A Thousand Yearnings

by Ralph Russell

  One day in a moment of idleness my eye lighted on his essay Ekka.* [My brother] Nasim and I began to read it. God knows what mood we were in, but we began to laugh, and we laughed so much that we could hardly go on reading. While we were reading it Azim came in. He saw that we were reading his book and was very pleased. But we were annoyed at this and made a face. He knew what he was about.‘Give it to me,’ he said,‘I’ll read to you.’ He read two or three of his pieces and had us literally rolling about. All our pretence was gone. It was not only what he was reading but the fact that it was he who was reading it. It was as though there was laughter everywhere, like sparks flying. When he’d made us look properly foolish he said, ‘You lot say that there’s nothing in my writings,’ and started teasing us. We were crestfallen, but we gradually recovered and got really cross with him. God knows what absurd things we said to him. We were very put out, and began to dislike his books even more than before.

  While he was alive I never praised his writings, though when he read what I wrote he was more pleased with them than words can say, and very loving in his praise. But I’d got into the habit of taking offence at everything he said. I thought he was making fun of me—and, by God, when he did make fun of people, his sarcasm, and bitter smile and cutting remarks would make them feel like getting down on the floor and kicking and crying like a child. I was always afraid that he’d make fun of me and I’d swear at him. Sometimes he’d say,‘I’m afraid, in case you start writing better than I do.’ And that too when I’d only written a few things. And that’s why I got angry and thought he was making fun of me.

  After he died, for some reason I began to feel an attachment to all his things. Every word he had written began to make an impact on me, and now, for the first time in my life I got down to reading his books. Got down to! That’s absurd. I didn’t need to ‘get down to’ it. I positively wanted to. ‘Good God!’ I would think, ‘That’s how he wrote!’

  When I began to read his books every word in them evoked the picture of how he looked in his last years. Within moments I would see his eyes, struggling to smile through all the pain that racked him all the time. I saw his dense hair falling over his dark, wasted, melancholy face, over which it seemed as if dark rain clouds had gathered, his bluish-yellow high forehead, his shrunken, purple lips, his uneven, prematurely broken teeth, his dried up, emaciated hands, with their long delicate fingers like a girl’s, impregnated with the medicines he was taking. And then the swelling attacked his hands. I saw his thin matchstick legs, ending in ugly, swollen feet which we felt afraid to look at, and so always went to the head of his bed. I saw his cage-like chest, working like a bellows, and the clothes piled on his body, and vests in layer upon layer. And that breast held an ever lively, ever high-spirited heart. God, how that man could laugh! Like a demon or a jinn, ready to grapple with every power in the universe. Never defeated, always smiling. A wrathful and tyrannical God visited upon him every torture that his constant coughing and asthma could bring him, and he responded to all of them with a laugh. No pain that this world or the next could produce was spared him, but nothing could reduce him to tears. One would have thought it beyond the power of any human being to laugh in all this pain and distress, let alone to make others laugh too. My uncle used to say,‘He’s a living corpse.’Well, by God, if corpses can be so lively, so restless, so ever-active one could wish that everyone on earth was a corpse.

  When I looked at him not with a sister’s eyes but simply with the detached eyes of a fellow human being, it made me reel. What a stubborn heart he had! How full of life he was! There was almost no flesh on his face, but soon after it had begun to swell he began to look quite handsome. His temples and his sunken cheeks began to fill out. A death-like radiance came to his face, and a sort of magical greenness like that of an embalmed mummy. But his eyes were the eyes of a mischievous boy, dancing in response to every little thing, or sometimes the merry eyes of a youngster. And these eyes, when an attack of severe pain was upon him, would scream out, and the clear bluish surface of his skin would turn a muddy yellow, and his helpless hands would tremble and it seemed as though his breast would burst. And when the attack was over, the same radiance, the same dancing brightness.

