“You’re right,” he replied. “But, my dear man, think about your health! Don’t you feel bad for your kids? When are you going to stop single-handedly feeding all of Karachi’s doctors? The minute we get there, your health will clear up without any pills. The water’s like medicine there.” Then he smiled. “And other pleasures await you! Anyway, you’re not going to die any quicker just because you spent some time in the mountains. Mosquitos? Flies? Not one! Mud? Not a speck of it! So what if there’s a horrible drought? Everyone’s beyond healthy, my God—it’s one ruddy face after another, one rosy cheek after another! Last year, a politician opened a hospital there. Three days before it opened, he had to import a sick person from Karachi. Then he stationed four big doctors to watch over him so he wouldn’t get well before the ceremony!”
“Good weather’s one thing,” I replied. “But I never feel right without my medicine.”
“Don’t worry about that! Wander blindly into any market street in Quetta, every third store is a pharmacy, and every second store sells tandoori roti.”
“What about the first store?"
“It makes the signboards for the other two.”
“But they don’t have doctors like here in Karachi. Here, you can’t go a block without tripping over five or six. These days, they won’t even let you die without a doctor’s help.”
“Whatever! Herbal remedies are good enough for your fake illnesses.”
Having used such good reasoning to quell my baseless doubts and misperceptions, he put to bed his lawyerly dispassion, fervently grabbed my hand, and, as though lecturing small children on right and wrong, he said, “Now that you’re almost someone, a 5,000-rupee bank loan is no problem, right? Don’t think I’m jealous—God, no! May God quickly bump you up to 50,000-rupee loans! I just meant that like other people of your tax bracket you should spend the summer at a hill station. Or at least take a vacation and stay at home. But then just don’t think about going outside. I’ll tell you why. The summer of ’56, my eldest daughter came home from school crying. Needling her with questions, I found out that her friend going to the Swat Valley had taunted her, ‘Are you guys poor or what? You never go anywhere!’ My friend, it’s no different now. Every May and June, I take my family on a staycation.” Then he named a long list of noteworthy Karachiites who just like him disappeared every year to protect their good name and honor. Seeing that his arguments were winning me over, he leaned in and dealt the knockout blow. “You haven’t been on a vacation in ten years! People have started to think you don’t go anywhere because you’re scared your colleagues at work will figure out that even without you things get along just fine!”
In the legend of Hatim Tai, there’s mention of a magical mountain called Mount Nida, or Mount Voice. It got its name like this. A strange voice descended from a certain mountain fort, and whoever heard it would immediately take off in its direction, no matter what, no matter where they might be. Nothing in this world—no power, no bond, no love—could stop them. When people hear about the legend now, everyone just smiles, thinking it’s made up. But every year there are more and more people who hear a voice like this calling them to the mountains. Then Mirza added that when you hear the call for the first time, you shouldn’t let poverty get in the way.
It was settled: for the sake of my health and honor, we should go to a hill station. What was a little more debt, anyway?
“Lend your money, lose a friend,” I mumbled, quoting the poet Shad Azimabad.
“But don’t you see?” Mirza went on. “There are clever people who turn your debt into someone else’s problem! My friend, in the right hands, debt becomes a weapon!”
It would probably not be inappropriate here to point out that, for the past fifteen or twenty years, Mirza’s belief about debt had been exactly the same as Maulana Hali’s belief about knowledge and skill, meaning, you should do everything you can to acquire it . . . from whomever, from wherever, however much . . . But I made sure to communicate my demands: if Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus came things would be more fun, and Zirghos too. Also, we should take Zirghos’s sparkling Buick.
Even though Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus wasn’t really funny, humorous situations always arose with him around. To get him to come, we would have to convince him how much fun it would be, but also how pretty it was there. In the fifteen years since he had left the little town of Chaksu, Rajasthan to come to Karachi, he hadn’t once gotten on a train. Now it was so bad that whenever he had to cross the city limits, he felt like a foreigner traveling in a strange land. But the apple never falls far from the tree. His father would have died rather than get on a British train. He died believing in his heart of hearts that the moon in Chaksu was bigger than anywhere else in the world.
Professor Qazi Abdul Quddus was a nature lover. Especially of the Indus River. He often said, “I swear to God, I’ve never seen a more beautiful river!” And he never had to eat his words. This statement was one hundred percent correct for the simple reason that he had never seen another river. God knows when he had got this way. We thought he would take some convincing.
But to our surprise, he said, “Of course I’ll go. Karachi’s a desert. There’s no rain to speak of. For the past two years, put your ear to the drain, and nothing! In the rainy season, I turn on the bathroom faucets before going to bed so I’ll dream of the pitter patter of rain.”
