Lunatics, Lovers and Poets Read online

  I speak of these things with too much compression. They ought to be a thousand pages in the telling. But these are hurried and heated times. It is a wonder one can tell any story straight.

  What happened with the rest of his life has been retold by many people. They are fleas on the back of a free-roaming bull. I only wanted to tell of one moment and its long aftermath. It is by the aftermaths that we must truly judge greatness.

  He left the printing workshop that day and was struck by the muggy light of that Ajegunle sun. Outside stood the scrawniest donkey I had ever seen. It was flea-ridden and refractory. Don Quixote leapt on the donkey, and was immediately thrown. He picked himself up and dusted himself down. He turned to us and said:

  ‘It seems Sidama does not want to be ridden today.’

  He picked up the rope round the donkey’s neck. That donkey was a rangy, stubborn thing. It looked as if it didn’t think much of its master. Don Quixote kept coaxing it. He spoke to the brute as if it were an intelligent human being. A crowd had gathered to watch the strange sight of a man trying to reason with a donkey.

  Then something unexpected happened. While Don Quixote was whispering into the donkey’s twitching ear, Sancho gave the beast a short solid kick in the rump. After that the donkey became tame. Don Quixote looked at us as if to confirm the efficacy of his technique.

  ‘All you have to do is reason with them,’ he said.

  He took up the halter, and rode towards the red cloud gathering in the north.

  ‌

  ‌Mir Aslam of Kolachi

  Kamila Shamsie

  In the city of Kolachi there lived the last of the Qissa-Khwans, or Storytellers. Once, the grandest boulevards of his nation were named for those of his vocation, but now only the peeling apartment block overlooking the sea, in which he had occupied the top-floor flat for decades, was known as Qissa-Khwani, though its official name as chosen by the building’s owner was Paradise View. The surrounding buildings, also owned by the same man, had names such as Paradise Homes, Paradise Point and Paradise Point II, Paradise, and Paradise Itself, so, to avoid confusion, the locals assigned an unofficial name to each structure, of which Qissa-Khwani was the best known.

  Mir Aslam, the last of the Qissa-Khwans, had been trained by his grandfather to recite the love stories which had kept his family in business for generations – stories of Laila Majnu, Sassi Punnu and Yousuf and Zuleikha – but as a young man caught up in a country’s independence movement he had understood there were other kinds of stories people would pay to listen to – stories, first, of fighting the British, then of fighting the Indians, then of fighting military dictatorships, then of fighting other political parties. No government ever arrested him because each understood it would be easier and more fruitful to hire him to write his rhyming-couplet stories in their favour, which he would declaim to great effect at party conferences or during independence day celebrations. But since the boom in cable television at the start of the new millennium, the government’s desire for rhyming couplets had fallen away – Mir Aslam was a man of the stage, not the screen – and as old age approached, the last of the Qissa-Khwans found himself in a state of professional crisis. It isn’t that no one approached him anymore to commission stories, but that increasingly the world of public declamation was becoming a place for those who wanted tales of violent jihad.

  Mir Aslam retreated into his books, refusing all commissions in which a drop of blood was spilled in the name of religion, and dreamt of a golden age of Islam in which scholars such as he (he had never been to university but was in possession of several honorary doctorates) earned their living through knowledge (as the world grew darker around him, Mir Aslam’s learning grew in his own estimation – he even began to think those honorary doctorates in his possession had been conferred on him rather than bought in the Paper Bazaar). He dreamt, in short, of Qurtaba, in al-Andalus. There was no melancholy as beautiful as that brought on by those dreams of the capital of Muslim Spain, ‘the ornament of the world’, with its libraries, its translators, its book buyers who travelled the world in search of knowledge that could enrich that city in which ‘books were more eagerly sought than gold or concubines’. At first, Mir Aslam dreamt that he was official storyteller to al-Hakam II, the most cultured of all the caliphs; when al-Hakam’s eyes tired of reading but his thirst for stories remained unquenched he would call his Storyteller to his palace in Madinat al-Zahra, and Mir Aslam would be to him as Scheherazade to Sheharyar but without the fear of execution. The more he dreamt himself into the tenth century the more he yearned to set foot in what remained of Qurtaba – to taste the oranges, to sit on the walls of Madinat al-Zahra and see the world spread out beneath him, to walk barefoot beneath the arches of the Great Mosque and know that faith and art and a generosity of spirit could entwine so beautifully.

