PLACES (A CHARMLESS PESHAWAR)

A CHARMLESS PESHAWAR 

By: Nasser Yousaf 

It may be pretty boring for my few readers to list here all those books I read, and in several cases reread, in the year 2020. However, with less than six hours left in this most fateful year in the human history, I would like to inform my kind readers that a travelogue titled, ‘TO THE FRONTIER,’ by Geoffrey Moorhouse was the second last book that I read in the month of December, and enjoyed it beyond the power of words to describe here. 

The aforesaid was followed by ‘MAKE BELIEVE,’ by Diana Athill, which one of my favourite American writers John Updike has called as ‘unnervingly candid, coolly harrowing.’ I am not sure many people in Pakistan would be familiar with the British writer Diana who went on to live consummately for 102 years before passing away in 2019. I too wouldn’t have heard of her had I not been attracted by the title of her book, perhaps a secondhand copy, lying unattended on a bookshelf in Islamabad. 

I would be ending 2020 with starting ‘APRICOT JAM,’ by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a collection of short stories by the Russian Nobel laureate. 

But here, I would like to get back to Geoffrey’s Frontier, and share my experience and views with the readers. Geoffrey came to Pakistan in the summer of 1983, and after landing in Karachi traversed the length of the country, partly by trains and the rest in buses, jeeps and on foot, before ending it up in the northern areas. 

Reading travelogues are my vicarious journeys. I, especially, love those penned around the River Indus, the wilderness of Baluchistan and, of course, those about the Hindu Kush, its formidable and forlorn heights, and its unique history and culture. 

What I loved most about Geoffrey’s style was an emphasis on exploring the historical significance of each area visited during the course of his enjoyable journeys. 

His encounter with the Baluch Sardar Akbar Bugti, whom he calls flamboyant, in the Karachi Gymkhana lends considerable colour to the aura surrounding the personality of the chieftain. ‘His face looked as though it had two jet black scimitars plastered onto the sides,’ could the late Sardar’s pen-picture be more accurate than this? Certainly, not! 

He similarly describes the desolate landscape of Baluchistan by quoting a local saying, ‘if you see a cow you have found water, if you see a donkey you have found a camp, if you see a camel you are lost.’ 

Since, I wouldn’t like to drag what I have already planned to be a short piece, I must now get to Geoffrey’s description of the erstwhile Frontier.  

Mountstuart Elphinstone, British envoy to the court of the fifth King of Afghanistan, Shuja ul Milk, visited Peshawar in the first decade of the 19th century. Peshawar then used to be the winter capital of the Afghan kingdom. Elphinstone’s description of Peshawar from the court of the king is pasted on the top of this write up. Geoffrey is not the first writer to highlight this piece of writing. Before him, Olaf Caroe and several other British writers have referred to it in their accounts of Peshawar. 

What is most touching about Geoffrey’s reference to the excerpt from Elphinstone’s voluminous record of Peshawar is the travel-writer’s innocent question at the end when he asks, ‘would that civil servants could write like that today?’  

Geoffrey was British. He died in 2009. I seem to have read his travelogue too late in life. I don’t normally miss such immensely knowledgeable and witty accounts about my land and its people. I must thank the bookseller in Islamabad’s Jinnah Super Market for handing me this book while I was looking for more fiction to replenish my stock for the harsh winters in Abbottabad. 

Before parting, I would like to answer Geoffrey’s question whose soul I am sure must be floating around somewhere in my near about. No, the present-day civil servants would not care, even if they have the ability, to write like Elphinstone. Had it been otherwise, Peshawar’s grand old heritage would not have been ransacked in the manner that it has been!

I hope we all have a blessed and joyful new year!

MEDIA (THE PAST AND FUTURE OF READING)

THE PAST AND FUTURE OF READING  

By: Nasser Yousaf 

I could not recollect Gulab Khan’s face when once during a brief stopover at his stall he mentioned dropping newspapers at our house in the old days. The time period that Gulab referred to was when we were in our teens, and our interest in the newspapers did not go beyond waiting for the children’s pages. 

There were then about half a dozen old bungalows and perhaps an equal number of shops at Abbottabad’s main business and residential area, which is still known by its old name ‘Mandian.’ 