  Only a few days ago I read his Khanam [Lady] for the first time. He is not its hero. Its hero is someone much stronger and healthier than he was, the embodiment of the hero he could imagine that he might have been, like the active vigorous youngster in whom a lame man would like to see himself; not him, but his hamzad,* whom he watched getting up to all the tricks that he, lying there a helpless prey to illness, could not get up to. Others may think that Khanam is nothing much. But all its characters except his hero are accurately portrayed, living characters—all exactly like the people who made up, and still do make up, a family. At any rate that’s what my family was like, and every word is true to life. Azim watched all of us in action in the home and when he wrote he portrayed accurately all that he saw… Everyone is there—and always will be. It is as though when he wrote all of us acted parts for him, all of us were moving puppets in his hands, and he produced a faithful picture of it all.

  He loved talking to people, and would make friends with absolutely anyone. There was an old mirasan.* He would sit for hours and talk nonesense with her. People were astonished. They’d think ‘Good God! What have those two got to talk about?’ But everything in his story Khurpa Bahadur is what this old mirasan told him. He would even stop the sweeper or the water carrier or anyone passing in the street to talk to them. Once he had to go to hospital for some days, and at nights, when everything was quiet he’d secretly gather all the patients together to chat with them. He and they would tell each other innumerable stories, and these were the basis of things he wrote. It used to give him great pleasure to encounter liars and cheats. He’d say ‘Tricking people and deceiving them is no joke. You need intelligence for things like that.’ Everything he wrote he took from life, including all the lies in which life abounds. He wrote many improbable things, because his poetic imagination could accept all of them.

  He used to love watching singing and dancing—but the kind of dancing he liked was the kind that wandering holy men would perform. He’d often give them money and then watch them dancing to the beat of the drum, watching so intently that you’d envy him his enjoyment. God knows what he could see in their naked, hungry dancing.

  He had been opposed to purdah for ages, but in the end he used to say, ‘All that’s out of date. They can’t preserve purdah now, no matter how hard they try. We’ve finished with that now. Now there are fresh things to worry about.’

  He did not take much interest in politics. He used to say, ‘I can’t be a leader, so what’s the point? People would say “Show us some results” but this wretched cough and asthma plagues me all the time.’ Many years ago he wrote some articles on politics and economics that were published in Riyasat. God knows what became of them.

  His writings cut no ice with us present-day writers. The world has changed and people’s ideas have changed. We’re outspoken, and abusive. When we feel pain, we cry. Capitalism, socialism, unemployment—these things have seared us with their flames. We grind our teeth as we write and spit out the poison we brew from our secret griefs and our crushed emotions. He too felt pain—he was poor, ill and destitute. He too was oppressed by capitalism, and yet with all that he had the courage to make faces at life and to joke at his distress. It was not only in his stories that he laughed; in every department of life he defeated distress with laughter.

  One of the reasons that Azim is not popular with contemporary, that is, completely contemporary readers, is that he did not write as openly and directly as the new writers do. He could see women’s beauty, but he hardly saw their bodies. In the old masnavis* like Zahr-e-Ishq, the description of women’s physical form is quite prominent. Then such writing came to be called old-fashioned. And now this old fashion has revived and the new literature is full of rising and falling breasts, shapely
calves and soft thighs. He used to think such ‘naked’ writing pornographic, and fought shy of it, though his writing abounds in the portrayal of naked emotions and he would write without hesitation of really filthy things. He would portray a woman’s naked emotions, but the woman would always be fully clothed. He never spoke very freely with me, because he looked upon me as a child. And he never discussed sexual problems with anyone at all. The most he said, speaking to a friend, was ‘The new writers are all very spirited, but they’re hungry, and very much under the influence of sex. In everything they write you feel as though they’re saying, “Mummy, I’m hungry.”’ He used to say too that in every age Indian literature has borne the clear imprint of sex. ‘Our people are much affected by it. Our poetry, our painting and even our ancient styles of worship all express our sexual hunger. If they forget love and sex even for a moment they lose their popularity.’And that is why his way of writing was soon abandoned and the old Thousand and One Nights style of writing prevailed again.

