Yaganah had published his volume of Collected Poems with checkmarks indicating which of his poems he liked best. Some he had marked great; some he had marked double great; and those that sent him straight into ecstasy he had marked triple great. This was so that an absentminded reader in the years to come couldn’t complain that no one had indicated a hierarchy of greatness! So Basharat followed in his teacher’s footsteps, but instead of the outmoded system his teacher had used, he put a red tick mark in both the right- and left-hand margins.
He had only one complaint about the job in Dhiraj Ganj: writing ‘Dhiraj Ganjvi’ after Makhmur not only ruined his pen name, but it also ruined everything fine about his ghazals. But when he thought about those poor poets who lived in places with even more stupid-sounding names — like Phaphund, Bahraich, Gonda, Barabanki, Chiraiyakot, Jalandhar, Loharu, Ludhiana, Macchali Shahar — and how they had to put up with those names, then, according to him, it wasn’t that he grew more patient, but that he grew to understand the quandary. One day as he lay in bed, he suddenly thought how the great poet Nizami wrote after his name, ‘Ganjvi.’ So his disgust for the term went away. If God wished it, he thought, He would reveal to him how to stomach the ‘Dhiraj’ part, as well.
From Maulvi Mujjan to Tana Shah
No difficulties presented themselves in getting a recommendation letter to the County Treasurer. But whomever he asked about Maulvi Muzaffar (whom everyone called Moli Mujjan, whether out of contempt, laziness, or love), presented him with a new problem. One person said, ‘He feels for his community. He has access to higher-ups. But he’s mean and malicious. Watch out for him.’ Another person said, ‘Moli Mujjan also runs an orphanage, the Light of Islam. He makes the orphans give him leg massages, and he makes them sweep the school. He sends the teachers out with the kids to Kanpur and Lucknow to ask for donations. But he doesn’t pay for their transport. There’s no doubt he doesn’t give up easily. He’s really helped the Muslims of Dhiraj Ganj. Those Muslims there that are educated and employed have his school to thank.’ Sometimes it seemed that people were sick of him for no reason at all. Basharat started to kind of feel sorry for him. Just as Master Fakhir Hussain had once told him that the secret to doing good work was to avoid trying to correct your elders, your bosses, or those who aren’t as misbehaved as you, even if you see them going down the wrong path; like the three wise monkeys, turn blind, deaf, and dumb. Then you will get what you want.
One bitter old man, the calligrapher of the magazine Zamanah, said the following: ‘He’s not just a miscreant, he’s also a miser. He’ll make sure to shortchange you. First he’ll look you up and down. He’ll appraise your character. Then he’ll hound you till you die. He learned to sign his name when he had to start writing fake receipts for his charity collection. And now? He’s Sir Syed! I saw with my own two eyes that he signed his marriage certificate with his thumbprint! He’s completely illiterate. But he’s clever as hell. And underhanded. And sly. He’s not your ordinary brown-noser. He’s a rogue, a rake, and a huckster!’ The abovementioned gentleman delineated Moli Mujjan’s different shades of baseness with such craft that, in order not to miss the finer points of his worthlessness, you had to have a dictionary on hand or, like me, to have spent your entire life in the painful company of wordsmiths.
Sayyid Aijaz Husain Wafa said, ‘Moli Mujjan is sure to pray five times a day. His knees, forehead, and conscience all have big calluses on them. He controls the police chief and the County Treasurer through his good manners, feelings of Islamic fraternity, hospitality, and bribes. He’s also asthmatic. He wipes his nose on his sleeve ten times in five minutes.’ The old guy didn’t have so much a problem with that as with his pronouncing ‘aasteen’ as ‘asteen,’ ‘yakhni’ as ‘akhni,’ and ‘hauslah’ as ‘haunslah.’ He had heard for himself Moli Mujjan say ‘Mijaz Sharif’ for Mizaj Sharif and ‘Shubrat’ for ‘Shab-e-barat’ [the Night of Salvation]. Like fools, brown-nosers, and goats, Moli Mujjan was always saying ‘me, me, me.’ (In order to save themselves from appearing pretentious, the elite of Lucknow have always referred to themselves in the first person plural, ‘we.’) A skinny old man added, ‘He’s a butcher or grocer by caste. And he’s from Delhi. So he hugs you three times. The upper classes from Awadh do it just once.’
But this is absolutely an injustice for those who live in Awadh because hugging just once isn’t so much about their high status as about their hoity-toityness. You also have to keep in mind that the tradition was for repining wives to use dry rice and dew as the tools of suicide: they threatened to eat the dry rice and fall asleep for good in the morning dew. They were only housewives, and Tana Shah far surpassed them. It’s famously recounted that when he was led in chains into the court, the question was raised how he should be put to death. The courtiers made their own suggestions. For instance, one said that the reprobate should be tied to the leg of an elephant in rut and toured through town. A second paid his respects and then said, ‘But who’s going to do this? An elephant in rut is horny for elephants. He won’t want to have anything to do with people. But if you want to punish the elephant for Tana Shah’s debauchery, that’s another matter.’ A third courtier spoke, ‘For a degenerate like Tana Shah, the best punishment would be to castrate him, then throw him into his harem.’ Another courtier suggested, ‘You should pour copper sulfate powder into his eyes to blind him. Then lock him in Gwalior Fort, and for two years make him drink opium on an empty stomach so that his body wastes away and he sees himself for who he is.’ A historian objected, ‘Tana Shah isn’t Your Majesty’s blood relative, and this treatment’s reserved for real brothers.’ One callous man said, ‘Throw him over the castle’s parapets.’ But an objection was raised here that on the way down his fearful soul would leave his body, and if real suffering was the goal, then it would never come to pass. In the end, the vizier solved this problem and so proved his own wisdom. He said that if both mental anguish and physical pain were the goals, then send a woman cowherd his way. For those readers who haven’t seen a debauched nobleman or a woman cowherd, then you should know that from just one whiff of butter and raw milk, from one sniff of a skirt that’s been in a foul-smelling cattle herd, from just one nose-tickle of a black waistcoat that has turned white from the alkalinity of sweat, a nobleman will lose consciousness. To bring him back you must then remove the musk gland from a deer, distill it into incense, and force him to inhale.
2.
The Sweetshop and a Dog’s Breakfast
Basharat left at three in the morning to get to the interview. When he arrived at Maulvi Muzaffar’s, it was seven and Maulvi Muzaffar was sitting on his chaise lounge eating jalebis. Basharat introduced himself.
‘Come in, come in, the man from Kanpur!’ Maulvi Muzaffar exclaimed. ‘Kanpur’s like Lucknow’s kissing cousin. Since everyone knows people in Lucknow are hoity-toity, I won’t even bother asking you to share my breakfast. Oh, Zauq, standing on formality is kind of like standing on glass!’ (Yes, he said ‘kind of’ when he meant ‘exactly.’) ‘You must already have eaten. The selection committee’s going to convene in an hour in my office. We’ll meet there, OK? And, hey, that loser you used for a reference? He’s not only a tremendous miser, he’s also dumb as a rock.’
This conversation transpired in under two minutes. Maulvi Muzaffar hadn’t even asked Basharat to sit down — he’d had to stand there like a servant.