Pittho's World

By Murtaza Razvi

Highly imaginative stories, full of humour, love, laughter, tragedy and loss ,No, I am no Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights,' I tell Rani, when she agrees to listen to my stories. 'And I am no depraved king,' she says ... Pittho's World is the magical domain of storytelling, of Sheikhu and his lover Rani, of parents, Big Brother, uncles, aunts and grandparents.  And of course, Aunt Pittho, she of the big hips, wielding magic and a stick. The stories originate in Iran, move through Afghanistan to Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, before returning to rest in Pakistan. Spanning two centuries and several generations, these are tales of love and happiness, tragedy and malice, black magic and manslaughter, linked together by two people's love for storytelling, and for each other.  Published posthumously, this delightful work of fiction by one of Pakistan's best-known journalists transports us to places and times long lost to humanity. They are stories of life, but also of death - which waits at the end, leaving in its wake a loneliness that lingers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9789350299906

Murtaza Razvi

Murtaza Razvi has a master's in ancient Indian and Islamic history from the University of the Punjab, Lahore, and a master's in political science from Villanova University, Pennsylvania. He is a journalist with Dawn Media Group and lives with his wife and three daughters in Karachi.

Book preview

Storytelling

‘NO, I AM NO Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights,’ I tell Rani, when she agrees to listen to my stories.

‘And I am no depraved king,’ she says.

We sit up in bed. TV is one thing she does not want in the bedroom. So what to do? Foreplay. Sex. What next? Sex again. Maybe. And after that? We are both kind of insomniac; don’t seem to get enough of each other’s company, or of waking life, even as we quarrel. So we stay awake and listen to each other’s sweet and not-so-sweet nothings. Sweet, because there’s no legal paperwork between us. A lazy defiance of convention keeps us from signing on the dotted line. Sheikhu and Rani, me and her, or Rani and Sheikhu, she and I; it can be said either way because there are no titles involved.

The two of us live in our small, not very perfect world, in a country that’s turning more and more imperfect, as if by design. We could be executed for living together without being married, because fornication here is equated with adultery… since 1979. Not believing in Allah, which applies more to Rani than to myself, is also blasphemy punishable by death… since 1984. But this is no Animal Farm, not just yet; odd strands of humanity can be found here and there.

Yes, I am the medium for storytelling. I grew up in a world crowded with storytellers. Everyone around me had stories to tell—their own, and other people’s. I listened hard, memorized some and was, in time, ready to spin some of my own. It’s all related. From the word go to the very end.

My journey began in Lahore, where I was born and raised, barely fourteen miles from India. It’s a place where distinctions between the past and the present blur. India is always the point of reference—the big, fat neighbour next door, with whom we fought wars, whose memories refuse to fade. In 1947, we wished India had gone away from our lives, but it refused to budge. So did we. Despite all our efforts, Lahore managed to get only fourteen miles away from India. It has gone no farther since. All things Indian have remained like addictions: the food, the song and dance, the kite-flying, the birth and death rituals, the pride in one’s caste and clan—you name it.

The journey back to puritan Muslim roots stretching into Arabia, which began at the birth of Pakistan, proved an uphill task. We lacked the Middle Eastern black-and-white worldview; there remained a huge grey area surrounded by a rainbow—shades of opinion. Even flashes of polytheism: patron saints buried in our soil remain the real, giving gods. They don’t threaten you with destruction or hellfire in the hereafter if you don’t adhere to their teachings, for that’s a task Allah has left to the mullah. There’s no running away from this fascinating world that pits Middle Eastern puritanism against Indian pluralism, as if the two were mutually exclusive. They are not. The stories that come to me say just that.

I am surrounded by an impressive array of pluralistic paraphernalia. Most people close to me—if not all of them— have been clinically mad. Friends tell me that Lahore is a mad city, and they are very proud of it for being so. Maybe that’s why, when I moved to Karachi, I found it very, very sane. I looked hard for madness and found it missing. Somewhere along the great swelling that Karachi underwent after independence, humour was lost. It is a city of migrants, and they flock to it in the thousands, year after year. They come from all over, busy digging their feet into the ground, making a living and so on. They labour, they toil. Some give up along the way, others go looking for greener pastures abroad. The energy they exude in the process eggs on a million new entrants. Few have time for fun and frolic, fewer still for the absurdities of life—which Lahoris, for instance, indulge in wholeheartedly, flaunting it as their culture.

Karachi, unlike Lahore, leaves you alone. In my case, to spin stories. It is a great sea of human diversity, which makes no fair or unfair demands of you. You don’t have to be part of anything. You don’t have to identify yourself or latch on to a clique. Just like the sea that borders the city, it gives you seamless space to be yourself, and tell tales. Until you’ve said it all.

So here goes.

I lost God at the age of eighteen, only to rediscover him ten years later. In the decade that we led our estranged lives, both God and I grew in different directions. At the time of our parting, God was more benevolent and kinder. When we met again, ten years later, and decided to reconcile, it was on his terms. Knowing me, he did not insist on my total submission to his will. Knowing him, and that he was now my need, I did not make a fuss about acknowledging him as the master of my destiny. I did not have the heart to argue with someone I had known for eighteen long years.

