At once he dug his heels into the ground
And started to turn around.
But he wasn’t a boy any longer. I mean, he was over seventy. It didn’t occur to him for even a second that all these wonderful, romantic things (which Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig, riffing on the phrase ‘the tools of cultivation,’ calls ‘the tools of rebellion,’ and each of which caused him to emit a hundred-decibel sigh) were not only available in Pakistan but in certain cases were even better there. There was just one thing missing in Pakistan. His youth. It turned out that after a lot of searching, he couldn’t find it in Kanpur either.
These Boys Are like Old Men, These Men Are like Boys
He’d planted a mulsari tree in front of his house in North Nazimabad, but the mulsari trees of his memories were so much better smelling and more elegant. He was experiencing the state of mind that comes right after old age’s onslaught when suddenly you desperately want to see again your childhood home before you die. But he didn’t know that in the time between childhood and old age an invisible hand interposes a powerful magnifying glass. The wise know not to remove this glass. If it’s removed, everything looks like its own miniature. Yesterday’s gods turn into midgets. If you’ve been away from your hometown for a long time, you should never return for a belated last look. Nevertheless, you go. The scenes pull you like a magical magnet, and so you go. You don’t realize that as soon as you look with your mature eyes upon the wonderland of your youth, its spell will be completely broken. Dreamland’s fairies disappear, and soot darkens The House of Mirrors. You find that the sacred aromas of youth no longer exist. Moreover, where’s the familiar rainbow of the God of Love?
What is this smoke?
Where is the fire of my youth?
You can’t believe what you’re seeing. Why does it look so different? Why does it smell so different? Sound so different? These aren’t the picturesque lanes and marketplaces where everything was fresh and new. What happened to everything? To everyone?
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
When the spell breaks, your imaginary past collapses. You’re no longer counted among the young or the old. You become suddenly colourblind. A peacock might dance in front of you, but you see only its feet, and so you cry! Everything loses its colour; dejection reigns supreme.
Your world is insipid
And your religion is cast in doubt
Wherever He Lived, He Grew Sick of It
So this childish old man went to Kanpur and mourned. For thirty-five years, he had lamented why he had left heaven for Karachi, and now he gnashed his teeth, ‘My God! Why didn’t I leave earlier?’ He regretted that for no reason he had wasted a good third of his precious life regretting the wrong thing! If he was looking for things to cry about, there were three hundred and sixty five great ones easily found, and that was because there were just that many disappointments (days) in a year. He left no stone unturned in his dreamland, but
Those pangs no longer excited his heart
Those feelings were no more.
Thirty-five years of nostalgia collapsed, and now everything looked desolate and rundown. The wide, crocodile-filled river into which he had fearlessly jumped from the crown of a mighty banyan tree? Well, when he went back, he saw only a seasonal creek full of frogs. And the gigantic tree itself? A bonsai specimen.
He couldn’t recognize himself in what he’d left behind.
2.
One Big Pigeon Loft
But enough of my philosophizing. Let’s hear the story from our hero, Basharat, as his storytelling leads to a different sort of pleasure.
Although this story is quickly told
It has all the charms of those of old
Sir, when I saw my house, I was shocked, ‘My God! That’s what we lived in? And, more than that, we loved it!’ The most pitiful and incurable type of middle-class poverty is when people have nothing but feel as though they lack nothing. God be praised — we were nine brothers and four sisters born one after the other. I use the phrase ‘one after the other’ knowingly because, whether playing, eating, lying down, or sitting, it would be more appropriate to have said ‘one on top of the other.’ Everyone’s name ended in the letter ‘t’: Ishrat, Rahat, Farhat, Ismat, Iffat, and so on. My father designed the house himself on the small school slate of the brother immediately older than me. He also kept over a hundred pigeons, and each was of its own unique race, with its own unique heritage. He didn’t let male pigeons mate with female pigeons of other breeds. He had a lumber store. He built all his pigeon lofts, bearing in mind the size, bad habits, and length of each pigeon’s tail. Sir, now that I’ve seen it again, I can tell you his worthless hobby made the house look like one big pigeon loft. In fact, we should call the house a crude version of the same.
My father was very perspicacious as well as practical. He realized that after he passed, his children would argue over the division of property, so as soon as another child was born he built a separate room. The problems implicit in this construction strategy were many. For one, part of the plan was to make each subsequent son’s room smaller than the previous. By the time I rolled around, my room was so small that I couldn’t stand up straight. It took seven years to build the house. And in this time, three more sons were born. When the walls for the eighth son’s room went up, no one could tell if it was going to be a bathroom or a bedroom. With the arrival of each newborn, he would sketch out on the slate the necessary amendments (the added room) to the house’s blueprint. The courtyard slowly disappeared. It became the cells we were going to inherit.
Buzary Replaces Bourgeoisie2
Sir, you can’t compare our Karachi house with its air conditioner, carpets, and fresh paint with that ruin, in which, if you happened to cough, plaster would slough from the wall. It hadn’t been whitewashed in over forty years. In my cousin’s house in Kanpur, I saw a plastic tarp used as a ceiling covering. No one in Karachi or Lahore knows the proper words for this ceiling covering, or for ‘awning.’ On the ceiling covering, there were three spots marked with nail polish with big multiplication signs (X). This meant that you shouldn’t sit underneath; the roof leaked there. In Kanpur and Lucknow, I found my friends and relatives fallen on hard times. Those who were white collar still were, but now their collars had faded to grey. They’d become proud of their indigence; they’d turned self-sacrifice into an art. At a private gathering, I made some superficial remark about this, and a junior lecturer who taught economics at a local college got bent out of shape. He said, ‘You owe your wealth to the United States and the UAE. Our poverty is our own.’ (To this, a man recited in Quranic tones, ‘Alhamdulillah…’) ‘I hope you’re happy piling up debt! The Arabs aren’t wrong when they say the Third World is full of beggars.’ I was a guest. I wasn’t in a position to argue. He went on for quite a while reciting couplets in praise of poverty, its noble mindset, and its coarse bread. He recited some couplets about Hazrat Abu Zar Ghaffari. I made sure to nod appreciatively. I was a guest, after all. Whether Indian or Pakistani, today’s intellectuals have replaced the love of making money with the love of not making money.