Festival redux

Khyaal Festival attendees enjoy the pleasant November air

One would have thought the Lahori literary pie too small to be sliced two ways, and one would have thought right judging from the turnout at last weekend’s Khyaal Festival of Arts and Literature. Marketed less aggressively than the LLF eight months ago and sprung without warning upon a city yet to wake up to its annual winter quarter of cultural activity, the festival had little time to announce itself before it had come and gone, resulting in what appeared like lifest fatigue.

First I heard of the festival was from a writer friend invited to conduct a session. Second and third I heard of it was also from writer friends invited to conduct sessions; that is how small the world of English fiction writers and readers in Lahore is. In this scenario sustaining two large-scale events of a similar nature doesn’t seem feasible, unless the smaller one distinguishes itself in ways the one with greater money and support cannot perceive.

Mohsin Hamid and Mira Sethi:

Despite all efforts to wake up early on a Saturday the first session I managed to attend started at 2PM on day 1. Conducted by Mira Sethi, this well-attended session was surprisingly enlivened by Mohsin Hamid’s wit and persistent refusal to answer anything straightforwardly. Surprising, because I had never quite imagined Hamid as a wit, having read Moth Smoke a decade or so ago; a book I don’t particularly recall for its humour. Mohsin met the articulate and well prepared Mira’s desire to dabble in political commentary with disarmingly amorphous yet well thought out positions on a variety of issues. A good hour for Mohsin fans and non-fans alike.

Manto and Faiz’s grandson:

Readings from Manto turned out to be Salman Shahid sitting in a weak pool of light on a darkened stage reading a Manto short story off a page, accompanied by a sitar-player arbitrarily weaving in and out of the narrative. Considering last year’s stellar performances by Naseeruddin Shah’s theatrical troupe that brought Ismat Chughtai’s stories to life in the same hall, this unrehearsed fumbling was rather a sorry affair. English literary festivals insistent on inserting token Manto, Faiz and Intizar Husain sessions in the name of Urdu representation need to put more thought into making them more engaging.

Slipping out of Hall 1, I went into the concurrent session between Musharraf Ali Farooqui and Ali Madeeh Hashmi called ‘Micro Narratives’. Ali Madeeh, grandson of Faiz Ahmed Faiz is a psychiatrist and writer with a debonair air, the sartorial elegance of an 18^th Century English nobleman and Punjabi-inflectioned Urdu curiously dissonant with the rest of his demeanour – the very embodiment of the Faiz-Alys legacy. One would have liked to hear more of him; as it was, Farooqui’s talk of micro-narratives goaded my Twitter-shaped attention span to quit the hall for the open air.

Outdoor stalls sold Lahori doodad: kettles and mugs painted with truck art; hand-knotted carpets, paintings, and some of the few books I saw at the venue (at education NGO Simorgh’s booth) – all looking a bit wistful despite the loud music’s attempts at masking the forlorn air of a festival lacking attendees. Sunday, though, saw a lot more milling about this area when young intellectual aspirants inadvertently walked abreast placard carrying participants of a ‘Dengue mukaao’ campaign sponsored by the Punjab government and spearheaded by Zakoota from Ainak Waala Jin.

Feryal Gauhar and Intizar Husain

‘Since I have worked in the Shahi Mohalla…which is not to say I operate from there…’ studded with such self-deprecating witticisms, Feryal Gauhar’s was a delightful session that Raza Rumi was wise and experienced enough to allow Gauher to take charge of. Never having heard her speak before, nor having seen ‘Tibbi Gali’, clips from which she showed during the session, I particularly enjoyed this one.

Raza Rumi talks to fans before the launch of his book ‘Delhi by Heart’

By the end though I did slip out to attend the last fifteen minutes of Khaled Ahmed and Intizar Husain in Hall 1. Expecting neither to be particularly stimulating, a notion based on my aversion to dry prose and abstract symbolism in short stories, I was taken aback by my own ignorance. In an intellectually sophisticated exchange Intizar discussed the artificial divide between Hindi and Urdu, questioned whether the term ‘saqaafti yalghaar’ (cultural invasion) has any meaning and insisted that if it does then Pakistan’s cultural invasion of India is as impactful as India’s cultural invasion of Pakistan (albeit committing the crucial fallacy along the way of equating Urdu only with Pakistan). Discussing Iqbal’s misra, ‘shamsheer-o-sanaa avval, taaoos-o-rubaab aakhir’ (sword and hymn first, zither and lute last) he said the West had proven this notion wrong by making concurrent cultural and military progress. This segued into Khalid Ahmed’s musings on what shape our culture would take in the wake of a countrywide consensus in favour of the Taliban, a doomsday scenario Intizar didn’t yet find credible.

Pakistani film and television:

Irritants like moderator Shehnaz Sheikh’s cluelessness about the debate surrounding Waar aside, Bilal Lashari’s presence and the audience’s ability to question him directly made the ‘Waar and Main Hoon Shahid Afridi’ session a compelling one, though organizers need to take active control when audience members’ ‘questions’ turn into lengthy, self-serving monologues, the bane of all such events.

