Mirages of the Mind

169 Pages·2015·1.22 MB·English

by  Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi

For Ashaa, Shoaa, and Sae Ah
Contents
Introduction
The Mansion
A Schoolteacher’s Dream
The Car, the Man from Kabul, and the Lampless Aladdin
Two Tales of the City
The First Memorable Poetry Festival of Dhiraj Ganj
Author’s afterword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, a Biographical Sketch
Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi was born in Tonk, sixty miles south of Jaipur, in what
was then the British Indian state of Rajputana, and that is now Rajasthan. The
year was 1922. His father was a local politician, and, in Yousufi’s own words, ‘a
simple, God-fearing Muslim.’ Yousufi was educated in Jaipur before receiving a
law degree and an MA in Philosophy from the renowned Aligarh Muslim
University. He married Idris Fatima in 1946, and the couple’s four children live
today in Pakistan, America, and England. After a brief stint in the Indian civil
service, he left for Pakistan. He arrived in Karachi in January 1950, and, aside
from an eleven-year stint in London, he has lived there ever since.
Yousufi has won national awards for his contribution to Pakistani arts and
letters, and critics and readers alike have praised his work, so much so that one
critic has called contemporary Urdu humour and satire writing, the ‘age of
Yousufi.’ He has written four works, each of which has been extensively
reprinted. Yet despite his national stature and the recognition that he ranks
among the best humour and satire writers in the history of Urdu literature, not
much is known about his life. That may be in part because he spent his
professional life in banking: after his first job at Muslim Commercial Bank, he
rose rapidly in the ranks, becoming President of United Bank in 1974 and the
chairman of the Pakistan Banking Council in 1977. But the scarcity of
biographical information may also be due to his personality and the fact that he
shuns the limelight. In one of the few interviews he has granted, he readily
admits to being a private person, and states that all he has to say is in his books.
Yousufi is known as a humour and satire writer, and the two together form
one genre in Urdu literature. Humour and satire writing has been a vital part of
Urdu literature since its prose traditions began to flower in the 1870s. It can be
commonly found in newspapers and literary magazines, and it is often used to
satirize society. Little is done to differentiate between the genre’s two aspects,
and the resulting confusion has been perhaps the single-most important reason
why the genre has not gained as much critical attention as short stories and
classical poetry, the ghazal tradition. Yousufi, the leading contemporary
practitioner of this hybrid craft, has stated that more care should be taken to
separate the two, as there is a real difference—namely, that of love, ‘You cannot
write humour until you love your target or subject of attack. Love is the foremost
condition. In satire it’s not necessary.’ While there are moments of political and
social satire in his writing, humour is the chief vehicle of Yousufi’s craft, and,
love, in one form or another, its chief object.
Reading Guide
Mirages of the Mind (in Urdu, Aab-e-gum) is a challenging book. It is
challenging because of its length but more so due to its erudition. Yousufi
acknowledges the difficulty of his work. On the occasion of his being awarded
the Sir Syed Ahmed Khan Lifetime Achievement Award in New York in 2008,
he recited an anecdote about how a schoolboy admonished him for the difficulty
of his Urdu. On a visit to the Karachi Grammar School, the boy asked him,
‘Uncle, do you find it very difficult to write in simple Urdu?’ When Yousufi
asked why, the boy said, ‘Because so many of us have failed Urdu because of
you!’
Yousufi’s use of different rhetorical registers, his punning on Urdu poetry,
and his encyclopedic descriptions of regional cultures mean that even the most
astute Urdu reader will miss some of the subtle humour or will be unaware of
certain cultural references. While we have tried to leave this experience intact as
much as possible, English doesn’t have as many rhetorical registers as Urdu
does, and so it inevitably flattens some of the irony that comes when Yousufi
writes in the decadent, florid, ‘high’ Urdu of old. In light of its challenges, we
would like to give several examples of the book’s main idiosyncrasies, namely,
encyclopedic culture, poetry punning, narrative digressions, and cultural
nostalgia.
ENCYCLOPEDIC CULTURE
The narratives of this book span the entire east-west axis of the northern Indian
subcontinent, from the Khyber Pass to the floodplains of Bangladesh, and
Yousufi documents regional culture each step of the way. He is fond of turning
his attention toward subcultural traditions that are quickly becoming obsolete.
This book is, as well as being ‘The Adventures of Basharat Ali Farooqi,
Bumbler and Bungler Extraordinaire,’ an encyclopedia of Pakistani and North
Indian regional cultures in the twentieth century.
