Memory of a mildewing photograph (perhaps the work of the same poor brained photographer whose life-size blow-ups so nearly cost him his life): Aadam Aziz, aglow with optimism-fever, shakes hands with a man of sixty or so, an impatient, sprightly type with a lock of white hair falling across his brow like a kindly scar. It is Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird. (“You see, Doctor Sahib, I keep myself fit. You wish to hit me in the stomach? Try, try. I’m in tiptop shape.” … In the photographs, folds of a loose white shirt conceal the stomach, and my grandfather’s fist is not clenched, but swallowed up by the hand of the ex-conjurer.) And behind them, looking benignly on, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, who was going white in blotches, a disease which leaked into history and erupted on an enormous scale shortly after Independence … “I am the victim,” the Rani whispers, through photographed lips that never move, “the hapless victim of my cross-cultural concerns. My skin is the outward expression of the internationalism of my spirit.” Yes, there is a conversation going on in this photograph, as like expert ventriloquists the optimists meet their leader. Beside the Rani—listen carefully now; history and ancestry are about to meet!—stands a peculiar fellow, soft and paunchy, his eyes like stagnant ponds, his hair long like a poet’s. Nadir Khan, the Hummingbird’s personal secretary. His feet, if they were not frozen by the snapshot, would be shuffling in embarrassment. He mouths through his foolish, rigid smile, “It’s true; I have written verses …” Whereupon Mian Abdullah interrupts, booming through his open mouth with glints of pointy teeth: “But what verses! Not one rhyme in page after page! …” And the Rani, gently: “A modernist, then?” And Nadir, shyly: “Yes.” What tensions there are now in the still, immobile scene! What edgy banter, as the Hummingbird speaks: “Never mind about that; art should uplift; it should remind us of our glorious literary heritage!” … And is that a shadow, or a frown on his secretary’s brow? … Nadir’s voice, issuing lowaslow from the fading picture: “I do not believe in high art, Mian Sahib. Now art must be beyond categories; my poetry and—oh—the game of hit-the-spittoon are equals.” … So now the Rani, kind woman that she is, jokes, “Well, I shall set aside a room, perhaps; for paan-eating and spittoon-hittery. I have a superb silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli, and you must all come and practice. Let the walls be splashed with our inaccurate expectorating! They will be honest stains, at least.” And now the photograph has run out of words; now I notice, with my mind’s eye, that all the while the Hummingbird has been staring towards the door, which is past my grandfather’s shoulder at the very edge of the picture. Beyond the door, history calls. The Hummingbird is impatient to get away … but he has been with us, and his presence has brought us two threads which will pursue me through all my days: the thread that leads to the ghetto of the magicians; and the thread that tells the story of Nadir the rhymeless, verbless poet and a priceless silver spittoon.
“What nonsense,” our Padma says. “How can a picture talk? Stop now; you must be too tired to think.” But when I say to her that Mian Abdullah had the strange trait of humming without pause, humming in a strange way, neither musical nor unmusical, but somehow mechanical, the hum of an engine or dynamo, she swallows it easily enough, saying judiciously, “Well, if he was such an energetic man, it’s no surprise to me.” She’s all ears again; so I warm to my theme and report that Mian Abdullah’s hum rose and fell in direct relationship to his work rate. It was a hum that could fall low enough to give you toothache, and when it rose to its highest, most feverish pitch, it had the ability of inducing erections in anyone within its vicinity. (“Arré baap,” Padma laughs, “no wonder he was so popular with the men!”) Nadir Khan, as his secretary, was attacked constantly by his master’s vibratory quirk, and his ears jaw penis were forever behaving according to the dictates of the Hummingbird. Why, then, did Nadir stay, despite erections which embarrassed him in the company of strangers, despite aching molars and a work schedule which often occupied twenty-two hours in every twenty-four? Not—I believe—because he saw it as his poetic duty to get close to the center of events and transmute them into literature. Nor because he wanted fame for himself. No: but Nadir had one thing in common with my grandfather, and it was enough. He, too, suffered from the optimism disease.
Like Aadam Aziz, like the Rani of Cooch Naheen, Nadir Khan loathed the Muslim League. (“That bunch of toadies!” the Rani cried in her silvery voice, swooping around the octaves like a skier. “Landowners with vested interests to protect! What do they have to do with Muslims? They go like toads to the British and form governments for them, now that the Congress refuses to do it!” It was the year of the “Quit India” resolution. “And what’s more,” the Rani said with finality, “they are mad. Otherwise why would they want to partition India?”)
Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird, had created the Free Islam Convocation almost single-handedly. He invited the leaders of the dozens of Muslim splinter groups to form a loosely federated alternative to the dogmatism and vested interests of the Leaguers. It had been a great conjuring trick, because they had all come. That was the first Convocation, in Lahore; Agra would see the second. The marquees would be filled with members of agrarian movements, urban laborers’ syndicates, religious divines and regional groupings. It would see confirmed what the first assembly had intimated: that the League, with its demand for a partitioned India, spoke on nobody’s behalf but its own. “They have turned their backs on us,” said the Convocation’s posters, “and now they claim we’re standing behind them!” Mian Abdullah opposed the partition.
