SHORT STORY 𝒃𝒚 Mustansar Hussain Tarar

I eluded people.

I averted meeting my eyes with my wife’s.

When my children came before me, I shouted on them as though they caught me red handed committing a sin, and now they thought that their father had bad character. My secret had divulged. And I was timid like a cat with squeezed tail in his groin, scared of the hit of first stone for stoning me to death.

I, Nasim Bokhari, a middle aged man — entangled in warp and woof of this age. My thinning hair could not defend against the javelins of the scorching sun and the sear pierced my skin. The crow’s paw had appeared around my eyes so many years ago, fatiguing their brightness. The flesh of my body had slacked. If I nipped the skin on the back of my palm, it shriveled there and didn’t return — stayed there static. After taking bath, when I happened to cast a look on my naked body, carrying out efforts to arrange my thinning hair to hide my baldness, I felt disgust.

My clumsy tummy hung like an old woman’s belly who had given birth to a lot many babies, sunken hips, and there was nothing except marcescence and lifelessness where once survived provocation and fertility. But now, my sexuality had long been burned out and collapsed. Ernest Hemingway wrote in his autobiography that if a man’s juices stop running, he has no right to live he must commit suicide. If it were the tests of life, many years have elapsed after my suicide. In other words, I had been leading a smooth, sober and normal life like a mediocre middle aged Pakistani, and I was satisfied with it. I neither moaned nor dejected, and nor dreamt the days when every dream ended on dampness. All the juices had dried, all the embers had burned out and I was satisfied with it.

All the implications of the old age had imposed themselves in my life viz I, Alhamdulillah, not only kept beard but also never failed in offering my Namaz five time a day. I wasn’t also conniving of, like many other Namazis, the basics of cleanliness by sprinkling water drops here and there during the ablutions for offering most of my namazs. I was one who performed ablutions, very carefully and thoroughly. If even a single drop of the ablution of a nearby squatting person sprinkled on my cloths, I always performed my ablution again. People are unaware about the philosophy of the ablution otherwise they keep themselves in ablution whole time.

I made longer prostrations. I had read a citation by some Sufi saint that if someone prostrates with the discern that he would rise up again then it’s not devout but toil. I would repent and wet the mosque’s carpet, donated by a philanthropic trader, over the oblivions of my youth though those weren’t many more. Although, I had started keeping fasts of the month of Ramzan regularly for the last few years but I failed in offering the Traveeh Namaz. But it was an oblivion which had no comfortable to Sharia except that I became sleepy while standing for a long time, my knees started to bump with each other because of weariness and feebleness, and the holy words of the verses lost their meanings, and only a constant buzzing heard so that I scolded myself but the meanings never came clearly.

In nutshell, I was spending a satisfied, middle-class, middle aged life, and as a mortified husband who had longer been incapacitated to satisfy his wife’s still passionate and legitimate orgasmic desires.

I had been spending my life piously as a responsible father and as a submissive middle aged husband without any suspicions and any big incident. I don’t know what to name that only my life’s passion and craving for, which can be said in customary declaration that I had over-fondness of poetry — not to compose poems but to recite them — and it is not a weird passion but I met an accident. If I had been fond infatuated of Ghalib, Mir or Momin, it was a normal thing that mostly are inflicted by this ecstasy but I fell in love with the poetry of foreign poets.