Amir Munawar, Vassay Chaudhry, Shehnaz Sheikh, Kamran Lashari and Bilal Lashari taking audience questions

Vassay Chaudhry, script writer of Main Hoon Shahid Afridi, rued not being able to turn the film into a sentimental India vs. Pakistan match for lack of a bigger budget. Lashari said his success confirmed that a majority of Pakistanis agreed with Waar’s world view. While both these gentlemen have the right to pander to public tastes and exploit them for commercial gain it was hard not to be disappointed by the hardboiled cynicism of artists so young.

Sarmad Khoosat in next day’s session on Pakistani drama was more willing to self-analyse, defending himself not by pointing to commercial imperatives but by talking of small acts of defiance such as the refusal to include dialogues against certain forms of art in his commercially successful play Shehr-e-Zaat.

Sarmad Khoosat, Asghar Nadeem Syed, Haseena Moin and Sarmad Sehbai at the Pakistani Television Drama session

Farida Khanum:

Farida Khanum and Ali Sethi ended the festival with a session that was undoubtedly its highlight. Hall 1 finally filled up to full capacity where a resplendent Farida Khanum sang many of her best-loved ghazals A cappella. Ghulam Ali who had come as an audience member was called on to the stage by the moderator as a mark of respect This made for a slightly too-many-singers-spoil-the-concert scenario but Farida Khanum’s bursts of singing made all other facts dwindle into insignificance. Spontaneous applause from the audience, talk of Radio Pakistan, Z A Bokhari, the evolution of ghazal singing in Pakistan, anecdotes about the recently deceased Reshma and Sethi’s tracing of both Ghulam Ali and Farida Khanum’s musical histories to the eight hundred year old tradition of Hazrat Amir Khusro turned this session into a truemehfil.

Farida Khanum delights the audience

The Khyaal Festival produced value by bringing the debates surrounding Pakistani literature and performing arts to a platform other than English newspapers, though the real task for any such festival is to take these voices to a truly diverse set of audiences. Neither the LLF nor the Khyaal Festival have yet shown much interest in tapping public school and university students to come and participate; to listen to concepts and ideas they would be hard pressed to access in the mainstream television and Urdu press. The real challenge for both festivals lies in that direction.

Published in The Friday Times on 8th November, 2013

Chinaman and Spiderman

The News on Sunday asked me to write very briefly about one favourite book and film in 2012. Here are my picks:

If you’ve never seen a cricket match; if you have and it has made you snore; if you can’t understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you. — Excerpt from Chinaman.

I first heard about Chinaman from a tweet by Mohammed Hanif, a befitting introduction, considering this is the funniest and most mould-breaking South-Asian novel I have read since Hanif’s own debut, ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’.

If you are a cricket fan (by which I don’t mean the kinds who crawl out of the brickwork before every Pakistan-India T20 match), this book will thrill you with its humorous references to the game’s legends and unknowns, commentators and controversies. The elderly narrator and his best friend come to blows over whether Muralitharan chucks, cricket games ‘overlap like stories’ in a Sri Lankan park, euphoria lifts a divided nation upon a world cup triumph. But even if you aren’t a huge cricket fan, Karunatilaka’s irreverent insights into life as it is lived every day, full of disappointments and little heartbreaks and the small ways in which we fail ourselves and others around us, is a profound and imminently readable treat.  

Like any good piece of fiction this one too is essentially about life, which in this case also happens to be cricket.

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I am not a prolific movie watcher partially because I only like watching my movies in the cinema. Since Pakistani cinemas are partial to big budget thrillers, I rarely catch a Hollywood film in genres I would prefer.

Having never seen or read anything Spiderman, I tagged along with a friend to watch ‘The Amazing Spiderman’, and was very pleasantly surprised. It didn’t garner as much media hype as other superhero films this year like ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ or ‘The Avengers’, and more knowledgeable friends tell me it wasn’t the best Spiderman movie either. But I loved Andrew Garfield’s reticently sexy Peter Parker — a more desirable 21st century incarnation of the nerd, as well as the surprisingly leisurely pace of this superhero movie.

Relying less on CGI effects and more on the sensitive high-school hero, who is just beginning to discover his powers, ‘The Amazing Spiderman’ resonated with me in several ways. I enjoyed how the movie used the superhero mask sparingly to help the audience relate more directly to the character, reflected best in the climactic moment where the hero removes his mask to help rescue a frightened child from a car perched fatally on the edge of a bridge. Emma Stone as Gwen Stacey, a capable science student, who is Parker’s intellectual equal, also added a great touch to the movie. It is sad that it turned out to be the lowest grossing Spiderman movie ever.

