The Grand Multi-Continental Epistolary Adventures of Kaku & Happu. Letter #II.

Grey. Clouds. Grey. Sums it up.

Dear Happu,

Your letter smells of the samosa chaat of Main Market. Might I suggest you get into the habit of washing your hands before wielding your pen? Science has proven that washing your hands before and after every meal decreases your chances of contracting a multitude of ailments, some of which can be permanently debilitating. If you dare to visit the scientific journals section of the Library, and can be bothered to part with your Progressive Writers and Beat Generation rubbish for a few minutes to go through the aforementioned scientific journals, you will find that out for yourself. You will thank me.

Regarding your troubling discovery: you are ten and eight years old. What’s ailing you so? You are but a babe utterly wet behind your ears and you come to me with these heavy philosophies that seldom become your age. The book theft and the incessant fixation upon Salman’s Mustang are both understandable and acceptable conditions of youth – but grief is a country you must not visit just yet. Or, may I suggest, never? Through your words, you have naively put grief in the nooks and crannies of human physicality, painting it as something romantic that God bestowed upon us by design so that we would remember our exit from Eden. Such are the trappings of youth that you feel anything untoward or sad that occurs must’ve been pre-ordained, forgetting in your drawl that where there is grief, there is also history weighed down by tragedies that have chipped away at any semblance of an escape. We have not yet reached that pit. Not yet.

You pretentious little twerp.

Talk to me about the length and breadth of the home that we are finally going to have, where there is enough room for all of us to keep our own counsel and not blindly stumble into each other’s beds at night because they are all within a twenty feet radius of the  bedroom us five brothers share(d?). Before you start writing to me about how grief is set like gelatin within the joints of the human skeleton or some other colourful variation upon that line of thinking, I would like to draw your attention towards the fact that I am hundreds of miles away, in a place where the sun seldom shines and it rains as if I am in a post-colonial re-enactment of Noah’s Flood. I am in a place so grey that, if I chance upon a bright, primary colour, I have trouble recognizing it. I am so terribly entangled in the struggle to survive that I cannot tell where my day began and where it ended. If it wasn’t for the dou sunnat, duo nafil of Fajr and char sunnat, char farz, dou sunnat, dou nafil, teen witr, dou nafil of Isha’a, I would not be able to tell the difference. I am so far away that Aba Jaan’s roar of a voice can’t reach me, and I can’t see Ammi sitting in the sunlight in winter, reciting Surah Yaseen, her graying hair oiled and wound up in a tight braid. On that note, stop referring to Aba Jaan as ‘The King’. He’s Aba Jaan. And you’re no more a prince than Ayub is the rightful President of the Country.

Moving on – is it cold there? I keep missing news bulletins on the radio and the reception for the Urdu Service is absolutely ghastly here. I guess you will be able to tell it is really winter when Choti religiously starts her visits to Landa Bazaar near the Railway Station. I think she thinks that we don’t know, but she doesn’t know that you and I have always known. It is commendable, though, her ingenious trick to buy the coats and the jumpers for their beautiful buttons, and stitching them onto the things she herself knits. Those long forgotten trinkets become beautiful and necessary once again. The cast-offs of random gora sahibs and mem sahibs serve her purpose and pride to a certain extent, and who are we to find fault in this?

Be kind to her. She is a disgruntled artist. I dare not compare her to the other Disgruntled Artist we know (the one who started World War II, if you are forgetting) – but it would be wise to be cautious. And considerate. The next time you commend her on her mustache fuzz being as prominent as yours may be your last. I will not be there to save you.

And so we come back to grief.

It is an acquired state of mind, Happu. We nurture it out of masochism; perhaps hoping someone would come and save us from whatever it is that ails our beating, bleating hearts. But no one will come. Why should you presume you would matter enough to someone else, when you have not extended that courtesy to yourself? Apa may be the happiest out of us all; so contained she is in the universe of her own making. She has accepted her fate and so she has mastered it. There is neither shame nor sadness in that.

The only thing stitched to our seams like our shadows is our desire to keep moving forward, past what may hold us down. Think about that during one of your bicycle rides around the Gates of the City and write again to me.

