Who Can Hold Off Time?
Nushoor Wahidi was all warmth and love. Even after chatting for four hours, when I got up saying I should go, he took me by the hand and sat me back down. And I was glad he did. His memory is weak. One time he kept asking about you, ‘How is he? I heard he’s writing humour essays. Really, it’s too much!’ You know that he’s always been thin and sickly. He weighed seventy-five pounds. He must have been just as old. His nose dominated his face. His sickly frame reminded me of Kanpur’s chunia bananas; they had exactly the same shape. You can still get them, so I special-ordered some. I was disappointed: they’re not even close to being as good as our Sindhi spotted bananas. One day I happened to say that our Sargodha oranges are better than those of Nagpur, and Nushoor whipped his head around, ‘That’s not possible!’ So Nushoor is (God protect him) still nimble-witted and spry. He looks better than he used to. That’s because he’s lost all his teeth, which used to stick out of his mouth this way and that like garlic cloves. You must remember how well Suraiya Actress used to sing, but her big overbite ruined the moment. I heard that after going to Pakistan, she had her front teeth pulled. I looked at a current photo of her in a film magazine; then I cursed myself for doing so. I made sure not to listen to her records, for fear of remembering how she looked. Aijaz Hussain Qadri has all the records from that time along with a horn gramophone. Sir, it’s amazing that this gramophone was the height of science, music, and luxury! He played a couple songs of that era’s Emperor of Music, Saigal. Sir, I was shocked to realize that his nasal singing had released such romantic feelings in me. Moti Begum’s face is a mess of wrinkles and looks like a raisin. Nushoor said, ‘Now, why are you feeling so bad for others? Get out your passport from ’47 and compare how you look now.’
Who can hold off time?
No mountain can, nor any blade of grass.
There wasn’t a national poetry festival to which Nushoor was not invited. And there probably wasn’t another poet who got as large a fee as he did. People really respected him. Now, through God’s benevolence, he has furniture. But he still kept to his old ways. His health was as usual. Meaning, very bad. Whenever I arrived at his house, he sat up from where he’d been lying down on his woven-rope charpoy. He never changed out of his undershirt, and he always squatted on top of a pillow. I could see the charpoy’s imprint on his back. One day I mentioned that I’d been on the train platform when it was announced in official Hindi that ‘the train, from its scheduled time, will be extenuated by two and a half hours’ and, by God, I had no idea what the train was doing — whether it was coming or going or simply taking its own sweet time. Hearing my story, he lost his temper. In the heat of the moment, he kept slipping from his pillow, and in one such instance, he slipped with such force that his big toe slid through the charpoy’s hold. He dug it in and lashed himself upright. Then he started talking, ‘It’s not easy to get rid of Urdu in India. In Pakistan you don’t have as many poetry festivals in five years as we do in five months. Crowds of twenty thousand are nothing. A good poet can rake in seven thousand rupees. And that’s not including all-expenses-paid transportation, food and lodging, and the adoration. Josh acted too quickly. He left for no reason. Now he regrets it.’ I didn’t think it was the right time to tell him that Josh was getting eight thousand a month (and a car) and that he was sponsored by two banks and an insurance company. Or that the government had given him a house and a monthly stipend, although the money was so little as to be an insult.
These days Nushoor loses his breath when he recites in tarannum. He recites haltingly. But his voice carries the same depth of feeling; it has the same resonance. His big eyes still flash brilliantly. His manner and attitude are bold and fearless in the way people get when they don’t care about anything anymore. He recited a dozen new ghazals. Amazing. One time I was about to tell him to put on his dentures before reciting. You’ve heard him many times. Once he created a stir all over India with his ghazal, ‘This is a secret, but the priest drinks too.’ Now audiences ignore him for lines like ‘Wealth never liked Islam, capital never wanted to be Muslim.’ Audiences have changed. Their silence is a type of ridicule. If Master Dagh or Nawab Sayal Dehlvi recited today some of their poems that used to blow people out of the water seventy or eighty years ago, they quickly would be fed up with the tastelessness of the audience and then leave. But Nushoor has changed too. He still runs away with each poetry festival. He still walks to the beat of his own drum. But he said he doesn’t have the same passion, the same desire. To me, he always seemed sick, weak, poor, and happy. Nothing has quelled his dignity and pride. He holds his head high in the company of the rich. Sir, that generation was a different breed. Those molds have been broken in which such rare characters were formed. Tell me — who could be more haughty and egotistical than Asghar Gondvi and Jigar Muradabadi? Their livelihood? Selling glasses! Not in a store, mind you, but wherever they wandered. I’ve been friends with Nushoor for just forty or forty-five years. At first, it wasn’t that. At first, I learned Persian from him at the Madrasa Ziaul Islam in the butchers’ neighbourhood. And, yes, butchers there don’t wear long coats with glass buttons anymore, nor do they wear fancy red patent leather shoes. In those days, you had to wear the clothes that everyone in your community wore; otherwise, you would be excommunicated.
I Want to Pay the Bribe Again
You can no longer recognize the old shopping districts. But I’ve never met such polite shopkeepers. They made me feel good. As soon as I stepped inside, they would put a cold drink in my hand. I wasn’t used to dealing with such ruthless salesmanship. It felt very rude to accept a soft drink, drink it, then leave empty-handed. So I ended up buying a lot of what the salesmen brought out, and I was left without money for the things I had set out to buy. You would never believe that a respectable shopping district — The Mall itself — had once existed before all this elbowing and jostling, screeching and crying, as well as the swirling noxious odors. Sir, the British made sure to build such a mall in each — a fashionable mall with high-class stores. It seems like just yesterday, but there was a time when the mall’s sidewalks were lined with acacia bark so that the police inspector’s son could trot his horse without difficulty. A groom followed on each side so that the boy would not fall off. When they got winded, the boy would double over laughing. We got to know this boy well. Once he took fifteen or twenty of us friends for a hunting trip in his village near Bahraich. It was five people per tent. At the back, there were the servants’ pup tents at a respectful distance. We slept in big tents. I can’t tell you how much fun it was. One night there was a dance performance. The prostitute was so pretty that even her bad pronunciation seemed cute. Professional hunters would bring us meat, and cooks would roast it on an open fire. Our responsibilities were limited to digesting the food and telling them what kind of game we wanted to eat next. It was the first time I ever ate sambhar deer. On the last night, they placed onto the picnic blanket four whole roasted black deer. In each deer, there was a goose, and in each goose, a partridge, and in each partridge, a chicken egg. We stared in utter amazement: how could we eat all that? This police inspector was very capable, shrewd, extremely likeable, and utterly corrupt. Sir, conmen, rapists, and drunks will always seem well-mannered, friendly, and likeable; it’s because they can’t afford not to be. This boy didn’t end up doing much with his life. He died of cirrhosis. His younger brother came to Pakistan. Somehow he got a teaching job in a school in Maripur. After a couple years, he found me. ‘I don’t have a Bachelor’s,’ he said. ‘I can’t get by on nothing. I live in Saudabad. I have to change buses twice to get to Maripur. Half my income is swallowed up in this. Please keep me here as your secretary.’ He had three girls coming of age. One caught her clothes on fire and burned to death. There were all sorts of rumours. He himself had two heart attacks that he had covered up at school for fear of losing his shitty job.