15 Spoilage: Wear and tear, or the loss of goods during loading and unloading.
16 Purebred rooster: A dark brown rooster with a tinge of red. They are very aggressive and attack-minded. Its meat was considered to be very invigorating. Maulana Abdul Halim Sharar wrote, ‘There’s no more courageous animal on earth than the purebred rooster. In fact, lions don’t have the sort of courage that roosters do. He may die while fighting, but he doesn’t shy away at all.’ According to his research, it came to India from Arabia, while, also according to him, and I quote, ‘the craze for quail fighting had come to Lucknow from the Punjab.’ It seems as though Maulana had used the wrong source about quail fighting. I’ve never seen Punjabis engaged in the blood sport of quail fighting. Instead, they kill them with their own two hands and then eat them.
17 In Islam, there are five pillars. In Akbar’s religion, there were four professions of faith: the renunciation of wealth, the renunciation of life, the renunciation of religion, and the renunciation of honour. In this religion, there was no need for a fifth because after the fourth (that is, the renunciation of honour) there was nothing left to renounce.
18 Hazrat Shah Abdul Qadir Dehlvi, may God have mercy upon him.
19 Hazrat Shah Rafiuddin Dehlvi, may God have mercy upon him.
20 Hazrat Shah Walliullah, may God have mercy upon him, was very happy to be greeted like this, and he ordered that in the future all greetings should be in accordance to the sunnat (Amir-ur-rawayat).
21 Dressage: My dear friend Mukhtar Masood, who in addition to being a writer with great style is also a great horseman, told me that ‘dressage’ is a dignified and ceremonial gait that horses use when carrying kings. (Their gait is so gentle that whatever water is in the king’s stomach won’t jiggle at all.) Whichever of my young readers hasn’t seen a king, a royal horse, or the way that Mukhtar Masood walks should read his Awaz-e-Dost [The Voice of a Friend] because the grace of his writing leaves the reader trembling for hours.
22 Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig, who has given loans to friends time and time again, and so has lost both money and friends time and time again, repeats this last phrase with a little change to it. He says, ‘Friends only haggle — hearts or no hearts.’
23 After thirty years, I’m finally taking his advice. He hung his picture in the picture gallery of my heart that long ago, and now I’m providing you with its dimmest outline.
Two Tales of the City1
1.
Lighting the Ruins
They were together for about forty-five years. Let’s call it a half century. After his wife died, Basharat was numb for many days. It seemed like he hadn’t lost someone but that he himself had died. His grown sons buried her. He stood watching stoically from the mound of fresh dirt to the side of the grave. He still carried around the small bag of cardamom she had made for him. The crocheted skullcap he was wearing was the one his dearly departed had made, staying up till two o’clock on consecutive nights so he would be able to go to the mosque for Eid. Everyone threw their handful of soil into the grave, and that was then covered with rose petals. Only then did he step forward, take from his kurta’s pocket several jasmine buds grown on bushes planted by his wife, and throw these buds, which were several hours short of blooming, on top of the bright flowers. Then he looked blankly at his soiled hands.
It was so hard to believe that the woman with whom he’d lived with for so long was suddenly gone. No, if that life had been a dream, then this was too. He felt as though she was sure to pop her head around the corner to smile at him. Sometimes in the night’s silence, he thought he heard her footsteps and the clinking of her bangles. This startled him. No one had ever seen him cry. Strangers and relatives alike praised his steely resolve. Then suddenly it hit him. His defenses failed. He started sobbing like a child.
But all miseries pass, just as all pleasures fade. Days clipped by, as they had before. Like La Rochefoucauld said, it’s against our nature to stare at the sun, or at death, for too long. The shock gradually wore off; it was replaced by grief, which then turned to loneliness. When I returned from Miami to Karachi, I found him in this state. Desperately sad. Desperately lonely. Of course, he wasn’t as alone as he thought, and yet it’s also true that you’re only as lonely as you feel. Loneliness makes you think. Wherever you turn, you find your reflection; you fear your own company, and you want to escape. Your loneliness takes you by the hand and leads you slowly back to every thoroughfare, footpath, alleyway, and intersection you’ve known. When you stop, thinking the road has changed course, you realize it isn’t the road but you who have changed. Roads don’t go anywhere. They remain right where they are. But people change. Roads don’t get lost. People do.
According to an old saying, regardless of exactly how many defects old age has, it has one more burdensome than all the rest combined. And that’s nostalgia. In old age, a person prefers to turn back from their unwanted, imminent end to recall the places they used to know. In old age, the past flashes all its dangerous charms. Old, lonely people live in sad houses where they have to have lights on even at noon; and when bedtime rolls around and they put out the lights, their minds are lit by the bright glow of memories. As this glow becomes brighter, so too their desolation becomes more pronounced.
So something like this happened to him as well.
His Imaginary Past and Purgatory
God had made Basharat’s life in Karachi fuller than he could ever have wished. But after his wife’s death, he experienced a sharp pang of nostalgia, and he began to miss Kanpur terribly. Before this, the past had never had any hold over him. But now he was living exclusively in the past. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with his present, except that, for an old man, the present has the sizeable shortcoming of not being the past.
For quite a while, I’ve wanted to be able to forget
The film of his life, with its every event, began to play backwards through his mind. It was a total reversal, as though a wizened banyan tree had turned upside down to sit in a yogic pose, sending its knotty limbs and deep roots into the sky. After thirty-five years, he decided to go back to Kanpur, his purgatory. He began to miss each and every thing — the lanes, marketplaces, neighbourhoods, and courtyards; the roofs that smouldered like young bodies in the summer heat; the desires that spread into the night’s dreams, and the dreams that transformed into the day’s desires. It got so bad that he even began to think of his grade school as a piece of heaven, the very one that as a boy he’d taken so much pleasure in avoiding. All the pleasures, all the memories washed over him. His friends smashed together on charpoys; the shade of neem trees heavy with fruit; the eastern breeze bursting with the sweet smell of mango blossoms and mahua fruit; the tamarind trees with ripe seedpods, and girls looking longingly at them, and boys looking longingly at the girls; forests full of deer; ducks shot from the sky falling three hundred feet to land with a thud; screens made of sweet-scented grass; ponds full of water chestnuts; velvety melted ice cream slipping down your throat; mulsari flower bracelets; the thin, flickering tongues of chameleons hidden in the jamun tree’s dense leaves at the height of summer; the lone stag standing on an outcrop with his ears turned alertly into the wind; the surging forth of youth and the despair of first love; the lightly tanned arms that fuelled both waking dreams and those of the night; the smell of freshly starched scarves; friends laughing and carrying on. This cache of memories called out to him so strongly that