Litfest Day 2: For the love of literature

Lahoris thronged Hall II at 9:30 on a Sunday morning to hear Mohammed Hanif speak about The Baloch Who is Not Missing and Others Who Are. The crowd’s enthusiasm was presumably not shared by the session moderator Rashed Rehman however, who failed to show up, prompting the organizers to hastily replace him with HRCP Director I.A Rehman whose self-deprecating sense of humour proved to be the only bit of relief in a session fraught with guilt-by-association for the Punjabis in attendance. A visibly affected Hanif set aside his one-liners for this one and dwelt at length upon the plight of the missing persons in Balochistan whose families’ continuous protests outside the Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad press clubs have been met with a stony silence by the media. That Hanif himself couldn’t risk discussing the political reasons behind the kidnappers’ motives remained an inescapable irony, however, forcing him to talk about the issue purely in terms of the personal toll it takes upon families. The establishment’s brutal crackdown on what is essentially a separatist movement remained the elephant in the room everybody tiptoed around though there was no shying away from criticism of the army in general, made especially scathing by an Urdu/Punjabi poem penned and recited by Hanif that sought to burst the myth of the ‘Punjabi army’, replacing it with the idea of the institution as a monolith that serves the sole interest of the institution itself. Despite its refusal to mention the Balochistan separatist movement one couldn’t help feeling that just the holding of this session was a bold move on the part of all involved.

Hall II emptied out the moment star attraction Mohammed Hanif exited the stage leaving a handful of people who stuck around for the ‘Narratives in Urdu Fiction’ session with Khalid Toor, Ali Akbar Naatiq and Musharraf Ali Farooqui. A good choice for moderator for this one, Ali Madeeh Hashmi comfortably straddled the Urdu/English divide, enabling him to reach out to the more ‘burger’ members of the audience without alienating those who actually knew something about the subject at hand. Khalid Toor’s reading of his story about a couple of villagers on a buffalo cart attempting to seek shelter from a strong wind proved a superb introduction to his work. The aandhi , not a full blown tornado nor just merely a strong wind, is so indigenous a phenomenon and Toor’s capturing of the rural idiom in a young boy’s voice so authentic that one couldn’t help but rue the possibility of a complete disappearance of such narratives because of the marginalization of local languages. Both Toor and Natiq laughed off such fears, however. Toor refused to ghettoize himself on the basis of the language he chooses to express himself in calling all literature the literature of the world, regardless of language or place, whereas Naatiq felt that the Urdu language is in a more healthy state than ever before thanks to the news and drama boom in the country. The festival, organized for and by the elite, with its inordinate stress on the English language bothered neither author as much as it did the 60-70 people in the audience.

Next session on another Urdu writer, but one who has been embraced by the English-speaking elite in droves, filled all of Hall I. Simply titled ‘Manto’, Ayesha Jalal’s session on her celebrated uncle also served as a vehicle for introducing her upcoming book ‘The Pity of Partition’. In a rather bizarre twist, Jalal’s defense of the idea of Pakistan riled up certain members of the liberal audience who attacked her vociferously for defending the Pakistani ideology.  Even the usually abrasive Jalal had to take a few steps back to try and parry the blows. Ali Sethi, the moderator, stepped in at this point to defuse the tension with his characteristic humour and the eventful session came to an end.

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Published in The Friday Times here

The LLF City

Fears of a Lahori elite schmoozefest coupled with the counterintuitive idea of a festival about reading, essentially a solitary activity for solitary people, had me sceptical about the first ever Lahore Literary Festival. However, the two days of the event ended up charming me for several reasons, chief among them the festivity they returned to the Lahori spring.

Watching my bevy of students, who had recently been assigned Mohammed Hanif’s ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ as extra reading, brave the pouring rain to get their pirated copies of his book signed at all costs must also have gone some way towards the softening of my stance. A sea of black LLF-logo umbrellas bobbed from Alhamra’s Hall I to II, from the grounds to the food stalls, helping stave off the downpour while keeping the determined spirits of culture-seekers and people-watchers alive. Nothing less than this level of organisation was required to smoothly pull off a festival of this magnitude, attended by 30,000 people over two days.

The evening before, the festival was declared open by the Chief Minister of Punjab who, in an attempt to distance himself from the legacy of General Zia, rued the disappearance of strolling couples on The Mall Road, the Parsis who once formed part of the Lahori landscape and the lost cultural vibrancy of the city and gave his support to this attempt at the revival of Lahore’s cultural landscape.

Tariq Ali’s well-attended keynote speech threw the festival open to the public on the morning of March 23 and in a subsequent session the famous left-leaning intellectual declared his intent to vote for the PTI, an announcement that was apparently met by a hallful of cheering Lahoris. Far from the madding political crowd, however, I attended a session with barely thirty people in attendance, that of Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka on his DSC Prize winning first book, ‘Chinaman — The Legend of Pradeep Mathew’. Moderated by Owen-Bennett-Jones this was an excellent session to attend. Shehan turned out to be just as disarmingly charming as his book and Jones asked him all the right questions, a circumstance that made the pedantic audience’s ‘questions’ even more painful to bear.

