Types of Books and Shameless Enemies
With everything underlined, he developed another emergency technique in order to make sure he didn’t study anything that was unnecessary or pointless. He called it, in English, ‘selective study.’ (I don’t know it’s Urdu synonym.) It went like this: he used scissors to cut out in their entirety those chapters that the previous year’s exams had covered so that these sections would not distract him and in order to lessen the unnecessary terror with which the books’ bulk filled him. And not just these chapters. He also cut out those associated passages that spread like cancer’s secondary growths into other chapters. Moreover, he removed the chapters that his advisors and well-wishers promised would never come up. He also relied a little upon his intuition. Finally he built up the courage and removed those abstruse sections that he would never have a chance of understanding, even if he should read them ten times. After this surgical pruning, less than a quarter of his books remained. Of these, there were three that were in such a state of disrepair that he had to take what was left of them and clip them inside other books. One book had been pared down to its title page. He stuffed some unimportant pages back inside it for good luck and to give heart to his examiners. He decided that if he was still alive by the time the exams rolled around, and if he was still able to see, then he would throw a cursory glance upon select portions of these aforementioned pages. After all, no two books can be read the same way. And his God-given intelligence and intuitive understanding should be worth something, too. As for his fear of failing, well, that would be there no matter what. It is what it is. And, anyway, it was much better to study hard and fail with dignity than to cheat and pass. Someone quoted a maxim from Bacon that he quite liked. The funny thing was that it was from a Bacon essay that he had torn out because he thought it was worthless. You probably know the maxim: ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.’ Mullah Aasi had added, ‘And some are to be read by a proxy who will tell you their gist.’ He modified this maxim further by saying that most, if not all, books are such that they should be sniffed, and then left for those who have no noses.
Sir, the other day at the function for the luxury beach hotel, you read from an excellent poem on noses. Probably only a couple of people in the audience realized who you were talking about. Even though your enemies don’t suffer from these attacks, I know you find them very pleasing. Do you remember any of the lines?
They haven’t got no noses
The fallen sons of Eve.12
Laying Bare the Whole of History
He also made history into child’s play. It went like this: he asked Hari Prakash Pandey to make a list of all the important dates so that he could deal with them in one fell swoop. But not more than twenty. Up till then, by hook or by crook, he had managed to deal with only five or six dates. Master Fakhir Hussain once said that history is no mystery, it’s just a bunch of dates; whoever uses the most dates in their answer gets the best score. Mullah Aasi learned the Urdu plural of ‘date’ from this piece of advice. When Master Fakhir Hussain said that, for us, the year of a great person’s death was more important than the year of their birth, Mullah Aasi felt as though something was amiss. He also learned from none other than Master Fakhir Hussain that ‘to be propagated,’ ‘to be liquidated,’ and ‘to be ensconced’ meant ‘to be born,’ ‘to die,’ and ‘to sit on the throne,’ respectively. He also gave this tip that the examiners form their impression of you from your first answer’s first paragraph. After learning these tips of the trade, Mullah Aasi, in the midterm exams of the tenth grade, made sure to lay bare the whole of history in the very first answer. I mean, in the very first paragraph on the very first page, he ripped through all the dates that he had copied onto his palm and onto the bottom of his Swan Ink box. It didn’t matter that none of these dates responded to the question, or that not even two of the dates went together. Threading all these dates together in such a way that Master Fakhir Hussain could see that the effect of his advice was something that only Mullah Aasi could have done.
The question was on Lord Dalhousie’s policies. I don’t remember it word for word, but in his first paragraph he constructed a complete chain of kingship that disregarded both religion and race. Then he killed them all. It went something like this:
After the reign of Ashok the Great (liquidated 232 BC), the next big kingdom was that of Emperor Aurangzeb (liquidated 1680 AD) who tossed his father from the throne in 1658 AD and ensconced himself there. Meanwhile a ferocious battle took place in Panipat, and while anarchy could not be reigned in, still Aurangzeb treated his brothers fraternally, that is, he put them to death one after the other. If he hadn’t, they would have done the same to him. Actually, as soon as Akbar the Great (propagated 1542, liquidated 1605) had died, there were signs of disintegration in the kingdom, and after many kings died, this resulted in the Battle of Plassey in 1757 AD and the Battle of Seringapatam in 1799 AD. And in Europe, Napoleon (liquidated 1821 AD) was beginning to lose control. [Here he suddenly remembered two more dates, so he threw them as offerings into the fire as well.] We shouldn’t forget that Firoz Tughlaq (liquidated 1388 AD) and Balban (liquidated 1286 AD) also failed to bring stability to their kingdoms. And here we shouldn’t forget that from 1757 to 1857 is a hundred years…
He held tightly to Master Fakhir Hussain’s advice that the way to defeat the examiners, as well as the correct approach to history, was through an assault of dates. He didn’t know the year of his birth, and so in that column he had always written, with complete honesty, ‘Unknown.’ But when Master Fakhir Hussain scolded him, ‘Look, here! The only thing we can claim not to know — and not to want to find out about — is who our father is,’ so afterwards, he began to write 1908 as his date of birth and affixed AD lest any nincompoop get confused.
We also learned from Master Fakhir Hussain that we should use the words ‘misappropriations’ and ‘misunderestimations’ to characterize our own serious blunders, so as to give them a hint of scholarly eloquence. At the time Master Fakhir Hussain was losing his memory. If he couldn’t remember something while trying to make a point or give an answer, he would say, ‘I’m not presently at liberty’ in such a way that we would become embarrassed at how ignorant we were not to have known better than to ask our question at such an inappropriate time. Teachers had a special way about them back then!
That reminds me of another bit of Master Fakhir Hussain’s wisdom about exam trickery. He said that wherever you can use a difficult word, make sure not to use an easy one,13 ‘You are students. A simple style looks good only to scholars, and they are the only ones who lack it!’ On this point, he also said that whenever we knew the plural of a Persian or Arabic word, we should use that over the singular. Thus, I learned from him how to call an enemy ‘my accursed devils.’ Its singular, ‘cursed devil,’ didn’t have half the bite.