It was so until the early eighties. There was no gate at the two stone-built pillars to our house, an expansive orchard of plums and an assortment of fruit-trees. Perhaps, a gate or barbed wires were not really needed in those days of quintessential calm. Ligustrum hedges made up the walls and boundary of our landed property. 

There are now several thousand shops and perhaps the same number of houses in the same area. 

It was during that brief idle talk when Gulab Khan wistfully dwelt on the charms of the old times. He had a broken down bicycle but it never failed him perform his duty which would commence at dawn. His nephews now did hawking on their bikes while by dint of years of handwork the elderly man had got himself settled in a shop that still retained its old mud walls and a tin-roof from the day it was constructed decades ago. 

Years had taken their toll and weariness was now written large on Gulab’s somewhat dark complexion. His shoulders had shrivelled but with his elbows placed on the newspapers spread on the wooden shelf, there used to be a smile on his shrunken face that looked ineffaceable. It was thus also with a smile, though sardonic, when one day he informed that the sale of the country’s leading English-language newspapers had suddenly dropped down from 700 to a couple of dozens due to some turmoil in the power corridors. 

Some months after that conversation with Gulab, the elderly hawker’s absence from the stall was found conspicuous. One thought that he might be resting in his village or out on some errand. So one asked his nephew about his uncle’s whereabout in a somewhat nonchalant manner. ‘He has died,’ the younger hawker shot back in a manner that looked only half serious. 

In another decade, or even less, there would be no newspaper hawkers left in Pakistan. There are very few of them left now; and famished to an extent that one could only take pity on their overall bearing. Hawkers of Gulab’s generation were an industry in themselves; they knew the finer points of newspaper reading better than those who sat on their desks in the relative comfort of their offices. They could call out dilettantes merely by looking at their faces, and would have nothing to do with them.  

What one would miss most about those hawkers is the passion that they would exhibit while marketing their products. Even a mundane headline read out loudly by a hawker would draw the attention of the curious observers compelling them to purchase a copy. The evening newspapers, especially, would mostly be dispensed with in this fashion although there would be little to read in it other than the screaming headline. 

Newspaper reading in the good days, which lasted only until the arrival of the age of internet, was an art. One really needed a domestic environment or culture, an experience of some considerable length or in the absence of the two a tutorial to be called an avid reader. Electronic reading has made short shrift of all that. 

One needs not go far to find out why what our newspapers publish, and keep updating round the clock, may not be serious works of writing. To keep their so called readers engaged, and in good humour, nearly all English-language newspapers accept comments on each news item, features and articles and post them in a matter of an hour or so after vetting by the moderators. The less said about the moderators, the better. The quality of most of those comments reveals how non serious the present-day readership tends to be. 

The decline in newspaper reading is not restricted to any one particular country, but in fact it is a universal phenomenon. It would appear that newspapers worldwide have wrought their downfall on themselves by playing to the rules set by a less than serious readership. 

The wonderful age of reading is indeed past. In these difficult times, readers have to be told about the length of time that a particular article would require. People like Robert Fisk, known for his wordy write ups, would not be missed. 

Attack on the Taliban-held Afghanistan was perhaps the last time newspapers were heard doling out dollars on newsmen when hordes of them descended on Peshawar to report war and its ramifications across the border. Since then things have reached such a pass where even some of the world’s leading newspapers could be seen requesting for a one-dollar donation from the online readers to help keep them afloat. 

Such being the financial straits of what once seemed to be the invincible media’s empire, where does a poor hawker stand! Since internet has injected every Tom, Dick and Harry with the power and capacity of being his(her) own reporter and announcer, and what not, future of hawking the newspaper by whatever means is as good as foretold.

LIFE (AUTUMN 2020'S LAST HARVEST)

AUTUMN 2020's LAST HARVEST 

By: Nasser Yousaf 

After a week-long break, it rained here in Abbottabad in the afternoon. It was a brief shower that took care of the last remaining leaves in our chinar-tree (Platanus orientalis, the Old World sycamore, or Oriental plane) that were still resolutely hanging onto their branches. It is indeed sad that Abbottabad, once known as the Hill Station of Chinars, today stands bereft of its most prized heritage and indeed its identity. Adieu, Autumn 2020!