by HM Naqvi
What follows is an awesome rendition of “Take Five,” more Puente than Brubeck, more marching band perhaps than jazz: Titus beats the edge of the dhol tentatively with a bamboo stick, reproducing the sensation of the introductory movement of the number, that peculiarly syncopated 5/4 beat—duddud-dudda-da-da-da, duddud-dudda-da-da-da—whilst the walnut strums the double bass as if this is the moment he has been preparing for since the Dawn of Time. When the trumpet enters the medley, I shut my eyes. You have to shut your eyes.
“Take Five” is like you are flying, arms extended, inhaling the beach at Seaview on a cool December evening, dud-dud-duddud-da-da-da, duddud-duddud-da-da-da. You see floodlights lighting up loping camels, and miniature families huddled around miniature stalls preparing corn on charcoal. If you are lucky, you see a woman dancing in the surf, her wispy aquamarine dupatta fluttering in the breeze. If you are luckier still, you see the silver-grey fin of a dolphin cutting the silver-grey waves, duddud-daada-da-da-da, duddud-daada-da-da-da.
The Felix Pinto Quartet play into the night. They play Armstrong and Getz, selections from the ragtime canon, and even a couple of Bollywood numbers.22 They play until they are tired and sottish and can play no more. When they are done, the walnut dozes in a corner, squeaking through his nose, then Pinto, clutching his drooling trumpet, puts an arm around me and burbles, “I need a favour, Cossack.”
There was a time when I could extend favours, when I had resources, succor. I was a different man then, a known man, a scion of a respected family. Whilst I have nothing, am nothing, the Caliph of Cool still believes I can help. “Of course, old friend,” I slur. I do not want to disappoint, or disappoint immediately.
“Is my grandson, Bosco. My daughter’s in a pickle and her husband’s a doper so you need to put him up for some time. You know things. Teach him something—character building and all that jazz.”
When I say I do not believe I have had the pleasure of meeting said Bosco, a dark, gangly lad of twelve or thirteen emerges from the shadows, wearing a parenthetical moustache and a checkered shirt too big for his frame. For all I know, he might have been standing there all night. “Say hello to Uncle Cossack,” instructs Pinto.
“Hello, Uncle Cossack.”
Lo and behold, a ward is thrust upon me. It is the damndest development.
21. The story goes that the Maharaja of the Princely State of Patiala invented the measurement to beat the team of visiting Irishmen on the cricket field. They, of course, fell for it.
22. Recall the lyrics of “Shadmani”: “Aaj to nasha aisa charha, pucho na yaron / Mein to aasman pe hoon, mujhay neechay utaro” or Don’t ask me how drunk I am tonight, friend / Can you help me get down from the clouds? The number was de rigueur at weddings once. Now it’s all just dances I don’t dance and dish-dish boom-boom.
ON RECONSTRUCTING MEMORY AND MAN
Verily, memory is a tricky wench.23 It catalogues images, episodes, reifies yesterday today, but recent research cited in Reader’s Digest suggests yesterday might change tomorrow, or the day after, in the mind. It’s all murky, molecular, but makes you what you are. I can attest to the fact that when I rake through the soil of my memory, there are certain episodes impressed in it like pebbles: I remember a fearsome cat with a severed tail stalking me in the garden, remember waddling inside the Lodge, teary, and my grandfather setting me on his bony lap, cooing in Gujarati, “Tamay kaim cho?” viz., You okay? Although he never completed school (he dropped out in the seventh form) he could negotiate the Queen’s English because he had to: like his contemporaries—Messrs Merchant, Mistry, old Ebrahimji Sulemanji—he had business with the Britishers. When I would shove my foot in his soft shoes, for instance, he would chide, “No naughty pun!” I was six when he passed. I bawled when I beheld his shrouded corpse, bawled louder when I was told that he was going to Heaven. There are rivers of milk there! “But he didn’t drink milk,” I sobbed. “He took tea only!”
My father spoke English to me (so I have little Gujarati), and generally cultivated an English air: he sported trilby hats and used the word “pardon” as a threat. One of my earliest memories features a smart young man in seersucker,24 pulling into the driveway in a cool blue Impala, the staff standing at attention. Whenever somebody invokes him—Your father used to say, or, If only your father were alive—some other incarnation materializes, though the canonical Papa, rendered in oil by a family friend, resides in the parlour downstairs:25 Jinnah cap perched on head, charcoal sherwani extending to the knees, he stares back, stands tall, fist on hip, commanding, indifferent. We all aspired to be that figure. Perhaps that’s why we all fell short.