The first man who got up did not allow any qualms about clearly never having heard of the book to hinder him from announcing his credentials as Assistant Professor of English at a local college and a member of its Literary Society, no less, in a loud, authoritative tone before asking Shehan something unintelligible. Nonplussed by this attack, the sprightly student volunteers quickly handed over the mike to a middle-aged woman who turned out to be a member of the same cult and pressed on even more urgently about the aforementioned literary society whose mere membership seemed to confer a sense of accomplishment upon its members.

Meanwhile Shehan looked on bemusedly. If there was any residual doubt left in my mind for the need for such a festival, it was cleared up by this practical demonstration of the service such platforms render in updating foggy old professors beyond Hardy and Frost.

Speaking of old, the Lahore in Literature session was marred by an excess of very old and frail panellists (Bapsi Sidhwa, Intizar Hussain and Pran Neville) who should have been balanced out by a few younger faces. Sidhwa, whose work I have a healthy regard for, suffered from a lack of preparation for the session, launching into a never-ending excerpt that did not seem to have any direct bearing upon either Lahore or its Literature.

Rafay Alam the moderator, being young and polite, failed to take the proceedings into his hands as the droning panelists refused to acknowledge the need to connect with the audience. This is where the conflict between the written and spoken word reared its head, writers aren’t meant to be performers and they cannot be judged on the basis of their ability to read their works in a manner as engaging as their writing.

Sometimes though, this is reversed. Moni Mohsin’s accented inflections while reading from her ‘Diary of a Social Butterfly’ enhanced the flavour of her writing brilliantly. The satire session in which she read her work, in fact, turned out to be the best session of the day. The crowd roared at the banter between Mohammed Hanif, Shehan Karunatilaka and Shazaf Fatima Haider facilitated by the irrepressible William Dalrymple. Each of the writers read out a humorous piece from their writings, some bawdy, some satirical which made for a light but thought-provoking session.

‘The Literature of Resistance’ session saw a video message from Arundhati Roy being played on the screen. For me its star attraction was Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh who spoke with great clarity and grace about the problems of being a writer attempting to explain a conflicting situation to the outside world. BBC’s Lyce Doucet was also a star attraction on this panel who spoke about her experiences reporting the Arab spring and her views on Lahore and Pakistan.

If there is one thing the festival did for me, it was to dispel the myth of the writer as unattractive nerd slaving away in a corner on his laptop, unwilling and unable to communicate with a world beyond his words. Most of the authors I listened to, with the exception of the very old ones, were savvy crowd-workers with ready wits and charming personalities, often quite different from what one might have imagined from just reading their works.

Daniyal Mueenuddin, for instance, with his gora looks and accent made for an odd contrast with his subject matter, i.e. the lives of ordinary villagers in rural Punjab. William Dalrymple whose works I haven’t read I had always slotted in my mind as a historian (the word conjures up very dry associations), so his affable charm came as quite a surprise. Writers like Mohammed Hanif and Musharraf Ali Farooqui dispelled my notion of authors as self-obsessed narcissists unwilling to engage with the less accomplished.

On the second day of the festival three back to back sessions left me with little energy to do much else post-lunch so I decided to sit out the rest of the afternoon on the Alhamra steps reading, people-watching and soaking the sun’s rays after a long week of rain and dreariness.

That my city allowed me to do that, for once, without any prying eyes or groping hands was cause enough for celebration, add to that people listening to authors, buying books and engaging with ideas without a bomb blast in sight and I was a happy trooper.

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Published in The News on Sunday here 

The Night Bookmobile

The ‘adult’ graphic novels at The Last Word stick out for their neat, hardbound calm among the dizzying jumble of superhero comics, baiting the desultory afternoon browser to pluck one out just for the joy of engaging with a beautiful book. I pick Audrey Niffeneger’sThe Night Bookmobile. A woman in a bright blue dress and crimson nail polish clutches an open book to her heart; eyes squeezed shut, a strained expression on her face most often associated with fervent prayer. Behind her from floor to ceiling stacks of vibrant books fill a room that’s too snazzy to be a library, too sombre for a bookshop. This is a book designed with the express purpose of enticing bibliophiles and the trick is working on me. Between the fishing out of the debit card for a (relatively) cheap book I had picked out earlier and the last wistful glance at the room’s enchanting motley, I lean over and grab this one I cannot afford. I decide it’s worth the purchase for the cover alone.