Mirza told him that it didn’t rain during the rainy season in Quetta either.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“It rains in winter,” Mirza clarified.
For several days at the Pak Bohemian Coffee House, speculation raged about why Professor Quddus had agreed so quickly to come with us, and why he had started to leak like an unglazed terracotta goblet from Multan when he heard mention of Quetta. Mirza had a thought: “The Professor got sable-skin gloves from a friend in Paris, and he wants to get to a hill station as soon as possible so he can wear them. In Karachi, even in December, everyone’s wearing muslin kurtas and eating ice cream.”
Mirza’s explanation was born out to a certain extent by the fact that Professor Quddus packed these gloves in his suitcase. The suitcase was covered with various colorful decals from hotels across Europe. Since that trip, he had never once dusted his suitcase for fear that these decals would peel off.
As for my friend Zirghos, all you need to know is that his full name was Zirgham Assalam Siddiqui, MALLB, Senior Advocate. We were classmates at college. There, out of a love for shortcuts, everyone had called him Zirghos, and our friends from back then still refer to him fondly by that nickname. He often pretends not to understand: “What? That’s not a name!” But if you see him just once, you’ll realize the name’s perfect. On one occasion, while describing his character (or shredding it to pieces), Professor made a funny observation, “If you took away his bank balance and his Buick, what would be left of him?” Immediately Mirza deadpanned, “An unhappy wife.”
Zirghos was addicted to traveling. But if you dug just a little deeper, you would see he was a city slicker. He was that type of urbanite who, before coming to the city, dedicated himself to routinely chopping down trees. The type who comes to the city and then starts wandering the world looking for forests. He was a very elegant man. The sort who, on the day of his execution, would make sure that his tie was all prim and proper before climbing the gallows. He was either actively traveling by car, or, while in court, daydreaming of doing so. The problem was that the main intersection in his neighborhood led from Karachi straight to the Khyber Pass.
Zirghos and Mirza had traveled together to Murree and the Kaghan Valley. Two years had passed since that trip. According to Mirza, even before leaving town, Zirghos had spread out an atlas on the car seat to pore over it.
“There’s only one way out of Karachi,” Mirza had remarked. “The other three directions are all ocean.”
“That’s why I’m so worried!” Zirghos had replied.
There was one memento from that trip. A photo. On Mount Shogran, Zirghos was riding the tiny pony of the pension where they were staying. Zirghos’s body swallowed up the pony. Only its tail could be seen. He was yanking on the reins so hard that the pony’s ears were touching his ears. Then, between the four ears, his double chin poked out, on top of the pony’s neck. He was pressing all his weight on the stirrups because he didn’t want to hurt the pony. Mirza said that several times during the steep ascent, the pony lurched forward, causing Zirghos to slip off the pony, since there was only an inch or two that separated him from the ground. Then, during the difficult descent, when the path narrowed and several-thousand-foot-deep chasms opened on either side, Zirghos got off. Standing on the ground, he said, “If it’s written in my stars that I’m going to fall to my death, I’d prefer to die because of my own missteps. Not the pony’s.” For three or four weeks, the photo was the center of attention at work. Then his lawyer colleagues got him to take it down, explaining to him that if anyone from the Organization For The Abolition Of Violence Against Animals saw it, he’d be taken to court in no time flat.
So the four dervishes set off in their caravan. In the desert, the hot wind dried up their sweat before it even had the chance to make it out of their pores. Once they passed Jacobabad, Mirza got a hankering for green chickpeas. They didn’t have any. But if they had had some, they could have parched them wonderfully in the scorching sand. After lunch, Mirza suggested putting some tea leaves in their jug to make tea. This process was unceremoniously interrupted when smoke rose from the road, and Zirghos had to pull over to sprinkle the jug’s warm water over the even warmer tires.
Soon, asphalt, which starts to melt at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, was flying up in bits to stick to the windows. Looking through this asphalt spittle, I pointed out a Balochi girl of seven or eight, balancing an empty terracotta water jug on her head while walking barefoot down the road. Seeing her, Professor swallowed the ice cube he had been sucking on. Zirghos told us the story of how one January when he had left Karachi to go see some snow, somewhere around Murree he had seen bloody footprints in the snow. The hotel guide told him that these were the tracks of mountain villagers and their children. Seeing the wave of pain that swept over Professor’s face, Zirghos comforted him, explaining that people like that were part of the landscape, they didn’t feel anything. “How’s that possible?” Professor asked. Honking the horn politely, Zirghos said, “If they felt something, they wouldn’t walk barefoot.”