When one thinks about it, my eldest brother Hidayatullah looked most like him, down to the Roman nose, though he was a breed apart—loud and bolshie, even as a boy. Next in line, the fair and lean Bakaullah looked more like Mummy, and though temperamentally sober, he would become severe with age. Neither took interest in our flagship business, the Olympus. Hidayatullah did spend time in other hotels carousing with the scions of established families, whilst Bakaullah, Comrade Bakaullah, fraternized with the local Communists, or Soorkhas, who populated Zelin’s and Café George on Preedy Street. He organised discussions on rooftops and street corners (attended by the likes of S. Sibt-e-Hassan) and rallies in support of farmers and the labour movement, but his career as an activist came to an abrupt end when he was nabbed by the authorities outside the Volk’s House, the Soviet “cultural centre,” for “subversive and suspicious activities.” After spending four months in Central Jail—Hidayatullah, a major in the army by then, lobbied the Inspector General (IG) of police for an early release—Comrade Bakaullah left for points West, or rather, the Near or Middle West, to become a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. In his new incarnation, he hounded me for running the family into the ground. That is slander, libel, bovine fecal matter.
It is a fact that, unlike the Major or Comrade Bakaullah, I was not a sportsman or academically accomplished.26 I was a sensitive child, a curious soul; I lolled in the garden, talked to myself. When the neighbourhood children congregated to play tennikoit or gulli danda in the vacant plot adjacent to Apollo House, I made figurines in the flowerbed recalling the local sphinxes featured at fairs and mud-men recalling the Priest King of Mohenjo-Daro. Although the zoo was around the corner—you could hear the lions roaring at night—I had a fetish for ants, beetles, dragonflies, creatures that comported themselves with quiet resolve. And whilst the others awaited the tun-tun-wallah, I awaited the cycling librarian’s delivery of National Geographic. Mummy called me “Anokhay Mian,” viz., Master Unusual. Papa attempted to draw me out, taking me on excursions, mano a mano:27 there were jaunts to Empress Market and Gandhi Garden and a memorable trip to the shabby shrine of Mungho Pir—patron saint of the Sheedis, the Afro-Pakistani community.28 Gawking at the crocodiles lazing in a murky pool, I remember Papa telling me that the frightful reptiles were just big lizards, said to have been the lice shaken loose from the saint’s head. “A giant, he was?” I asked. (“Primusinterpares,” he remarked cryptically.) When Papa narrated a story of how the mighty Sheedi general fought the British, losing ten thousand men to the machine gun, a leathery old man within earshot invited me to bang on a sheepskin drum—dhug-dhug, dhuga-dhug—a rare honour. I can also remember quarterly pilgrimages to the Toy Trading Agency where I once picked up a locomotive labeled “Made in Occupied Japan,” but as I grew older, Papa bid me to put away childish things. Circa nineteen hundred & fifty-four, he took it upon himself to make a man out of me.
During oppressive Currachee summers,29 when families we knew made their way to hill stations up north—Murree, Ziarat, or the emerald abode of that Fairy Queen—Papa put me to work in the kitchens of the Olympus. I peeled potatoes until my fingers bled, chopped onions until I bawled—it was trial by fire—but burn by burn and by and by, I learnt to negotiate the involute ecosystem. It helped that the chef, a jolly Goan named Pereira, took a shine to me. He had been recruited from Agha’s Tavern, t
he finest steakhouse in Currachee, on the condition that he had absolute dominion over the kitchen & there was truth to it: I remember him telling Papa once, “You do your work, man, I do mine.” Nobody dared confront Papa, save Pereira. I also recall him telling Papa, “Boy’s a natural”—I could, after all, prepare beef bourguignon and coq au vin—but I am not certain my father was impressed; he was hard to please.
Consequently, save the two years I spent at the American University in Cairo during the Suez Crisis—I read Political Science—I devoted myself to becoming Papa’s Aaron (AS) or Ali (AS). After all, if I could not become Papa, I could become his man—politics or science had nothing to do with it. At the tender age of twenty-two, then, I was virtually running the Olympus. I had a card printed on ivory paper that read: “Executive Manager.” I wore spotted kerchiefs, felt important. Papa could be proud.
