PEOPLE (A PATHAN'S CEASEFIRE)

A PATHAN’S CEASEFIRE 

By: Nasser Yousaf 

Some of the great works of fiction need to be reread to be fully enjoyed. It never took one long to decide and harp on which of those timeless novels ought to be reread. 

Thus, during the last about two years and in line with the foregoing opinion and the resultant inclination, one has reread Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. 

One would always be tempted to reread George Eliot’s historical novel Romola which is set in the 15th century’s Florence, and which for some unknown reasons has not been as greatly acclaimed as the rest of her scintillating works of fiction. 

But one really did something funny in the year 2020. No, it hadn’t got anything to do with or was one of the excruciating repercussions of the global pandemic. The best explanation for rereading Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White would be that one simply had to reread it. 

One had ordered the said novel after reading its review in the TIME magazine sometime in 2006. Now, lengthwise Faber’s novel is not an ordinary work, it is a tome with 838 pages and scribed on extra long pages. Perhaps, it was owing to its formidable size that one had just run through it, not according it the importance that this novel deserved. 

The Crimson Petal and the White is set in the 19th century London. In terms of its very high quality of prose and the amount of research painstakingly gone into its writing, the novel has very aptly been called one of ‘Victorian proportions.’ 

Some people, with a far higher degree of sensitivity than myself, might take issues with Faber for plotting a story of such monumental weight around a prostitute. But then the lead character, Sugar, is no ordinary harlot. 

Also, since the aim here is not to explore and introduce to the readers Sugar’s forays in the high society of London of those days, but only to highlight the significance of that three-line startling paragraph that appears in the story on page number 828. 

Towards the end, Sugar disappears with her most ardent lover’s, William Rackham of Rackham perfumeries, reclusive little daughter, Sophie. Here ensues a desperate search that once again brings William face to face with the crippled Colonel Leek and his wife, the keepers of the infamous house where Sugar worked. 

‘I have come to see Sugar,’ William tells the colonel. ‘She never came back for me, the trollop, a woman’s promise is like a Pathan’s ceasefire,’ sputters the curmudgeon retired soldier with all the spite at his command. 

This simile indeed was like a jolt of titanic proportions in an otherwise quiet sea where the ship was sailing smoothly, with its revelry-seized inhabitants enjoying themselves in a variety of ways. 

Before one gets to another queer note connected to this most disturbing line in the novel, isn’t it time to commend Faber for the kind of research that he must have carried out to enrich his story. One would thus conclude that the writer was no stranger to what the British experienced during their long tenure in the Frontier, the internecine skirmishes, sniper’s attacks and an unremitting climate of pugnacious scheming and plotting. 

But howsoever disturbing this one line must be, the great truth lying behind it can neither be dismissed nor wished away. In fact, and truth must not be held back from the readers, Pathans have, through ages, put everything at stake only to prove the sheer truthfulness of such an unflattering attribute. 

The best ready-to-show example would be that of the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan that has battered the Pathans’ way of life on the two sides of the Line drawn by the British civil servant Mortimer Durand. Ever since the conflict first erupted, though originally in another form, Pathans or Pakhtuns or the Pashtuns as the variants go, have been ceaselessly trying to ensure that it never ends. 

Many historians, analysts and travel-writers have chronicled this sanguinary episode. In Pakistan, literally, every Tom, Dick and Harry, expert in the art of writing is trying to prove their unique comprehension of the Afghan imbroglio and getting themselves published in the mainstream media. Though in the process, all that these ambitious writers do is produce a chronology of the four-decade long conflict which needs no retelling. 

While one was looking for a suitable example in the history books to compare this maddening tendency with, Michel Faber appears to have put a stop to the search. Henceforth, whenever a suicide attack rips through the uneasy calm of Afghanistan, before or immediately after the Taliban agree to a ceasefire, one would need only recall Colonel Leek. 

Such is the tragedy of Afghanistan, and of its mostly Pashtun dwellers, that when the world talks of some respite in the ongoing killing, the request is only to the extent of reducing violence, and not altogether ending it.