A song of the open road is only as long and as interesting as the road itself, and based on our own intendent reporting, we can say that something amusing took place with each passing mile. For now, it’s enough to say that Professor and Mirza’s humorous interactions made the 600-mile journey speed by, and we never felt tired. The rise and fall of the hilly roads was a new experience for Professor. “My God!” he said in his inimitable way, “this road is like an EKG of a heart attack!” Every swerve in the road looked to him like his wife’s unkempt part. He kept turning back to look at the road, which wrapped around the mountains like a snake. On one occasion, we entered a tunnel. When we came out the other side, Mirza, thinking back to the British engineers, got very emotional. He raised his hands to the heavens and said, “These hill stations were like gods to the British! They discovered them!”
Professor Quddus quickly objected to the second statement, rubbing his right temple, “History tells us that these mountains were here before the British.”
“Yes, of course! The mountains were here, but the British didn’t know we were here.”
Finally, the mountain road ended, and Quetta lay in front of us like the sparkling diamond of a cobra’s hood.
“Eureka! Eureka!” we shouted.
Once in town, I soaked in the pleasant weather and all my worries disappeared. As for Mirza, he smiled so wide that the corners of his mouth touched his ears. You could have stuck a big watermelon slice inside. Looking at the gigantic poplars on either side of the road, he started swaying back and forth like the trees.
“Heaven’s Canopy, that’s what they’re called. A whole wedding party can sleep beneath one. You know, there are trees in Lahore that are just as strong and tall. But all June and July, you can’t find a leaf on any of them! And they stand there stock-still, like they’re holding their breath while someone takes their picture.”
“Whereas in Karachi,” I interjected ironically, “the pleasant sea breeze wafts through town twenty-four hours a day.”
Mirza ignored me, “You know, the first time I saw a fig tree with leaves in Karachi, I considered it a miracle. I went to thank the Municipal Corporation for going to the trouble. But here the natural beauty is too much to warrant such praise. I swear, it looks just like a Christmas card!”
The three of us weren’t looking at this “Christmas card” but at Professor, who was so enamored with the newfound sight of living trees that he was lost in thought. He was so used to seeing apricots packaged in colorful fruit-shop paper and wrapped with brocade thread that seeing apricots growing on actual trees had blown his mind.
In town, the first order of business was lodging. The hotel selection process was entrusted to the Professor. But his useless opinion was that none of the hotels were up to snuff. He didn’t like one “ultra-modern” hotel. The bathrooms were big and spacious, but the rooms were as small as a miser’s tomb. He didn’t like the next hotel because the situation was the reverse. And, the third hotel, he rejected because the bathrooms and the rooms were built on the same blueprint. I mean, you can guess what the problem was. (Tiny rooms and bathrooms.) We fled from a fourth hotel, which was beautiful, on the basis that he wasn’t used to staying anywhere where the help was better dressed than the guests. Finally, a large welcome sign announced the fifth hotel’s charm: “Homey Food and Feeling.” This time it was Mirza who pulled up short. “My friends, I won’t set foot in any place that says . . . ” but before he finished the sentence, we got what he was going to say and moved on to the next hotel.
The sixth hotel was called the Jantan Hotel. This rather respectable colonial-era building peeked out from behind a blind of glossy white poplars. It was a stunning sight, and it twinkled like a birthday cake. Professor approached the idle manager and, after saying hello, asked the rates of the various rooms.
“Single room, 55 rupees. Double room, husband and wife, 75.”
Utter silence followed. When Mirza regained a little composure, he asked, with a dry mouth, “Seventy-five rupees to stay with your own wife, as well?”
Having finally found a place to stay, we thought about going out to see the sights. Professor’s overall impression of Quetta was very favorable. But we didn’t contribute to this overall impression. It was his alone. He was held in thrall by every blandishment: no, each brick of this City of Love, this Garden of Romance! Though he was enjoying himself, one thing was getting under his skin. Tourists.
After four or five days, I pulled him aside to ask if he liked the hill station.
“Yes, if there weren’t any mountains, it’d be great.”
“What do you have against mountains?”
“As Majaz once said, you can’t see over them.”
He was a little disappointed that the mountains were arid. One day, he asked Mirza why the mountains were as bald as his head.
“Once upon a time, they were covered with cedars and junipers,” Mirza replied. “It was a bucolic paradise. But the goats ate it up. So, the government declared war on the goats. These days, everyone, absolutely everyone, carries a knife wherever they go. The government included.”
