Hey, no one brings the desert into the house!
‘He eats Delhi’s nihari stew for breakfast. Then, in the afternoon, he dreams a miraculous dream — in a forgotten corner of his boss’s house, he lovingly waters his Frontier corn, which he’s planted out of season.
Everyone is sad when in a foreign land
But look — I’ve made my hometown flowers bloom even here!
‘All day long, he speaks Bombay Urdu with his Pashto accent, then in the evening he relaxes listening to Pashto songs on the transistor radio, then he falls asleep in his roadside shack fantasizing about Peshawar’s railway station. All throughout the night motorcycles, rickshaws and trucks rumble by on the street, backfiring and making a ruckus, but he dreams of the drums, the surna, and the rabab playing his favourite hometown melodies. When Balochis come to Karachi, they look at the blue ocean, and tears well in their eyes as they remember their province’s craggy mountains and the fat rams that they make into crispy sajji kebabs. And the old Sindhi man, the poor soul, sighs as he thinks back to the time before the coming of these four gentlemen.’
Then Khan Sahib hammered the last nail into this particular coffin. He said, ‘Enough! There are two reasons for this. First, Shaikh Sadi said that if you’re always dreaming about some other village, then you can be sure that your village is going to go to pot. Back home, if a woman gets married for a second time but starts talking about her first husband, then her new husband will cut off both their noses. Mullah Karam Ali said that women like this are cry babies. There’s a real bad word in Pashto for the second husbands of women like this.’
Sometimes Khan Sahib solved thorny issues and life’s riddles with his illiterate commonsense in such a way that you would have to say that
Where the books of knowledge were on the shelf, that’s where they stayed.
The Roosters of Principle and Fake Wars
Please excuse me. I’ve digressed again. But now it should be easier for you to understand the temperaments of Basharat and Khan Sahib and the nature of their disputes, which had gone on for so long that when they took up the argument again, they couldn’t help but smile. It was no longer an ordinary business dispute. They were holding fast to their principles. It had become a cockfight, although they had agreed that whoever won, they would remain friends. Khan Sahib did like to say that whoever eats the cock killed in a cockfight will become such a sissy that they will think everything the government says is right. Sometimes it seemed that he was stretching things out because he was enjoying himself; otherwise, he was a happy, kind, sociable, and charitable man. Basharat knew this very well. He also knew that Khan Sahib loved him very much and really enjoyed his wit and humour. Two years before this, in Peshawar, he had told Basharat that he wanted to sit him down and listen to his stories for months on end. Basharat was fond of Khan Sahib, as well. He really enjoyed watching the sparks fly when he’d get heated up.
On the one hand, Khan Sahib was not willing to compromise on his accounting because it would undermine his Pakhtun honour, but, on the other hand, he was so loving and considerate that if anyone gave Basharat a hard time, he was eager to make them feel the heat. Four years previously, an excise inspector had bought on credit 10,000 rupees’ worth of lumber at his store, but Basharat had never seen the money. One year after that, he wrote a promissory note. But now the inspector refused to pay. He said, ‘I’m not going to pay. Go ahead, take me to court. The promissory note expired already.’ Basharat mentioned this in the course of talking about his other problems. The very next evening after sunset prayers, Khan Sahib took a couple dozen of his commandos to the inspector’s house. He knocked on the door. The inspector opened the door and asked why they had come. Khan Sahib said, ‘We’ve come to rip out the windows and doors that were made from my friend Basharat’s wood.’ Then, in one brazen jerk, he pulled the door off its hinges. He put the whole kit and caboodle (door, hinges, screws, doorknob) under his arm like mischievous schoolboys who go around with their writing slates under their arms. Then he ripped out the framed photo of the inspector’s dead grandfather — whose frame, he suspected, was made of Basharat’s wood, as well — and handed it to one of his lieutenants. The inspector was a wily sort. He immediately understood how delicate the situation was. He said, ‘Khan Sahib, your humble servant wants to make a request.’ Khan Sahib said, ‘Shut your trap. I’m no ass. Your time for making requests has expired. The rich always think they can get away with shit. Come to your senses. Go get the money.’
It was just a couple minutes before midnight when Khan Sahib brought to Basharat the 10,000 rupees in ten stacks of new notes. Seven of the stacks were stamped Valeka Textile Mills, which fell within the inspector’s circle of bribery. But it wasn’t just this money. He also extracted from the inspector rickshaw-fares for his commandos, as well as milk money, at the rate of one litre per person.
Khan Sahib became so close to members of Basharat’s family that he started to bring sweets, clothes, and toys for the kids, who had started calling him ‘uncle.’ To entertain the youngest boy, Khan Sahib would lie down flat on the bed, have the boy sit on his belly, and then pump his belly like a bellows to throw the boy into the air. When the neighbour kids saw this, they started harassing their mothers, asking if they could go over to get the same treatment. Now Khan Sahib went with Basharat to his relatives’ weddings, funerals, and birthdays. But then suddenly Basharat put an end to this when he learned from external sources that his relatives actually preferred Khan Sahib! One day Basharat was aghast when he learned that one conniving relative — with whom he had a strained, or, really, non-existent, relationship — had invited Khan Sahib without inviting him!
Then he learned from an informant that Khan Sahib had already secretly visited the police station a couple of times. And that he had given the SHO a karakul hat, a gunnysack of walnuts, a honeycomb, and a revolver made in Darra for which he didn’t have a license. Basharat started to worry that some new torment was on the horizon. Perhaps that too would have two causes.
13.
The Clown Has to Earn His Bread by Hook or by Crook
Khan Sahib no longer bothered with his own shaving, nor did he have to re-string his shalwar’s drawstring when it slipped out. Now he had Khalifa for that. As I mentioned previously, Khalifa was a jack of all trades: a groom, a driver of animal carts, a driver of vehicles, a cook, a waiter, a barber, a gardener, and a plumber; there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. He was also extremely skilled in the most useful art of all — companionship and sycophancy. When all these peripheral jobs fell by the wayside, he retreated to his ancestral one. He often consoled his eldest son, who despised the barbering profession and was ashamed by his family’s involvement in it, ‘Son, barbers never have to look for work. The entire world always needs barbers. I mean, as long as the world doesn’t convert to Sikhism! But Sikhs won’t let that happen.’ Khalifa was by Khan Sahib’s side day and night. In the evening, when Khan Sahib’s band of mountain men bedded down in front of the house, Khalifa brought out coffee and chillum pipes. Once, he brought them a biryani made from four purebred roosters that had just learned how to crow. According to him, when these young roosters puffed out their necks and crowed in the early morning, then all the mullahs and hens of the neighbourhood became restless and came out to see what was going on. He also claimed that when he was holding the position of gardener at the Governor General’s house, he had seen Khwaja Nazimuddin eat the father (roasted) of these deceased roosters. After the prime minister Muhammad Ali Bogra married Alia (his second marriage), he had asked her to cook up an aphrodisiac halva made from the eggs of the deceased roosters’ fathers’ mourning widows. One day, to celebrate the resolution of a Kohat land-dispute, he roasted a whole sheep and brought it to the house. He brought a goat’s tail too, so that Khan Sahib wouldn’t guess that instead of a goat he had actually cooked up a cheap sheep. (He liked the rhyme that came out of this, as well.) Khan Sahib immediately said that it was impossible for such scrawny thighs to have come from an animal with such a big tail! Khalifa had never thought about that. He got up, with his hands folding together in supplication. Then he grabbed Khan Sahib’s knees. Then he started to massage his legs with great energy up and down. Khan Sahib said, ‘Hey, now, what’s the big idea? Why are you grabbing my knees and touching my thighs?’