Goodbye to Urdu: A Language Uttered in a Dream

By Ali Daniel

Dreams that come true hurt us most in future.
People are not afraid to go to hell because they’ve already been through a hell here. A preacher tries to put fear of graves in their hearts in graphic detail, but they mock him.
Nothing new, they are so used to it — visceral fear in real life.

The story of a boy who grapples with the death of his father. He tries to find the answers in the life passed in his village in the soft light of the night and the brutal sunlight of the day. It is not only the loss of childhood dreams but also the language spoken in them. Slowly and surely he watches a ghetto surreptitiously encroaching upon his family and community. There a bird refuses to recognize another bird. Exiled there with the same seasons, now ruthless and relentlessly painful, he confuses the cries of the birds with the cries of the children. It’s just not the fear for himself but the fear for generations to come. What will happen to them? People have a different criterion for buying homes there. They look for a place where they will not be attacked at night.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Oct 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543706901

Ali Daniel

Ali Daniel was born in UP, India. Postgraduate in history, he has been on and off a teacher on a hill station and the plains of India. He has no family of his own and lives on different campuses of schools and colleges. Now he lives in Lucknow.

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Copyright © 2020 by Kausar Ali Khan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction and all characters, places and incidents described in this book are the product of author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Father

THE VILLAGE

Chapter 1 Writing in Stone

Chapter 2 The Bush Family and the Bushes

Chapter 3 Sparrows in March

Chapter 4 Red Shoes

Chapter 5 Blacker than the Black Storm

Chapter 6 Terror, the Prodigal Father

Chapter 7 The Broken Pieces of Mirror Which Hurt the Eyes

Chapter 8 The Winter

Chapter 9 The Night

Chapter 10 Spider Family

Chapter 11 The Rain

Chapter 12 The Headmaster

Chapter 13 The Afternoon Sun

Chapter 14 Gum-dish

Chapter 15 The Long Journey of a Rickshaw

Chapter 16 The Newspaper Headlines

Chapter 17 Grandfather

Chapter 18 Daydreaming in the Night

Chapter 19 The Stairs to Happiness

Chapter 20 A Summer of Disquiet

Chapter 21 Beating Around the Bush

Chapter 22 Beauty in the Bushes

Chapter 23 A Villain’s Script

Chapter 24 The Graves Without Names

Chapter 25 The Keys Without the Locks

Chapter 26 Three Red Doors

Chapter 27 The Gun

THE GHETTO

Chapter 1 Dead Birds

Chapter 2 The Sun Shines Too Bright Here

Chapter 3 Fish Don’t Shed Tears in Water

Chapter 4 The Word Is Out

Chapter 5 The Fright Train

Chapter 6 Three Seasons in the Ghetto

Chapter 7 Waiting for a Penniless Boy

Chapter 8 The Winter Will Follow

Chapter 9 Spring

Chapter 10 Waiting for the Loo, the Hot Wind

Chapter 11 The Moth Feast

Chapter 12 Mubarakpur

Chapter 13 Wishing for a Solitary Confinement

THE FACTORY

Chapter 1 Praying on the Road

Chapter 2 The Girl with a Book

Chapter 3 An Elephant Ride with the Sleeping Woman

Chapter 4 Return to the Ghetto

Chapter 5 Streetlamp Poems

Chapter 6 The Wedding Poet

Chapter 7 The Bushes Gone with the Dust Storm

Husain

Mother

Hasan

Hasan and the Return of the Prodigal Father

Far

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

F ather shot himself to death in his gun shop where he had sat on a ramshackle chair all his life. It was like a violent shaking of the earth whose vibration you felt even after the eyes were opened, or you were still sobbing after the heart-rending cry had stopped in a dream.