“But we haven’t seen any goats.”
“The locals ate them all up.”
“But I don’t see any locals.”
“That’s right. They all live in Sabbi.”
“So what if there are no trees now?” I interjected. “As long as the Forest Service is in good hands, maybe there will be in the future.”
“My friend, the Forest Service? In these rugged mountains, they’re as worthless as ocean liners in Afghanistan.”
Looking at the rugged mountains, Professor kept saying that there were very few examples of such “pure” mountains in the world, where, aside from mountains, there was nothing else. Mirza’s take was that mountains and middle-aged women were a lot like oil paintings, or best appreciated from afar.
But Professor wasn’t convinced about the allure of distant objects. To get him to appreciate the mountains, one night while the moon was rising, Mirza pointed out the snow-capped mountain in the Murdar chain, which, if you stared at it for a while, would start to look like the outline of a beautiful woman’s corpse. One feature after another would reveal itself, the longer you stared. Her hair streaming from her head. Her broad forehead. Her alluring profile. Her voluptuous breasts. Mirza took Professor’s finger and traced her outline. Professor shielded his eyes with his right hand and continued to look at the beautiful sight. It impressed him. After a period of close inspection, he declared that the beautiful woman wasn’t dead, just sleeping.
Two days later, we did the difficult drive to eight thousand feet where we found the village of Ziarat, the favorite hill station of the Quaid-e-Azam. There, as far as Professor’s glasses could decipher, it was green, green, green. Before we had even unpacked our bags, our esteemed professor launched up a little hill to snap some photos. There, the victorious smile plastered across his face was just like those of the nawabs and maharajas in old photos, with the butts of their rifles on the heads of dead lions. He told us that this saucy mountain was at eight thousand five hundred feet. And this was truly no exaggeration: that was its elevation above sea level, even if its elevation relative to the surrounding land was just fifty feet higher.
Only God knows the truth, but Mirza swore that after Professor conquered the summit, the sound of his wheezing could be heard for a good five minutes at “base camp,” where, in the beautiful light of the evening, Zirghos was filming this historical scene. During the expedition’s last sortie, Professor declared that if the government put chairlifts in the mountains, the country would develop a taste for mountaineering.
Mirza objected to such laziness. “To think we’re part of the same race of men as Zahir ud-Din Babur,” he said. “He scaled these rough-and-tumble mountains on horseback. For exercise, he would grab a bunch of powerful Mughal soldiers and run around the castle ramparts. And he never grew tired.”
Professor sat next to a spring for a little R&R. He washed his hands and feet in the crystal-clear water, then took a sip of Murree beer from the flask dangling from his neck. Then he spoke:
“But our history doesn’t end with Babur, my friend. How could you forget that when Wajid Ali Shah, Nawab of Oudh, wobbled up a set of stairs, he had to have two beautiful girls standing by his side to prop him up. That was before wooden handrails had been invented. The man was as bent over as a Mughal sword.” He then presented several historical examples of those from our race who had overcome the hurdles of geography and topography. Each example was dubious, even if the lot didn’t lack creativity. When he was backing carefully down the mountain, a deep shadow fell from a facing peak. In the mountains, the sun sets quickly. Night was rapidly shrouding the scene in obscurity. The stillness was complete, pure, and piercing. If you had put your ear to your wrist, you could have heard your pulse’s heavy beating. Mysterious shadows descended. A scream slipped from Professor’s mouth, echoing deeply into the night. When it stopped, the word “bear” could be heard. He dropped to the ground. He told Mirza to hunker in place and put out his cigarette. Mirza had already heard stories about bears in the mountains, and, since he was a good Muslim, he immediately followed the instructions. When he finally opened his eyes, he asked Professor, “But why is it saying meh-meh-meh?”
Plastered to the ground, Professor listened for another minute, then leapt to his feet. “Please! You can’t tell by its voice! A mountain bear is a very tricky animal!”
The care and consideration that Zirghos put into traveling was something to see. It’s said about Muhammad Shah Rangeela that when he led his army out to confront the invading army of Nadir Shah Durrani, each officer rode into battle in a palanquin, scaled at small, medium, or large, whichever was appropriate for his rank, and attendants walked in front with their brilliant swords raised in the air. At the same time, henna was sprinkled over the many ox-carts laden with instruments of war, so that the soldiers and the commander in chief could have their hands, feet, and hair coated with the king’s favorite color before battle. According to Mirza, traveling is meant to be inconvenient. But, even in the city, Zirghos was a stickler for a certain formality, the upshot of which was that when his eldest boy played cricket, a servant ran around shielding him from the sun with a parasol. Like Ghalib, Mirza would take a sword and a shroud while traveling, but he would also bring a toilet seat and some camphor incense. Well, not just that, but also a comforter and a muslin kurta, salt and Coca-Cola, cards and Casanova (his black dog), a dinner jacket and the Pickwick Papers, a gun and a large first-aid kit. What useless thing wasn’t in his travel knapsack? On the trip home, despite the fact that the trip had been a stunning success, he rued how he’d never had the chance to use his first-aid kit.