  He was especially fond of Hijab Imtiyaz Ali’s stories. (I must say, with apologies to the lady, that the secret of why he liked them has died with him.) He used to complain to me that I wrote the kind of lies that have no head or tail to them, that my lies were the cry of a hungry man, while his lies were the smiles of a hungry man. God knows what he meant by that.

  We generally used to tell him his stories were ‘all lies’. Whenever he started talking my father would say to him, ‘Have you started your castles in the air again?’...Azim would tell him,‘My dear Sir, it’s lies that give colour to life. If you want to make what you say interesting you must mix lies with truth.’ And he would say, ‘The descriptions of Heaven and Hell too are no more than castles in the air.’At this my uncle would say,‘Stop this living corpse saying such things. It’s blasphemy.’And Azim would mock him and his in-laws, and tell them that they were a superstitious lot.

  I never saw him saying his prayers. He used to read the Holy Quran lying down. He showed no respect for it and would fall asleep as he read. When he was rebuked for this he put it in paper covers and would tell people he was reading a law book. He used to study the Traditions a lot, and look out and memorize very strange ones so that he could argue with people about them. He would read them out and argue about them. People were at a loss to cope with them. He used to memorise verses of the Quran too, and never tire of referring to them; and if you cast doubt upon them he would take the Quran out by the head of his bed and show you them.

  He was a great admirer of Yazid,* and talked a lot of nonsense about Imam Husain. He would argue for hours on this theme. He used to say, ‘I dreamt that Hazrat Imam Husain was standing somewhere when Yazid the accursed came along, fell at his feet, humbled himself and joined hands in supplication to him. At this Husain was deeply moved. He raised him up and embraced him. From that day I too began to revere Yazid. In Paradise they were reconciled. So why should we fight over them?’

  He used to think that piri muridi†was a hoax. But he would say, ‘All hoaxes are attractive lies; and lies are in themselves attractive.’ He used to say,‘If my health had permitted, I’d have got people to worship at my father’s grave. I’d have arranged qawwalis for two years, and got people to donate coverings for his tomb. It would have been a fine and enjoyable way to earn an income.’

  He was addicted to religious controversy, but in the end he stopped arguing so much. He would say, ‘You lot are strong and healthy, and I’m dying. And if by any chance it turns out that there is a heaven and a hell what shall I do? Best keep quiet.’ When people used to tell him he would go to hell he used to say, ‘And what sort of paradise has the Good Lord given me here that threats of hell should deter me? I don’t care. I’m used to hell. If the Good Lord burns me in hell he’ll be wasting his sticks and coal, because there’s no suffering I haven’t got used to.’Sometimes he said,‘If I go to hell then at any rate these germs will be killed. If I go to heaven I’ll infect all the maulvis with my T.B.’

  And that’s why everybody called him a hellbound rebel.

  It seems as though he was born crying, and he was reared with all care and attention. People saw how weak he was and forgave him everything. He would hit his big stalwart brother, who would just bow his head and take it. Because he was so weak, my father would excuse him no matter what he did. Everyone tried all the time to please him, but when you’re forever telling someone who is ill that he’s ill, how can you please him? All our kindnesses to him only made him feel his weakness more. He got more and more rebellious, more and more angry; but he was helpless. All of us began to adopt Gandhi’s policy of non-violence, but what he wanted was to be counted with others as a member of the human race, to be scolded as others are scolded, to be numbered among the living. And he worked out that the way to achieve this was to be a troublemaker. Whenever he felt like it he could get any two people to quarrel with each other. God had given him a good brain, an astonishing imagination and a sharp tongue, which he would ply with great enjoyment and to great effect. His brothers and sisters and our mother and father all began to loathe him. Our home became a fair old battlefield, and it was he who caused it all. What more could he want? All his self-regarding emotions were satisfied, and the weak, helpless, ever-ailing villain of the piece became a hero. He made all his weaknesses his weapons.

  But he didn’t really want people to abandon him. The more his family avoided him, the tighter he clung to them. In the end, may God forgive us, we all came to loathe the very sight of him, and, for all his pleadings, to regard him as our enemy. His wife didn’t look upon him as a husband, nor his children as a father. His sisters told him,‘You’re no brother to me,’ and his brothers would turn away in disgust at the sound of his voice. My mother would say,‘I gave birth to a snake, not a child.’

