The aforementioned locker had been the intensive care unit of Mullah Aasi’s pigeons since 1953. Another reason he couldn’t go to Lucknow that day was that he didn’t want to leave his sick pigeon alone while he went on a pleasure outing. Once, he had a female pigeon named Noor Jahan that died, and he didn’t leave the house for two weeks. She had chicks, and they weren’t used to caring for themselves. He fledged them. When a female anara pigeon (the ones with red eyes) named Draupadi broke her beak, he fed her from his hand for months on end. He named each and every pigeon. When I was there, we saw through the open door a fan-tailed pigeon named Ranjeet Singh that was walking in front of other breeds’ female coops with his chest and tail feathers puffed out. He was walking in circles in such a fashion that had he been a man he would have been killed in communal violence long ago. For him, there would have been neither funeral nor memorial service.
A Pigeon Coop
He had always loved pigeon flying. His father had, as well. My father did too, for that matter. Even your Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig is convinced of the virtues of pigeons. Hobbies — real hobbies — should be completely worthless and without redeeming value. Usually people raise animals for some self-gain or self-interest. For instance, those miserable people who keep dogs do so because they can’t afford an aide-de-camp or courtier. Some people pet dogs under the mistaken notion that they must have the virtues of younger brothers. They raise goats with the idea of dropping their faeces into milk and serving that to Urdu critics. Elephants were usually raised by those nobles who had fallen out of favour with a king; the king had in fact given the elephant, along with a silver howdah, so that the nobleman would be forced to keep stuffing food into the animal for as long as it lived. People raise parrots so that when they get old and forget their pet phrases, the parrot will continue to repeat whatever they have taught it. Mullahs put up with rooster calls only because they want chicken for dinner. And, Mushtaq Sahib, in 1963 you kept a monkey because you wanted an animal you could call ‘Darwin’!
Sir, pigeons are kept only because they’re pigeons, and that’s it. But one of Mullah Aasi’s neighbours, Sadullah Khan Ashufta, swore to God the following was true: ‘One day, it was bitterly cold, I prepared a cup of Kashmiri tea, then went to his house. It was six in the morning. Inside it was freezing cold. He was sitting deep in meditation in front of a Bodhisattva statue, and, to keep warm, he held a pigeon in each hand.’ If anything about this is off, then blame Ashufta.
One day we happened to start talking about pigeons. He said, ‘I’ve heard, but can’t believe, that you don’t have a single pigeon coop in all of Karachi. What kind of city are you building? I wouldn’t want to look at the sky if it didn’t have pigeons, sunsets, kites, or stars. My friend Abrar Hussain was in Karachi in December 1973. He must have stayed two months. A haze hung over the city the whole time. He saw a star only once, and that with binoculars. It was actually a comet! He said that unlike in Lucknow, people in Karachi don’t conduct kite, partridge, chicken, or ram duels. Instead they fight themselves. But the truth is there aren’t any kite contests or pigeon contests in this neighbourhood too. Only this one coop remains. Lucknow is even worse off. Once upon a time, after you left, in December ’47, Alimuddin — you know, our Shaikh Chilli Laddan — had packed to go to Pakistan when at the last minute he changed his mind. That was because Master Abdus Shakoor, BA, BT, told him that he couldn’t take his pigeon coop on the train. And if he managed to sneak it on board, then at the Wagah border, the Pakistani customs official might arrest him on some suspicion. My brother Basharat! You immigrated to Pakistan and so became a muhajir. But without going anywhere we became foreigners in our own country. This is not the city that it was; that’s become something of storybooks. It’s different now. This neighbourhood is now 95 percent vegetarian. The street-cats are dying for meat, and so they hang around my pigeon coop all day long. Do you remember the boss at Allen Cooper? What was his name? Sir Arthur Inskap? When his wife brought a Siamese cat from England, her husband neutered all the cats of Kanpur so that their cat would remain unsullied. Ajmal, the lawyer, lived two doors down. People liked to say that one night Sir Arthur got Ajmal’s dog neutered as well, just as a precaution. That was in ’41, just before the Quit India Movement.’
We laughed about this for quite a while. Even these days when he laughs, he laughs like a child. Then he wiped his tears and suddenly turned serious. He said, ‘I’m not strong enough anymore to go up on the roof to close the pigeon coops. At dusk, the well-trained pigeons return to their coops on their own. My students make sure the rest get in. Then they feed them. The noble pastimes of old are no more. You can’t find millet in town anymore. I have to order it from a village fifty miles away. The village registrar was my student. But nowadays just ask any college graduate what’s the difference between finger millet, pearl millet, and foxtail millet. If he knows the difference, I’ll shave my eyebrows using his piss for shaving water. Ninety-nine percent of everyone has never seen barley. Tell me, is it the same in Karachi? Three years ago a well-wisher came from Karachi, and bearing in mind my long dedication to this pastime…’ (look, here, again, Master Fakhir Hussain is speaking through the mouth of Mullah Aasi) ‘… as a gift he brought the novel Twilight in Delhi. Its author is the venerable scholar Ahmad Ali. He writes so well. He knows everything about Delhi. The Urdu translation was entirely idiomatic. By God, it was very good. Each and every page was filled with idioms related to women and pigeons. If he has another book about pigeons, please send it along with someone.’
The Black Pigeon and the Handsome Young Girl’s Cat
There isn’t any one story that can sum up his eccentricities. I’ll tell you about one of his annual routines. He finally passed his final high-school exams when he was twenty-two; yet even before this, he had stopped looking in the newspaper for any test results. During the month the results were printed, he didn’t buy newspapers, read newspapers, or meet with people who read newspapers. It might have just been indifference, but it also might have been fear. Mirza thinks that he couldn’t face his yearly good-for-nothingness in printed form. In any event, a week before test results were to be printed, he would go over to his close friend Imdad Hussain Zaidi’s house to give him a black male carrier pigeon and white male tumbler pigeon. Then he would go home, lock the door, and begin meditating. He instructed Imdad Hussain to immediately release the white pigeon if he passed, and the black one, if he failed. Then from time to time Mullah Aasi would stick his head out the window to look up at the sky and go onto the roof to see if the results were in yet.
Each year that the black pigeon came back, he would slaughter it and give it to Merjina (the good-looking neighbour girl’s cat). In ancient times, kings had killed the bearers of bad news, and so he carried on this kingly tradition until he had earned his BA. On the day the results were released, there would be intervals of crying and carrying on in the house, and that was because whenever his mother and sisters saw a black pigeon, they would assume the worst, even though just as many white pigeons landed on the coops as well. After every three or four years, that day would at last come again when
It came, headlong, tumbling, thrashing, writhing. .
Meaning, the white tumbler came. He was so happy that he fed all his seventy or eighty pigeons wheat instead of millet and released them to fly together. The next day he put a tiny silver painjani16 on the white pigeon’s feet and then placed ten female taftah pigeons in front of his coop.17 I said pigeon coop without thinking about it. What I should have said was that by the time he graduated from college, he had gone through this three times — middle school, high school, and then college — and so his white female pigeons had increased by thirty, and his entire house had been transformed into a harem of good-news-bringing birds — meaning, tumbler pigeons. With this, the people of the house were reduced to being nothing more than the servants and shit-picker-ups of said pigeons.