I could not express this admiration openly because the committers of this aberration were considered punishable in our society. They are pronounced slavishly imitating the Western culture for their deviation from their own traditional and cultural values, patriotism and language. I neither had wide critical sense of poetry nor had any excellence at par about criticism but I was a serious reader of the literature. I felt that there was nothing in our poetry except piquancy of the tongue, tales swirling around flower and nightingale, bewailing of the beloved and the rival in love, uncontentedness, impotence, and sacrifices for survival, and moaning and lamenting over the betrayal of the adored. There was nothing except determining oneself as the most inauspicious person of the world and yearning for death all the time. Though, there some speck of mysticism would fell on this black sheet of yowls but that would never conspicuous in this darkest picture. I don’t want to start a disputed debate that it is purely a personal analysis of a reader; a thought which can be faulty because the poetry has other worlds too, which could not became known to the poets. Pushkin, Petofi, Rilke, Nazim Hikmet, Forough Farrokhzad, Mayakovski, Soyon, Lorca, Neruda, Ezra Pound, Eliat, Nebokov, Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, Rasul Gamzatov are the poets who took us along on the journey of the universe. I am surely a westernized person. Indeed, among my favorite poets some are in neighborhood, some in Africa or South America but all the things which is out of our restricted sight is in the West and the person, who crosses this limit, is westernized.

On an evening of my middle age, impotence, idle life of mortification, I was watching television like an idiot — also called an idiot box — with keen immersion a political scene without blinking my, wherein persons of both sides were attacking and gnawing at one others. Light, which often comes and goes, went. Now, I’ll share a secret. It is said, some extra ordinary human senses wake at the moment of an extra ordinary situation, and he tackles the situation using those senses. Load shedding has become a routine of our lives.

During the span of previous some time, a sense had awakened itself in me. In the beginning, I and my acquaintances did not believe it since this is attributed to the holy saints only that they can make a prophecy. As soon as, all the lights turned off, television screen went black, freezer stopped working with rumble and the whole house wrapped in complete darkness then I could predict that the electric transmission would restore after three hours and twenty five minutes. I tell you how this perception felt upon me. Every time when fissure of electric supply happened, the bulbs turned off with a particular flash, television screen went black completely in different ways and the rumble of freezer had different sounds, I ascertained from these symbols, like an expert doctor, that when the transmission will restore.

I was telling about that night, which had become stark dark due to load shedding, my newly born sense informed me that now the electricity will be restored after four hours and twenty two minutes, so it was useless to sit before television, and I went to my bedroom.

I was not sleepy. I lit a Chinese made Shivilng shaped candle, taking out of the side table, which gave less light but left bursts and cracks more. After being accustomed to that crack and flash, I go to the book shelf, and I took out randomly one of the dust covered books like practicing augury from Diwan-e-Hafiz. After winnowing it and dusting its title with my palm I found it was “Leaves of Grass” — a collection of poems of Walt Whitman — which I had purchased about thirty years ago, enchanted by its title. I wrote my name and date on its first page and forgot it after placing it in the book shelf. Its ageing papers had turned brownish and insipid like me. It was like a child who rolls and tosses in the clay; you rebuke him simultaneously patting lovingly and some particles of soil rise.

Published in 1855, this collection was also like a child covered with dust and when, keeping it in the right hand, I patted it with my right palm its brownish and leaving natural smell, a little cloud of dust body also rose from its body. I was in habit that whenever I opened a collection of poetry on the lectern of my palms, I always started from the first poem or Ghazal:  Where is the artist whose art they protest? Then, I would open book randomly like a predicator parrot, and cast a cursory glance over the page which came henceforth before my eyes. And then, if poet’s craftsmanship, musicality, poetic diction and techniques, and uniqueness impressed me like “I knew, so it dwelt in my heart too”, I would read it till the last page. I gone through Walt Whitman from here and there, and wherever I read his poetry, I found it captivated. The first piece of his art protested:

Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves;

Like lighting Europe le’pt forth, half startled at itself;

Its feet upon the ashes and rags, its hands tight to the throats of Kings.

The poem did not match my temperament as it had the old logos and tales of old territories, so I wasn’t impressed.

No later, I closed the “Leaves of Grass”. I patted again the back of this dust covered child of decay, the blind fireflies of dust rose in less number than earlier. I opened it again and found a poem whose oriental passion and fervor stopped me with.