  Before he died he was in a pitiable state. Not as his sister but simply as a human being I tell you that I wished he would die and get it over with. But even then he never stopped hurting people. He was like the torments of hell. The hero of a thousand stories had become a villain and his ambition was satisfied. Yet even now he wanted people to love him, wanted his wife to worship him, and his children to look affectionately upon him, and his sisters to feel ready to do everything for him, and his mother to take him to her bosom.

  And his mother did that, returning to the path from which she’d strayed. She was his mother, after all. But the others still hated him, until the time came when his lungs packed up, the swelling got worse, his eyesight failed and he would grope his way like a blind man and still not find it. He had made himself a hero, but in the end he was defeated. He never got what he had wanted. What he got instead was hatred, revulsion, and contempt... Such was the man who, with ulcers in his lungs and legs that had been stiff for ages, and arms pierced with innumerable injections, and boils on his hips the size of apples, laughed as he lay there dying. The ants had begun to crawl over his body, and he looked at one of them and said,‘How impatient my lady ant is! She’s here before time to claim her portion.’This was two days before he died. What a heart he must have had to joke like this when he was dying!

  At four o’clock one morning he who had been born forty-two years earlier as a weak little child had played his role in the drama of life. At six in the morning on 20th August Shamim came and told me to get up, because Azim was dying.

  ‘He’ll never die,’ I said crossly.‘Don’t wake me up for nothing.’ And I tried to get to sleep again in the cool of the morning.

  Shamim got worried, and shook me,‘Get up, you wretch. He’s asking for you.’

  ‘Tell him I’ll see him on Judgement Day,’ I said. ‘I tell you, Shamim, he can’t be dying.’

  But when I went down he could no longer speak. All the furniture, all the junk, all the books had been cleared from the room. Medicine bottles were rolling uselessly about. Two of the little children were staring anxiously at the door. My sister-in-law was making them drink their tea. There were no tears in her eyes.

>   I leant over him, ‘Munne bhai,’ I said. For a moment his eyes focussed, and he compressed his lips. Then he again lapsed into a coma. We all sat waiting outside his room, and for four hours watched the struggle that his dried up, lifeless hands were waging. It looked as though even Azrail, the Angel of Death, was losing the unending battle.

  ‘He’s dead.’ I don’t know who it was who told us. I thought to myself, ‘He isn’t. He can never die.’ And today I look at his books and say, ‘Impossible! He can never die. He’s still fighting. What difference does death make?’ For me it was his death that brought him to life, and God knows how many more there will be—how many there will go on being—for whom he will be born after his death.

  His message was, ‘Fight pain, fight hatred, and go on fighting even after you’re dead.’ He’ll never die. No one can kill his rebellious spirit. He was not a virtuous man. If his health had been good he would not have been an abstemious man either. He was a liar. His life was a lie—the biggest lie of all. His tears were a lie, and his laughter was a lie. People say, ‘He caused nothing but pain to his mother and father, and to his wife, and to his children, and to the whole of creation. He was a malevolent spirit sent into the world to plague it, and now the only proper place for him is hell.’

  Wherever he is, whether it’s in heaven or in hell, I want to see him. I’m certain that he’s laughing even now. Worms will be eating his body, and his bones will be crumbling to dust and his neck will be bowed under the burden of the fatwas of the mullahs,and the saw will be tearing at his body. But he’ll still be laughing. His mischievous eyes will still be dancing, his blue, dead lips will be moving in bitterness, but no one will be able to reduce him to tears. Wherever he is, I want to see him, to see if his sharp tongue is at work there too, to see whether he’s making love to the houris in heaven or laughing as he angers the angels in hell, whether he’s quarrelling with the maulvis or whether in the leaping flames of hell his cough resounds and he’s breathing with difficulty, and the angels are giving him his injections. What difference does it make to go from one hell into another? Where else would the hellbound be?