In the throes of the optimism epidemic, the Hummingbird’s patron, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, never mentioned the clouds on the horizon. She never pointed out that Agra was a Muslim League stronghold, saying only, “Aadam my boy, if the Hummingbird wants to hold Convocation here, I’m not about to suggest he goes to Allahabad.” She was bearing the entire expense of the event without complaint or interference; not, let it be said, without making enemies in the town. The Rani did not live like other Indian princes. Instead of teetar-hunts, she endowed scholarships. Instead of hotel scandals, she had politics. And so the rumors began. “These scholars of hers, man, everyone knows they have to perform extra-curricular duties. They go to her bedroom in the dark, and she never lets them see her blotchy face, but bewitches them into bed with her voice of a singing witch!” Aadam Aziz had never believed in witches. He enjoyed her brilliant circle of friends who were as much at home in Persian as they were in German. But Naseem Aziz, who half-believed the stories about the Rani, never accompanied him to the princess’s house. “If God meant people to speak many tongues,” she argued, “why did he put only one in our heads?”
And so it was that none of the Hummingbird’s optimists were prepared for what happened. They played hit-the-spittoon, and ignored the cracks in the earth.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. According to legend, then—according to the polished gossip of the ancients at the paan-shop—Mian Abdullah owed his downfall to his purchase, at Agra railway station, of a peacock-feather fan, despite Nadir Khan’s warning about bad luck. What is more, on that night of crescent moons, Abdullah had been working with Nadir, so that when the new moon rose they both saw it through glass. “These things matter,” the betel-chewers say. “We have been alive too long, and we know.” (Padma is nodding her head in agreement.)
The Convocation offices were on the ground floor of the historical faculty building at the University campus. Abdullah and Nadir were coming to the end of their night’s work; the Hummingbird’s hum was low-pitched and Nadir’s teeth were on edge. There was a poster on the office wall, expressing Abdullah’s favorite anti-Partition sentiment, a quote from the poet Iqbal: “Where can we find a land that is foreign to God?” And now the assassins reached the campus.
Facts: Abdullah had plenty of enemies. The British attitude to him was always ambiguous. Brigadier Dodson hadn’t wanted him in town. There was a knock on the door and Nadir answered it. Six new moons came
into the room, six crescent knives held by men dressed all in black, with covered faces. Two men held Nadir while the others moved towards the Hummingbird.
“At this point,” the betel-chewers say, “the Hummingbird’s hum became higher. Higher and higher, yara, and the assassin’s eyes became wide as their members made tents under their robes. Then—Allah, then!—the knives began to sing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high-high like he’d never hummed before. His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him; one broke on a rib, but the others quickly became stained with red. But now—listen!—Abdullah’s humming rose out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe eight thousand four hundred and twenty pie-dogs. On that night, it is certain that some were eating, others dying; there were some who fornicated and others who did not hear the call. Say about two thousand of these; that left six thousand four hundred and twenty of the curs, and all of these turned and ran for the University, many of them rushing across the railway tracks from the wrong side of town. It is well known that this is true. Everyone in town saw it, except those who were asleep. They went noisily, like an army, and afterwards their trail was littered with bones and dung and bits of hair … and all the time Abdullahji was humming, humming-humming, and the knives were singing. And know this: suddenly one of the killers’ eyes cracked and fell out of its socket. Afterwards the pieces of glass were found, ground into the carpet!”
They say, “When the dogs came Abdullah was nearly dead and the knives were blunt … they came like wild things, leaping through the window, which had no glass because Abdullah’s hum had shattered it … they thudded against the door until the wood broke … and then they were everywhere, baba! … some without legs, others lacking hair, but most of them had some teeth at least, and some of these were sharp … And now see this: the assassins cannot have feared interruption, because they had posted no guards; so the dogs got them by surprise … the two men holding Nadir Khan, that spineless one, fell beneath the weight of the beasts, with maybe sixty-eight dogs on their necks … afterwards the killers were so badly damaged that nobody could say who they were.”
“At some point,” they say, “Nadir dived out of the window and ran. The dogs and assassins were too busy to follow him.”
Dogs? Assassins? … If you don’t believe me, check. Find out about Mian Abdullah and his Convocations. Discover how we’ve swept his story under the carpet … then let me tell how Nadir Khan, his lieutenant, spent three years under my family’s rugs.
As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art. “Look at me,” he said before he killed himself, “I wanted to be a miniaturist and I’ve got elephantiasis instead!” The swollen events of the night of the crescent knives reminded Nadir Khan of his room-mate, because life had once again, perversely, refused to remain lifesized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed him.
How did Nadir Khan run across the night town without being noticed? I put it down to his being a bad poet, and as such, a born survivor. As he ran, there was a self-consciousness about him, his body appearing to apologize for behaving as if it were in a cheap thriller, of the sort hawkers sell on railway stations, or give away free with bottles of green medicine that can cure colds, typhoid, impotence, homesickness and poverty … On Cornwallis Road, it was a warm night. A coal-brazier stood empty by the deserted rickshaw rank. The paan-shop was closed and the old men were asleep on the roof, dreaming of tomorrow’s game. An insomniac cow, idly chewing a Red and White cigarette packet, strolled by a bundled street-sleeper, which meant he would wake in the morning, because a cow will ignore a sleeping man unless he’s about to die. Then it nuzzles at him thoughtfully. Sacred cows eat anything.