The city-dweller in him would never let go. This city-dweller would take hold of his hand, put a knife in it, and force him to carve his name and the date onto the trunk of whichever almond tree was around. The city-dweller would praise the beauty of the mountain partridge by shooting at it with a .22-gauge rifle. At the rim of a thunderous waterfall, he would sometimes play rock and roll or twist records while whistling the tunes. And sometimes when walking through forests, he would look exactly like he was out for an evening stroll in Karachi on Elfy or the Mall.
Time and time again, Mirza said to him, “Look here, try not to act like that when you’re in nature. Wearing eau de cologne, with a cigar in your mouth, holding a beer, and talking like you’re sitting in someone’s living room, all of this dulls the subtle pleasures around you, the delicate scents that remind you where you are, where the rainbow of pleasures plays across the skies now and forever more! It’s the countryside! It’s raw milk and the sweet scent of fresh-cut grass, it’s the acrid smoke of dung fires rising from thatched roofs, the odor of warm corn flour ground on a slowly turning stone mill, it’s ‘that sharp scent of young women’ in songs, it’s the bracing odor of algae on stagnant ponds, it’s the sharp scent of mustard plants, the stink of flocks of sheep and goats, it’s the pleasant sensation of roti cooked in glowing embers hitting the bottom of your stomach. And, more than anything else, it’s the scent of warm bodies in the fields and on the threshing floor, this eternal scent wafting up and covering everything. It’s the sweet smell of the land’s wildness. Let the land breathe! We’re here to meet the inner soul of the land’s sweet scent! Let it soak into your pores! Don’t use deodorant, don’t smoke a Havana cigar! That will mask its odor! You must have noticed how kids have a particular odor, right? Something raw and pure, which goes away once you grow up. That’s the scent of little towns, too. Cities are like old people. There’s no sweet scent left.”
Professor Quddus saw this thinking as emblematic of Romantic nostalgia for the countryside, which inspired white-collar urban workers to take flight. “The musk pod of city deer could be found in their brains,” he said. And I noticed that whenever he was about to lose a debate, he would fixate on one of Mirza’s half-philosophical statements to attack it in a purely professorial tone—I mean, instead of attacking the main argument he would start quibbling with the footnotes.
Even if Zirghos didn’t always act with sound judgment, his activities definitely promoted good health. I mean, he ate to praise nature’s beauty. When the weather was pleasant and the scenery beautiful, he believed that one way to enjoy this happy coincidence was to stop wherever you were to eat and to keep eating. Then, after completing this pleasant activity, whatever little time was left should be spent playing gin rummy. Unfortunately, the weather was constantly spectacular on our trip, and so we played gin rummy between meals every day. For six weeks straight , in the most friendly fashion possible, the best of friends tried to drain each other’s bank accounts. Zirghos didn’t think there was any harm in switching cards on the sly, since even when he won fair and square, Professor accused him of cheating. Countless times, I witnessed the two of them playing some card game wholly oblivious to the entrancing fir and poplar forests around them. They never looked up to see the sunset behind the awe-inspiring mountains, or the moon rise in its full majesty. They never bothered to glance at the beautiful town whose residents were flush with vigor and happiness and where roses were blooming in the fields where once an earthquake had wreaked horrible destruction. Their hair was graying at their temples, but they had never experienced wanderlust’s unique freedom, which makes life feel so lively. They hadn’t learned to look at each flower, each face, as though for the last time, as though their fate would soon take them far away, to never return. It was just like Babur in his diary Tuzak, where, writing about passing through these mountains and valleys, he noted how disappointed he was to see that when they got to a river to set up camp, his Mughal soldiers pitched their tents facing the beautiful river, and yet his Hindu forces would pitch their tents in the opposite direction. It’s not that Zirghos was shortsighted or superficial. The truth was that when he got back to Karachi, when he pulled out the short films that he had shot while on vacation, he was shocked to see how interesting the trip had been. “Man, look at that! Quetta’s so beautiful!”