The lyrical quality of the jacket echoes in the novel’s poetic style which opens with its protagonist wandering the streets of Chicago ‘at that quiet time of morning when the cicadas have given up but the birds haven’t started in yet’. Wandering aimlessly to clear her head after a fight with her long-time boyfriend she chances upon the Chicago Version of the Alif Laila Book Bus blaring ‘I Shot The Sherriff’ from the corner of a street. Against her better judgment she engages in a conversation with the bus driver who invites her in with a card that reads ‘Night Bookmobile—Hours Dawn to Dusk’. The room she slips into is subdued and pleasant, smelling of ‘old, dry paper, with a little whiff of wet dog’; books stretch out endlessly within it. All the ones in the first shelf are children’s books, some have catalogue numbers on their spines, others don’t, and the numbers seem to belong to different systems. She wonders if Mr. Oppenshaw, the bus driver and librarian has been running around stealing books from different libraries. Further exploration of the library leads to the discovery that all the books on its shelves are familiar ‘from Jane Austen to Paul Aster, from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook to college biology textbooks’, even her personal diaries. That’s when Mr. Oppenshaw tells her that the bookmobile is a complete collection of everything she has ever read in her life, a concept as fascinating to the protagonist, Alexandra, as it would doubtless be to anyone who is an avid reader. At dawn the librarian promptly turns her out after which the next appearance the bookmobile makes in Alexandra’s life is nine years later. Thus the stage is set for a rather fascinating tale of magical realism and fantasy.

The urge to own books and the ways in which our reading defines us is at the core of The Night Bookmobile. Imagine being led to a place that contains every single word you have ever read including cereal boxes, periodicals and newspapers, even your own diaries. Imagine a librarian whose sole job it is to keep track of all that you read and keep updating your personal collection of books accordingly. How would that change your reading choices? What kind of connection would you feel for a person accessing all your thoughts in the form of all you choose to read and write, however discretely? For those captivated by alternate worlds where does fantasy end and reality begin? Do books bring us greater clarity or further confusion? What we read, what we highlight and what we leave unread can be as intimate as our dearest thoughts and it is a fascination with all these ideas thatThe Night Bookmobile successfully manages to capture in its first half. All the more disappointing when such an intriguing concept is left criminally underdeveloped and the book fails to explore any of the questions it raises in any depth.  Hardly has the book begun when it ends, the text not even as long as most short stories, leaving its overarching metaphor dangling and incomplete, but despite that the nocturnal ambience of a big city that it evokes so movingly, the life of a lonely woman increasingly consumed by the books she reads, a dreamlike Chicago of late rainy nights, music concerts, baseball games and a fantastical night bookmobile that comes and goes of its own whim; the narrator's almost imperceptible sexual tension with the balding, asexual-looking eternal librarian- a distant, ethereal man who knows her more intimately than anyone else, and the idea of a place filled with all the books you have ever read and thus been shaped by, is enough to call this a good purchase. 

The Night Bookmobile is like walking through someone's dream, with all the escapist thrill and incompleteness of one. A dream you don't want to let go of as you lie there in the early morning twilight zone between sleeping and waking, vainly fighting against the demands of the real world pressing down upon you.

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First published in The News on Sunday here

Legends -- Personal and Traditional

Legend has it that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was so impressed with an aerobics display by school students in Korea that he came back and ordered it to be replicated in Pakistan. This show was successfully staged in Islamabad on 14^th August, 1976 which motivated Bhutto to ask Punjab’s Education Secretary to hold a similar affair in the provincial capital. The whopping estimate of 3 crore for the Lahore event, to be staged on 23^rd March, 1977 involving 20,000 school children put the Punjab Education Ministry in a unique quandary since it did not have the legal right to spend more than a crore on an event of this nature. The Secretary’s consternation trickled down to his staff, one of whom –Dr. Kibriya, Chairman Punjab Text Book Board – assured him that 3 crores was an exorbitant amount and entrusted with the task he could do it within 50 lakhs. The Secretary looked skeptical and the subject was dropped. A few weeks later, however, he handed the Chairman a cheque of Rs. 1 crore from the Chief Minister’s Office along with a letter making him in-charge of the event. Dr. Kibriya reiterated his pledge of working within 50 lakhs upon which the Secretary transferred 59 lakhs of the total amount to the Chairman’s personal account. The show was staged impeccably on Pakistan Day as promised at a total cost of 34 lakhs. The burden of a surplus 25 lakhs of taxpayers’ money in his account weighed heavily on my taaya, Dr. Kibriya’s conscience. He wrote a letter to the Secretariat requesting them to return this money to the national exchequer but his letter was taken as a joke and dismissed. Soon the Education Secretary got transferred and a new one took his place. Dr. Kibriya kept sending reminders to every subsequent Secretary till such time as he retired from his post with the amount still lying in his National Bank account at the Secretariat. Finally one Secretary who knew him personally paid heed to his queries and relieved him by taking the money off his hands.

These and other such legends were told with great relish on occasions my father’s family got together. My father and uncles— the first daastaan-go I heard growing up—delighted in the stories they weaved of their lives, planting themselves unabashedly in the center as swashbuckling slayers of authority, deadly-honest romantic ideologues and achievers against all odds, who prided themselves not on their proximity with the rich and powerful but in taking them on. These central narratives collided with my father’s own fight as a young man against his eldest brother’s disdain for the humanities as a suitable career for a boy born in poverty, complicating the overarching central daastaan of my family, immediate and extended.

