LIFE

ECQBAL BA'BU'S IDIOM AND THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD

By: Nasser Yousaf 

Butterflies 🦋🦋🦋 are said to be among the victims of climate change; they have become smaller in size, and the flood of colours that one would see them in, flittering from one flower 🌻🌹 to the other, have also disappeared. 

One remembers seeing a black butterfly, and indeed in colours that would defy description. You now see them in white or just about that. 

Similarly, glow-worm 🐛 which is so deeply rooted in one's childhood memories from Abbottabad have become extinct, and so have snails 🐌 which we would find stuck to our trees in hundreds during summer monsoon, especially. We would call them the 'topai cheenjey,' rather squeamishly.

The military stable in Abbotabad appears to be another casualty of Time. Several times during a month hundreds of brown, reddish brown, black and white horses would march up and down the six to eight kilometres stretch of the road, piercing the calm of the valley with the clatter of their hoofs. 

Some memes being exchanged these days show parents showing their younger ones what shape printed books looked like. 'But there are no joysticks attached to these,' the bemused little ones are shown asking their parents. 

One is not sure people will have time for the voluminous work 'In Search Of Lost Time,' by the French writer Proust. The work was inspired by the momentary taste of biscuits that the author had had one evening after returning home.

Ecqbal Ba'bu would have come up with a witty and indeed profound idiom in one of the several sub-continental languages that she could express herself in to make sense of whatever has happened to the world and its habitats. 

The late doll-like, fair complexioned Ecqbal Ba'bu was my half aunt, my mother's half sister and my maternal grandfather's eldest child. She was older than even my mother's mother (or my grandmother), and quite often she would call my grandmother as 'lureiy' (daughter). 

This is not to take issues with since we live in a patriarchal world. Thus after marrying off Ecqbal Ba'bu, my grandfather married my grandmother as his third wife. My grandmother was then younger in age than his eldest daughter. Father and daughter then went on procreating simultaneously in their own separate little dwellings.

I remember my mother saying, 'I am going to see Ecqbal Ba'bu, Ecqbal Ba'bu is not well, Ecqbal Ba'bu is making me pickle, Ecqbal Ba'bu is not happy with her two elderly son's, and then finally one fateful evening, Ecqbal Ba'bu has died.' 

I remember Ecqbal Ba'bu sitting on her prayer mat spread on a raised, wide wooden block and surrounded by some cages where she kept some birds with whom she would keep talking all day long. Then, there were an array of jars in which she would concoct pickles.

Ecqbal Ba'bu had had a traumatic life, and that too found expression in her idiom. She had summed up her laments in a Pashto idiom that meant, 'the year of grief wouldn't have dawned if it knew it would rent me apart.' 

And on a lighter note, she'd often scold one of her daughters in law on account of her gross carelessness with a Hindko language idiom, ' Iqra be rondi the Bikra be ronda e the thu beti begham,' (both your daughter and son are crying and you are pretending as if you cannot care less).

I often wonder had she been alive, I would have asked her the equivalent of some idioms of English language in Pashto. It is because these idioms strike an uncanny chord with what one has been witnessing in Pakistan. I believe self-righteousness to be an evil, and the root cause of our misery.

What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. An idiom that could be used in the case of Pakistan and Afghanistan and the kind of government that we in Pakistan would like to see at the helm in Afghanistan.

Heads I win, tails you loose. An idiom that could describe the rather puerile conduct of some politicians who do not accept reality.

And finally to not see the woods (forest) for the trees. Only if our megalomaniac self-proclaimed saviours, knew the significance of this, forests in our country would be found on ground, not on papers.

Butterflies, glow worms and snails wouldn't then have disappeared from where we exist.