Silver Sex Powder and a Chillum from Chiniot
Oh, yes, it’s come back to me! I knew a man named Mian Nazir Ahmad. He was somehow related to people in Chiniot. He went to Bombay frequently in connection with his leather business. There he got addicted to horseracing. He hardly had any money left after betting, and so he spent that very sparingly. He got hitched to a prostitute named Gulnar. After returning from the hajj, she renounced her bad ways and made Mian Nazir give up many of his vices. So he changed. She didn’t have the flat expression and raspy voice that many prostitutes get in middle age. She could really sing milad shareef. Her voice could be extraordinarily sad. When she sang Jami’s na’ats or Anees’ marsias, she would cover her head in a white scarf and sway gently, and a thousand shades of sweetness dissolved into a thousand shades of devotion. We listened to her on the sly. She looked good in black at Muharram. She moved to Pakistan. She lived in a little three-bedroom apartment on Burns Road near Adeeb Saharanpuri’s place. Even in the winter Mian Sahib wore a muslin kurta, and every morning after taking an ice-cold bath, he would drink a lassi. It was rumoured that one day he had been overcome with a desire for instant strength and so had gulped a big dose of roop ras, or silver sex powder. Gulnar’s two younger sisters Munni and Chunni were a real handful. You know black and green cardamom? Think of them like that. It’s too bad that no one uses black cardamom anymore. It does taste different. I know you don’t like black cardamom. But I really don’t think it looks like a cockroach. Munni Begum’s face and sumptuous arms made her look nude whatever she was wearing, you know what I mean? Chunni Begum sang Persian ghazals well. People were always asking her to sing more. She sang sitting down, but if she thought the audience wasn’t appreciative enough, or if the mood suddenly struck her, then she would get up. The sarangi and tabla players7 would tighten their golden turbans and get up to accompany her. She would go through the audience two or three times while dancing in circles then stop in the very centre of the crowd and spin quickly like a whirligig. Her long gold-embroidered dancing gown would rustle as she twirled, and with each revolution its hem would rise toward her waist. It was like a dancing show of lightning bugs. The music and the movement went from fast to faster, and the flashes of light would sparkle and flicker. Soon everyone lost track of the dancer, and all they saw was the dance.
Then I didn’t see anything other than a restless hot flame…
And when she suddenly stopped, her dress would wrap around her shapely legs like a vine. The musicians would try to catch their breath, and the singed fingers of the tabla player resting on the khiran8 seemed as though they were about to spit blood.
Look, I’ve returned again to god-forsaken brothels! But you’ve stopped taking notes. Are you bored? Or am I repeating myself? I promise that I won’t let any other prostitute, no matter how ravishing, come between us. Sir, we enjoy these conversations, don’t we?
You should remember these; you’ll never find them again…
Two days from now you’ll be on your way to London. It was Mir himself who spoke about the world’s ephemerality when he called getting together with friends a ‘floating party’ because each friend is a traveller and company is fleeting. Anyway, I was talking about Mian Nazir Ahmad. He couldn’t stand Kanpur’s 40-degree weather, and so in May he fled to Chiniot to enjoy its 40 degrees. He claimed that Chiniot’s summer wind was not as bad as that in Kanpur. We came up with a Shakespearean song:
Blow, blow thou Chiniot ‘loo’
Thou art not so unkind
As local specimens of mankind
Who couldn’t care who’s who!
Mian Sahib often said that everything in nature has a purpose. In the Chiniot heat, the year’s festering thoughts were purged in sweat. He never let the racing season or sickness prevent him from fasting. In the summer, he always broke his fast by licking a lump of salt from Lahore and taking one deep drag on his hookah. First, he would test the hookah with three or four quick puffs, just like the sitar player tests the tightness of his strings with a pick, and the tabla player knocks on the sides of his instrument with a hammer. Then with one deadly drag he would suck the tobacco dry, and his life too would pass before his eyes—soo-soo-soo-suh-suh-su-su-vu-vu-vu. His entire body would go limp. A cold sweat would break out. His eyes would roll back in his head. First his spirit would pass from his body, then his senses, and that is how he remained until Gulnar served him pomegranate juice and stood him up for prayers. The hookah’s hose was wrapped in jasmine garlands, and the stem was wrapped in sweet grass. He liked his tobacco strong, bitter, and raw. He ordered paan syrup from Lucknow. He ordered his silver mouthpieces from a goldsmith in Delhi. His clay chillums and chillum plates (the part between the coals and the tobacco) were always from Chiniot. He liked to exclaim, ‘My lords! There’s nothing like the sweet smell of dirt from Chiniot!’
It’s Spring in Lahore
Mian Nazir Ahmad would stand on his rooftop wearing a muslin kurta without a cap on his head even in the depths of winter. And he would be flying a kite. He was so silly that he thought that wearing a thin kurta was proof of youth. A couple of us boys would steal some of his aphrodisiac pearls to satisfy our sweet tooth, but then for weeks afterwards we would wait in anticipation for their miraculous effects to take hold. Mian Sahib never used a blanket except when he had a bad fever. He was full of bitter contempt for the winters of UP. He said, ‘My lords! You call this cold?’ He respected only two sorts of cold — Lahore’s and the type you get after catching malaria. Your friend Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig had this complaint — that people in UP don’t know how to properly celebrate winter, just like Punjabis don’t think so highly of summer. Sir, UP winters and Punjabi summers are put up with as yearly punishment. They also have their own opinions about the monsoon. Punjabis accept the rainy season because without it their crops wouldn’t grow. But in UP the monsoon is made for tasty deep-fried treats, mangos that hang heavy from trees, and the swings where young girls play. In the Punjab, only parrots care whether mangos (or anything else for that matter) are hanging from trees.
You said that the English get their decency and good manners from how it rains for three hundred and forty five days a year, and the other twenty bring snow. I mean, they end up cursing out the weather instead of each other.
On Shankarat, Mian Nazir Ahmad would enter the kite competitions even though he wasn’t very good. He would get six or seven of his kites cut, but he was happy and his losing made others happy as well. Whenever he lost a kite, he would immediately think back to Lahore’s spring. Sir, what did he expect but to lose his kites? He would be flying his kite against others in Kanpur and telling stories about Lahore’s wonderfully colourful spring skies. His eyesight had become quite weak as well, but he would grudgingly put on glasses only to count currency or to eat fish. One unintended consequence of his refusal to wear glasses was that the kite that he understood to be his opponent’s and that he zealously ‘cut’ turned out to be none other than his own; as its string wore down, it would quiver and shake like a greedy person’s mind. Only when the string suddenly snapped would he realize that he had ruined his own kite and the only thing left for him to do was to wind his spool. He often said that while there was no doubt that the kite-makers of Lucknow were the best, the wind in Lahore had no parallel. In truth, it’s only in Lahore that the kites rise up into the wind so quickly to show their strength; it seems like the kites themselves are eating the string. It’s only in Lahore where kites blossom into full colour pulling on the line in the wind. In Kanpur, people say ‘it’s cut’ as though apologizing or consoling someone whose relative just died. But in Lahore, it’s ‘I cut it,’ and this sounds like the cry of one wrestler who, having just thrown his opponent, sits on the loser’s chest, with the arena’s dirt coating their sweat-soaked bodies.