The daily offerings are always fresh
And head to foot full of new details
Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus, MA, BT, says that each and every prurient story about these chaste women is ridiculous. (I should have said ri-dick-ulous.)
And you’ve done very well. You’ve kept the thousands of pages of notes from your own travels to, what, fifteen, twenty countries, in your pile of abandoned manuscripts. Well, sir, there’s a strange wind blowing. As soon as they buy their plane ticket, whether they’re just going to Dubai or Sri Lanka, today’s writers think they’ve become Ibn Battuta, think their travel accounts are masterpieces, and think their travel encounters with beautiful ladies are the sayings of saints. I agree with your suggestion that just as the Pakistani government makes each applicant for a passport swear that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani is a false prophet, they should also make each writer swear — no, provide a written guarantee — that upon their return they will not write a travel narrative and they will not accuse themselves of having acted inappropriately while abroad.
Gujranwala Is Gujranwala
The elderly Sikh man kept on asking about his beloved city, and I very confidently continued to make up things about Gujranwala. He kept calling out to his sons, grandsons, and sisters-in-law, ‘Come here. Say “hello” to Basharatji. He was in Gujranwala in November.’ My problem was that, other than Lahore, my knowledge of the Punjab was limited to one locale, I mean, Toba Tek Singh. Akkhan Auntie’s grandson worked there at the Agricultural Bank, though after three months he was suspended and was left stranded there for eleven months of waiting. From what I knew of that area, I constructed tall tales of Gujranwala. The surprising thing was that the old man not only liked my rendition but also confirmed it to be true! I made up a story about the past and present of a canal where the old man used to jump off a bridge to swim with virgin lady water buffalos. When he asked, I confirmed that I had seen the same spot on the left bank of the canal where he used to leave his Hercules bicycle alongside his clothes. One time, thieves stole his clothes but left his bike. After this incident, as a precaution, he never brought his bike again. When I added the detail that the rosewood tree at that locale was as good as dead and soon its old limbs would fall upon the auction block, the old man got weepy, even though he wasn’t in any better shape than this tree. The wife of his middle son, who was a lively, good-looking woman, said, ‘Babuji had a heart attack last month. Please don’t make him cry, Uncle!’ I didn’t like being called ‘uncle’ at all.
When the old man liked some witty remark of mine, he would slap me on my thigh and obstreperously order another glass of lassi to be brought from the kitchen. After the third glass, I asked to go to the bathroom. In order to protect my thigh from his slap-happy praise, I adopted a very reserved manner, lest in a thoughtless moment anything funny should slip from my mouth. He said, ‘We have a very good transport business here. I’ve seen all of India. But Gujranwala is something else. The corn and mustard greens here don’t have the same flavour, the same smell. And the jaggery here is worthless.’ He went as far as to say that there was a lot of water in India’s water, but in Gujranwala’s water there was a hint of alcohol. (He meant that it was strong water. He compared everything that was good for you to alcohol.) As I was leaving, I said that if there was anything I could do for him, he should feel free to let me know. So he said, ‘Then, if you could, make sure that someone travelling this way brings three or four big chunks of Lahori salt.’ His great wish was that before dying, he would be able to take his sons and grandsons to Gujranwala and take a picture standing in front of his middle school. As a gift, he gave me a length of raw Indian silk. As I was leaving, the same daughter-in-law wished me goodbye. This time she didn’t call me ‘uncle.’
What Should I Call It — Torments or Dreams?
The old man showed me around the entire house. His daughters-in-law went ahead and hastily tried to tidy the messy house. Those things that they didn’t have time to deal with were dumped onto a bed and covered with a clean sheet, so whenever I caught a glimpse of a clean sheet, I assumed that beneath it was trash. Sir, curiosity isn’t necessarily a good thing. In one room, I stealthily pulled up the corner of a sheet. What appeared there was the old man’s uncle with his hair down, wearing tight underwear! His white beard was so long and thick that there wasn’t really any need for him to be so formal. The house had changed a lot. The arch-shaped windows through which Gulnar, wearing a glittery, silver-and-gold-threaded scarf, had used to look were now blocked off with bricks. Now, look, you’ve started smiling again, sir! What can I do? The old-time words and expressions still find their way out of my mouth! The courtyard had been paved. The jasmine vines were gone, as was the guava tree.