A wish to rediscover these oral narratives (having passed from my life since my taaya’s death and due to a lifestyle revolving increasingly around the keyboard) took me to the aptly titled ‘Daastaan Goi—The Lost Art of Urdu Storytelling’ on two consecutive days last weekend. Following closely on the heels of Naseeruddin Shah’s packed ‘Ismat Apa Ke Naam’, the country’s ‘cultural capital’ seemed to be suffering from theatre-goers’ fatigue, or maybe bragging rights of attendance at the Rahat Fateh Ali concert at Lahore Gymkhana trumped these relative unknowns from Delhi. Whatever the case may be I walked into a half-full Hall II presenting a stark contrast to the capacity crowds Shah and co had attracted at double the ticket price just a week ago. Interestingly, Daastaan Goi’s ethos turned out to be quite similar to Shah’s Motley Theatre group – same sparse set, similar focus on theatrics of the spoken word and a comparable fervour for bringing Urdu’s dying heritage to a larger audience.

The invitation cards stated that daastaan-gos Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain would present Daastaan-e-Ameer Hamza and Daastaan-e-Chouboli that evening. The debonair Mahmood Farooqi walked on to the stage in regular attire beforehand, however, to clarify that they would only recite the Rajasthani Daastaan-e-Chouboli that evening, a tale that he promised would fill us with nostalgia for the land it had sprung from. Before going offstage to change into his performing gear Farooqui instructed the audience on the adaab of the mehfil—the audience were to express appreciation only with waah waahs. Clapping would be considered the equivalent of tomato throwing in certain other traditions. This marked out the evening as magical and distinctly Eastern even before it started.  A short while later, now dressed in white kurta pyjama with a traditional white cap and a similarly attired Daanish Husain by his side, Mahmood Farooqui unfurled Daastaan-e-Chouboli.

Instead of evoking any special feel for Rajasthan the daastaan seemed to be set in an Eastern Neverland of cheerful polygamy that could be situated anywhere from Baghdad to Delhi to the fervent sexual fantasies of male story tellers who must have helped hone this daastaan over the ages. Despite this, Thakur, the male figure who sets the tale in motion becomes progressively marginal as the story moves forward, almost ending up as the fool, while increasingly the women surrounding him arouse sympathy, awe and romantic desire. In the grand tradition of heroines who escape the limitations of their fate through male disguise, the female protagonist of Daastaan-e-Chouboli dresses up as a fresh, appealing young man who endeavours to make the stubborn but beautiful princess Chouboli speak four times in one night to win her hand in marriage. Twenty four virile young men have tried before her but none has had the wherewithal to crack Chouboli’s cool emotional exterior with the weapon of storytelling. Enter our protagonist, combining Rosalind’s heart and Scheherzade’s wit to reaffirm within the daastaan the importance of being able to tell a gripping daastaan. She narrates such fascinating tales with endings so contentious that Chouboli cannot help but speak up to set the narrative straight.

This emphasis on stories as the most effective weapon in the armory of the romancer reminded me of a paragraph from Tarun Tejpal’s The Alchemy of Desire. I came back home and looked it up to find that it reflected exactly the spirit of both Daastaan-e-Chouboli and the art of Daastaan-Goi:

“Passionate love has nothing to do with any obvious attributes of the lover – class, intellect, looks, character. It has everything to do with the stories the lover can tell. When the stories are stirring, complex, profound – like great fiction they need never be crudely true – then so is the love.

The stories lovers tell each other are tales about themselves, their past, their future, their uniqueness, their inevitability, their invincibility. Stories about their dreams, fantasies, the nooks and crannies of their fears and perversions. Those who can tell their stories with power create powerful love. Those who can’t never know the emotion.”

In this both Farooqui and Hussain succeeded marvelously. The waah waahs in the hall flowed freely at each bit of verbal trickery, every plot twist; egged on, I suspected, not just by the beauty of the story and its masterful rendition but with a certain self-aware delight at giving daad in a manner so archaic, so sophisticatedly unpunjabi; the spectators tickled by their own role-play as audiences from a different time and space.

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Tales that my father and uncles told never touched on love and romance, topics too debauched to be dwelt on in front of children. The details of their youthful exuberance emerged only amongst whispers and nudges from the more gossip-oriented retellings of the female members of the family. No grand personal narratives were ever heard from the mouths of the women, cementing the daastaan in my mind as strictly a male affair. Daastaan-e-Chouboli’s greatest personal gift to me was to turn that framework on its head.

