Chaudhuri Gulzar Muhammad was from Pindi Bhattian but had lived unhappily in Kanpur for twenty years or so. At his studio, he also sold photos of the Taj Mahal and the Qutb Minar, which he himself had taken. He decorated the walls of his house with photographs of Pindi Bhattian, including one of his house with a thatched roof and ridge-gourd vines climbing over it. In front of the door, an old man with a saintly face was sitting on a beaten-up charpoy and smoking a hookah. Nearby, a goat with udders as full as balloons was tied to a stake. Every photograph was an example of Laila’s beauty as seen through Majnoon’s lovestruck eyes. We all laughed when he said ‘dechagi’ instead of ‘degchi’ and ‘taghmah’ instead of ‘tamghah.’19
He was well built. He could cut through the largest bone with only one stroke of a cleaver. He could skin a nilgai weighing two men, then butcher the meat all neat and proper, and all in under a half hour. His kebabs were the best. He always dreamed of Bombay. When he was skinning an animal, he would say, ‘The only thing worth anything in Kanpur is its nilgai. Just you wait and see, one of these days I’m going to become a cameraman for Minerva Movietone, and I’ll shoot close-ups of Madhuri and Mehtab and send you prints.’ He would start to dance and make sexy poses, and instead of wrapping a black cloth around his head he would put on top of it a bloody mop, and with a fake camera he would take a close-up of himself. One time, while he was taking a picture of the doll-faced Naseem, his knife slipped and he cut through the nilgai’s skin. Mian Tajammul Hussain shrieked, ‘To hell with the doll-faced Naseem! You’ve cut her for the third time! What were you thinking? You’re ruining the hide.’ There was an excellent taxidermist in Kanpur. But he had to send lion heads to Bangalore. The rich had lion skins on their floors, the middle-class houses had deer skins, and the women in poor houses made designs with colour-fast dyes on their cow-dung-coated floors that looked like carpet designs.
The Story of the Deerskin
Even now the hide of the doe that Nisar Ahmad Khan killed is spread out on Mullah Aasi’s floor. There was a fierce edge to Khan Sahib’s countenance, demeanour, and way of speaking. And his beliefs were always extreme. He was known as a Wahhabi, God knows if he was or not. He was addicted to hunting. He was very kind to me. Mian Tajammul Hussain used to say that the reason he liked me was because of my shaved head and ankle-high pyjamas. The bullet wound in the hide was exactly as it had been. While dying, she had delivered a full-term yearling. No one ate the doe’s meat. Nisar Ahmad couldn’t sleep for two nights. It affected him more than the time he was out partridge hunting and accidently shot a farmer who was standing behind some bushes and in the process blinded the man. He spent two hundred rupees to get out of that. Within three months of this affair with the doe, his only son, who was studying for his BA, chased a wounded duck into a pond and drowned. People said, ‘He lost his son because of the pregnant doe’s curse.’ When they brought the body to the verandah of the women’s quarters, the women started wailing and carrying on. Then there came a choked, heartrending cry. Nisar Ahmad said to his wife in a grief-afflicted voice, ‘My dear, patience, patience, patience. God’s prophet prohibited people from crying loudly.’ His wife stopped crying but went over to the window and started banging her head on its bars until her head bled. Her hair’s part was splattered with blood. They lowered the corpse into the ground, and when people were throwing dirt into the grave, Nisar Ahmad took dirt in both hands and started smearing it over his head and white hair. People stepped forward and grabbed his hands. No more than six months later, the man who had tried to calm his wife then wrapped himself in a shroud and stepped into his grave. According to his will, he was buried next to his son. (His wife’s grave was at his foot.)
So I went to the cemetery to pray the fatiha. I had a hard time finding it. While it was still possible to recognize some things about the city, the cemetery had completely changed. It used to be that everyone knew every grave because no one forgot a person once they died. Sir, a cemetery is also a place to learn things about life. When you go to the cemetery, when you see each grave, you remember the day the person died, how much lamenting went on, and how the mourners moaned and wailed. You remember how these mourners then died and so caused others to cry for them, and how they became one with the earth. Sir, when this is going to happen, then why all the sadness, why the distress, why all the crying?
I went and prayed the fatiha at Master Fakhir Hussain’s grave as well. Please don’t ask about all the things I remembered there. His gravestone had fallen over. On it is engraved a Persian couplet that he often read to us. Thirty-five years of rain had made the letters difficult to make out.
After I die, don’t look for my grave on earth
In the heart of the divine my tomb is lodged
His recitation style was a special mixture of straight recitation, a bashful tarannum singsong, and a sort of musicality, which he himself had invented and that died with him. Before reciting the couplet, he would open the third button of his shervani. As soon as he finished, he would take off his tassel-free fez and set it on the table. Since he read each and every couplet with the same rhythm and metre, those that had pauses or gaps he filled with the exclamations, ‘Oh, yes!’ and ‘My lords!’ or he emitted a very pregnant cough. While reciting the couplet mentioned above, when he got to the part that went ‘the heart of the divine,’ he would gesture three or four times knowingly toward his chest. But when he got to ‘my tomb,’ he would open his hands toward us bad students and pretend to dig his own grave.
Look, I’ve entered into the labyrinth of memories! The poor Sahir said about this — or perhaps it was someone else—
O, God, memories of the past are torture
Please wipe away my memory bank.
But I’ve got away from the story of the deerskin. One day, out of carelessness I knocked over a penholder. The ink from the pens is still on the hide. I noticed that Aasi never steps foot on the pelt. It’s the most expensive thing in the entire room. He walks on the patches of the open floor in a zigzag as though he were sliding down a chute in Chutes and Ladders.
Two Tales of the City
Nisar Ahmad Khan gave Mullah Aasi his unlucky rifle because he was his son’s close friend. During a riot, the police rounded up all the neighbourhood’s guns, and they took this gun too. He never saw it again. He had only a stamped receipt to show for it. He tried everything. He even hired a lawyer. But a policeman at the station said that the DIG had taken a liking to it: ‘If you keep complaining, you’ll get your gun. But the police will come to your house and plant a liquor still, as well. All your relatives have left for Pakistan. Your house too can be registered as evacuee property. Think about it.’ So he thought about it and didn’t say anything. God, oh, God! It used to be that the city’s top cop would come meet his father every three days or so. A Purdey was a great gun. They say it would cost twelve thousand dollars today. But, sir, if you ask me, such a valuable gun can only be used for killing a man-eating lion, a dictator, or oneself. Anything else would be an insult to it. While showing everyone his gun license and his stamped receipt for his impounded gun, Mullah Aasi still likes to say, ‘Even from a half mile away, if it just grazes a black buck, it will die right then and there.’