Back in the day, Mian Nazir would get two waterskins of water sprinkled onto the courtyard during the evening and then have wicker stools set out for everyone. For himself, he ordered a lathe-turned Chiniot charpoy with colourful legs. When Mian Nazir’s nostalgia became too much, he fed us cubes of local sugarcane. But when he thought of Lyallpur’s sugarcane, he couldn’t swallow for his emotions. On moonlit nights, Mian Nazir would sing mirza sahiban in a voice that sounded like our gym teacher’s as he played the jugni tongs. When he got emotional, we got emotional, although our crying was due only to his bad singing. After a while, when he realized how awful he sounded, he would throw the tongs contemptuously across the courtyard and say, ‘My lords, the tongs of Kanpur aren’t fit for singing. They’re only suitable for filling a chillum.’ Sir, once he had been a playboy. And yet, while he had lived in Kanpur for a long time, he had never eaten paan, never greeted others with high formality, and never recited poetry, not even at a brothel, where all of these things were the staples of culture.
After lying through my teeth, I left the house. My nostalgia immediately wore off. Then Inamullah The Loudmouth took me to see my old house. We stopped at the corner of an alley sweetshop. He said, ‘You want to go see Ramesh Chander Advani, the lawyer? He’s from Jacobabad. He’s seventy. But he doesn’t look it. He looks eighty. Hearing that someone has come from Karachi, he’s dying to see who it is. He wants to ask about Jacobabad and Sukkur. Then he’ll play kafiyan for you on the sitar. If you say you like it, he’ll play more. And if you don’t, even then he’ll play more. He’ll say, ‘This one’s better. Maybe you’ll like it.’ He remembers the poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. He’s learned Hindi, but when he gets excited, he starts talking in some strange, ghostly language. He’s crazy, but you’ll get a kick out of him.’
So, sir, I talked to Advani. Or not so much that as listened to his monologue. It was like being taken prisoner. He wanted to confirm that Jacobabad was as beautiful as it had been when he had left it as a young man. I mean, was the full moon as full as it had been? Do the palla fish still jump around in the Sindh River’s waves, shining and glimmering in the sun? Is the weather still good? (Meaning, is it still 46 degrees in summer or has that declined as well?) Does the hot wind still blow from Khairpur with its sweet scent of dates? Was there still the yearly cattle fair in Sibi or not? What about the Sibi darbar? When I told him that at the fair there was now a poetry festival and poets came from great distances to participate, he went on for a long time lamenting the fair’s deterioration. He asked, ‘Have good cattle gotten so rare in Sindh?’ He couldn’t stand UP’s fertile plains. He said, ‘You see, we’re rough, uncultured desert people. But we’re warmhearted. We care about each other. You cultured people of the plains and swamps — what do you know about how the hot wind blows playful waves in the sand, making pictures that it erases then begins making again? You see, raging windstorms make our entire sandscape. The hot summer winds and their minaret-like dust devils churn through the desert. Today’s sand valley was yesterday’s sandstorm. Mountains of ember-hot sand blow up in the scorching afternoons. Before dawn, the gentle wind that blows over the cold, velvety sand sounds like a pakhavaj drum. The tossing and turning waves of sand look like strong, young, flexed biceps. No two waves are the same. No two hills are the same. No two nights. When the empty monsoon clouds pass winking over Sindh’s sea of sand, the moon locks everything beneath its spell. Those who think the desert is all the same haven’t yet learned how to see. You see, we’re nothing compared to you. But we’re the fish of this sandscape. We can dig our fingers into the sand in the middle of the night and tell you over which hill the sun rose in the morning, which way the wind was blowing in the afternoon, and what the clocks read at that very moment in the city. When the earth decides not to give us its bounty at harvest time, we take all the beautiful colours of the rainbow and sprinkle them over our block-printed clothes, our patchwork quilts, our scarves, our shaluka kurtas, our cholis, and our decorative tiles.’