***

The next evening at The Avari was a very different affair, not just because the daastaan narrated that day was a modern-day one but also because the expensive charity event catered to a crowd different in its eliteness from the one at Alhamra, the financial elite as opposed to merely an intellectual one. The irony of attending Mantoiyat (a collation of Manto’s life from different sources) within the luxurious entrails of a five-star hotel seemed lost on most of its fashionable attendees. The need to relate to the artist’s personal life, however, has never been a pre-requisite for enjoying great works of art, thus most who attended seemed to enjoy this break from whatever they otherwise do at such dos. Manto’s three daughters were also in the audience for this recital, clearly something the daastaan-gos themselves considered an honour.

Mantoiyat, literally and figuratively, did not have the magic of Chouboli. A friend was disappointed in it as merely an oral retelling of all he had already read in print, but for people like me, (who, I imagine were in the majority) familiar only with Manto’s major works and some sketchy details of his life, Mantoiyat was a literary treat. It placed the legend within his context, casting astonishing light on his life’s achievements amidst formidable difficulty. For me personally, Mantoiyat’s greatest strength lay in bringing to life a supporting cast of literary satellites who often get overshadowed by the giant fame of Manto and Chughtai.

For those with intellectual pretensions Manto and Faiz are Pakistan’s Che Guevaras, icons whose mere names symbolize rebellion and romance. Their fame in Pakistan rests on precisely the opposite reasons to officially patronized authors like Iqbal. While conservatives pick and choose from Allama’s poetry to perpetuate his holier-than-thou image, Manto is romanticized by liberals as the perpetually colourful sympathizer of prostitutes, fighter of obscenity trials, despiser of boundaries and speaker of truth to power. In these distilled portrayals the three-dimensional man is often dismissed as an inconvenience, never allowed to be less than larger than life. The daastaan technique, however, allowed Mahmood Farooqui and Daanish Hussain the freedom to dwell on the domestic Manto, with his concerns for his wife and daughters and his in-depth pregnancy advice to Ismat Chughtai, delightful little details literary criticism and political ideology have little room and taste for.

The daastaan was concluded by Majeed Amjad’s poem on Manto, the man whose verses my father never manages to recite without being overwhelmed with emotion, who is inextricably associated in my mind with my father’s lifelong efforts to bring him to the limelight. I’ll leave you with this poem in Sarmad Sehbai’s English translation:

 Tossing the empty bottle he shouts,                                                          

‘Oh world! Your beauty is your ugliness.’                                                  

The world stares back at him                                                                  

Their bloodshot eyes rattle with the question                                          

‘Who nabs the pillar of time                                                                        

By the noose of his drunken breath?                                                      

Who dares to break into dim corridors                                                        

Of twisted conscience?                                                                            

Who intrudes upon poisonous dens                                                            

Of demonised souls?                                                                        

Through icy glasses his rude glance                                                                    

Chases us like a footfall                                                                            

Foul monster!’                                                                                        

Bang! Bang! 
-----------------------

A version of this was published here in The Friday Times

Writing Harry

Straight from Pakistan's 7-0 drubbing by Australia at the Olympic Park, still wearing my green Pakistan cricket team t-shirt, I took the tube to King's Cross St. Pancras to catch The British Library's 'Writing Britain' exhibition. I didn't think wearing a particular team's t-shirt right in the thick of Olympic season would be considered any kind of curiosity. But it was. For the first and only time in London I got a lot of pointed glances on the street, mostly amused. I suppose with the racist slur 'Paki' in England, a Pakistan tee becomes an automatic statement, intended or not.

There isn't an English writer I can think of who wasn't represented at the 'Writing Britain' exhibition, except P.G Wodehouse, and that is a notable omission. I took many pictures of the rivetting things on display but was made to delete them all by a rather rude security guard, who I was predisposed to view as racist considering the aforementioned Pakistan t-shirt. So, I have no pictures to share of John Lennon's scribbles or Jane Austen's neat but illegible handwriting.

However, there is this picture of a small portion of the 6th chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone that The British Library made available on its site:

I love the way Rowling has doodled those inverted hearts around the margins in that squiggly, childlike fashion. It is a glum realization that these insights into writers' personalities will no longer be available in the age of the word processor. For me the most fascinating aspect of this particular manuscript was the bits Rowling had crossed out. What made her do so? Also, Hedwig was called Widicombe at this time!

I noted down one chunk of text that Rowling had crossed out, since I found the hows and whys of it so fascinating. Here it is:

"He fixed a piece of paper on the wall with the days left before September the 1st marked on it and he ticked them off every night. On the 31st of August he thought he'd better speak to his uncle about getting to King's Cross next day, so he went down to the living room where the Dursleys were watching a quiz show on television."

The difference between the first and final draft of the first page of Hanif Kureshi's The Budha of Suburbia was a soothing sight for any aspiring writer. The first was horribly amateurish, the final one polished and captivating.

There was so much to see that despite spending nearly 3 hours inside I couldn't really process everything properly, at least not without the aid of pictures to remember it all by, or visiting often to really interact with all it offered. But it was a temporary exhibit so even if I were a permanent London resident I would not have been able to access all of it whenever I pleased. And this all was apparently just a fraction of The British Library's treasures. I have no clue why they keep it all hidden away most times and what the point of this whole proprietorial attitude is.