The year God and I made up, following my twenty-eighth birthday, it rained in Karachi. The cloudburst was so strong that people came out to the streets to celebrate the rain after a long wait of three dry years. Later, everyone was embarrassed about celebrating when there was a complete civic breakdown for days after the rain. The power went off. Tap water was the next to go. Then there were pools of stagnant water—infested with flies and mosquitoes—that refused to dry up. The potholes on the roads have stayed since then to remind us that we shouldn’t have wished for something we thought was our need. Karachiites have since had a muted response to rain. They know it might be up there, in the skies, and it can make its presence felt when it chooses, but they have stopped longing for it. They love the rain’s kindness in showering water upon them, for it is a rare feat in this desert-surrounded city of fifteen million, but they dread the misery it unleashes. Just like my interactions with God.

I ask: what happens to the soul after it leaves the body? As has been the case always, in our relationship of eighteen years, God has chosen not to help me in my quest—not that I expect a vision or a miracle. Given the kind of casual relationship God and I have, I would be very disturbed if a sign of God were to come to me, like it did to my pious and holy ancestors. But why were they holy and not I, I ask again.

Questions abound and answers elude. Why not begin by asking what happens to the soul when it is in the body? Does it age, mature, feel the pain and anguish of growing up, happiness at crossing a threshold, dealing with a turning point in life? Does it enjoy the presence of near and dear ones, mourn the loss of those who are no more, regret the knowledge of what is known, dare to know the unknown?

Frankly, I don’t know. That is perhaps why I need God back in my life. He, unlike most people I know, is a good listener. He does not talk back, even when you unload your story onto him, or demand an explanation. He just listens.

My first memory of excitement is from a summer many, many years ago. My uncle had come to visit us in Lahore from Dhaka. I was barely three-and-a-half years old. He took me back with him to Dhaka on a Trident plane. The journey lasted some two-and-a-half hours. Then the plane landed at the monsoon-washed airport. Driving out of the building, there was a strange, sticky feel to the air. I remember I kept rubbing my palms, but the stickiness wouldn’t go away. Looking back, what a sharp contrast it must have been even for a child that young, from the baking, dry June heat of Lahore! I had never seen so much greenery before, never felt so much warm moisture in the air.

A feeling of déjà vu gripped me years later, on another visit to Dhaka. It was as if little had changed in the magical land that was the other half of my lost country. From the sky, it seemed all of Bangladesh lay under water, with the roads below looking like long, black snakes swimming their way through the monsoon flood. When I came out of the airport, the air was just as damp as the first time I had felt it as a little boy. On the way to the city, the roads were as crowded as my mind, with childhood memories rushing forth. I was able to relate to the city at once in a very strange way—like meeting God anew after having lost him for ten years.

I celebrated Dhaka’s rain-washed skyline, the damp, wide greens and the flooded landscape, the seamless rivers, over which grey clouds gathered for rendezvous. It was as if the moving water in the river and all around the roads made its way up to the sky, to come crashing down again with thunder. Little had changed in this mysteriously beautiful land. Time stood still, as it were, even though it had moved on.

Lahore, the city of my birth, lay further away from Dhaka than it used to. It was over two decades, an international and a domestic flight and a passport check away. ‘Karachi, Dhaka’, I had read on the label of Tibet Snow, a skin-whitening concoction, in an Asian store in a London suburb years after East Pakistan had ceased to be, and it had taken me back to Dhaka, the fallen city of my lost half-country.

Meeting big cities, their presence spread out before you for miles on end, is like meeting God. They can leave you awestruck, like Moses on Mount Sinai, or cold and shivering, like Muhammad in the cave of Hira…

Thence begins a new life—as it did for my ancestors, when they moved to Lahore from Iran in the nineteenth century.

‘I never thought you are capable of sensing continuity in history; its rolling into the present, giving a destiny-like sense to what’s to come,’ Rani tells me in a reflective tone. ‘You should write it down someday. But before that you must tell me all the stories you have. Less philosophy and more tales, promise?’

I nod in complete harmonic acquiescence, a rare treat between us, even though we’re not married.

2

Three Holy Men

IT WAS SHORTLY BEFORE the execution of my great-great-grandmother Zahereh in 1852, by Nasruddin Shah, the Qachar ruler of Iran, that her father and uncles set out for India. The woman tore her veil to shreds at a meeting of a handful of emancipated women of Tehran led by the Babis, the followers of Seyyed Ali Mohammed the Bab (‘Gate to enlightenment’ in Arabic). The Bab founded the Babi faith, considered heresy by the Qachars and the religious establishment. As it turned out, the Babis were to be the forerunners of the Bahà’i faith, which in turn was founded by Mirza Hosssein Ali Bahaullah, the promised Mahdi the Messiah. Whether thirty-year-old Zahereh, trained in Islamic tenets and classical Persian literature, had converted to the Babi faith remained a mystery, but she was put in front of the firing squad along with the heretics. A huge Tehran crowd cheered on: ‘Marg bar monkereen, marg bar mortedeen’ (Death to those who deny the truth, death to heretics) as they shot the ‘heretics’ dead.

