Once his crying enema was over, I left. Outside I said to Inamullah, ‘That was too much. What a strange Hindu — he’s living on the banks of the Ganges but dreams of deserts!
He lives here, but his heart lives there
Imagine living in exile your whole life long
If it’s so bad here, we should put him on a camel and send him to Bikaner where we’ll have him sit on a mound of sand or on the stump of an acacia tree where above his head there won’t be a cloud in the sky and beneath his feet there will be nowhere good to die. If you show me another person afflicted by nostalgia, I swear to God, I’ll gather up a water pot, a water-drawing rope, a mat, Nazir Akbarabadi’s Complete Poems, fruit salt, and head for the desert wilderness. So listen up. I don’t want to have to shake hands with one more old person.’
Sir, my old age and wretchedness make me want to throw up. Your Mirza wasn’t wrong when he said that each time you shake hands with another person as old as you, your life expectancy goes down by a year.
5.
Mullah Aasi, the Monk
I went all around Kanpur. I met everyone. Everything came back to me. But the best part of the trip was meeting Mullah Aasi Abdul Mannan. Zauq said this about meeting old friends:
It’s better than meeting a messiah or Khizr himself.
When sending letters, Abdul Mannan’s grandfather adopted the habit of signing ‘aasi’ (‘sinner’) before his name. His grandson confiscated the name for himself, and, beginning in the seventh grade, he began to sign his name Aasi Abdul Mannan. He sprouted a beard the next year. By the time he was in the tenth grade, everyone called him Mullah Aasi. And the name stuck so that now he’s known only by that name. AASI A. MANNAN is still written on his gate. He’s a marvel. He’s lean but muscular. He’s light skinned. He’s of average height. He has extraordinarily long, monkey-like arms. His shoulders slope down like coat hangers. His thick hair has gone white, but it retains its curls. His eyes protrude like those of fish. Since childhood, he has had a tic in the corner of his right eye that still twitches from time to time. He didn’t touch his beard for the first ten years. And the truth is he looked better with it. He had a long neck and a small, round face. The day he came from the barber with his face clean-shaven, it looked like a chillum on top of a hookah’s stem. He always got his throat shaved on the first day of the new moon, and afterwards he would say, ‘I got my collar tightened.’ (That’s what they said there.) But Mushtaq Sahib, you used to have a moustache back then too; you ought to put a photo of it in your next book. Mullah Aasi liked to say, ‘I haven’t prayed since I stopped doing all childish things. At times in the past if I got stuck somewhere at prayer time and someone insisted, then I led prayers. This was my beard’s big drawback. So I shaved it off.’ When he started pretending to be Buddhist, people began calling him ‘Mullah Monk.’ He still can’t pronounce ‘r,’ but the way he says it is pleasing. His tone of voice is very sweet. He’s as carefree and eccentric as ever. In fact, more so. When I was face to face with him, I couldn’t help but stare. I was surprised to see that someone could live like him. He left off everything and shadowed me everywhere. It was a real treat. What can I say? It was like a river of love. It was like a shower of affection.
Please believe me, he was just as we left him in ’47. He must have been seventy-five or older. But he didn’t look it. I asked him his secret, and he said, ‘I never look in a mirror. I never exercise. I never think about tomorrow.’ But he was underrating himself on the last claim. Let alone the next day, he didn’t even think about that day. He hadn’t changed a bit. He greeted me very warmly. In his embrace, I felt transported back into my twenties. I felt like I was meeting a long-lost twin. I agree with you that the embrace of some people always makes you feel ecstatic.
You’ll find Mullah Aasi ready to help everyone and ready to do every sort of work, just so long as it’s not his own. He knows every police officer in town. If someone needs him to speak on their behalf at midnight, he goes with them. If someone’s sick or in a bad way, he’ll hoof it himself to make sure they get medicine or whatever else they need. He’s also a homeopath. Regardless of whether homeopathic medicine has any effect or not, his hands had the healing touch. There were always sick people hanging around him. He didn’t charge anything for medicine or advice.
And this was no different in his youth. Like Aladdin’s genie, he was always ready to be of service. He was a great organizer. Once during the summer of ’41, Mian Tajammul Hussain had a great idea; his dad had gone to Calcutta. He said, ‘Hey, Mullah, it’s been ages since I’ve seen a prostitute dance. The last time was for the wedding of Mr Jamal’s son. That was seven months ago. Let’s get a dozen friends together to pool our money for a show. All you have to do is grab the bull by the horns and get her here. Then, by god, it’ll be a blast!’
‘Now why didn’t you say anything before?’ Mullah Aasi replied. ‘You just get a carpet, and I’ll do the rest. But there’s one thing. When money’s involved, there’s always the chance of foul play. Infighting’s OK — and expected — when everyone’s trying to do good, but when bad things are involved, we need absolute confidence in one another and unanimity among ourselves. So, now, tell me one thing, who would a collectively hired prostitute pay her respects to?’
That Saturday after dinner, Mullah Aasi arrived on a horse-drawn cart with ‘the rest.’ (He himself was holding onto the cart’s side — that part that extended out from the seat.) He brought down the betel-nut box, the tablas, the sarangi, the ankle-bells, and the old and infirm tabla player. He whispered to me that the prostitute hadn’t wanted to come on account of his beard. As for money, we managed because we split the costs among ourselves. Everything else was his doing, and that included selecting and procuring the bungalow in the countryside where this party was to take place. He was friends with the deputy collector. He laid out the food on the picnic blanket by himself. He had bought Kanpur’s special red-and-white rasgulla in big terracotta cups. He had gone to the trouble of having Lucknavi cream made for us to eat with zardah. He said the paan was folded by a comely, young Lucknavi woman. She packed it so tightly that if you should happen to throw it at someone, the victim would cry out in pain. The paan might break into pieces, but it would never unfold. Just before spreading out the picnic blanket, he supervised the sprinkling of jaggery and salt onto the tandoori bread. In Kanpur, these are called chinte ki roti. He made sure that newly plated fingerbowls filled with neem leaves and water were placed in the room’s corner. Long story short, he did everything. Then after we all sat down on the picnic blanket, someone asked where he was. We sent out a search party, but he was nowhere to be found. The party took place, but it was joyless. The next day when I asked him about it, he got mad, ‘When did you ever invite me? You asked me to arrange things, so I did.’