It was a cold foggy morning of those winter days when District Magistrate usually would announce school holidays because of the extreme weather. It was a deliberate decision, or he just took it on an impulse. Maybe he thought and thought all night or for many many nights. Tossing and turning on the bed or lying still, not able to shut eyes for a moment. In the empty house, watching the walls and ceiling all the time until the walls started to close in, or the walls started to slip away from the grasp of his eyes, and the ceiling turned upside down like an umbrella in the gusty rain. Fear of a dawn or waiting for it so that it would end everything. It was a hell without a fire. I might never know, or there could be an answer at the end of the day. But my mother prayed that it was the time an apocalypse should hit the earth. Hundreds of thoughts, wounds and worms assailed me at the same time, and I could concentrate not on one. Like numerous red ants roaming around the brain. My imagination ran fast as if it was separate from me, like a tethered horse running away with the rope and the peg. Like the high fever in childhood when the sunlight looked so different, and the mosquitoes sounded weird on a hot night. My mother shrieked on her cell phone as my hands stopped over the washbasin. The same hands which were going to splash water on my face. I requested my mother to change her caller tune. After that I was always scared of a phone ringing; whenever it rang I prayed first before picking it up. For many days I felt my cell phone was ringing somewhere. Sometimes it was ringing in my head without a call. If I lost sight of it anytime, I heard it vibrating all the time somewhere.

My mother kept on saying: We’re coming, we’re coming!

All night I had watched protest on Tahrir Square and waited with bated breath for the good news when Hosni Mubarak would step down. I was washing my face when the horrible news came.

It has happened so often that at such a time, either I am washing my face or wiping it on a towel. My head was bent on the washbasin and water was in my cupped hands. The cell phone rang. I held my breath as my mother yelled with a disaster in her voice: What!?

I had the gut feeling that something terrible had happened. I stopped where I was in my motion – my palms cupped on my face and my body bent over the basin. Mother didn’t wait for a second. Father is dead, he’s shot himself! In panic, she always forgot to say your father.

Another phone call. I’d never forget that cell phone, the ubiquitous Nokia mobile phone, whose famous and horrible ringtone I would hear and recognise again in the movie – A Mighty Heart, when Angelina Jolie, playing the role of Mariane Pearl tried to contact her missing husband again and again.

Someone has murdered your father, spoke his neighbour. I was too shocked to argue with him.

I know, we’re coming, I could only utter these words. Now I keep my cell phone silent or on vibration and miss so many calls. My family gets irritated, and it can be hazardous professionally. Once I was standing on the green grass in a school lawn and it rang; I saw the name of my town and my face fell. Even the children who were standing near me felt this. I had a sense that my face must have turned red or white. Go where no phone signal reaches you! When the doomsday dawns, it will start from this town: the images that flashes and penetrate your mind without your will, and the words that whisper make you feel like hitting your head against a seedy yellow government wall.

I use my cell phone for reading, direction, watching movies but hardly for phoning. I was going home after five or six years. I was always weak with dates. Whenever I visited home: the first question my relative or an acquaintance on the road, or a guest in the house would ask: When did you arrive? Either I would shy away from the question or strain my mind to remember, and I was always hard pressed to recall the date. Sometimes I told the wrong date to satisfy the curiosity of the relative.

One relative who was sitting near me in the taxi kept phoning his wife all the time as if we were going on sightseeing: now we’ve reached this place, that market is crossed, the level crossing is closed, and we have left that railway station behind. Two roads forked as we were about to enter the town, and I forgot which road we should take. I failed to tell the driver, and he drove a few metres the wrong way. The relative with the phone was annoyed. I didn’t even know the way to my home, he seemed to suggest with his exaggerated gestures and expression.

It was often in cold weather that misfortune befell people here; the old and infirm, who were ill for many years, passed away in those six or seven days of extreme cold weather. When they built the houses here, they forgot about the cold and misfortune – both lasted only for a few days. So the house had a big courtyard, an open veranda, twisted doors with damp which couldn’t be shut, and windows with broken panes which were never fixed properly.

It was cold too when I was riding my bicycle, looking for a doctor, as the darkness and smoke fell on the road plastered with mud, dry cow-dung, and imprints of worn out slippers of tired men. The sky was like the ceiling of a seedy theatre, a few light bulbs twinkled, and you knew where the fused ones were fixed. The light would usually fail in the evening when it was needed most. The doctor was not there, and Mother was very ill that night. Sometimes it looked like a typical city here: people sleeping at the side of the roads, squalor and poverty. I saw almost half a face sleeping under a grey blanket. But I was looking for a doctor, and I tried to find him behind tin shacks and advertising boards which were fading, peeling and remained obscure. I did not ask for the direction because I had stopped trusting people. When I passed the beds in a row with fresh cotton sheets, I saw blood – lots of blood. One shopkeeper was scared of his customers. He started to sell behind an iron grille, still the customers poured on him like a crowd of zombies. Then I found a shop which looked like a doctor`s clinic – spacious, cold and empty. There I asked a glass of sherbet. I was afraid if I had asked too much, though I was ready to pay more.

