Between Clay and Dust Read online

  Between Clay and Dust

  Musharraf Ali Farooqi

  Restless Books | Brooklyn, New York

  ~For Afzal Ahmed Syed~

  Table of Contents

  Inner City

  Ustad Ramzi

  Tamami

  Gohar Jan

  Unworthy Heir

  Kotha

  Malka

  Coveting and Anxiety

  Newcomer

  Challenge

  Disdain

  Closure

  Encounter

  Rival

  Strategy

  Solitude

  Visit

  Return

  Regimen

  Loss

  Rage

  Rains

  Defender

  Donation

  Taint

  Dread

  Pact

  Defiance

  Resolve

  Sinking

  Intermediary

  Addict

  Fixation and Hope

  Sanctity

  Reckoning

  Reproach

  Retirement

  Changes

  Strife

  Passage

  New Reckonings

  Passing

  About the Author

  Colophon

  Inner City

  The ruination of the inner city was attributed to time’s proclivity for change. It lay abandoned, half buried in and half surrounded by the squalor of shanty towns. New settlements cordoning it on three sides seemed to avoid the shadow of its sunken grandeur. Streets connecting new colonies skirted off its periphery. Links binding old and new neighborhoods were either never formed or broken at the start. The wide serpentine alley of high, arched gateways dividing its residential and artisan quarters looked strangely desolate.

  The ravaging winds of Partition had left it unscathed. The turmoil that had seared the fiber of men and gored their souls had not touched this quiet habitation. There had been anxiety that things would be greatly changed, but later there seemed hope that the worst was over and life’s routines could now be renewed. Nobody expected that in Partition’s wake would follow a slow disintegration of values that would unravel the inner city. In a way, the inner city was always a cat’s cradle—a crisscross of life’s many faces, each sustained by the other. The strings of this cat’s cradle had not snapped but they had become hopelessly tangled.

  The inner city had been emptied of most of its old inhabitants. Just as its walls had been stripped of their turquoise-colored mosaic panels, time’s ravages had forced into oblivion its generations of the dead, too. To answer the fierce demand for construction material during the last few years, the memory of those who had shaped the inner city was not only stripped of the tombstones that commemorated their existence, but also the bricks that marked their graves.

  The disfigured architecture and worn, paved stones of the inner city still intoned its past splendor in broken whispers. There were a few enclaves where the last of its remnants were yet visible. Unconcerned and out of step with the currents of time, even after the recent changeful decade, these enclaves and those who inhabited them had continued to exist by exercising some power to resist change, or perhaps because no one found it worthwhile to remove them.

  They had been left on their own and forgotten, and it occurred to some that the mist of oblivion would hang over them forever.

  Ustad Ramzi

  Ustad Ramzi was the head of a pahalwan clan and the custodian of a wrestler’s akhara. He was a man of frugal speech and austere habits, and appeared to some a stern man. His imposing stature, a heavyset jaw, and upturned whiskers only reinforced this impression. He was one of those men who do not accept the futility and emptiness of life, but who try continuously to give it meaning—a reflection of their own life’s purpose.

  Fifteen years earlier, in 1935, he had won the highest wrestling title in the land, Ustad-e-Zaman. This title was at the heart of a long struggle between Ustad Ramzi’s clan and its rivals who had defended it for years. By winning the title, Ustad Ramzi had fulfilled the coveted dream of his clan elders. He had defended it many times since and cherished it as a sacred trust vouchsafed to the strength of his arms.

  Recently, Ustad Ramzi’s world had been shaken by the abolition of the princely states whose nawabs and rajas had traditionally patronized the wrestling arts. Many smaller akharas had closed down in consequence. The two surviving akharas belonging to Ustad Ramzi and his rival clan had also experienced the bite of hard times. Trainee pahalwans continued to take instruction, but there were fewer of them than before. Only a few bouts had been organized in the past year, and they had not drawn many spectators.