When Basharat goes back to Kanpur, his hometown, in his attempt to find
the things that he has missed since immigrating to Pakistan, he meets a number
of old men who, like him, want to know about their hometown, but, unlike him,
haven’t had a chance to travel over the border. One such man is Ramesh
Chander Advani. Basharat narrates his encounter, in which this man speaks
longingly, and in great detail, about his native Baluchistan:
So, sir, I talked to Advani. Or not so much that as listened to his monologue. It was like being
taken prisoner. He wanted to confirm that Jacobabad was as beautiful as it had been when he had
left it as a young man. I mean, was the full moon as full as it had been? Do the palla fish still
jump around in the Sindh River’s waves, shining and glimmering in the sun? Is the weather still
good? (Meaning, is it still 46 degrees in summer or has that declined as well?) Does the hot wind
still blow from Khairpur with its sweet scent of dates? Was there still the yearly cattle fair in Sibi
or not? What about the Sibi darbar? When I told him that at the fair there was now a poetry
festival and poets came from great distances to participate, he went on for a long time lamenting
the fair’s deterioration.
This is only the first third of his monologue. Yousufi takes the time to fold such
evocative, elegant sketches of regional, and increasingly historical, culture into
the overarching narrative of Basharat’s adventures. Often he colours these
descriptions with slight exaggeration to make them lightly humorous.
POETRY PUNNING
The reader will see that sections of the text are indented, and that some are in
italics. All of these passages are lines of poetry: the ones that remain in Roman
type are direct quotes from canonical English poems, given in the English
original; and those that are in italics are Urdu, or occasionally Persian, poetry,
that we have translated. The majority of these lines have been altered by Yousufi
for humorous effects. In ‘A Schoolteacher’s Dream,’ Basharat goes to confront
Maulana Karamat Hussain, a worker for the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals, who has been giving him tickets for using an injured horse.
He finds the man’s shack in one of the poorest sections of Karachi. The man is
absent, but his children, in a seemingly endless string, come out of the shack to
greet Basharat. To this, Yousufi quips, ‘The entire universe is one big net of
children.’ This plays off a line of Ghalib’s poetry:
Yousufi: alam tamam halqa-e-dam-e-ayal hai
Ghalib: alam tamam halqa-e-dam-e-khayal hai
The only difference is one syllable in the second to last word. Ghalib’s couplet is
full of metaphysical implications.
Don’t be beguiled by being, O, Asad,
The world is but a single loop in thought’s net
Yousufi changes Ghalib’s line into something entirely worldly and more
practically challenging—raising a bevy of kids on close to no income at all.
NARRATIVE DIGRESSIONS
Yousufi’s style is situated between the oral and the written, as it toggles between
the recitation of anecdotes, third-person accounts, and intellectual asides.
Yousufi himself functions as the narrator and scribe whom Basharat occasionally
addresses in the course of telling his stories. This oral-textual style appears
immediately in the first chapter, ‘The Mansion’: ‘Long Live Qibla! When I first
met him in 1945, he was as old as I am now. But since I’m talking about my
good friend Basharat Ali Farooqi’s father-in-law, it would be good to let
Basharat say a few things. I’ve heard the stories dozens of times. Now it’s time
for you.’ Here, Yousufi writes in the first person. But he immediately passes the
narrative task to a new storyteller. This back-and-forth between Yousufi and
Basharat continues throughout the book, and it creates the story-within-a-story
texture familiar from classic Eastern, or Oriental, tales.
Yousufi’s narrative style favours the anecdote, the vignette, and the
digressive. The book is episodic and picaresque. Its chapters are arranged not in
strict chronological order but associatively, providing, in toto, the story of some
fifty years of Basharat’s life, and doing so in the way that events are recalled in
conversation. Yousufi has chosen this form self-consciously, or, perhaps, it has
chosen him:
Writing about Basharat’s love for phaetons and horses has brought me far afield. My mentor and
master Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig once shared with me a great piece of wisdom: ‘When you slip
on a banana peel, you should never ever try to stop yourself or put on the brakes because that will
only cause greater injury. Just slip without a care in the world. Enjoy it. In the words of the great
poet Zauq, “Go as far as it goes.” When the banana peel becomes tired, it will stop on its own.
Just relax.’ So I use this principle not only when walking but also when writing and thinking. But
why shouldn’t I go ahead and tell you the whole truth? All my life, the banana peel and the
banana peel alone has been my sole means of conveyance. If you happen to notice a youthful
spring to my step, it’s due to the banana peel. If my pen happens to slip, then I go along with it
happily.
