H.M. NAQVI
The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack
A Novel
Also by H. M. Naqvi
Home Boy
Copyright © 2019 by H. M. Naqvi
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers India
Cover illustration Faiza Butt
“Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun” from The Father of the Predicaments
© 1999 by Heather McHugh. Published by Wesleyan University Press.
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FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN 978-0-8021-2894-2
eISBN 978-0-8021-4686-1
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18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Zafar Iqbal and Akbar Naqvi
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Also by H. M. Naqvi
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
Volume I
Critical Digressions
On Negotiating Ontological Panic
On The Jazz Age Of Currachee—An Anecdotal History
On Rites And Responsibility
On Reconstructing Memory And Man
On The Hazard Of Spirits
On How Historiographical Sensibilities Inform The Politics Of Preservation
Volume II
On Roadside Metaphysics
On Poeticus, Furor
On Consequences Of The Socratic Method
On Mater Familias
On The Possibilities Of Love & Literature
On The Culinary Anthropology Of The Region
On The Conventions Of Modern Courtship
On The Death Of Civility
An Oral History Of The Cossack Era
On The Art Of Entertaining In The Dark
Volume III
On Signs And Symbols
On The Dynamics That Inform The Dissolution Of Families
On The Dark Night Of The Soul
On How To Get Things Done
On The Consequences Of Felicide
On Travels In Scinde In Time And Space
On Confronting Mortality
On The Games We Play
On In Vino Veritas
Volume IV
On The Proverbial Heartbreak Hotel
On The Abject Failure Of The Legal System
On The Consequences Of Solitude
On Confronting The Other
On The Bona Fides Of Manhood
On A Conspiracy Of Thieves
Volume V
On The Joys Of Family Life
On How To Conduct A Funeral
On Notions Of Honour
On Theories Pertaining To Theodicy, Anthropodicy And Such
On The Proverbial Devil & Deep Blue Sea
Afterword
A Sociocultural Genealogical Table
Glossary Of Terms For Those English-Speaking Peoples Who Are Unfamiliar With Our Idioms
Acknowledgments
Back Cover
NB: Dear reader, I’m not a writer or intellectual. I’m a doctor, a medical doctor, an ophthalmologist, not a PhD. But I’m not entirely unschooled in scholarly matters: I can distinguish between a nota bene and an afterword, as I was once a student of literature and intellectual history myself. I have to come clean about my qualifications because I’m the one who has compiled this volume. Some years ago, I received a hefty package in the post, but given my professional commitments and family responsibilities, the project has taken time. Organising the texts into a cogent manuscript, glossary, table and all, has also taken some doing. I don’t think I need to delve into the mechanics of the process here, but I would like to say that I’ve tried my best to honour the work and its author. The reader should understand that there is no manual for such an endeavour, and this is no ordinary opus, so please excuse any editorial errors or lapses of judgment.
—BB
FOREWORD
(AND BACKWARD?)
It is said that cities are founded by gods, kings, heroes, but Currachee1 emerges from nothing, from stories. Indeed, one hears stories about Lord Ram’s sojourn in the verdant cove known since as Aram Bagh, about the fag end of Alexander the Greek’s bloody adventurism,2 about that lad Moriro who saved the coast with steely ingenuity from a monstrous rampaging shark. But the fact of the matter is Currachee, like Calcutta, like Shanghai, was a modest entrepôt when the Britishers happened upon it a couple hundred years ago. Although expelled on several occasions by the hardy denizens, the blighters were intent on seizing the environs by hook or crook for the natural harbour promised great geopolitical potential. The community swelled from a few thousand souls in 1845 (when work began on St. Patrick’s Cathedral) to millions today: you can fit the populations of Norway, New Zealand, Uruguay, Paraguay, and the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) into the city on a good day and have space left over. Due to the great demand for cotton during the American Civil War, a railway line was laid here and everyone knows that once you lay down tracks, the Train of Change barrels through. By the time our Empress Market became the second largest vegetable market in the world, my grandfather, a dry goods merchant, had set up shop there—tea, tobacco, coir, fibre, secondhand pantaloons—grafting our history onto that of the city.
But I am more phenomenologist than historian, less concerned with Who Did What & What Happened When than with the more discreet, indeed noble investigations—nary the chota chota but the mota mota.3 For instance, the Mythopoetic Legacy of Abdullah Shah Ghazi (RA), the patron saint of my city, is one of the matters hitherto ignored by historians, pundits, and punters alike, suggesting a variety of perversity that eclipses the newsworthy issues that vex the denizens of Our Broad Swath of the World. It is as if in this savage, insensible, this distracted age, we have become obsessed with anecdotal indicators, hermeneutic lint, ignoring What Makes Us What We Are, indeed, What Makes the World What It Is.