  The prevailing situation made the future of this sport look uncertain, at best. These circumstances, however, had not affected Ustad Ramzi’s unremitting adherence to his creed or checked his aspirations for the sport and its practitioners.

  The akhara was a hallowed place for him, where a man made of clay came in contact with his essence. On the day he first put on the fighter’s belt and stepped into the akhara, Ustad Ramzi made the pahalwan’s traditional pledge to strive for the perfection of his body and soul until he returned to earth upon his death. The akhara, which his patriarchs had tended with their labor and sweat, was still the mainstay of his life. It had always been guided by the example of his elders, and as it was before, so it was now.

  Ustad Ramzi had continued with his absolute ways in his diminishing sphere of influence where everything was predetermined, and every act, every gesture was of consequence. This consciousness had given a fatalistic decisiveness to his actions. People coping with the pressures of life after Partition, battling harsh circumstances with all the means in their possession—had neither the use nor sympathy for such intensity of purpose. Even those close to Ustad Ramzi sometimes found it difficult to understand or appreciate his motives. For many, Ustad Ramzi’s set outlook on life had turned from a virtue to an impediment.

  Adjacent to Ustad Ramzi’s akhara was a private cemetery marked by an enclosure lined with cypresses, yews, and banyans. It was a relic of the time when it was not unusual for people to be buried where they had worked and spent their lives. Besides Ustad Ramzi’s ancestors, other pahalwans who had upheld the art’s strict tenets were also honored by being buried there.

  Ustad Ramzi did not allow sweepers to enter the cemetery for fear of polluting the sanctity of its grounds; instead, he swept it himself every week with a broom of palm fronds. He never entered it without making ablutions. He kept the cemetery rimmed by rose boughs as a sign of devotion to the memory of his elders whose lives had been lived in strict conformity with their creed. He always experienced a deep sense of harmony in that place.

  The graves were not laid symmetrically, and the ground was a little uneven and sloped to one side. In a corner at the acclivity of the slope, Ustad Ramzi had placed two stones and surmounted them with a marble slab to improvise a bench where he kept his gardening tools. Sitting there he could see the spot in the cemetery where lay his own unfilled grave. He had made it several years earlier and exulted in the anticipation that the day he was laid there, his life, too, would have conformed to that of his elders’ existence and become a part of it.

  In recent days, the enclosure that housed Ustad Ramzi’s akhara and the adjacent cemetery was jestingly referred to as the Elephants’ Graveyard—that mythical spot in a forest to which elephants retire at the approach of death. The caricature of the pahalwan as a dying beast and the implied suggestion that in the eyes and minds o
f people the pahalwan’s art and his world were doomed, were not lost on Ustad Ramzi. The wedge of antipathy that had slowly been driven between him and the world had left Ustad Ramzi unruffled; he had learnt to take in disparaging words without feeling outrage.

  Tamami

  When the akhara was allotted to Ustad Ramzi’s ancestors, its five buildings were used as living quarters by pahalwans and their retainers. Only three buildings stood now, in varying stages of ruin. One had been locked up after its roof caved in. For some years swallows had nested there, along with the peacocks kept in the enclosure by Ustad Ramzi’s father to exterminate the snakes that once infested the property. One building was used by the trainees. Ustad Ramzi and his younger brother Tamami lived in the other building which overlooked the akhara.

  There was an age difference of twenty years between Ustad Ramzi and Tamami, and their temperaments and outlook on life were also greatly at variance. Tamami was of a frivolous nature. Unlike Ustad Ramzi, who took a nobler view of his art and creed, Tamami was more interested in the celebrity conferred by the title. While he was mostly neglectful of his duties as a pahalwan and had won neither honor nor renown for himself, he never let an opportunity pass to impress upon his friends and acquaintances that he was the scion of the clan in possession of the title. Tamami behaved as if he were himself the titleholder.

