There’s a really bad word in Pashto for men like that.
Pashto stones are not worn down in water!’
Horses, Slingshots, And Humility
‘My grandfather was a very hot-tempered man. He murdered six men. And he performed the hajj six times. Then he renounced killing. He used to say, “I’ve grown old. I can’t keep going on pilgrimage.” He willingly went to meet his maker when he was ninety-five. He was unwilling to go until his last enemy had died. He used to say, “I won’t let any of my enemies walk in my funeral procession. And I won’t be able to bear seeing my wife become a widow.” He was a very burly, truly intimidating man. Even when he walked, it seemed like he was on horseback. He was wise to the ways of the world. Mentioning horses reminds me how he used to say, “Walking is the best way to get around. You should use a horse only in two instances. One, to rush upon your enemy in the battlefield. Two, if that doesn’t work, then to flee the battlefield in double time.” I’m kidding. He never said that. He was like a Cossack horseman — he could leave the saddle, slide underneath the galloping horse, and then mount the saddle from the other side! I have his sword and fancy dagger. They were made from the same steel that was used to make Nadir Shah’s sword. I’m the first man in my family for a hundred years who hasn’t killed someone. At least till now. God be praised! Well, my uncle didn’t kill anyone either, but that was because he was killed as a young man.’