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems;

You shall good of the earth and the sun, (there are millions of suns left,)

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor free on spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

I would have stopped in the dwelling of this poem, but another poem made me vagrant. Since the man, traversing the stages of evolution, acquired the civic sense that only hunting, woman and children aren’t the life alone, he started loving horse, carved its images on the stones whenever he hid himself in caves. Sometimes, he engraved the images of horses of the era of China’s Confucius and sometimes those looked in motion in the paintings of Behzad. In short, there was no civilization wherein the carvings of horses were not prominent. Even in the present age, M. F. Hussein and Saeed Akhtar painted horses to show their love for them. The war horses of Mahabharata painted by Hussein, and the scared, sad, head below horse without his trooper in the battlefield of Karbala painted by Saeed Akhtar, and the Burraq travelled to the limit where even the feathers of the angels seize to fly but its Rider was He who is the motive of creation of the universe. Not only the painters but the poets, especially those of paganism era of Arab, also depicted eulogies for the horses.    

A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses;

Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears;

Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground;

Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving;

A gigantic beauty of a stallion….

Once, I had spent few days in the rectangular Nemerlong Island, situated in the suburb of Newyork. One evening, my friend with snow white hear, handsome and good looking picked me up from my abode and started for his home on the shore of  Long Island to enjoy the seaside. The highway was overcrowded with gigantic and little, glittering and clumsy, fresh models and gloomy looking cars. Suddenly, I glimpsed at a mile stone on a side road. It was just a sight in a wink but I was able to read “Walt Whitman Street”. I was not aware of the dignity and marvel of this poet then, otherwise I beseeched my snow white hear, handsome and good looking friend: “Stop…. Please stop. A poet was born in a house of this street, who wrote a poem which caused me to elude.

I avert of meeting my eyes with my wife’s.

When my children would come before me then….

It was he who divulged my secret.

But I was oblivious by then because I breathed in the age of ignorance, otherwise if he hadn’t stopped on my request I had stopped him forcibly: Stop.

Some bulbs were giving dim light in the surrounding houses because their UPSs were in better condition and they, unlike me, did not go into stark darkness on the failure of electric transmission. The UPS, placed under the stone slab of my kitchen, had gone out of order a few days ago. I showed somewhat niggardliness, trying to save money in view of my limited income by installing a second hand UPS because I was impressed with the glibness of an electrician, and the thing died away instantly. So, I was wrapped up in the pitch dark. But I had an advantage over my neighbors that they thought that the electric supply would be restored after an hour or half an hour and waited fervently but I didn’t. It was only me who had the intuition about actual break-down time: four hours and twenty two and half minutes. To deal with this situation, I had erected four thick candles on the table side by side, out of which first one had already reached to its logic end and the length of the second was going short and short perpetually, and the hot wax had been freezing into drops around its body. I spent last two hours and twenty two minutes turning pages of “Leave of Grass” and reading the poems of Whitman with great difficulty because the candle light flickered and the words shimmered and trembled, too.

That night, a queer secret disclosed itself over me.

If a collection of poetry is read in the electricity light, its distiches are much palpable and naked. But, if the same collection is read in the flickering candle light indeed this iridescent is pernicious to the eyes but believably not only the meanings of the couplets vagaries in the dim shimmering candle light but also their grandeur furs up the body like a parasitic dodder and enthralls you.

When I placed four candles side by side to meet with that pitch darkness, they could be blamed for obscenity for their vertical erection. If these stood in the same position in a temple, dasis desired to gratify themselves with them, prostrating before the Shiv Maharaj.

When the second candle also came to its last flash, felling down like a tower of Babul, then I lit the third one. And then, Whitman’s that poem suddenly fluttered before me like a bird getting freedom from the cage, and it divulged my secret; it made me to steal my eyes; it made me worthless; and it brought defame for me.

I became numb that how Whitman found perspicacity into the clandestine parts of my heart and he opened in his poem the secret of mine, which dwelled there. I felt despise to Whitman that moment because he turned my calm and smooth life into a topsy-turvy.  