  The years of middle age had marked Ustad Ramzi’s constitution. His hair was turning grey at the temples, the skin was beginning to wrinkle, and the joints of his bones were slowly being drained of their long resilience to pain. But Ustad Ramzi’s devotion to his art remained unabated. Every morning before dawn he took the ewer from the niche in the wall and blessed the akhara clay by sprinkling it with blessed water. He then turned the clay in the pit, kneaded it with oil and herbs, and smoothed it before the trainees gathered to wrestle there. The modest tasks of turning and smoothing the akhara clay were as much a reminder for him of his pahalwan’s pledge as they were an exercise in humility.

  In recent years, at the approach of winter Ustad Ramzi felt the penetrating, dull throb of rheumatic pain that stiffened his knee joints and strained his walk. It sometimes kept him awake at night. His body had finally revolted against the prolonged use of arsenic, which he took to help digest a pahalwan’s heavy diet. The year before, as winter progressed, the sharp pangs of pain he felt in his knees had gradually worsened, and made it difficult for him to finish his daily tasks in the akhara. In turning the clay, he still plied the mattock with a steady hand, and his back remained straight as a wood plank, but his knees could not hold up under stress in the same way. He did not tell anyone about his deteriorating health and carried on with his duties as before.

  Ustad Ramzi’s pride would not allow him to ask another to take on his duties. When he was a trainee pahalwan, even to have the privilege to ask for an important task one had to first prove oneself worthy of it. He was willing to be persuaded to delegate the tasks, but Tamami never asked to take them on. He merely expressed surprise at Ustad Ramzi’s insistence on performing them himself when he could easily assign the work to one of the trainees.

  Ustad Ramzi was disappointed by his brother’s disregard of what his elders held a sacred ritual of their creed. He told himself that if Tamami failed to realize the importance and purpose of those humble rituals, he could never understand the essence of his creed. At the same time, Ustad Ramzi also saw the futility of pointing this out to Tamami. He knew that his brother had to come to that understanding on his own: only then could he understand the true significance of his existence, and find the conviction to make sacrifices for his art. Until such time he could not be trusted with the responsibilities of guarding the clan’s interests to which Ustad Ramzi’s own life was dedicated.

  In the past, Ustad Ramzi had refused to discuss the delegation of tasks to others, but winter was upon him once again, and his knee pain had resurfaced. Almost overnight he had to learn the limits beyond which he could not exert his body.

  Ustad Ramzi had delayed announcing his retirement in the hope that a day would come when the clan would find worthy hands to defend its honor after him—a day when he could hand over his place to Tamami and finally hang up his fighter’s belt and retire. That day had not come.

  Ustad Ramzi finally informed everyone in the clan that he would continue with his morning duty of blessing the akhara clay, and delegate to Tamami other duties such as the scheduling of trainees for preparing the akhara.

  Tamami expressed happiness at his brother’s decision and failed to notice the bitterness in Ustad Ramzi’s smile.

  Ustad Ramzi felt his vulnerability against the advance of disease and age keenly. He was still the titleholder and the head of his clan, but from the day he made the announcement he knew that he would begin to lose his grip on the akhara affairs which he had run unchallenged for many years.

  Gohar Jan

  Early in his professional career, Ustad Ramzi had realized that the entanglements of married life would not let him devote himself fully to his art and its exacting discipline. He vowed to remain celibate to achieve perfection in his art and shut his mind to thoughts of women. He finally attained the rank of an ustad or master, and acquired such celebrity that the mere privilege of being his sparring partner conferred eminence on a pahalwan. Throughout this time Ramzi observed his vow of celibacy.

  The news of his visiting Gohar Jan’s kotha in the courtesans’ enclave was therefore received with great interest.

  Gohar Jan was an accomplished singer whose raga recitals were renowned. Once a celebrated beauty, she was known for her haughty airs and capricious treatment of her lovers. Like other prominent tawaifs of her time, she maintained her own kotha where trainee girls or nayikas received instruction in the arts of musical entertainment. Gohar Jan’s kotha in the inner city was the largest and most famed.