Consequently, I have been attempting to reify certain truths on the page, an endeavour that can keep me up from the onset of whisky twilight to the baleful call to morning prayer that animates the resident cock, the murder of crows, until my piles are damp and sore, my extremities rosy with mosquito bites. When sleep eludes—my GP avers it has to do with the Circadia
n Rhythms—I observe the local nightlife from my perch, from the transvestite troubadours chanting vulgar odes on the street to the cockroaches pressed together like dried petals by my varicose foot. There have indeed been times when I have sensed daybreak only by the quality of light refracted through the dirty stained-glass windows spring, by the flutter of hummingbird wings, but I am afraid I have also been waylaid by anxiety, lassitude, contretemps, and the intermittent shove of history, here in the bosom of the vast, cluttered, famously custard-yellow enclave known to all and sundry as the Sunset Lodge.4
1. This orthographic tic can be attributed to my affinity for the sonorous, indeed alliterative quality of the colonial appellation for the city—after all, I came of age during the Raj—but the long and short of it is that it’s my city and I’ll call it what I want. I can, however, mention other variations in passing: Karachal, Khor-e-Ali, Kalachi-Jo-Ghote, Crotchey, Kiranchi. A fisherman once told me that when his people were taking the Brits around the harbour, they kept asking “What’s this place?” viz., Kroch hi tho? but you can choose to call it what you like, disregard the fallibilist imperative, or for that matter, disregard all the postscripta on offer—it doesn’t really matter to me.
2. I have it on good authority from a Poonjabi historian—they are a nation of historians, aren’t they?—that the Greek was mortally wounded by the spear belonging to a mighty kinsman of yore who proclaimed, teeth-gritted, Twadi aysi di taysee. It’s admittedly an apocryphal episode in the Annals of Recorded History. But you never know.
3. I have done some work on the Uses of Mother’s Milk in Musalman Jurisprudence, for instance, the Zoroastrian Intellectual Traditions that Inform the Yazidis of Georgia, and the Leitmotif of Our Swath of the World in Hollywood (from The Man Who Would Be King to Bhowani Junction).
4. The Lodge is situated en route to the zoo in the erstwhile genteel environs of Garden East. If you lose your way, you could end up in one of the largest urban necropolises in the world. There is a discrete, walled Jewish cemetery in the neighbourhood as well, a stone’s throw from the site of the old synagogue. Only I can take you there now but in the old days everyone knew: shuttling past, the bus conductor would holler, Yahoodi Masjid! Yahoodi Masjid! as if it were the most natural thing in the world. One of the best roadside joints is located down the street where they serve that thick haleem that burns your esophageal cavity if you wolf it down too quickly. The other landmark amongst the squat untidy flats that mar the topography is the sprawling police station mainly manned by gruff northern tribes. Once upon a time Garden was populated by a decent breed: recall the Mehtanis off Pedro D’Souza Road, the Souvenir Tobacco people, the Royal House of Khayrpur. Eminent barrister A. K. Brohi took residence in the vicinity afterward, renowned crooner Habib Wali Mohammed & Begum Hamidullah, editor of the Monthly Mirror. Not long ago I would come across the poet Rais Amrohvi taking his evening constitutional but I do not get out often now.
VOLUME I
CRITICAL DIGRESSIONS
(or THIS, THAT, THE OTHER)
My head is like a rubbish heap: you have to sift through the muck to find a working toaster. When I was eleven, I overheard one of my brothers telling another that I am a bastard. They say if you scale the bluff by Shah Noorani (RA), you happen upon the clenched mouth of a cave, and if you manage to crawl in, you are your father’s son. I do not patronize Shah Noorani (RA)—if I am a bastard, I am a bastard—but you might find me at the seaside shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi (RA) on a Thursday night, inhaling hashish amongst the malcontents who congregate on the rocky southern slant of the hill. It’s always a carnival, populated by fortune-tellers, bodybuilders, thugs, troubadours, transvestites, women & sweet, rowdy children. I am at home there.
When I enter the cool confines of Agha’s Supermarket to purchase Smoked Gouda, however, shoppers part to give me way.5 Those who once knew me turn to memorize the sodium content in shelved cans of French Onion Soup. The last time I was dragging myself through the aisles, I called out to this busty, sixty-six-year-old Persian cat who had just celebrated her fifty-fifth birthday. Although married to a portly patrician now, she would be at the Olympus in the old days, making eyes at the young men with carnations fixed in their lapels. When I hooted Sweety! she paused for a moment, as if crossing off the loaf of bread on the list in her head, before disappearing around the corner from the shoe polish. Verily, decency is dead or dying.
I have been mulling a project, some permutation of the Mythopoetic Legacy of Abdullah Shah Ghazi (RA), since the fateful day my father asked me to punctuate the following sentence: That that is that is that and that that is not that is not. Naturally, I retorted, “Comma after the sixth word, sir!” Papa could be difficult but I knew then that he had in an indirect way communicated his aspiration for me to be a phenomenologist even if he would deny it vehemently afterward.