  On the day the mosque he had attended as a child was bombed for being a home of worship to the wrong sect, he decided it was finally time for the pilgrimage to Qurtuba, and changing out of his ink-stained shalwar kameez into a suit and tie he set off for the travel agency next to the photocopier stall. One wall of the travel agency was covered in pictures of tall buildings hulking together, another had the holy Ka’aba surrounded by rings of humanity. Behind the desk a woman with talcum powder not fully blended into the wrinkles of her neck asked how she could help him. At first neither al-Andalus nor Qurtaba made any sense to her. When he explained, she threw the word Schengen at him. Neither of them wanted to be inexplicable to the other so further efforts were made and finally he understood that he would need a visa to a place named Schengen – which was to Spain as al-Andalus was to Qurtuba – and in order to get the visa he must first buy a plane ticket and rent a hotel room, but there was every likelihood he would be refused the visa which meant he mustn’t buy the cheap plane tickets which were non-refundable but the most expensive sort. As for hotel rooms, those could always be refunded but, the woman advised, leaning close enough that he could smell the talcum powder, that didn’t mean he should rent a room at a very expensive hotel because that would make the visa officers suspicious.

  When he asked if he had to pay her extra to issue a visa along with the ticket she sighed, looked at the nail polish bottle on her counter and then at him, as if deciding which was a better way to spend her afternoon, and then decisively dropped the nail polish bottle into a drawer. He would have to apply in person at a drop-off centre, she said, but she would help him with the application forms. But first he had to tell her which category of visa he needed. Tourist, Family, Medical Visit, Business, Conference, Diplomatic, Official, Airport Transit or Sailors’ Transit. None of the above wasn’t an option, and after listening to his reasons for the visit she suggested Tourist. Mir Aslam didn’t like the sound of that; it conjured up images of people who travelled in order to take pictures of themselves in places to which other people travelled in order to take pictures of themselves. He pointed to the wall with the photograph of the Ka’aba, and asked what visa was required for those who went on Haj. A pilgrimage visa. That was what he wanted for Qurtuba. She pulled up her neckline, pursed her lips. Pilgrimage is for the Holy Places, she said. Neither the government of Spain or Pakistan accepts your category. When she opened the desk drawer and removed the nail polish he understood he was dismissed. He was halfway down the street when he heard her voice, and returned to take the envelope full of paper that she handed to him.

  Mir Aslam returned home, changed back into his indoor clothes, brewed an extra-strong cup of tea, and sat down at his desk which overlooked the dark-grey sand and dove-grey sea of Kolachi. First, the list of requirements. A passport, valid for three months past his date of return from Spain. Mir Aslam had last required a passport nearly forty years earlier when he was flown out to London, UK, to perform at an exiled politician’s birthday. A new passport would have to be acquired, but what was he to do about the next requirement, which was to also bring all previous passports, along with photocopies of all pages bearing vi
sas and stamps? He consulted his English dictionary in case ‘all’ might mean ‘the most recent’ in some archaic version of English that was still spoken in Spain, but this seemed not to be the case. Not that it made a difference since he had neither his previous passport nor the ones before it, but what a strange requirement that ‘all’ was. It was the sort of thing that might deter many applicants, and perhaps someone should relay this to officials who made up rules without realising the consequences. Well, anyway, he would simply tell the officials about that period of his life in which he read a great deal about the Sufi ascetics and dispensed with anything that might seem excessive. He would offer to bring them to his house so they could see that aside from his books he owned almost nothing, and certainly didn’t keep hold of old passports or any documentation related to travel. Perhaps they’d be too busy to visit, and he would arm himself against this eventuality by taking along pictures of the filing cabinets which had come with this apartment, and which he used to store tea and rice and lentils.

