Mistaking the Cave of Fear for the Cave of Hira
Actually, Basharat had never thought about this. Neither had I. Basharat had always heard his father say ‘Greetings,’ and he had always found this to be very sweet sounding and elegant. Khan Sahib scolded him like this one more time in front of others, and this made Basharat think about the past. One scene after another passed through his mind.
1. He sees the Mughal emperors take off their Timurid hats and Tashkent turbans and throw them to the ground. In their place, they tie Rajput turbans. The Shadow of God on Earth puts a tilak on his forehead and sits in the Prayer Hall in Fatehpur Sikri listening to Faizi recount chapters from the Persian Ramayana. Then, just a little while later, the Hindu pundits and Muslim mullahs create such a hullaballoo while arguing that it seems as though donkeys in heat have started to gnaw on wasp nests. Akbar the Great is so fed up with religion that he invents his own. In order to win over his Hindu subjects as quickly as possible, he expresses his disappointment with and rejection of his ancestral religion. The truth of the matter is that despite his great power he has turned his back on the sharia, is disappointed with mullahs, and is scared of the majority of his population. Gradually, the Shelter of All Religions mistakes his cave of fear for the Cave of Hira and declares himself a prophet,17 although his own wife Jodha Bai and his advisor Mullah Do Piaza reject this claim. In order to please everyone, he makes a religious cocktail, which everyone rejects on the exact same grounds.
His Mastery of Flute Playing Did Nothing for Me
2. Then he sees that the Mughal warriors who have ridden bareback on their black stallions through the night and who have conquered one country after another are now sitting on kingly balconies made in the Rajputi style, or they are now on the banks of the Jamuna River sitting in their red howdahs on the backs of gigantic elephants, whose foreheads have been painted with five stripes. They have taken off their quilted cloaks because of the hot wind. Their chainmail is replaced by light angarkha coats. Gradually, the conquerors turn their backs on their mother tongues of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian and form a new language called Urdu, which is initially as strange to them as Turkish or Persian is to Hindus. After the complete military conquest of a country, new rulers abandon their language and so accept a sort of cultural defeat so that the conquered people don’t think that they want to institute their mother tongue on a permanent basis along with their coinage. The doors and archways of mosques and shrines begin to be decorated with bas-relief of the Hindu holy flower, the lotus. Never again will the assemblies of warriors hear the clanking and clamoring of Tajikistani dancing, or the passionate songs of Samarkand and Bukhara; time not only changes the tunes but also the instruments used to play them. It’s now been ages since the great musicians from beyond India and the extraordinarily gifted singers of distant Persia pressed their harps, cymbals, and rababs beneath their arms and left. But the heavens didn’t cry at their departure. Nor did the Himalayas mourn. That’s because the connoisseurs learned to enjoy the pleasures of Indian ragas played on the sitar, sarangi, and drums.
Ganga-Jamuni Work
3. The finger turns to yet another page in the album of cultural compromise. On the banks of the beautiful Gomti River, the last king of Awadh, a great connoisseur of the dramatic arts, with bells tied to his ankles, is choreographing dance steps on stage to match a Hindi melody that he himself composed. Turn another page and, along the banks of the Jamuna, you see another bizarre scene. A few bearded, God-fearing elderly gentlemen are reclining against their bolsters while writing essays in Arabic and Persian on the decline of the Muslim community, the renaissance of religion, and the need for jihad; and when they greet each other, they bend down piously, express only the most appropriate sentiments, and regale each other with politeness, most respectfully. They avoid saying ‘Assalam Alaikum’ (which for twelve hundred years had been the way that Muslims greeted one another, just as ‘Shalom’ had been for Jews and ‘Jai Ramji Ki’ and ‘Namaskar’ had been for Hindus) because the custom has become painfully outdated. Things get so bad that even Hazrat Shah Walliullah’s family stops saying it! The compiler of the Amir-ur-rawayat writes, ‘When Hazrat Shah Walliullah’s family members greeted someone they said, “Abdul Qadir18 offers his greetings. Rafiuddin19 offers his greetings.” When Hazrat Syed Ahmad Barelvi came to take initiation rites as a disciple of Hazrat Shah Walliullah, he was the first person to ever greet him with “Assalam Alaikum!” ’20
All these cultural compromises went on throughout the centuries winning over our hearts, but in the end they proved to be just wishful thinking. In the tumult that followed, cultural refinement and kingly designs couldn’t save anyone’s life or property (nor could they save Urdu itself, the very language of that compromise). Time drowned all this wishful thinking and fancy understanding in blood. After all, velvet sheets can’t stop walls from crumbling. So what was going to happen happened. How could it possibly be that your beloved tongue is cut off at the root, the flag of sincere tolerance is lowered, and yet the culture left over would flourish?
Basharat often says that he will never forget how an illiterate Pathan from Peshawar made him give up his stilted style of greeting, which had been nurtured in his family for four generations.
12.
Karachiites Don’t Let Chicks Grow into Roosters
Khan Sahib would normally ascribe two reasons for everything, and one was always quite absurd. For example, one day Basharat complained, ‘Karachi mornings are always hazy and depressing. Even the sun doesn’t want to get up. I don’t want to get up. My body aches like a boxer was using me as a punching bag all night. In Kanpur, I got up as soon as the cock crowed. I would spring up out of day every day.’ Khan Sahib pointed with his stubby, little index finger at his knees, ‘There are two reasons for this. First, in Karachi, people don’t let chicks grow into roosters. They slaughter them before they’re big enough to crow. Second, your springs have arthritis. Eat fried fenugreek seeds for forty days, and apply a paste made from the plants that grow on the community well. One of our Pashto poets has said that every plant in a well is medicinal because they’re always being touched by our damsels’ scarves. Whenever I come to Karachi, I’m always surprised. Whoever I meet, whoever I talk to, they’re always complaining. I haven’t met one person who was proud of the city. There are two reasons for this. First, there’s nothing to be proud of. Second…’
Weeping Wall
He had raised his index finger toward the heavens and was about to tell us the second reason when Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig interrupted, ‘Sir, the second reason is that muhajirs, Punjabis, Sindhis, Balochis, Pathans — they all came here looking for work. The sun was so hot. Like an affectionate mother, Karachi spread her torn, worn-out canopy over everyone’s heads. It even embraced those who wanted no more than a little heap of sand to rest their heads on. Then they got greedy. Everyone’s unhappy. Everyone’s complaining. Everyone’s upset. Take the muhajirs. They think of Lucknow, Bombay, Barabanki, Junagarh — even little Jhunjhunu—’ (meaning, Jaipur, and here he pointed toward yours truly) ‘—and sigh and moan. They don’t realize that the city that they miss, the city whose memory has left them in a permanently tearful state, well, it’s not this place that they miss but their bygone youths, to which they can’t ever return. So, sir, what they’re crying over isn’t geography but time’s passage, and this poisons the life they know today. Punjabis, who Sir Syed Ahmad Khan nicknamed “the passionate Punjabis,” will cry out, “O, Lahore, Lahore, where have you gone?” when they reach heaven. “There’s no city in the world like Lahore!” they say. They don’t like Karachi at all. Because they don’t find the same taste of Multan’s mangos and Montgomery’s oranges in Sindh’s spotted bananas, chikku fruit, and papayas, they get really sad. Gul Zaman Khan, the night watchman, is from the Frontier. He sits in his shack in Sher Shah Colony and longs for the mountains, forests, and rivers of his homeland!