My grandfather’s large old stone house, bought from the proceeds of the gemstone shops and blind Ghani’s dowry settlement, stood in the darkness, set back a dignified distance from the road. There was a walled-in garden at the rear and by the garden door was the low outhouse rented cheaply to the family of old Hamdard and his son Rashid the rickshaw boy. In front of the outhouse was the well with its cow-driven waterwheel, from which irrigation channels ran down to the small cornfield which lined the house all the way to the gate in the perimeter wall along Cornwallis Road. Between house and field ran a small gully for pedestrians and rickshaws. In Agra the cycle-rickshaw had recently replaced the kind where a man stood between wooden shafts. There was still trade for the horse-drawn tongas, but it was dwindling … Nadir Khan ducked in through the gate, squatted for a moment with his back to the perimeter wall, reddening as he passed his water. Then, seemingly upset by the vulgarity of his decision, he fled to the cornfield and plunged in. Partially concealed by the sun-withered stalks, he lay down in the fetal position.
Rashid the rickshaw boy was seventeen and on his way home from the cinema. That morning he’d seen two men pushing a low trolley on which were mounted two enormous handpainted posters, back-to-back, advertising the new film Gai-Wallah, starring Rashid’s favourite actor Dev. FRESH FROM FIFTY FIERCE WEEKS IN DELHI! STRAIGHT FROM SIXTY-THREE SHARPSHOOTER WEEKS IN BOMBAY! the posters cried. SECOND RIP-ROARIOUS YEAR! The film was an eastern Western. Its hero, Dev, who was not slim, rode the range alone. It looked very like the Indo-Gangetic plain. Gai-Wallah means cow-fellow and Dev played a sort of one-man vigilante force for the protection of cows. SINGLE-HANDED! and DOUBLE-BARRELLED!, he stalked the many herds of cattle which were being driven across the range to the slaughterhouse, vanquished the cattlemen and liberated the sacred beasts. (The film was made for Hindu audiences; in Delhi it had caused riots. Muslim Leaguers had driven cows past cinemas to the slaughter, and had been mobbed.) The songs and dances were good and there was a beautiful nautch girl who would have looked more graceful if they hadn’t made her dance in a ten-gallon cowboy hat. Rashid sat on a bench in the front stalls and joined in the whistles and cheers. He ate two samosas, spending too much money; his mother would be hurt but he’d had a fine time. As he pedalled his rickshaw home he practiced some of the fancy riding he’d seen in the film, hanging down low on one side, freewheeling down a slight slope, using the rickshaw the way Gai-Wallah used his horse to conceal him from his enemies. Eventually he reached up, turned the handlebars and to his delight the rickshaw moved sweetly through the gate and down the gully by the cornfield. Gai-Wallah had used this trick to steal up on a gang of cattlemen as they sat in the brush, drinking and gambling. Rashid applied the brakes and flung himself into the cornfield, running—FULL-TILT!—at the unsuspecting cattlemen, his guns cocked and ready. As he neared their campfire he released his “yell of hate” to frighten them, YAAAAAAAA! Obviously he did not really shout so close to the Doctor Sahib’s house, but he distended his mouth as he ran, screaming silently, BLAMM! BLAMM! Nadir Khan had been finding sleep hard to come by and now he opened his eyes. He saw—EEEYAAAH!—a wild stringy figure coming at him like a mail-train, yelling at the top of his voice—but maybe he had gone deaf, because there wasn’t any noise!—and he was rising to his feet, the shriek was just passing his over-plump lips, when Rashid saw him and found voice as well. Hooting in terrified unison, they both turned tail and ran. Then they stopped, each having noted the other’s flight, and peered at one another through the shrivelling corn. Rashid recognized Nadir Khan, saw his torn clothes and was deeply troubled.
“I am a friend,” Nadir said foolishly. “I must see Doctor Aziz.”
“But the Doctor is asleep, and is not in the cornfield.” Pull yourself together, Rashid told himself, stop talking nonsense! This is Mian Abdullah’s friend! … But Nadir didn’t seem to have noticed; his face was working furiously, trying to get out some words which had stuck like shreds of chicken between his teeth … “My life,” he managed it at last, “is in danger.”
And now Rashid, still full of the spirit of Gai-Wallah, came to the rescue. He led Nadir to a door in the side of the house. It was bolted an
d locked; but Rashid pulled, and the lock came away in his hand. “Indian-made,” he whispered, as if that explained everything. And, as Nadir stepped inside, Rashid hissed, “Count on me completely, Sahib. Mum’s the word! I swear on my mother’s gray hairs.”
He replaced the lock on the outside. To have actually saved the Hummingbird’s right-hand man! … But from what? Whom? … Well, real life was better than the pictures, sometimes.