The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

by HM Naqvi

  But I am not in the market for protein or produce; Barbarossa procures the meat for the household—I suspect he serves up blinded cockerels on occasion—and my roots, tended lately by one Bosco, are famous across Garden. I have been lecturing the lad on Topics in the Horticultural Sciences since he has been in my stewardship (what has it been? a fortnight? two?) addressing matters that include the Requisite Water for the Healthy Development of Vegetation in Sandy Loam and Coastal Subtropical Conditions.50 Brow furrowed, legs crossed, he takes notes. There are, however, secrets about various processes—the Modulation of pH Levels in Soil with the Use of Milk, for instance—that I cannot, or rather, will not disclose. You have to learn some things by doing, by living. And Bosco is doing.

  No, I am on my way to pick up reference books required to tackle the only enterprise of any consequence in my life, The Mythopoetic Legacy of Abdullah Shah Ghazi (RA) (and, if Lady Luck smiles, several dog-eared copies of a local digest that features Lesbian trysts51). The fact of the matter is that I need to get out of the Lodge, and my head. Although not temperamentally paranoid—anxious, yes, but not paranoid—I sense a sulfuric conspiracy. There have been intimations even prior to the Major’s visit.

  The other week, for instance, I woke to an unfamiliar mechanical clamour, deriving from the general vicinity of the vegetable garden. To my shock and weak-kneed horror, a large diesel generator, veritably as alien as a UFO, materialized by the boundary wall, belching smoke. My calculations suggested that the device occupied 17 percent of my patch, ravaging the zucchinis and cherry tomatoes that garnish my cold pasta salads. When I protested to Babu that evening, I was told in a tenor reserved for recalcitrant children that the “loadshedding situation” had compelled him to acquire a secondhand, Korean-manufactured 6 kVa generator.

  “I’m not concerned about the capability of the dashed contraption! I’m concerned about its placement, partner, and the smoke—look at that smoke!”

  “We had no choice.” We who? I would have liked to ask. “You see,” he gestured, “the line from the street enters here from the grid.” The fact had the force and function of a full stop.

  But it’s not just a matter of generators: if I were to construct a treehouse for the Childoos in the old banyan in the backyard (a project I have been mulling for years, even if I do not possess the stamina or knowhow), there would be strident demurrals, drama. And a treehouse is a major infrastructural undertaking; I even have to inform the authorities if I solicit the services of a plumber when the commode gets backed up. A plumber for God’s sake! One cannot even relieve oneself without negotiating the dashed administration!

  I feel somewhat unstable, somewhat unhinged. I am in good company: everyone turns lunatic in the Holy Month, or worse—small, testy, sanctimonious. In fact, the only time one feels the presence of God during this disconsolate period is when one happens to be on the streets at the break of fast: the city seems uninhabited then, and in the resonant silence, there are Intimations of Providence. But the streets remain raucous till then, teeming with the faithful, hurried, harried, haggling over the price of fritters.

  Consequently, I find myself walking in circles. But I am not a famous walker: my gait is laboured due to the girth of my thighs and recurring gout in my knee, not to mention the cotton sack slung over my shoulder, weighed down by a thermos of water, a box of cardamom biscuits, a spare pair of knickers, and a volume of Müller’s Sacred Books of the East. And my size, complexion, the drama of my parasol52 presumably attract gawkers, street children, the attention of pye-dogs—try as I might, I cannot avoid notice. But I have attracted something odd, ineffable, today, like the shadowy fireflies that flit across the field of vision in the sun. Perhaps it’s the heat; perhaps, Ateed or Raqeeb53—it is, after all, the Holy Month.

  By the time I arrive at the narrow environs of Afghan Alley, populated by merchants lounging on rolls of fabric, swatting flies, I am parched and panting. Just as I raise the rim of my thermos to my maw, a hoarse admonition rings out: “Kya karti hay?” or What are you doing?

  Turning, I find a lupine lad sporting a fanned beard. “Kya lagta hay kya kar rahi hoon?” I reply, or What does it look like I’m doing?

  “Tum musalman ho?” he persists, or You a Musalman?