  Next on the list was two recent passport-sized photographs – he patted his still-thick hair, and decided he would need a haircut first. The following requirement was ‘accreditation of profession’, defined as an ‘introductory letter by the employer’, which asked for such details as salary, period of work in the present organisation, or position or post in the organisation. Mir Aslam slumped in his chair, defeated. How far al-Andalus had fallen that it could not conceive of storytellers and poets and musicians, let alone pilgrims. Only tourists and the salaried could apply. Nowhere in the list of requirements did it say: tell us about your love for Spanish history, literature, dance, or those small green salted peppers he had once eaten at a Spanish restaurant on that visit to London, UK.

  And what was this? They wanted his travel itinerary. Did Ibn Battuta have a travel itinerary when he visited Granada in 1350? No! He set off from Tangier intending to join the Moroccan army which was defending the Port of Gibraltar against the expected attack by Alfonso XI of Castile, but when he arrived he discovered the Black Death had killed Alfonso and so he turned his purposes from military to exploratory, wandering towards Málaga where orange trees grew in the courtyard of the mosque, and proceeding from there to Granada where the sultan’s mother sent him a purse of gold coins in recognition of his status as a man of knowledge. Why shouldn’t he, Mir Aslam, explain to the visa officials that he was a modern-day version of Ibn Battuta, whose travel itinerary would have read ‘wherever my feet and the tides of history take me’? Yes, he would explain all this, and he would explain also that Ibn Battuta had no accreditation of profession beyond his own intellect and curiosity. And both these qualities Mir Aslam had, and would take along to the visa application centre.

  The next day he returned to the travel agency. She was there again, her nails painted purple though yesterday’s nail polish bottle had been a pleasing shade of pink, and seemed glad to see him. He had only intended to buy the ticket and make the hotel reservations, which he’d failed to do the previous day when the matter of the visa came up, but she offered him a cup of tea and asked if he’d had any trouble with the application checklist, and he found himself talking to her about Ibn Battuta.

  Was he a soldier, she asked, that he had set off to join the Moroccan army?

  No, Mir Aslam explained. Ibn Battuta was everything that the moment demanded. He knew how to hold a sword, had used it in his travels, and when he heard the Moroccan army required reinforcements to hold Gibraltar against Alfonso he decided to join them.

  And this Alfonso was Christian, she said? And Ibn Battuta was Muslim? So he was like those Muslims from Kolachi who went to fight with the Taliban when America attacked Afghanistan?

  He most certainly was not! He was a Moroccan joining his nation’s forces to repel invaders.

  She shook her head at him. I wouldn’t tell this story to the Spanish visa officials, she said. Can’t you tell them you want to go to Spain to watch a bullfight? That will be much less suspicious than all this talk of jihadis who go where history takes them, and making a pilgrimage to the places where Muslims ruled over Spain. You think they want to be reminded of this?

  It was a golden age of civilisation. Who wouldn’t want to be reminded of that? And when they hear my story of it, they’ll understand I value their country’s history.

  What story?

  Mir Aslam stood up. The suit and tie felt wrong, but he would make do. He moved his chair to the centre of the room, and gestured for her to sit down in it, which she did when she saw he was adamant. Then he carefully cleared a space on her desk, and sat cross-legged on it, one hand raised in her direction in the formal storytelling pose. He had never done this in English before, but the Spanish visa official and he could exchange sympathetic comments about how they were both forced to communicate in English, that language of world domination, rather than in their more beautiful native tongues.

  Listen closely, sir, I am here to tell a tale

  Of Spain when it was a nation of Akbars, not Rafaels–

  I don’t think it’s pronounced to rhyme with ‘tale’, she said. That tennis player, you know, with the muscles? His name is said in a way that rhymes with nothing.