  The young men frequented the kothas to learn the bearings of polite society, the older men to socialize, or rekindle the memories of their lost youth. Whenever one of them fell in love with a tawaif or a nayika, his affairs provided a spectacle and entertainment to the rest of them, until he was cured of his passion. Those who could not survive it did not return. A tawaif who fell in love had only two choices: she could either put an end to the association, or leave the kotha to pursue a life outside—if one was offered her. Implicit in the latter choice was the understanding that she would never be readmitted to the kotha if the promise of the new life failed her. There was a universe of failed unions, dreams, and abandoned hopes that started in the kothas and trailed off into the anonymity of the city’s dark alleys. It was said—with some justification—that only the fickle survived in the kothas, and only the pitiless prospered.

  When people heard the news of Ustad Ramzi’s visits to Gohar Jan’s kotha, they thought that like scores of others, he, too, was lured by Gohar Jan’s physical charms. But there was another purpose to Ustad Ramzi’s kotha visits.

  Ustad Ramzi had been taken by an old acquaintance one evening to listen to Gohar Jan’s mehfil of a raga recital at the kotha. That day, for the first time, he saw Gohar Jan as she entered with her nayikas and took her seat at the head of the ensemble of musicians. He saw her command her troupe quietly and imperiously, often with just a glance. That day, also for the first time, Ustad Ramzi felt the powerful meditative effect of music when Gohar Jan started a raga.

  He had always struggled with a component of his discipline which stressed the need for meditation to focus physical strength. That chance visit to Gohar Jan’s kotha made Ustad Ramzi understand how music could quieten the aggressive humors of his soul. He later returned to Gohar Jan’s kotha and soon became one of the habitués of her mehfils.

  Those who watched Ustad Ramzi for any signs of becoming infatuated with the tawaif were disappointed. At the end of the mehfil, he always left her kotha with others. Even after it was borne out that it was Ustad Ramzi’s fondness for music that occasioned his visits
to the kotha, that fact was not accepted. People made all kinds of insinuations: that Ustad Ramzi’s endeavors outside the akhara did not meet with any success; that it is one thing to floor men, and another to contest the favors of a tawaif like Gohar Jan.

  These comments inevitably reached Ustad Ramzi’s ears, too, but he never learned that some people attributed these insinuations to Gohar Jan herself. Those who knew the tawaif could readily believe that it would have provided endless entertainment to Gohar Jan to make a spectacle of someone as self-absorbed and sacrosanct as Ustad Ramzi. But whether Gohar Jan found the sombre Ustad Ramzi too dull and uninteresting a quarry, or some other consideration hindered her, for some reason the insinuations ended there, and the gossip also died out.

  For many years now Ustad Ramzi had regularly attended Gohar Jan’s mehfils. He never realized that his visits to her kotha had now become for him a need; he felt restive without attending her mehfils once every few days. Over the years, the ragas themselves had been suffused with Gohar Jan’s inflection and intonation; when Ustad Ramzi heard another’s rendition, it hardly stirred a thing in his breast. It was as if the ragas only existed embodied in Gohar Jan’s voice.

  Unworthy Heir

  The akhara routines fell into disarray soon after Ustad Ramzi relinquished these duties to Tamami.

  After a few weeks, the trainees slackened in their appointed chores. It was plain to see that they took their cue from Tamami. Instead of being the first to arrive at the akhara to supervise work, Tamami was often the last. And even then, he displayed no sense of urgency but idled away some more time talking to his friends from the neighborhood. On some days the trainee who was supposed to turn the akhara clay would start late; on other days everyone would be held up because nobody had allotted the trainees their duties. The trainees had to wait for Tamami. In the meanwhile their bodies cooled down, and if they sparred without another warm-up they ended up with torn ligaments.