Mullah Aasi didn’t show up on time. At first I was mad. Then I got worried. I got a rickshaw and went to his charming abode. Musty papers, files, and thirty years’ worth of bills and receipts were spread across his carpet, and he was sitting on his haunches in the very middle of it. He hopped to and fro like a frog looking at his papers. When he found something that he wanted to look at later, he put a Buddha statue on it. He had three statues: one of a smiling Buddha with eyes closed; another of a young Buddha from the time he left his sleeping wife at home for good; and the third was of a skeletal Buddha deep in a month-long fast. He was using them as paperweights. I had raced over. I was covered in sweat. My muslin kurta clung to me like an onion peel. As soon as I entered the room, I flipped on the switch for the fan, but the switch gave me a shock, and I fell onto the floor. Well, sir, at that point a storm broke in the room and hundreds of paper airplanes took flight. We couldn’t see each other. His 30-year-old filing system took to wing. He quickly put on his wooden sandals and shut off the fan. If you weren’t wearing wooden sandals, the forty or 45-year-old copper switch shocked you so bad you would think you were about to die. He ran here and there grabbing his papers just like boys run after kites. He said, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t go to Lucknow today. Something unexpected came up.’
The Good Points of the Chicken Pose
Sir, the unexpected thing was this. The water bill he received the day before had his father’s name not as Aijaz Hussain but Aijaz Ali. He’d never noticed this before. And so he was going through the bills from the last thirty years to see when this mistake first appeared, and if this mistake was limited to the water bill or had spread to other offices. Why the Water Department was interested in his father’s name was also something that he wanted to resolve. I said, ‘Maulana, just pay the bill. What difference does it make?’ He said, ‘Of course it makes a difference. If your father’s name doesn’t matter, then what in this world matters? When I was in the fifth grade, I said that Emperor Shah Jahan’s father was Humayun and so Master Fakhir Hussain made me stand in the corner in the chicken pose. He thought I was fooling around. But if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. For the most part, that’s how my school days went. I was allowed back to the bench only when he ordered me to stand on it. When I dream about those days, it’s either me in the chicken pose or me finding out that I failed a test. Master Dwarika Das Chaturvedi, the director of education, has just returned from a trip to Europe and America. I heard that his report says that no other country in the world has discovered the chicken pose. At one point, I stopped wearing a fez. That was because when I was in the chicken pose, its tassel would dangle one inch in front of my eyes like a pendulum. Right, then left. Then, by the end of the class period, when my legs were about to give out, the tassel would start swaying front to back. It also seemed to denigrate the Turks, which my belief in Muslim brotherhood couldn’t stand. So I gave up wearing hats altogether.’
I quipped that Mahatma Buddha never wore a hat. He didn’t dignify my quip with a response. Instead he said, ‘Have you ever noticed that since the chicken pose was banned in school, both educational and moral standards have gone down? I tolerate all sorts of stupidity in my students, but if they mispronounce words, I immediately make them stand in the chicken pose. And I don’t allow them to wear tight jeans. Because then it’s hard for them to pronounce Persian words, to clean their butts, and to stand in the chicken pose. But that pose makes today’s boys start wobbling in just five minutes. Back in our time, I knew boys who could stomach twenty lashes of the cane without so much as wincing. One became a superintendent of police; he’s retired. Another was a director in the Department of Rural Uplift. Now where are such mischievous, courageous boys! There was not a question of character back then. Think of it like this: back in the day, we failed in chemistry because we didn’t have Bunsen burners, but today they fail because they’ve never felt the cane.’
A Silver Bowl
It was extremely hot. For the first time in almost a half-century, I scooped water with a coconut shell to fill his famous engraved bowl. Inside, the entire chapter of the ‘soora-e-yasin’ is engraved. It’s pure silver. Have you heard the expression ‘bowl-like eyes’? Sir, I’ve seen them! When we used to come back in the evening after soccer, we would wedge the bowl’s thin edge between our lips, and immediately we felt the water’s coolness spread through our bodies. Immediately after his birth, Mullah Aasi had drunk his mother’s milk mixed with honey from this very bowl. As his grandfather and then his father lay dying, they were given drops of aab-e-Zamzam from this very bowl. Even today people often borrow it to fill it with water to give to the sick. I drank water from it but felt a little uncomfortable doing so — there was grime deep in the grooves of the engraving. But, sir, the truth is that even today the water might be the same cold water, the bowl is the same as well, the drinker, the same too; but where has the old-time thirst gone?
He also had a steel cup with Muradabadi engraving. It must be just about as old as he is. The first time I went to see him, he sent a student out on an errand. He brought back a little packet of sugar. Mullah Aasi then turned a pencil upside down and used it to stir the sugar into the water to make a sugary drink. I had completely forgotten how good a sugary sherbet tasted! In our childhoods, we often served this to guests. Soda water and ginger drinks were used only for indigestion and for their bottles during Hindu — Muslim riots.
Sher (Shah) Is inside the Iron Cage
Now what was I talking about? Yes, it was about his bills. After he got all his bills in order, I wanted to turn on the fan again. But he stopped me. He said, ‘I’m sorry, but Sher Shah is under the weather. The fan will only increase his fever.’ I looked around. I couldn’t see anyone of that or any other name, sick or otherwise. But I shouldn’t have been looking for a person. Sher Shah was, in fact, the name of his sick pigeon that sat in the corner in a big mesh locker, the type that people used to call a ‘ganjeena’ and use as a refrigerator. It had a wooden frame of three tiers covered by a thin wire mesh, whose secondary purpose was to let air in, but whose primary purpose was to keep flies, cats, rats, and children out of the food. Beneath each of the frame’s four legs, people used to put bowls of water for ants. When those ants that would try to cross these moats to reach the banned delicacies above got to the water, they drowned. (So therein floated the bodies of greedy ants.) These lockers were better than refrigerators and freezers because leftovers would rot within half a day, and this would save everyone from having to eat them over and over ad infinitum. These lockers were in every wealthy family’s house back then. Lower middle-class households had another system where they hung things from the ceiling. And in the homes of the poor, even today the safest place to store food is in the stomach.