  I am asked to elucidate my relationship with God in the bright light of day—a parlous query at the best of times. What to say? What to do? When I was young, of course, I would have run. The boys chased me in the playground at Jufelhurst54—the Brothers Ud-Din I recall, neighbours, nemeses—chanting, Fatty Boy, Fatty Boy, turn around; Fatty Boy, Fatty Boy, touch the ground. Although I was chubby if not quite corpulent, and the jibes were not particularly clever—sticks, stones, and that whole thing—there were occasions when I was tripped or biffed as well. Returning home, I would shove my head in Mummy’s ample bosom, red-eyed, and lie, complaining of headaches. Since she suspected migraines, she took me to a hakim, an autistic chap who lived on a farm amongst goats and a broken Jeep and prescribed proprietary medieval remedies packaged in satchels tied with string. The foul concoction wrought of reddish powdered leaves turned glutinous and slimy when mixed with milk. I suffered it daily even though it made me retch, suffered it for Mummy’s sake.

  And later, much later, I attracted violence for different reasons: when I would brush against some young hothead at the Shadow Lounge, I would be mistaken for the Goliath to his David. As a result, I learnt to avert my gaze, slouch, shrink into myself.

  But not anymore; I am too old, too large. Breaking wind, I holler. “This is Currachee! This my city! I could be Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, Hindoo, Amil, Parsee. I could be Shia, Sunni, Ismaili, Bohra, Barelvi, Sufi, Chishty, Naqshbandy, Suhrawardy, Wajoodi, Malamati, Dehria, anything, everything. If you want to ask such questions then go back to Kabul!”

  As the commotion attracts attention, I find myself surrounded by five or six chaps, intent on mischief if not a riot. “O you who believe,” the boy persists, flies swarming around his head, “fasting is prescribed for you as it was for those before you, that you may become pious!”

  “The Prophet (PBUH) said, ‘What is better than charity and fasting and prayer? Keeping peace and good relations between people!’”

  And for the next five, ten, fifteen minutes, a dashed eternity, we are locked in an excitable roadside doctrinal debate that features piecemeal quotation of scripture, anecdotal evidence, tenuous analogies, madcap allusions, CP4. After a chorus of alhumdulillahs, the learnt perspectives of grandfathers, uncles, the neighbourhood maulvi, a veritable Renaissance Man, are invoked. I want to say, “Bhaar main jaye tumhara chacha!”—viz., The hell with your uncle!—but instead attempt to communicate that there are manifold realities, and they have no claim on mine.

  “My piety,” I proclaim, “is between God and me. How dare you intervene!” They can do what they want to do—shave their moustaches whilst letting their pubic beards run amok—only if I can do what I want to do: drink water in the middle of the street in the middle of the Holy Month. I am a diabetic for God’s sake! My God allows it if theirs does not. “If you’re sensible, then your God is sensible,” I proclaim, “but if you’re a dolt, your God’s a dolt!”55

  My antagonist swats my flask to the ground. The horde smells blood. Fatty Boy, Fatty Boy, turn around; Fatty Boy, Fatty Boy, touch the ground. I am ready. I have been ready since my birthday. It will be a good death, a noble death. But before I am knocked down, kicked in the ribs, beaten to watermelon pulp, and interred at the end of the urine-stained alley, I perceive movement from the corner of my eye.

  Turning, I behold a looker in the fray, an equine-faced, flinty-eyed dame in a low-cut canary kameez and tangerine pyjama. “Oye!” she cries like a traffic warden. Leaving me to my own devices, the horde turns on her, jeering & jostling, shoving & shouting, “Scamp!” “Hussy!” “We will break your legs!”

  Although it’s an opportune moment to flee, I am not a bad man, a dishonourable man; I stand before my Godsent saviour
like a boulder and declare, “You pray five times a day, keep your fasts, but this is the way you treat another human being? A lady? Shame on you! Shame on you all! If this is your creed, I am a Kaffir!”

  There is a pause, a moment pregnant with peril—the smell of sweat is thick in the air like spoiled meat—then one of the lads picks up my flask and hands it to me. I guzzle a quart before my audience in one glorious swig—verily, water tastes like wine when one’s thirsty—then beckon to the dame with a wave of the hand. Hopping over a crate like a lady, she grabs my hand like a man, and we dash like Bonnie and Clyde, leaving the faithful to contemplate exercises in eschatology, epistemology & logos.