In any case, just to chronicle it for myself:

• First edition of Five on Kirrin Island Again by Enid Blyton.

• A draft of William Blake's 'Tiger' written in his personal journal that originally belonged to his late brother.

• Manuscript of Persuasion opened to a description of Bath, a passage I clearly recalled from my reading of the novel (so particularly thrilling).

• Philip Larkin's handwriting. I have written in the notes in my diary that I'm uncomfortable with the notion of author as rockstar. And so I am, but this exhibit turned something that could have been an exercise in mere celebrity-worship to a lesson in history, since it chronicled England's changing landscapes through the writing it showcased.

• Manuscript of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

• Arthur Conan Doyle's handwriting (though not a Sherlock manuscript.

• Virginia Woolf's neat handwriting from a chapter of  'To the Lighthouse'.

• The manuscript of Thomas Hardy's Tess, a text I read in my MA and I kind of love/hate.

• The strange, strange manuscript of James Joyce's 'Uleysses', all crossed out in red and blue crayon through which the words were still legible. 

• Manuscript of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss turned to the last boat scene. The scene where the author kills Maggie off and reveals her inability to deal with the larger than life female character she had created.

• There was also something by Dickens that I wasn't able to look at clearly since the menacing bodyguards had called out time.

• An unbelievably meticulous manuscript of Alice in Wonderland with elaborate cartoony drawings by Lewis Carroll. 

I loved this little line I read at the exhibit. It made me think of all the marginalized:

Berger notes how 'poor and therefore uneasy districts...are pushed in the imagination of those who are prospering, further away than they really are', and thinks 'today's Islington is far closer than it used to be'.

(Islington being a London neighbourhood considered a dump at one time, but now a hip and happening place.)

A poet could not but be gay

On Twitter, the other day, I referred to the flowers outside my window as 'pansies'. Well, that is exactly what they are. All one hundred and twenty seven of them. A friend, however, found my usage quaint and antiquated (why do these words sound like they're related). But from what I know the flower hasn't been given another name yet to clear the confusion between the contemporary usage of the word and its earlier botanic incarnation. Gay, however, seems to have been done away with altogether as a synonym for happy. So much so that you can now no longer spontaneously recite Daffodils on a fine spring day like today without eliciting some giggles from bystanders. Assuming the recitation of poetry isn't itself a giggleworthy enough phenomenon for bystanders.


So, coming back to pansy, the serendipity of encountering the word whose archaic usage had made me a laughing stock of sorts (yes, i am looking at you @akkhan81) in a snazzy, contemporary book of non-fiction was a most lucky coincidence (which is what serendipity happens to be, by the way). The book, 'Guerrilla Gardening' by Richard Reynolds, details attempts by people all over the world to beautify or cultivate neglected public space. On page 55, Reynolds writes:

Paul 1119 has used guerrilla gardening to mark hundreds of memorials in a continuing and powerful art project spread across England and the USA. He began in Manchester, planting pansies to mark where homophobic attacks had taken place ('pansy' being a slang term for a gay man in anglophone countries). 

Using police records of where  both verbal and physical attacks had occured, Paul planted the pansies along pavements, in crevices beneath trees, at the foot of walls and to plug gaps in flowerbeds. He took a photo of each one and named the image after the particular abuse that had occurred there. 'Faggots!...Poofs!...Queers!' is a beautiful burgundy pansy on Oxford Road outside Sainsbury's supermarket; 'It's about time we went gay-bashing again, isn't it?' is a pale peachy one that is timidly growing through some melting snow on Grosvenor Street. The Pansy Project went legal when Paul sought and won the support of cultural institutions in North America and Britain, and it now has its own website (ThePansyProject.com).

In March 2007 Paul was given funding by the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival to plant along Queen's Walk on the South Bank to mark the murder in 2004 of David Morley, which was widely perceived to have been motivated by homophobia. As well as filling empty tree pits and flowerbeds, pansies were stuffed into ribbons of soggy black stockings and bin liners to be wrapped temporarily around the bases of bins and bollards.

Paul asked me to help clear away this temporary part of the exhibition and transplant the pansies somewhere permanent. And so I spent an evening with Claire 1971, Lyla 1046 and Gavin 2881 crawling around the South Bank prising out pansies and perplexing the rowdy al fresco drinkers who favoured us with some light horticultural abuse.

I loved how these people combined the two uses of 'pansy' to make a statement.

However, even more strangely, I came upon the word pansy again in a book I picked up the very next day. 'Fun Home' by Alison Bechdel also puns upon its two meanings to illustrate her younger self's understanding (and judgement) of her father. Here it is:

So, glad to know the original meaning of pansy is still very much in use, even as it is supplemented by its modern slang usage, a pejorative whose own meaning is being redefined by those it has been hurled at as an insult.