Someone told me to eat something. I said that I had a fast. Again I felt my cell phone ringing in the air, though nobody was phoning me. The few relatives and acquaintances who had gathered around us were bewildered for keeping fast at such an unusual time when, after the few hour of the crack of the dawn, your father would shoot himself. They didn’t know that I hadn’t slept the night before too, waiting for Hosni Mubarak to abdicate, to step down. Here the cats had forgotten to cry or meow in their natural voice; instead they issued forth anguish cries of humans. Long time they wept like children. Now we had all gone silent, the shock was so heart wrenching that we forgot to cry. Suddenly a lady uttered a piercing cry, Oh! You’ve lost your home! She sobbed into her maroon shawl and wiped her tears with its dirty corner. She did not know that I had lost my home long ago. Last time we were there, the termites were eating my father’s suitcases – everything that was important and valuable in his life he had put inside them. In the late morning he flung the suitcases on the misshaped brick-floor in the courtyard, and they literally fell apart, like domino effect: their sides, covers and bottom fell with a touch of a finger. Termites like fine dust were encroaching on the usual contents of his life: letters, deeds, agreements, black and white photographs, albums, files, and diaries. Everything he touched was turned into dust. Unlike the Midas touch, it was my father’s touch.

Red spots of blood I glimpsed on his crumpled white cotton shroud, which I only remembered after a long time had elapsed. When they were taking his body inside the door, somebody forgot to put the palms under his legs, and they slid down and folded. At that moment, I felt like I was hanging from the ceiling upside down like in Spanish inquisition. There was black earth under my feet either from darkness, or the earth must be wet.

Last time when he had set out for his shop … if he had locked the door of the house, or the boy reminded him. Did he need to lock the door? Later on someone told me that he did lock the door and gave the keys to a neighbour. Almost every day he used to take this walk two times a day for years. So he locked the door finally and the last time intuitively as he wished to save the house but not himself.

We were sitting on red plastic chairs before the funeral; I didn’t know who had brought them. It was so quite, the quite like those chairs. Many people didn’t recognise me, my jacket was too long and loose which could only fit me well with two sweaters inside. I forgot this arrangement in the morning. My father gave me no time for this. My trousers were not ironed, and I felt two ladies were standing on the edge of a rooftop, and they were watching me constantly. Once I imagined myself as a black and white sketch with water colours from an old story book: I was facing the shut door, and a small leather bag was dangling from my right hand. A shriek or scream (can’t tell the difference now) would pierce the silence. When I spoke, my voice sounded so different as if it was not me, but I was listening to someone else. Sometimes in a dream you are present, but you can’t spot yourself: you see the house, narrow alleys, cots in the veranda near the brick walls, soft light, and the grey earth. A few fakirs visited the house, and they stood near the half opened door, however, nothing had been cooked for days, probably months. I followed the funeral and jumped over the rivulets of dirty water as if from a long habit. The clay-brick houses, chipped doors passed by me like a train slowly leaving the platform and streetlights. I didn’t look left or right but kept my eyes to the earth. The tears wouldn’t wet my eyes, they were dry and I smothered a cry. When the funeral procession turned sharply at a narrow corner, I heard the sound of a rivulet and the water touched my shoes. Closeness of water makes you cry. We feel like crying when the rain doesn’t stop for days, or we sit before a filled bucket in the bathroom.

Long time back, in this ghetto house, it took many days for me to translate an Urdu couplet of Mir in English: Toady I went on crying washing my hands, the same hands have gone to sleep lying near my head. Here in this ghetto house whose crumbling and misshapen doors and windows would not shut properly, I had lost the pages. I wouldn’t even search for them. I never search for the lost things. Then I would even lose the hope of finding them. If you search, you will always find something missing.

The white shroud touched the whitewashed corner of a protruding wall as the space was not enough. We passed the mosque where he used to pray with a crying face in happy times. I used to look at his face that distorted and contracted with every silent word spoken with moving lips in prayer. I felt embarrassed lest my friends should see him in such a condition.