I remember it all as if it were yesterday. But yesterday is no more.
23. The opening sentence of fellow Khoja Badr-ud-Din Tyabji’s Memoirs of an Egoist comes to mind.
24. Unbeknownst to most, I know for a fact that “seersucker” is derived from the Urdu khir and shukar, or “pudding” and “sugar.” Pudding! Sugar! Hoo! Ha!
25. Said friend was the late great Pakistani Jewish painter Samuel Fyzee Rahamin, protégé of one John Singer Sargent. The latter is often neglected by Western art critics whilst the former has been all but forgotten here, though in recent years I managed to sneak into a secret room at the Mohatta Palace to see many a canvas.
26. Hidayatullah was tennis champion at the Gymkhana, then at St. Lawrence. He was also a swimmer, runner—he ran the fifty metres—and later, took up skeet shooting. And Bakaullah topped in Senior Cambridge, then again at NED—the famous Nadirshaw Eduljee Dinshaw University of Engineering & Technology.
27. Typically, however, excursions were en famille. I remember when the entire clan was stuffed into the Impala to Ranikot, the largest fort in the world. We camped in the open under a powdery spread of stars, attended to by our staff. I also recall spying Badbakht Begum’s ras malai buttocks as she relieved herself in the bushes.
28. Sheedis maintain sheedi is a variation of the Arabic sahabi, or “companion.” Some claim descent from the Prophet’s (PBUH) associate, Bilal (RA), whilst others, the Qambranis, claim descent from Ali’s (AS) coterie.
29. The summer lasts from April to July. August & September is the Monsoon. Then there’s what can be characterized as the Indian Summer.
ON THE HAZARD OF SPIRITS
(and HIGH TEA)
There is a proverb in Gujarati that goes Jagya tya thi savar, which amounts to “It’s morning whenever you wake” in the Queen’s English. I am uncertain of the import but the day after my platinum jubilee, I wake beside my bed, marinating in my smoking jacket. There is a pounding in my head and a pounding at the door, dhas-dhas-dhas-dhas, but I am a sack of potatoes. Of course, at my age every gesture demands Herculean stamina: it takes me three, four swings to peel myself off a divan, knees cracking like biscuits, and I have dispensed with socks because I have not been able to touch my ankles since Tiananmen Square. Somehow I manage to hoist myself up, mouthing that old shanty, “Hurrah, and up she rises,”30 and traverse the expanse of the room as if braving a sandstorm. A patina of crust glues an eye shut but I perceive a disembodied visage at the door. “Who is this?” it squeals.
“This is who?” I reply through my fingers, chuffed that even in a state of raw, gut-churning lassitude, my capacity for inductive logic remains functional. Stepping aside, Nargis the Opossum reveals a bony, fawn-faced boy regarding his joggers. I don’t know him, I begin to say, don’t know much at this particular juncture of history—but instead find myself mouthing the curious appellation: Bosco.
“Bosco?” Nargis repeats.
“Bosco,” Bosco confirms.
“I found him wandering around downstairs. I was so frightened. You know, I’m alone in the morning after Babu and the children leave—”
“Bully for you!”
“Really, Abdullah Bhai!”
“Come on, lad.”
“What’s wrong with you?” she asks with arguably earnest exasperation.
Quavering, “Heave him by the leg in a running bowline,” I shut the door on her and slip back into a fugue. There are days, indeed seasons, when one is felled by fate again and again, and on such occasions one wonders how and why one keeps getting up. It might be a matter of habit rather than faith but who knows? I know this much: when I come to, I find my trousers around my knees, a syringe lying next to my pulpy, pallid thigh & Bosco sitting on his haunches beside me, chin balanced on palms, whispering the Memorare or some other esoteric supplication.31 “I’m fine,” I mutter. “This happens all the time.”
Extending a stringy hand, the lad attempts to yank me up but it’s the cordial whiff of the alloo bharay parathay32 and pickled mangoes that compels me to my feet. The March of History attests to the fact that there is nothing like hunger to transform a Thinking Man into a Man of Action. And there is nothing that sates the soul like Barbarossa’s luncheon spread. Master Bosco and I sit under the fan in the verandah and lunch like kings.