Once I pass’d through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions;

Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there who detain’d me for love of me;

Day by day and night by night we were together — all else has long been forgotten by me;

I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me;

Again we wander, we love, we separate again;

Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go;

I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous;

Once I pass’d through a populous city…..

I was caught red handed.

This was the clandestine concealed only between me and a woman. How he, the cursed Walt Whitman, while lodging in his home in Long Island reached to my far-flung city in the East though even unaware its name, and he reached to merely me among the millions dwellers of this city, and he exposed secrets of middle aged life! How he, while writing this poem during any night in his home in Long Island, came to know that once I pass’d through a populous city, and there I casually met a woman who passionately clung to me, and then we wandered, we loved and then we separated! Was he around us like a spy when she held me by my hand and said I must not go?

When I recited last line of the poem, frightening and hating him that he exposed me, suddenly there was coruscate.  The television became alive again. Freezer rumbled, and the extinguished figures of the micro wave oven lit. The dazzling uncovered my crime.

I felt grief but not as much if my secret would have been exposed years ago when I had met that woman in a populous city, but now — after such a long span of time — when I have been spending a satisfied life, prostrating before God five times a day, and wetting the mosque’s carpet in repentance over my committed and non-committed sins. There was dead smoothness in the life that not even a single wave ever raised over its surface. So, during these days and years of debilitated satiation of dejection it was Whitman who ravaged my disciplined and appreciated life. It was the meanness at its peak.

I hid myself from them like a wet cat in the rain, feeling humiliated and ashamed and averting my eyes. I cursed the poet, silently. I was going to make better my afterlife but he unveiled all my nobility.

Many days passed.

I walked through the home in these days, lowering my gaze and stealing my eyes like the embarrassed cat that devoured the pet-pigeon.

Many days elapsed.

And one day, I cast a stealing glance hesitantly around when my lowering eye-lids tired, and I could not believe on my eyes that neither my wife had cobwebs of suspicions over her face, passing by me with her weary smile, nor my children behaved inconsiderately. They were obedient and respectful, customarily. There was not anything different in the routine.

There was no any tint on my hand and if it was not, I wasn’t caught red handed. It meant, they were completely oblivious that once I pass’d through a populous city, where I casually met a woman who passionately clung to me, and we wandered and made loved. They knew not. But, why they knew not? Why were the unaware? They must know, must be aware of that once I pass’d through a populous city, where I casually met a woman who passionately clung to me, and even today I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous. They must know.

I wanted they must be aware of but they weren’t. Neither my wife suspected my character nor my children felt any humiliation over it. Life was normal.

Centipede of gloominess clutched me. I felt disgrace and ignominy. My masculinity was shocked, and I desired they must know it but they didn’t, and how they could? Because, that woman did not exist.

All these were yearnings, fantasies, and delusions. All these were my hallucination and apprehensions.

That woman had no existence.

Every man, when he reaches at the doors of his middle age, is fatigued and withered with troubles of traverse of life, so he creates an imaginary woman who had once met him passing through a populous city, who had stopped him, who had made love with him passionately and clung to him.

Every man needs an imaginary woman not to lose her love in the days of troubles and unattained longings, and to spend his remaining days with her. He wants that his wife and children must not abandon him like a good-for-nothing and like a worthless thing. Thus, he wishes that they must reproach him, taking his imagination as reality. They must put him under suspicion and must not throw him into the dust bin as a useless and worthless thing. Neither the woman exists anywhere in the world or the city, where she had met you casually. All these illusion and fantasies are created due to fear of being abandonment in the middle-age. Indeed, you neither met that woman nor you met her, nor you wandered with her, nor you made love with her but you feel her intimacy until the last moments of your life. You feel touch of her trembling lips on your withered lips.

Once I pass’d through a populous city…..

….

(Translated from Urdu by Najam-uddin Ahmad)

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