He left behind one frayed woollen cap, a red torch, blue diaries, and a trial for land. He had no bank account: all his money was buried in the forgotten entries in his blue diaries as loans and gifted money to his friends and acquaintances. Someone told me there were only 1100 rupees in his blood stained shirt, and I wished he’d never return it to me. Few black and white photographs remained in a family album which I had made for a school project. My brother had made three rounds to the city, which was five km. away, to buy coloured paper, crepe paper, cardboard and black photo corners with gum to stick the photographs in. The teacher was sitting on a wooden chair on the grass without a table. He held the project in one hand and with the other hand put a tick against my name. He didn’t look at the album even for a split second and threw it on the grass on piles. The termites took more time to turn it into dust. The termites did not touch the letters which I had written to my father from university. I thrust a rusty iron wire into the stack of letters – inland letters, postcards, envelops, and hanged them up by the ceiling. I wished to read them again, but I couldn’t because there was no home where I could. And in my father’s home, I could no longer stay. Sometimes I saw him in my dreams, wearing his well ironed and starched dresses which were also going to dust and ashes. These dreams started even before I went to sleep. He was loitering on the road in clear bright daylight near his gun-shop where he ended his life. He evaded my gaze: he looked ill, dejected and unshaven for days. He was indifferent to the bustling crowd and the people walking on the road as if he were an invisible alien; maybe in the night when he went to sleep he remembered everything – the faces, boards on the shuttered shops, and the legs of a rickshaw-puller. This road passed before his shop where I’d watch him in so many nightmares. If he saw me he’d change his way and turn into another alley, as if he had changed his mind. This time I held his hand and we entered into the dark shop. His friends followed, avoiding the silent mosque which stood like a silhouette. The smell of gunpowder was overwhelming. There was a wooden chair whose netting was broken in the middle, and if anyone sat on it, he sat as if he was sitting on a commode. To relieve the tension, my father sat on the edge of the frayed and worn sofa and started to gaze on me. His eyes were soft like water, and they were filled with helplessness. Then I tried to remember his eyes when he was still living because I seldom look into the eyes of the people who are living around us. He rested his right hand on the back of the sofa and yearned to say something. But he couldn’t utter a word. He wanted to fall apart like his suitcases under the blue sky in the courtyard. At the end, only thing which remained, which still remained in my mind was his white stubble glowing on his unshaven chin.

We shared our dreams those days besides fasts and food; my mother’s were bright with hope while mine gloomy – like roof falling in, the house on fire and people running out of it, then we couldn’t find each other. In her dreams dazzling sunlight was pouring in the rooms after the roof had caved in.

*****

In the last few days, a neighbour’s son, the neighbour already dead, delivered him food when he had no appetite left for it. Sometimes from a hotel and sometimes from his home. He paid him handsomely, but left the food untouched, mostly. Yes, it would have been better had I got the cancer instead of befriending and trusting this man or any man here! He was sitting outside, and he was afraid to go inside his home. Out of the blue, he would ask the question: When will the Last Judgement strike? He seemed more afraid of the present than the doomsday.

The neighbour’s son said that his last days were like a terrible injured bird that neither lives nor dies, only waits in excruciating pain. Had you seen him in those days, you would have forgiven him whatever hurt he had caused, he said. He was his own hangman. Whenever the neighbour’s son complained that he’d phone me, or he’d tell others, he’d take some bites. He didn’t wish that anybody should know what did ail him. He strongly wished it.

Once he couldn’t even wait for the food to be served and started only with dry chapattis like a starved man, the neighbour’s son told me.

It is not the food I am eating but I’m eating myself! he said. We had not taken anything for two days, we stopped thinking of food. Whenever a muezzin called in the mosque, he would sit up on the bed quietly like a devout child as if he was atoning not only for the past sins but also fearing the sins in future which awaited him like the thunder after a terrible lightning. The sins were there like the devils sitting in every corner, in the middle and sideways too. If you had to walk, you had to shrink yourself like wrapping your arms around you and minimizing the space between your legs lest you should touch them. And one call from a mosque was followed by other ones as there were many mosques around the house.

All his life he had taken this journey, almost every day, a walk to his gun shop. But that day it was so different – to end the journey for good and to end the life as well.