I would like to ascertain the nature of his familial travails, apprehend the boy’s familiarity with the scourge of diabetes, inquire about his habits, hobbies, crushes, but he keeps stuffing his mouth as if he has led a life of privation, reared, as it were, on a diet of grass and shrubs. I ought to lecture him on the Protocols of the Sunset Lodge—First Things First: Stay Clear of Nargis the Opossum—but fain watch him eat; his entire being informs the act. I offer him paratha after greasy paratha and he keeps tucking in. The only request he makes is for a napkin—I wear a striped plastic apron, for napkins don’t fit the bill, so to speak—and a bottle of pop, Pakola. “Ah,” I proclaim, “a man after my own heart!”
But what the dickens do you do with a ward? Not quite the Boswellian type, is the boy Watson to my Shaukat, Aflatoon to my Socrates? The trajectory of the query leads me to the library where amongst the gazettes and pamphlets stacked on the floor and yellowing articles cut out from magazines dating back half a century,33 I happen across a gilt-spined decalogy regarding the Intellectual History of the Ancient World. “Your grandfather told me to build your character,” I say, “and they say there’s no better place to begin than Greece.”
Stuffed like a taxidermist’s bear, a Yankee Grizzly, I retire for a siesta ad interim, dreaming up those phantasmal eyes, but before being swept far from the shores of consciousness, I am roused by the slate-faced, iron-haired housemaid known universally as Bua, informing me that I have been summoned downstairs for high tea. It is a decidedly odd development: the family dines together once a month but seldom fraternizes otherwise. Moreover, strictly speaking, teatime is over.
Anticipating a dressing down, I don my lucky tomato-red silk shirt (one ought to look proper if one does not always behave properly), comb my kinky hair to the side for good measure (though it will spring back shortly), buff my crisp nails (even if they require clipping not buffing) & glance at the mirror to assess whether a shave is required (though I have never been capable of whiskers). On the way out I tell Bosco to hold the fort—there is no reason to subject him to the Opossum again—and pick up a couple of finger-shaped balloons because the Childoos always expect a gift; an egg crate would do. Oh, if only realizing joy were so easy!
Lumbering down the staircase, lightheaded from the balloon blowing, suddenly, uncannily, I have the sensation of being observed again—I think I sense that phantom firefly from my dreams. As I pause to collect my breath, my wits, I survey the gate, the length of boundary wall, but my cataract eye renders me practically blind in weak light.34 Then I hear the cartoon voices of those crazy little Childoos: Choo-choo (choo-choo), chuk-chuk (chuk-chuk). Verily, they have the power to banish ghosts!
When I enter the parlour flinging balloons in the air, they run to me in mismatched slippers chanting Cha! Cha! Jan! as if welcoming a politician. “You must le
t Cha-cha-Jan sit!” Nargis cries. “You’re in his way!”
“Not in my way,” I pant, “they’re never in my way.”
Palming my cantaloupe knees, I say, “I want one kiss on this cheek, and one on the other.” Guddu capably complies but Toto, a famously inept kisser, licks my face as if licking ice cream. A wilful, spirited character, he is also known for conspiring against his elder brother by twelve minutes—there is no doubt in my mind that he will purloin Guddu’s balloon by bedtime.
As soon as the two march off, Babu embraces me, an awkward gesture partly because we are not the embracing sort, and partly because I am in medias res. “When they were up, they were up,” I hum, “and when they were down, they were down—”35
“Sir?”
“Cheers, partner.”
“Happy birthday!”
Drawing my attention towards a wreath with the proportions of a tractor tyre, the sort that embellishes the grave of a bureaucrat or brigadier, Babu says, “Isn’t it special?” as if he fashioned it himself.
“Yes, but I’m still alive—”
“God is merciful!”
Babu contends he sent word the day before via Barbarossa to join the family for supper, a claim that cannot be supported because the old man oft cannot recall the number of toes on his feet, but I play along: I say I was out with a friend but do not mention the friend or venue because Nargis is the sort who consults the Holy Book to make the most mundane decisions—I swear she flipped the pages to determine whether she ought to serve Polka ice cream during the Holy Month—and sees Signs of Judgment Day everywhere. If she only knew I was as drunk as a wheelbarrow the night before.
When the cake arrives—the spongy, saccharine sort, the sort that can kill a diabetic—I think Good God but say, “Good job!”
“Nargis organised it,” declaims Babu.