Again: I prefer unscented letters, even if the scent is of the samosa chaat that I once loved so much.

Practically shaking my head at the places your imagination drags you to,

Your Brother,

Kaku.

______________________________

*Photograph by Anis A. Siddiqi. Touched up by Khurram A. Siddiqi.

The first letter in the series can be read here.

The Grand Multi-Continental Epistolary Adventures of Kaku & Happu. Letter #I.

It takes a lot of money to develop a roll of film, you know.

Kaku,

 

After much consideration, I have realized that the secret ingredient in the core of human creation was grief. A bit of clay and a huge fistful of grief, placed in odd places like underneath the heart, at the back of the brain, at the slanting corners of our eyes…somewhere down in the pit of our stomachs. In the fat of our buttocks. In the curve of our ribs. We can’t function without it. We seek it everywhere we go and every which way we look. We search for it in fading photographs of the people we once loved, and we sense it out in others – potential new lovers. A parent’s raised voice drives us into the arms of imagined grief. Newsprint and newsreels familiarize us with it. It’s inside us and outside us. It exists because an Angel didn’t take a knee to the first of our kind, or because it took us so long to shed our matted fur and walk upright and grow opposable thumbs. It’s everywhere and anywhere like those pick-pockets on the Volvo buses.

 

Life originated in water, and grief originated in the first tear of the first person who realized that in this great creation the burden we bear is that even though there are so many of us around, none of us understands the other fully. We are all just one-in-a-few-billion, and that’s not something to celebrate. That’s something to be terrified of.

 

I went bicycling along the railway track with these thoughts, with my tiffin packed and my satchel slung across my body, which is, as you know, not more than an extremely minor interruption in someone’s view of the countryside. I can imagine your furrowed brow now, and you mumbling under your breath: Lahore is not countryside!

 

It isn’t.

 

But the place where The King has decided to build his empire surely is. There is grass upon grass upon grass as far as the eye can dare to see. Then there is this railway line. Then there is more grass and trees, and among this wet dream of green, there are termite mounds that threaten to swallow the whole of our possessions at a minute’s notice. I do not understand why The King is investing all of his life savings in this wilderness-on-the-left-side-of-Civilization-called-Lahore, but I am young, and it is not for me to question, lest my princely domain is invaded by some royal decree. I take the Canal as my guide and go to the expansive reminder of how some of the Colonial Masters really didn’t mean us any harm. I study. I spy on a few of the lads, one of whom just received a Mustang – a Mustang. I imagine great scenarios of his ultimate humiliation, imagining his vehicle will run out of fuel at some point and I would go paddling on, swerving past him with a hat-tip and hello. What joy would that be!

 

But before you pick up that phone and ask the operator to dial a quick one to Pakistan, I want to tell you that I am only occasionally petty. Most of the time I study at the Library, scale the steps of the Minar, and espy the population with my bird watcher’s binoculars. I am also proud to report that I no longer feel the need to steal the books from the Library. The librarian just lets me take them with a promise of return.

 

I do return them. When I remember.

 

I suppose my unrelentingly crass attitude towards the Library rules causes much grief to the Old Man. I try to control myself from overanalyzing his state of mind, though. He eats paan with only katha, chuuna and supari. He must be tough enough.

 

Otherwise things are well and in order, if a bit noisy at home sometimes. Apa reads her Urdu classics with quiet grace while stirring the daal concoctions with a wooden ladle in the kitchen and Choti keeps tearing down the silence with both hands raised up to the heavens with constant demands of immediate release from this monotonous life. I don’t suppose that upsets Apa much at all. I will know it has upset her when I eat some Aatish flavoured moong-masoor. Till then, all is well. Her grief is confined in her books, and that keeps everything in order. Like clockwork.

 

I end this with a request. Think about what I said when you are out and about in the Land of the Queen. Test my fractured theory. Let me know if you feel the way I do thinking about it. Quite honestly, two people believing in the fact of grief being sewn to us like our shadows would be better than one person believing in it. Loneliness and grief? A combination that could kill even the mightiest.

 

And I have never claimed to be mighty.

 

Raising this anda paratha roll in salute to you,

Your brother,

Happu.