  “I am very grateful to you,” I say, hailing a taxi.

  “You should be,” she replies matter-of-factly.

  I ask her name. I hear Jugnu. I ask where I should take her. “I am with you,” she announces. I look into her fantastic, indeed obsidian eyes. I am certain I know her from somewhere else.

  49. Not so long ago, a Hindoo tailor told me that Empress Market was built on a site where the Brits hung political prisoners after an uprising. The story goes that after the hanging of a Hindoo rebel, flowers would appear on the site every morning. The authorities posted guards and then, in a tizzy, rounded up the members of the family and banished them from the city. I have searched for the marigold bouquet. One day, I might find it.

  50. I suspect that changes in the hydrological cycle are causing Global Warning via evapotranspiration. Put differently, put simply, more water is evaporating into the atmosphere than before. If you’re an avid gardener, somebody who has been at it for decades, if there is a crust of dirt lining your fingernails, you will know. Nobody cares here. Maulvis, for example, pray for Judgment Day. They want the world reduced to dust.

  51. Bless the Lesbians & their trysts. Bless publications that appeal to both head & hand.

  52. The relic provides only a pretense of shade. Isn’t it perplexing that Umbrella Technology remains so horribly primitive well into the Twenty-First Century? We should have developed umbrellas with fans by now like John Steed’s whangee-handled marvel.

  53. Those in the know know that Ateed & Raqeeb are those clerical angels perched on our shoulders, recording our deeds from puberty to the grave in respective ledgers in shorthand. Those in the know won’t, however, tell you that it is the accounting for good deeds that ultimately does us in. Who would disagree that Good ought to come from within rather than without?

  54. I must note that Jufelarians are some of the finest graduates in the country. But no more: one hears that the Building Control Authority wants to tear the edifice down. Ms. Sybil D’Abreo, who built the school in ’31, would undoubtedly be turning over in her grave.

  55. For the record, the exact words I employed were: Agar tum bawlay ho to tumhara khuda bhi bawla ho ga.

  ON POETICUS, FUROR

  (or COME, IF ONLY TO LEAVE AGAIN)

  Any civilized human being can tell you that in the Taxonomy of Verse, the ghazal is not only unique because of the associated protocols of rhyme, refrain, and metre,56 but because as a form it functions only to address love, particularly the unrequited variety. Imagine if the limerick were exclusively devoted to pain, say, arthritis, or the villanelle pertained only to matters of geological time; and the triolet—what about the triolet?57

  Recall that the lover in the ghazal is typically a fool, a masochist; the Inimitable Ghalib, for instance, wrote, “I will be dust before you realize I am here.” Why couldn’t he have just dispatched a note? “Madam, you stir me. Yours, G.” Note or not, the lover is doomed from the beginning, and the beloved is typically elusive, illusive, cruel till the end; and sometimes God. Consequently, every word is a metaphor. Indeed, the homologous conceit suggests the Multidimensional Dominion of Love: the ghazal asserts that divine and profane love are fundamentally, organically the same stuff. That is elegant, profound, tip-top.

  But I’m no philologist, poet, no authority on Urdu58—I cannot pen ghazals, much less rearrange the topography of contemporary poetry. After the incident at Afghan Alley, however, I find myself composing spontaneous doggerel in my head, affected, as it were, by afflatus, and God has nothing to do with it—I cannot recall the last time a dame smiled, just smiled at me, and this dame has saved my worthless life.

  As we sit side by side on the ride home like children thrust together by serendipity, I find myself stealing glances at Jugnu’s slender nape, swimmer’s posture & the zircon stud embellishing her aquiline nose, reminding myself not to stare. She has no such compunction: when I stutteringly, circumspectly, inquire whether it was she who spied on me the other day, my birthday, she looks me in the eye, and declaims, “Tum nangay thay,” viz., poetically speaking, I observed you in full plumage. The response induces a couplet—“Dallying outside, she spies a small indiscretion / Admittedly, I’m no Priapus, a peacock perhaps”59—and colour in the cheeks.

