A Neon Sign of Good Behavior
In the ad, Maulvi Sayyid Muhammad Muzaffar — the school’s founder, manager, chief administrator, guiding light, accountant, and embezzler — stated that applicants need not apply by mail, but rather they should come in person at eight in the morning with their degree and documented proof of good behaviour. Basharat couldn’t understand what would constitute proof of good behaviour. Proof of bad behaviour was easy to come by. For example, traffic tickets, a restraining order, a warrant for arrest, a notarized copy of a conviction order, or a copy of a registered list of offenders, on which the names of the biggest troublemakers are listed. A man can prove his bad behaviour in five minutes, but he can never prove his good behaviour. But his anxiety was pointless. That was because his appearance (a shaved head; kohl-rimmed eyes; high-water pyjamas; a black, velvet Rampuri hat; wooden sandals that you wear around the house, to the mosque, or in the neighbourhood) meant that even if he wanted to look like anything but a goody two-shoes it was impossible. Good behavior was his destiny; there was no choice in the matter. And his appearance wasn’t just its proof; it was its neon sign.
This was the very appearance of all lower middle-class boys of the neighbourhood’s respectable households. ‘Respectable households’ meant those people who never personally had to do anything in order to be, remain, and be called ‘respectable.’ The stamp of respectability, property, and the abovementioned appearance was bestowed one generation after another as a matter of legacy within those houses in the same way that genes and hereditary diseases come to everyone else. If the great grandson was the spitting image of his great grandfather in beliefs, in the limits of his knowledge, and in his appearance, then this was considered proof of this family’s nobility, respectability, and authenticity.
For his interview, Basharat wore his best clothes. He had his achkan coat washed. It had grown discoloured, so he told the washerman to apply a little extra starch. The previous Friday, he had gone to the barber’s to get his head shaved with clippers. Then he had it shaved again, but this time with a razor. After that, he had the stone from a raw mango rubbed over his head, and then he had his scalp massaged with amla oil. It stung for quite a while. Then he put on his hat. As he looked in the mirror, he saw that his shaven head had started to sweat as it would after he applied Vicks or balm. He started fanning himself. When he took off his hat, the fan’s motion made him feel as though the wind was mixed with mint. (It’s probably not inappropriate for me to admit that when we left our Asian confines and for the first time saw with our own eyes the bright colours of Europe, our entire existence stung the same way.) Then Basharat spit-shined his shoes as soldiers do and so put the finishing touch on his get-up. The chairman of the selection committee was the County Treasurer. He had heard that his was the voice that really counted. He was a free-spirited, witty man, elegant and literary; he was sociable, fearless, and he accepted bribes. He rode a horse to work. His penname was Nadim [Ashamed]. He was a crafty, clever man.
To win him to his side, Basharat bought a ream of almond paper and a half dozen reed pens, and all night long he prepared a manuscript of poetry, that is, he copied out twenty-seven ghazals. He wrote under the pen name Makhmur [Drunken], which his teacher Jauhar Illahabadi had given to him. He named his not-yet-fully-fermented wine, I mean, his incomplete poetry collection, The Winehouse of Makhmur from Kanpur and Lucknow. (His only tie to Lucknow was that five years before this happened, he had lain half-unconscious in a hospital bed for five days after his gall bladder had been removed.) Then he added a bulky appendix as well.
The story of this appendix was that while selecting poetry for the volume proper, he had to be so self-critical that it was painful; it was like having to carry a mountain on his back. No matter how worthless and weak a poem is, it is as hard to set it aside as it would be to call your own offspring ugly or to remove your own loose tooth by yourself. Even Ghalib hated this, and so he had handed over the task of cutting down his poetry to Maulana Fazal-e-Haq Khairabadi; he had sat with his face turned away, exactly as many people do when getting a shot. Although Basharat set aside some things, he wasn’t satisfied. And so he ended up making an appendix of all his excised poems. These poems were mostly from the period when he was without a teacher and went by the pen name of Fareftah [Lover]. The defining quality of this pen name was that it always ruined his closing couplets, and so his ghazals usually didn’t have them. In the several closing couplets he did write, in accordance with the rules of poetry, he used the synonyms Shaidah and Dildadah (and he marked them as such), but that only caused other problems. Actually, the thing was that it was beyond the power of any human to put into verse all the myriad things that he was thinking about in the hollow recesses of his mind.
Yaganah (the Poet) Thought He Was God; By God, He Wasn’t
On the first page of his Collected Poems, he drew an arch, and on top of it he wrote in Arabic, ‘Some poetry is indeed pure wisdom, and some eloquence is pure magic.’ And beneath that, ‘The Winehouse of Makhmur from Kanpur and Lucknow.’ And then, ‘Updated Table of Contents.’ Then on the next two lines, ‘Published by Munshi Nawal Kishore Press, Lucknow, Under the Auspices of Kesari Das Seth, Superintendent.’ Then he carefully added in very faint letters ‘To be’ before ‘Published,’ so that at first glance you wouldn’t see these words. Then, on the last line, he wrote, ‘First Edition, December 1937.’ Underneath the title, he wrote his name in letters twice as large, ‘Basharat Ali Farooqi of Kanpur and Lucknow, BA (Agra University), Successor to the First Officer of Poetry, the Most Eloquent, God’s Beloved, Hazrat Jauhar Chughtai Illahabadi.’
If any reader doubts this, then I would like them to know that even Krishan Chander wrote MA after his name until 1947, and, that without it, his name seemed so painfully naked that he didn’t recognize it as his own. This tradition went back many years. Whenever his work appeared in a book or magazine, Akbar Illahabadi’s name was written in the following fashion: ‘The New Voice of the Times, Khan Bahadur Akbar Hussain Sahib, Retired Sessions Judge, Allahabad.’
And Basharat’s favourite poet, Yaganah Changezi — who called himself ‘the Wizard of Ghazals, the Father of Meaning, Yaganah Alaihis-Salam (Peace Be Upon Him)’—dedicated his second book to his hero and spiritual preceptor Genghis Khan with the following words of limitless worship and praise: ‘A Humble Gift to Hazrat Changez, the Great Lord, Scourge of God, the Fountain of Fear, the Prophet of Wrath and Punishment, the Emperor of Human Beings, who Surpassed Alexander and Jamshed, from Mirza Yaganah Changezi of Lucknow.’
But Basharat unwittingly let one error slip in. He had copied everything from the title page of a book from Nawal Kishore Press in exactly the same diction and with the same honorific tone (including the same price), and while introducing his teacher Jauhar Chughtai Illahabadi, he had also copied down ‘Beloved of God’ after his name as a courtesy and hadn’t thought about how the man was presently living, and not only living, but young and healthy, and that he would still have to wait a long time to secure his place in the hereafter.