  In all his years as a Qissa-Khwan no one had ever interrupted to correct him. Interrupt to ask him to repeat a beautiful couplet, yes; interrupt with appreciative cries of vah! vah!, yes; interrupt to declare oneself an unworthy recipient of such poetry, yes. But interrupt to correct? Did she not see that in English he was like a sculptor of clay forced to work with cold, unyielding marble? Though he could not bend the material to his will, something of his deep knowledge of sculpture should still convey itself beyond the superficial failures. Let her try to rhyme in English and see how far she would go! But he would not allow her taunts to shame him.

  Listen closely, sir–

  How do you know it won’t be a madam?

  Listen closely, please, I am here to tell a tale

  Of the golden age of Islam before it was derail

  Al-Andalus, Qurtaba, the wonder of Granada

  Let’s not forget please Madinat al-Zahra

  Such libraries, such excellence,

  I must now shed some tears

  How further back we are now though

  forward in years

  Euclid, Homer, Aristotle

  Without the Moors would be forgotten

  What made it such a perfect mix,

  Islam and Spain? Was it the figs?

  Figs? What do figs have to do with anything?

  In the Quran, Allah swears by the fig and the olive. Spain has both.

  I think you’re trying too hard to make this rhyme. Anyway, what is the point of all this? You think you can walk into a visa office and perform like this? First of all, you only go to deliver your documents to a courier company. They send them to the embassy. If the embassy wants to see you then you have to make an appointment with them, and there if you try to climb onto the official’s desk they’ll shoot you dead. But personally I think you’ll be rejected straight away without an interview. Where is your letter from your employer?

  Mir Aslam decided that a woman who could not appreciate the cleverness of an ‘Aristotle / forgotten’ almost-rhyme clearly lacked all understanding of the Qissa-Khwan’s art and said could he please just buy his ticket. She asked for his passport, and he asked if his ID card would suffice.

  I’m only doing this to win points for heaven, she said, and locked up the travel agency to accompany him to the passport office. In the back of the rickshaw they had to sit so close their sleeves touched, which made it too late to ask her name. She would have to be ‘Madam’ only.

  Outside the passport office, men pressed forward towards the rickshaw in the way of those who could shortcut through long bureaucratic processes. At Madam’s instructions, Mir Aslam handed one of them a certain amount of money and waited by the side of the road while Madam sat on a plastic chair beneath the shade of a tree. The man returned a short time later with a
bank draft for an amount of money which was not too much less than the amount Mir Aslam had paid him – special discount, the man said, jerking his chin towards Madam.

  Then he took Mir Aslam by the elbow and started to lead him towards the passport office. Mir Aslam looked back towards Madam, who was sipping a cup of tea. She raised a hand at him in a way that let him know she would be waiting. Inside the office there were many numbered counters. The man who had taken charge of Mir Aslam led him to the front of each line with a cry of My grandfather, he’s unwell! which prompted everyone to move aside and let him through. At the first desk he handed in the bank draft, and received a slip of paper. At the next he handed in the slip of paper and received a plastic token; at the third, he had his picture taken (he had forgotten to have a haircut); at the fourth, they took his fingerprints and the plastic token. At the fifth they asked him for information that was already on his ID card and typed it into the computer. At the sixth they took his ID card and checked that what was written there matched what had been typed in by the person at the desk three feet away. At the seventh they printed everything out and a man handed him a pen, and said sign here, and here.

  One signature was required at the bottom of the sheet, verifying all the information was correct. The other was required beneath a statement enclosed in a black box. Mir Aslam read the statement, in English and in Urdu. He looked up at Madam’s man, who told him to sign and not worry about it. Mir Aslam read it again. It asked him to attest that people of a certain group were not Muslims, even though those people claimed they were.

  What does this statement have to do with my right to travel? Mir Aslam asked. Madam’s man told him not to speak so loudly. He guided Mir Aslam’s pen hand towards the dotted line.

  Mir Aslam stood up and walked out of the office. Madam stood up and came towards him.