That’s One Army That’s Apparently Short on Arms
The day when he wasn’t able to go to Lucknow because of his ailing pigeon Sher Shah, I said, somewhat annoyed, ‘My God, look at you. The world’s advanced, but you’re still messing around with pigeons. Can’t you give up them already?’
He replied, ‘Your father was a great adept at pigeon rearing. In comparison, I’m nothing. People think it’s a despicable hobby, but it used to be the best of the best. I read somewhere that when Bahadur Shah Zafar’s party would set out, a flock of two hundred pigeons flew overhead, creating shade for the Protector of the World. When Wajid Ali Shah was exiled to Matiya Burj, even in that wretched state he brought more than twenty-four thousand pigeons and the hundreds of caretakers required for them.’
‘And people still don’t understand why the empire declined!’ I said. ‘Their ancestors had been brought up in the shadows of swords, but they were brought up under the shadows of pigeons! No wonder the royal trains ended up in Matiya Burj and Rangoon! If Bahadur Shah had spent on artillery even a tenth of what he spent on pigeon coops, and if Wajid Ali Shah had spent on guns even a tenth of what he spent on girls and pigeon coops, then their conquering armies, no, their pigeon armies, wouldn’t have come to that sad pass where, leave alone fighting, they didn’t even have guns to give up during their surrender, my God—
That’s one army that’s apparently short on arms!’
Mullah Aasi shouted, ‘So you’re saying the Mughal Empire declined because of pigeons? Even Jadu Nath Sarkar never said this! Mr Chaturvedi was saying that there are seven lakh and fifty thousand pet dogs in England. In France, there are thirty million pets. According to government figures, every third child in England is a bastard! And in the last ten years, there were more than two and a half million abortions! In our country, a man has many children, but in their country, a child has many fathers. So why the hell aren’t they in decline?’
10.
Crazy
There’s one story in particular about Mullah Aasi’s odd behaviour that I want to share with you. A neighbour complained several times that Mullah Aasi’s renter had put in a new window that looked onto his property and exposed the ladies of the house. When Mullah Aasi did nothing, the neighbour came over to threaten him, ‘If you don’t have that window filled in, I’m going to take you to court. I swear on my mother’s grave that I’ll bankrupt you! Your Buddhism won’t be worth anything then!’ Poor Mullah Aasi, the renter was a thorn in his side, as well. His renter was impossible to deal with. So instead he lectured his neighbour on the negative aspects of keeping purdah, but this only made the neighbour more upset. A couple days later the neighbour came over with a court order saying that if Mullah Aasi didn’t remove the window in under a month, he would be brought to trial. Mullah Aasi read this, then tore it up. He had up till November 30. At five o’clock in the morning on December 1, Mullah Aasi knocked on his neighbour’s door. His neighbour looked frazzled; he answered the door barefoot and rubbing his eyes. Mullah Aasi said, ‘Sir, so sorry to wake you this early. I just wanted to remind you that today you have to take me to court. Goodbye.’
The way that people in Karachi say ‘crazy,’ well, that’s always applied to him, but now he’s totally intolerable. He keeps in one wardrobe all his schoolbooks that he read — no, that he didn’t read — from the eighth grade up till graduating from college. (He keeps separately a file for all test papers.) The silver cup in which saffron had been dissolved during his childhood Bismillah reading ceremony, the gold-embroidered hat he had to wear to Muslim circumcision ceremonies, and all sorts of other relics are stored safely in another wardrobe. Just be thankful that he wasn’t able to dictate actions at his own birth otherwise he would have kept his umbilical cord with the other keepsakes in his collection. There isn’t enough time to tell you in detail about all his stuff. Just think of it like this: collecting everything in one place was his attempt to reduce the painstaking labour that historians and biographers usually have to go through when picking through the lives of famous people. My God, I’ve never met anyone like him. I think he was incapable of throwing anything out, other than his religion. Even his trash became ‘antiques.’ You couldn’t call it a room; it was a debris field of memories, and if you happened to dig with a spade to its very bottom you would find him himself.
In the Name of the Younger Wife
Likewise, he has impaled on darning needles all the letters that his friends and family have written him over the last thirty or forty years, and these are organized chronologically. Mostly, it’s postcards. In those days, 95 percent of people wrote postcards. If a postcard’s corner was cut, this rang the alarm that the card contained news of someone’s death. Just by seeing the corner cut, the women of illiterate households would start enumerating the supposed attributes of the unknown dead person and then start crying and carrying on. If a neighbour read aloud the postcard, the women would add the name of the dead person to their lamentations and subtract some of the attributes. I’ve seen postcards with thirty or more lines written on them that the writer had probably used a watchmaker’s loupe to write and that had to be read in the very same way. I knew a leather merchant named Sheikh Ata Muhammad who, when he went to Calcutta to buy goods, would write postcards to his beautiful youngest wife (whom everyone in the neighbourhood just called ‘The Little One’) in order to save money, and yet he had no ability to express his personal feelings so parsimoniously. Back then people loved reading others’ letters on the sly. The postman would let us — meaning, Mian Tajammul Hussain, Mullah Aasi, and me — read Ata Muhammad’s postcards. We fed the postman meatballs (made out of deer) in exchange. Sir, once he developed a taste for meatballs, he was hooked. When I was working at a school in Etawah, I wrote a letter home to my new bride that the postman let Mullah Aasi and Mian Tajammul read. Its contents spread through town like a cholera outbreak. From the leather merchant’s postcards, I had stolen wholesale several passionate exclamations and even some full sentences. Although he sold rawhide, and, actually, his very ornate writing skills went beyond what you would expect not only from someone in his job but also from a husband in general, his letters conformed entirely to the ideal set out by Chaudhuri Muhammad Ali Rudaulvi concerning how to write letters to your wife. I mean, she couldn’t show it to anyone! Some jackanapes told Sheikh Ata Muhammad about what was in my letter. He said that if some man wanted to copy his most intimate words to his own wife, then his was a happy fate. When my wife learned that I had plagiarized, for quite a long while even my extremely original letters smelled to her like rawhide! It was a big mess. My wife and ‘The Little One’ started thinking of each other as co-wives, and this ashamed both of us men. When I went back to Kanpur over the December holidays, I confronted the postman about his misdeeds and threatened to report him to the postmaster and get him fired. I was so upset I was beside myself. I yelled at him, ‘You worthless scoundrel! Now those two are feeding you deer meatballs!’ Getting up, he begged for mercy with his hands folded together. Then he said, ‘I swear on the Quran. Since you’ve left, I haven’t had any. You might as well accuse me of eating pork!’ I took off my shoe and chased after him, and then the rascal admitted that they had served him meatballs made from nilgai.