The scandal would have shaken the roots of Zahereh’s very conservative family that presided over the religious establishment of Qom if it hadn’t been for her father, the Grand Ayatollah ‘Bozorg’. ‘Big Brother’, they called him in the holy city with the ancestral shrine. The man had a premonition a few weeks before his daughter was to tear off her veil in the street and court arrest. It is said that he had woken up earlier than usual for prayers on that chilly February morning, when Siberian winds blew a blizzard across the Persian plateau. He summoned his two younger brothers, Ayatollahs ‘Middle’ and ‘Young’, to his presence.

‘I’ve been ordered to leave Persia at once and head for Hindustan. You are free to choose your own course: stay here in Qom or accompany me east—the choice is yours. I must leave soon after the prayer. You have until then to make up your minds,’ he declared solemnly, as he had been told in his dream to make the announcement to his near and dear ones. The unspoken secret among his followers in Qom was that the twelfth Imam, Mahdi the Messiah, living in occultation under Allah’s command since the early ninth century, was in touch with Big Brother from time to time. He never publicly confirmed or denied the assumption.

When the morning prayer was over, the old man looked up to his brothers from the prayer mat with piercing eyes. Middle Brother informed him that arrangements had been made and camels readied for the entire family to set out at first light to traverse the grand Persian desert, with Hindustan as their destination, praying they could survive the blizzard. Big Brother’s face lit up: the family had behaved the way he had expected—unlike his rebellious daughter, who had, just a year ago, gone off to Tehran to pursue her own destiny.

‘Death is beckoning her, so who am I to come between her and her Creator, to whom she must return at the appointed hour?’ Big Brother had thundered at Zahereh’s departure from Qom. The ultra-conservative, religious environment of the city, she said, was stifling her intellect.

Starting out from Qom on that freezing February morning, the family headed north-east to the still colder climes of Khorasan. A thousand miles across the desert in Mash’had lay buried the eighth Imam and the great ancestor. On the way there, three infants died of the cold and a newlywed daughter-in-law succumbed to a miscarriage.

‘Migration is the will of God, to which we must all submit. Each one of our ancestors, the twelve great Imams, was ordained to lay his and his children’s lives in the way of God. Endurance of hardship is the first step on the path of purity, which we, the descendents of the Holy Prophet of God, Mohammed—peace be upon him and his progeny—have been promised. God forgive us for our sins, for indeed we have sinned, knowingly and in ignorance,’ was Big Brother’s long refrain in the face of adversity.

From Mash’had, moving on to Herat in Afghanistan and then through the rocky plateau to Kabul and beyond, the caravan climbed up the Khyber Pass to come down the other side of the Hindukush mountains into the plains of Hindustan. The day they crossed the Indus into the plains of Punjab, they celebrated Nauroze, the Persian new year, on 21 March. Back home in Iran, festivities traditionally lasted thirteen days, with a different colour of food cooked on each day, until the thirteen basic hues were covered and the spring breeze started to make its presence felt. In the plains of Punjab, it was already warm, with mustard greens having turned into burning yellows and oranges.

On the fourteenth day of the new year, it rained, and Big Brother ordered the collection of rainwater, the Aab-e-Neesaan, in large earthen pitchers, for the water that poured down from the skies for a month after the start of the new year had healing qualities. By this time, the pitchers were all that was left of their earthly property; the camels had been sold to buy food in the strange land. No sign of God came to guide the party to a welcoming place where they could settle down, even if temporarily.

When they reached the banks of the Ravi and saw the minarets and havelis of Lahore touching the horizon across the river on a mild April afternoon, Big Brother offered a prayer of thanksgiving.

‘This was the place in Hindustan I was told to go and conquer, all praise be to Allah Almighty,’ he shouted, rising from his prayer mat. There was a sense of relief at last. Mothers hugged their little ones with joy, their eyes lighting up.

‘This is the city of the Bibiyaan-i-Pak Daaman (the pious ladies of the House of the Holy Prophet), who sought refuge here after the Karbala tragedy,’ cried Big Brother’s aged wife, who had only heard of the legend in Qom.

‘We shall go and pay homage to our brave great-aunts, who prayed to the Almighty to part the earth and swallow them alive before the Hindu Raja’s men reached the mound where they had camped and cast their dirty eyes on their luminous faces.’ She narrated the story with tears rolling down her wide, swollen cheeks that betrayed her Mongol ancestry.

The next day, the party crossed the river on a ferry and entered Lahore from Taxali Gate. The degenerating red-light district of Hira Mandi (named after Hira Singh, who belonged to the clan of the late Maharaja Ranjit Singh) greeted them. The city had looked pretty only from a distance. You could not tell from across the river what lay scattered at the feet of the impressive mosques, minarets and multistoreyed havelis rising to the sky.

Inside Taxali Gate, where the mint that churned