Mullah Aasi showed me another beloved photo. This one was of Mian Tajammul Hussain in Natraja’s victory pose. That is, he stood smiling with his foot on the head of a nilgai and displaying the stock of his 22-gauge rifle. I’m standing to the side, pulling a long face, with an old-time zinc-plated flask hanging around my neck, and a mallard in each hand. Mian Tajammul claimed that the nilgai measured from chin to tail the same as a man-eating Bengal tiger. For a long time, hunting nilgai was illegal in India. But now you can. Once they started being a nuisance in the fields, people started calling them horses and killing them became OK. Like in England where they no longer call blacks ‘black’ but instead call them ‘ethnic’ and then kill them without any qualms.
Chaudhuri Gulzar Muhammad, the photographer, used his Mint camera to take this photo on Mian Tajammul Hussain’s property. When they were having their photos taken, people back then had to hold their breaths for so long that their faces looked funny. So only the dead nilgai ended up looking real. Gulzar Muhammad often tagged along when we went hunting. I never had any interest in hunting — I mean, not in the actual hunt. But I liked the eating part. Mian Tajammul always travelled with his assistant (me). God forbid but if he is sent to hell, then I’m sure he won’t go alone. He’ll send me first to set up his welcoming committee. There was good hunting seven or eight miles from town. Usually we went by horse-drawn cart. The horse had to transport the nilgai back despite its being exactly the same weight. One poor soul (me) was responsible for everything that had to do with the trip, except for pulling the trigger. For instance, not only did I have to carry around stuffed tiffins for everyone, but I had to get up at four in the morning to have parathas and kebabs made, before schlepping them hot off the griddle back to stuff everyone to the gills. In the freezing cold December air, I had to retrieve the wounded ducks from the pond. If he missed while shooting at a deer (which often happened), I would have to swear to God that a bullet must have found its mark. The deer was definitely limping. And once the wound cooled, the shameless deer would suddenly collapse into a lifeless heap. If a partridge should happen to die before the sacrificial ceremony, one sin of my office was that I had to daub halal partridge blood on its neck because if it died before the knife could touch its neck, he would insult me for weeks. I prayed for the long life of the wounded animal so that it would last long enough for me to kill it halal style. He sent the non-Muslim birds to Sir Arthur Inskap’s house. Well, we didn’t send them. Actually, I had to take them over on his bicycle. He would sit on the back carrier with the meat in his lap so that everything wouldn’t weigh too much! He weighed two hundred and thirty pounds on an empty stomach. Despite this, I pedalled very fast. If I didn’t, the smell of the meat would attract the street dogs. He would say that the gun was his, the bullets his, the aiming his, the kill his, the butchering his, the bike his, and he even said that he had filled the bike’s tires with his own air. Then he would say, ‘If I drive, what’s there left for you to do?’
If the beloved is also faithful, then why are you here?
You understand? What should I say? I can’t express how much humiliation this friendship has caused me. How should I say that Mian Tajammul always rested his gun on my shoulders when he took aim? Sir, how could he have used my shoulder when I was not only carrying his gun but him as well? By God, not only did I have to bear with his insults, but I actually had to bear his body.
I Was Punished for the Horny Camel’s Misdeeds
I’ve probably already told you that old Haji Sahib, I mean Tajammul’s father, considered horse-drawn carts and cars the height of arrogance and laziness. But he had no problem with bikes and camels. That’s because he considered these among the tools for ego-killing. He often said, ‘Up till I was twenty-five, I had only ever seen eunuchs dance. And that was at my son Tajammul’s birth. When I was twenty-six, back in Lyallpur, I snuck into a prostitute’s dance show at a wedding. When my father found out, he was livid. He threatened to disinherit me, although all I was scheduled to inherit were his debts! He said, ‘The boy’s turned bad. I’m the first of the Chiniot clan who’s been shamed by his own son.’ And so by way of punishment, I was sent from Chiniot to Jhang to buy cotton on credit on the back of a horny camel whose forehead was oozing very bad-smelling pus. It hardly moved. Instead, it cried its guttural cry. But in the dying light of the setting sun, when we caught sight of the trees of Sargodha along the village’s edge, suddenly he stopped in his tracks. He had seen a female camel. In giving chase to her, he passed through Sargodha, and then for five miles he flung me up and down, this way and that, on top of his hump. After the first mile, I lost track of her. (I’m not a male camel.) But he was hot on her scent’s trail. I was riding on a time bomb. Then the camel blindly stepped (with me on his back) into a swamp. He quickly got stuck. I could neither sit on top nor jump to safety. The villagers brought a rope, a ladder, and gravediggers, and they saved me. The saddle on the camel’s back had been a metre wide. For a week, my legs were splayed apart. They looked like a slingshot’s arms. I walked like a dangerous murderer with fetters on. Or like a boy after being circumcised. I asked the Mehter toilet-cleaner to put the Turkish toilet’s footrests a little wider. I was punished for the horny camel’s misdeeds. My father said that from seeing how I walked, camels must have learned a lesson too.’
Aligarh Pyjamas and Arhar Lentils
In 1907, Mr Haji Sahib started working at four rupees a month for a Hindu businessman in Kanpur. He was a completely honest man. He was also very tall and muscular. The businessman must have thought how easy it was going to be for him to collect his debts. After World War II, Haji Sahib became a millionaire, but he didn’t change at all. I mean, by his masochistic stinginess, by the way he dressed and acted, by his humility, and by the way he talked, anyone would have thought he was still earning just four rupees a month. He wore a coarse muslin kurta, and he tied his square-patterned lungi above his ankles. He wore a shalwar only when he had to go to court or to a funeral. He never sold anything on credit to those who wore sunglasses, pants, and churidar pyjamas. He must have lived in UP for forty or forty-five years, but he had never eaten smoked firni, nihari, and arhar lentils. Also, he never wore his dopalli hat and pyjamas. But in 1938 he had an operation, and when he was unconscious the nurses dressed him in pyjamas. When he came to, he immediately took them off. Like the poet says,
It was good to be unconscious
Too bad I came to.
He would often say that if tongs had to wear something to conform to sharia or to some other law, then Aligarh pyjamas would look best. (This sounded very funny in Punjabi. We asked him to say it often.)
The Nilgai and the Doll-Faced Naseem
I goaded Mullah Aasi, ‘Do you still hunt?’ He said, ‘I don’t have the time or the taste for it anymore. You find deer only at the zoo. I don’t even use down pillows.’ He took down a tattered undershirt from a clothesline. He smelled it, then took down a wooden frame and began rubbing it with the undershirt so that the glass was revealed, and then beneath that, a photo.
This photo was taken by Chaudhuri Gulzar Muhammad in the forest during a hunt. In it, a Chamar untouchable and yours truly were carrying a black buck on a hunting pole back to a horse-drawn cart. The good thing about the photo was that the crows and kites hovering overhead were nowhere to be seen. What should I say, sir? My friend made me do a lot of things for free. But I didn’t mind. I would have done anything for him. It was a very beautiful and muscular antelope. Its huge eyes were filled with sorrow. I remember that I looked the other way when its throat was being cut. A good hunter will usually not kill a black buck. The entire herd scatters, not knowing what to do. You must have heard the saying, ‘Kill a black buck, and seventy female deer will become widows.’