  Changing the subject, I ask, “What were you doing in Afghan Alley?” She offers but a smile in response. One can only discern this much: the dame wafts talcum powder and tobacco and is Cool as a Cucumber. As we swerve through traffic, for instance, my leg keeps knocking against hers, behaviour generally unbecoming of a gentleman, but when I apologise, she places a long reassuring hand on my gouty knee. “Koi nahin,” she avers—No worries.

  At the Lodge, however, I deport myself in an uncivil manner again: when we arrive, I realize I cannot invite her in. How can I? There is always somebody if not somebody else installed in the parlour—Babu and Nargis, Barbarossa or the Childoos—somebody always coming or going, especially in the Holy Month—Nargis’ neighbourhood gang, housebound malcontents who find solace in the sermons of a revivalist preacher, that famous swine Chambu, manager of my garment-dyeing business, or our squawking relatives, Badbakht and Gulbadan Begum,60 who drop by unannounced for supper at the drop of a hat—and at that moment I espy Bua lurking in the shadows, undoubtedly conspiring with her good-for-nothing husband and good-for-nothing son.

  Imagine if I am seen going up with a dame! Imagine if the authorities got wind of it! It would be a dashed debacle! There is a social law that few acknowledge: Relationships Are a Function of Logistics. Consequently, I fix a time to meet at the zoo the following day on the benches outside the Reptile House—what the Yanks would call a date—before dispatching her into the night with a small fortune for carriage. It breaks my heart but what to do?

  Lying awake in my quarters, staring at a gecko on the prowl, I plan a picnic in my head as if planning a banquet—silk napkins, silver cutlery, the candelabra. There will be pakoras and hunter-beef-and-butter sandwiches, bottles of pop, Pakola; strawberries, chocolate syrup, and ice cream! Although I might not be able to arrange entertainment on short notice—snake charmer, Mariachi Singers—I will charm her with jokes, droll anecdotes, poetry:

  Would have offered samosas, tea,

  My jackfruit maybe—

  But how to get in? And out?

  Rendezvous day after, we agree, at dusk.

  Sky purple before dawn,

  And bloated like a belly;

  Distant gunfire, or firecrackers,

  Restlessness pervades, and dew.

  I should have woken with the cock and crows at first light but instead wake on the morrow at midday like a delinquent, panicked and palpitating: the probability that I can organise a picnic banquet is next to nil—a soufflé rising in a sandstorm.61 Girding my loins, however, I reckon I can, at the least, fry some samosas. But those in the know know that the manufacturing of a samosa requires stamina and nimble fingers and mine are like cigars—more Toro Grande than Petit Robusto. Consequently, flattening the doughy balls into paper-thin discs is trying, fashioning the miniature cones, testing. No matter! I am a man possessed!

  As the skinned potatoes for the filling come to a boil, I am reminded that my only pair of linen slacks is stained with frosting, and since Barbarossa must be cocking about, and Bua, conspiring with her husband, I retrieve a ca
uldron from the kitchen myself and squat on my haunches in the loo for the first time since the Tit-for-Tat Nuclear Tests in ’98, scrubbing like Lady Macbeth. There are fireworks. I pass out in the tub.

  When Bosco stirs me—“Hypotension again, Uncle Cossack?”—I pop up like toast from a toaster, hot and bothered: the samosas are not sorted and the trousers are wet along the lining. “Dash Murphy,” I thunder, “and dash his law!”

  “Who’s Murphy?” Bosco asks.

  “He discovered the fourth law of thermodynamics,” I reply. “Read up on it. I’ll quiz you when I’m back.”

  Ad interim I conduct my own Experiments in Thermodynamics: after sliding limp fritters into boiling corn oil, I place my trousers in the oven at 10°C—an inspired gambit. But just then Murphy strikes again: I hear a howl from downstairs and descend, thighs chafing, to find Toto has banged his nose on the swinging doors. Guddu weeps in fraternal sympathy. Since neither Nargis nor Bua is in sight—they would have undoubtedly resorted to that absurd strategy of beating the villainous table—I settle them on the settee and narrate the fable about the Lion & the Mouse. The moral of the story is not really relevant: the trick is to divert attention immediately. If only I had children of my own to spoil! But I am only capable of spoiling samosas: the first batch is burnt, and badly.