The room was filled with the grey light, and I couldn’t keep myself warm however hard I tried to wrap myself with a thin single quilt. The cold air would enter from the raised corner of the quilt from one side and shiver my back. I walked a few feet to the door and opened it. The bright silver light dazzled my somnambulant eyes. Somebody also opened her door nearby and said, Wow! It must have snowed all night. Every inch of the open space was wrapped in cold light and thick layers of fresh snow – trees, red roof of the mosque, and the green mossy path winding down to the playground. I had never experienced snowing before so I never had a dream which even had an idea of snowing let alone an inch of snow. It was always rain, hot wind, dust storm, shadow and sunlight inside the crumbling seedy houses with leaking roofs, the crowded bus stops, and the train which ran on the tarmac road. When the train picked up the speed, it was stuck into a marshy land. I tried to jump off but my father jumped before me and his head hit a stone, and the blood burst forth like the sudden breakage in a high pressure pipe-line. It was terrifying to listen to the sound of gushing of the blood in a dream. I was relieved when he stood up.

The hen walked with her brood and scratched in snow, but the dog found it difficult to put his feet on the layers of ice. He’d put down his feet with hesitation and quickly lift one and let it hang in the air. I started to reread from the page whose corner was folded. It was only when I had left home and read Dostoevsky’s Idiot, I realised what excruciating pain and heartrending agony he must have gone through when he had decided that he should end his life anyhow, and waited for the right day, right time and right place. The English translation from the days of Soviet Union, Raduga Publishers, was in simple English and easy on mind with the fear of librarian lest the book should be damaged. Plenty of these books were available when Gorbachev visited India. I go back time and time again to the books which remained unfinished during the period of life that was dreary, painful and full of distress, just one or two steps away from destitution and homelessness. Was any other period different? I doubt. Books still remain unfinished – now I think I have so little time left that I wish to read so many books at the same time. No sooner had I started one than the desire to read another one itched me. The book I loved most was ‘Stories of Anton Chekov’. I devoured their quaint words and illustrations. I tried to translate them in Urdu and copied the black and white ink drawings during hot summer afternoons – Gurov standing before a French window and Anna sitting on a sofa in a hotel room. Two sisters turning up unexpectedly at the white stone gate with lions on them in An Artist’s Story. I imagined the big room where the artist lived, which shook in thunder-storms and all the ten big windows would suddenly lit up by lightning. When I watched Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, the movie showed the exact room as I had imagined years before. On a portable TV, which lay on a square table in the only room in the house with a roof, a veranda and an inner courtyard, I had watched a Tarkovsky movie first time – Andrei Rublev.

The tablecloth was pink with green embroidered flowers, but the TV was black and white. Then I didn’t know which movie was shot in colour. Father was going through a long bout of depression then, and he couldn’t sleep in those days. He walked in dark and cursed himself, and sometimes abused his brother who had disappeared. Sometimes he drank hot water from the water cooler when the temperature must be hovering around half the boiling point. We didn’t need to bake chapattis on the gas ring; they’d bake if we just stick them on the kitchen wall, we joked. It was so hot there as if the hell fire was being stocked underneath. As he walked on the gravel and gutter water, I imagined raindrops were falling outside. It was years later that I came to know that the movie was also in black and white. In the movie when Andrei Rublev started to speak and paint with colour, the movie also turned into a colour movie, and at that time the light failed. Almost twenty years had passed when I watched the end of the movie, and only the end was in colour.

After reading all those books I thought the world was full of suffering, and people lived in misery; they needed helping hands. So I extended my helping hand in goodness to anyone who needed it, and even to those who didn’t need it. My father said I was hallucinating; I was delusional. He was right. By the time I had finished the movie in twenty years; my hand was bitten, chewed and burned that I couldn’t recognise it. Some movies are so good that it is painful to watch them again. It is like defrocking a virgin. I couldn’t bring myself to watch any other movie for many months after Andrei Rublev; even the best seemed mediocre. If I read whatever I have written here: it seems to be written by a person who is living in a solitary confinement. He is not able to see the sky, and he hasn’t been in the fresh air for a long time. He has forgotten when he stood on the field covered with snow, or when he was slapped by the hot wind. If I read it with Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler, it transfers me to a place I cannot name, but people living there are sensitive.

The taxi was late for the funeral or post-mortem; I could not tell. One of the uninvited and curious guests kept on calling the driver time and time again, hovering around the door with cell phone stuck to his ear. I had not visited home for many years, and I was in no hurry to return there. Whenever I left home or rather my home town; it was like I had escaped a war. I was too scared to look back, to steal a glance. Even in peacetime, people are cruel and mean and nasty,