There is no doubt in my mind that my mother, an aristocrat hailing from an erstwhile martial state in the North, would have encouraged the project. When she entered a room, people squinted as if she were wrought of light. If I close my eyes I can recall hers: sunny and blue like the sea at Sonmiani. Married to a cousin at seventeen, the Khan of This or That Khanate, she ran away when she realized that he was only keen on hunting partridge. She met Papa at the Olympus in ’29 when visiting an aunt twice removed for high tea. She had five sons with rhyming names: Hidayatullah, Bakaullah, Abdullah, Fazlullah, a.k.a. Tony & Rahimullah, a.k.a. Babu.6
When Mummy passed, the family, the House of K., became fundamentally unglued. After retiring from the army as a major, Hidayatullah moved to a palatial residence in the suburbs featuring a diamond-shaped pool whilst Bakaullah, once a card-carrying Communist, immigrated to some dusty corner of the Near East where he reportedly runs a transportation & logistics concern. Tony,7 my boon companion, left for university in the United States of America before squatting on our estate in Scinde where he cultivates dames & produces wine—our very own vinos de la tierra.
I am certain I was Mummy’s favourite. She raised me to be myself. I am not a bad man but not good for much anymore. I am a fat man, and an anxious one. The insides of my thighs chafe when I climb down the stairs from my quarters; I avoid loitering below because my youngest brother, Babu, occupies the mezzanine with his twin boys and plain, moon-faced wife, Nargis—a lass with the charm of an opossum. The arrangement poses a bit of a problem because I love the children, those two crazy little Childoos.
When they manage to break free, they sneak up on me like those Ninja Warriors8 and clamber atop my domed belly. We sing, cavort, creep up to the roof to observe the silently sundering clouds, the odd meteor. We startle the nesting crows and put the fear of God in their black hearts. When their rasping protests ring through the still of the evening, Nargis the Opossum comes bounding up the stairs. She does not approve and changes the rules all the time:
1. No Taking the Children to the Roof at Night (or During the Day, the Afternoon, or at Sunset)
2. No Feeding the Children Walnuts (or Custard Apples, Chilli Chips, Sugar Wafers)
3. No Singing Tom Jones to the Children (or Cliff Richard,9 Boney M., the Benjamin Sisters)
And even though I cradled him in my arms, carried him on my shoulders, even though I taught him how to whistle, how to say thank you—thunku, he said—the aforementioned Babu is not an ally. Many years ago, he laughed when told I was a bastard. Like many, like most, he quietly judged me then, quietly judges me now. I don’t care. A fortune-teller named Sarbuland once told me, “Tum lambi race kay ghoray ho,” viz., You are the horse of the long race.
But I am not the same man I was yesterday.
5. Of course, in the old days, one frequented Ghulam Mohammed Brothers for bread and butter, and Bliss & Co. for tonics and balms. Long after the proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Black, sold the business and moved to the UK, they wintered yearly at the Olympus. You still might be able to pick up a bottle of Bliss Carbonate or Calamine at pharmacies in the city, presumably even at Agha’s.
7. I christened Tony Tony because as a child he could not pronounce his own name—like all our names, it is a mouthful—and because he resembled Tony Curtis circa The Prince Who Was a Thief.
8. You might recall that that Lee Van Cleef chap—a peer by age, perhaps, if not by distinction—played a Ninja Warrior in the serial in the early eighties. I am no Lee Van Cleef. I cannot scale walls or walk between raindrops. I would be happy if I could scratch my back without risking a herniated disk.
9. Who remembers today that Cliff Richard was a native of Our Swath of the World, a neighbour, a Lucknavi. Who remembers old Peter Sarstedt for that matter, a Delhi-wallah, who wrote, “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?” And Pete Best, the Beatle from Madras? I ask you: why doesn’t discourse acknowledge that we pioneered rock & roll?
ON NEGOTIATING ONTOLOGICAL PANIC
(or DOWN & OUT)
I wake feeling fraught and delicate like a soft-boiled egg for I have transformed into that dwindling subspecies homo septuagenari overnight, and there are few conjunctures that stupefy, that unsettle the soul more than the thought of a fallow life. Lying amid fading canvases, steamer trunks, rolled Turkish rugs, Mummy’s cut-glass perfume bottle collection, Papa’s clockwork gramophone, china and a brass candelabra from the Olympus, several dusty Betamax recorders, and the cadaver of an exercise bicycle, I stare at the whirring fan with one open cataract-swept eye, dimly pitting reasons for & against remaining prone: Nobody would care if you stayed in bed, I tell myself. You’re a sad man, long in the tooth, an animal: you drool, soil your knickers. It is a downpour of self-pity, a veritable monsoon of misery, but then the urge to relieve myself compels me to the commode. There is no doubt that there is reprieve if not respite in ritual, in diurnal bowel movements (even if the exercise has become trying on account of my piles) & the pages of The New Golden Treasury of English Verse.10 Oh, that golden crowd! What jocund company!