Not only does his own writing lead to digressions, but he also presents characters
that prefer this method of telling:
Now listen to the rest of the story as told by Basharat in his circuitous way. (The fun of it is not
‘long story short’ but ‘short story long.’) In so far as my pen and my memory allow, I will try to
recreate word for word his special idioms, his way of talking, and his lilt and stutter. Whenever he
starts telling a story, his digressions and random asides start telling their own story. He doesn’t
even let you catch your breath.
Digressions are so thoroughly interwoven into the fabric of the book that it
would be wrong to consider them secondary to a supposedly primary narrative.
The book’s reading pleasure is found in ‘short story long’ and not ‘long story
short.’ Not only does Yousufi, the narrator-cum-scribe, intrude upon Basharat’s
stories to offer his own opinion, but two other characters also frequently provide
commentary, though they themselves never appear within the stories themselves.
Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig, mentioned in the quote just above, and Professor
Qazi Abdul Quddus, MA, BT, offer comments in every chapter. Both pretend to
be fonts of wisdom, and their comments demonstrate varying degrees of
ridiculousness. In a way, they resemble Statler and Waldorf, the two hack critics
from the Muppets, who provide inappropriate commentary from the balcony and
yet find themselves intensely funny.
CULTURAL NOSTALGIA
Nostalgia is the feeling of loss over what has disappeared; it can range from
innocent daydreams to a deep and persistent desire to return to the past to
recover what has been left behind. These attempts are almost always futile: what
has disappeared is not simply a person or a place, but that person and place in
time, as they existed then. Outside of that time, they are not the same, and the
difference between the two—the one known and the one returned to—is enough
to frustrate any sense of recovery. Strong nostalgia can disable a person. But
most people live with a weak sense of nostalgia, a tendency to think back to past
times, people, and places, and to reminisce fondly.
Yousufi contextualizes this book as, in part, a critique of nostalgia. It goes
without saying that the partition of the subcontinent created cultural nostalgia for
many displaced people, and so this book can be read as another volume of
Partition literature, a dominant subgenre of north Indian and Pakistani letters.
While Yousufi’s general critique is never directed explicitly toward those
displaced by Partition, inevitably those characters at which he pokes fun for their
symptoms of nostalgia are these very ones. Perhaps as a defense mechanism
against the real losses that immigration entails, including those of the ‘muhajirs,’
or Urdu-speaking Indian Muslims, to the new state of Pakistan, he criticizes the
tendency, especially prevalent among the elderly, to long for the ‘good old’
times and the places and experiences of youth. Examples of this outward critique
are numerous. In his afterword, he likens nostalgia to a drug:
Most of the characters in this book are lost. They live in the past and avoid people at all costs.
They suffer from nostalgia for a different time and place, and they suffer from this individually
and collectively. When someone falls in love with the past and stops anticipating the future, they
get old fast. (Bear in mind that anyone can age before their time—even the young.) If they can’t
get drugs, then the depressed and defeated can find their last refuge in the intoxication of
memories and fantasy: just as the determined and diligent use their iron will to shape their future,
the dead-to-the-world use their imagination to lose themselves in visions of their past, and the
heady rivers of memory descend into the mirages of the mind.
Nostalgia, he writes, is like a drug, or a mirage, something that promises much
and delivers only a paltry version of that promise, if at all.
‘Two Tales of the City’ deals directly with Basharat’s nostalgia for Kanpur,
his hometown. After his wife’s death, a sharp pang of nostalgia overwhelms
him:
According to an old saying, regardless of exactly how many defects old age has, it has one more
burdensome than all the rest combined. And that’s nostalgia. In old age, a person prefers to turn
back from their unwanted, imminent end to recall the places they used to know. In old age, the
past flashes all its dangerous charms. Old, lonely people live in sad houses where they have to
have lights on even at noon; and when bedtime rolls around and they put out the lights, their
minds are lit by the bright glow of memories. As this glow becomes brighter, so too their
desolation becomes more pronounced.
So something like this happened to him as well.
And yet when it comes to characters suffering from nostalgia, Basharat or
otherwise, Yousufi treats them so gently, and their depictions are so endearing
that we can’t take the author’s stated objection too literally. Certainly, those who
suffer from nostalgia are easy, and rewarding, targets of humour, as who, other
than the truly enlightened, hasn’t looked back from time to time with a sense of
longing for yesteryear? Furthermore, Yousufi himself suffers from a sort of
nostalgia—his penchant for antique words—which he acknowledges without
regret:
‘Mirza often taunts me about this,’ I replied. ‘He says that I’m one of the very few who hasn’t
filed a claim for property abandoned back in India, and the reason for this is that before coming to
Pakistan, I dug up all the local Rosetta Stones, stuffed them into my travel-all, and headed over